Subjective Well‐Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?
Citation (APA): Wolfers, J. S. (2014). Subjective Well‐Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation? [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 7
once “basic needs” have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being.
Nota - Posizione 8
LA TESI DI MOLTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 10
we find no support for this claim.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 11
In 1974 Richard Easterlin
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 11
increasing average income did not raise average well-being,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 12
Easterlin Paradox.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 12
new and more comprehensive data
Nota - Posizione 12
ORA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 13
robust positive relationship between well-being and income across countries and over time (Deaton, 2008; Stevenson and Wolfers, 2008; Sacks, Stevenson, and Wolfers, 2013).
Nota - Posizione 14
x ESITO DEI NUOVI STUDI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 15
researchers have argued for a modified version of Easterlin’s hypothesis,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 16
claiming that beyond a certain income threshold, further income is unrelated to well-being.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 18
Diener and Seligman (2004, p.5) state that “there are only small increases in well-being” above some threshold.
Nota - Posizione 18
x SELIGMAN
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 19
Clark, Frijters and Shields (2008, p.123) state more starkly that “greater economic prosperity at some point ceases to buy more happiness,” a similar claim is made by Di Tella and MacCulloch (2008, p.17): “once basic needs have been satisfied, there is full adaptation to further economic growth.”
Nota - Posizione 21
ALTRI AUTORI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22
Layard (2003, p.17) argues that “once a country has over $15,000 per head, its level of happiness appears to be independent of its income;” while in subsequent work he argued for a $20,000 threshold (Layard, 2005 p.32-33). Frey and Stutzer (2002, p.416) claim that “income provides happiness at low levels of development but once a threshold (around $10,000) is reached, the average income level in a country has little effect on average subjective well-being.”
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 27
graphs show clearly that increasing income yields diminishing marginal gains
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 27
this relationship need not reach a point of nirvana beyond which further gains in well-being are absent.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 30
there is no satiation point.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 39
we find no evidence of a satiation point.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 42
I. Cross-Country Comparisons
Nota - Posizione 42
t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 43
evaluating whether countries at different levels of economic development have different average levels of subjective well-being.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 44
log of real GDP per capita,
Nota - Posizione 44
RICCHEZZA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 44
purchasing power parity.4
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 55
two measures of life satisfaction drawn from the Gallup World Poll:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 56
“ladder of life”
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 57
question about overall life
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 57
data are drawn from the five waves of the Gallup World Poll run between 2008 and 2012 and GDP per capita, plotted on a log scale. We have data on 155 countries, which account for over 95% of the world’s population, across the spectrum of levels of economic development. Each of these measures of subjective well-being is highly correlation with GDP per capita ( 0.79 for the 155 countries in the upper panel, and 0.85 for the 86 countries in the lower panel) .
Nota - Posizione 60
DATI
Nota - Posizione 67
ALTRA FONTE
Nota - Posizione 68
ALTRA FONTE
Nota - Posizione 69
ALTRA FONTE
Nota - Posizione 82
g
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 87
Pew Global Attitudes studies, which posed the satisfaction ladder question in 44 countries in 2002, 47 countries in 2007, and 22 countries in 2010,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 88
Social Survey Program, which asked a consistent happiness question in 1991, 1998, 2001, 2007 and 2008
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 89
Each of these datasets strongly reject the null that 0.
Nota - Posizione 90
...
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 93
In Table 2 we consider alternative thresholds for “poor” and “rich”.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 99
the well-being–income relationship observed among poor countries holds in at least equal measure among rich countries.
Nota - Posizione 100
ACONC
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 100
Our larger datasets emphatically reject the weak and strong forms of the modified-Easterlin hypothesis,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 102
II. Within-Country Cross-Sectional Comparisons
Nota - Posizione 102
t
Segnalibro - Posizione 103
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 103
comparing rich and poor people within a country.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 103
We begin by analyzing data from the United States,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 108
we find no evidence of a significant break in either the happiness-income relationship, nor in the life satisfactionincome relationship,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 110
This finding contrasts with a claim made by Frey and Stutzer (2002, p.409)
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 131
III. Conclusions
Nota - Posizione 131
t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 131
While the idea that there is some critical level of income beyond which income no longer impacts well-being is intuitively appealing, it is at odds with the data.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 132
there is no major well-being dataset that supports this commonly made claim.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 133
evaluative measures of life satisfaction and happiness
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 135
Kahneman and Deaton (2010) have shown that in the United States, people earning above $75,000 do not appear to enjoy either more positive affect nor less negative affect
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 136
they are based on very different measures of well-being,
Segnalibro - Posizione 137
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 137
Indeed, those authors also find no satiation point for evaluative measures of well-being.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 138
Stevenson and Wolfers' Flawed Happiness Research eric falkenstein
Nota - Posizione 139
t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 141
Richard Easterlin found that within a given country people with higher incomes were more likely to report being happy. However, between developed countries, the average reported level of happiness did not vary much with national income per person.
Nota - Posizione 143
X EASYERLIN
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 143
although income per person rose steadily in the United States between 1946 and 1970, average reported happiness showed no long-term trend and declined between 1960 and 1970.
Nota - Posizione 144
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 146
the relative-status utility function is the key
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 149
evolution favors a relative utility function
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 150
Economists from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and even Keynes focused on status, the societal relative
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 162
they find that the income-happiness effect is at least twice as strong among richer
Nota - Posizione 162
RISULT W
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 163
further using one set of data the effect of income on happiness is negative.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 163
authors note, however, that this is merely because of one country, the Phillipines.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 167
Their second set of findings concern cross-sectional data within a country. Easterlin did not dispute this, however.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 167
Given positional goods like mates and lakefront property, relative wealth should matter.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 186
the biggest problem with the Sacks, Stevenson and Wolfers analysis is that they estimate a short-term relationship between life satisfaction and GDP, rather than the long-term relationship.
Nota - Posizione 187
X BIG PROBKEM
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 187
over an economic cycle,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 189
people who aren't fighting for basic necessities are focused primarily on status
Segnalibro - Posizione 200
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 202
Crude Materialism versus the Wolfers Equation Bryan Caplan
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 210
Happiness (in Standard Deviations) = a + .35 * ln(income)
Nota - Posizione 210
EQ WOLFER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 211
Most people interpret Wolfers' findings as a shocking refutation of everyone who thinks that money has little effect
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 213
I think not. If you picture a continuum with Epicureanism at 0, and crude materialism at 1, Wolfers stands at .24.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 214
effect of income on happiness, though positive, is small.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 216
if you currently earn $50,000, Wolfers' coefficient implies you'd need an extra $820,585 per year to durably increase your happiness by one lousy standard deviation. In math, that's not "zero effect of income on happiness." But in English, it basically is.
Nota - Posizione 218
x IN ALTRE PAROLE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 218
Wolfers deliberately refrains from controlling for confounding variables,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 219
true effect of income on happiness is almost certainly even smaller
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 220
it goes against first-hand experience, the wisdom of the ages, and the rightly interpreted empirical evidence.
Nota - Posizione 221
L EFFETTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 222
Wolfers Responds on Happiness
Nota - Posizione 222
t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 226
I actually think 0.35 is pretty big.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 231
if there exist massive disparatives in income, then a small coefficient can have a big effect.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 242
The Happiness of the Richest Bryan Caplan
Nota - Posizione 242
t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 244
100% of the richest people were "very happy."
Nota - Posizione 244
DATO INCREDIBILE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 246
respondents with family income over half a million a year
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 246
And in the same survey, happiness was virtually flat from $30k to $150k
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 247
Extreme Epiricureanism is both demonstrably false and approximately true.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 252
the small effect of income/wealth on happiness throughout the income distribution remains ideologically inconvenient for free-market economists. A free-market economy is a fantastic tool for making people rich, but making people rich is a mediocre tool for making people happy.
Nota - Posizione 254
X FELICITÀ E MERCATO
