Money Does Make You Happy #
April 16th, 2008 | In Worth Considering
As Justin Wolfers explains the Easterlin paradox has long baffled happiness researchers. It’s components:
- Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people.
- But, rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much).
- As countries get richer, they do not get happier.
The trouble is, new data — collected by Betsey Stevenson and himself — suggests that these observations are, well, wrong, and should be replaced by these:
- Rich people are happier than poor people.
- Richer countries are happier than poorer countries.
- As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.
His post links to more information (mostly PDFs) on the topic, as well as this illistrative chart.
