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Empirically, however, societies with higher income inequality have lower happiness (and this is fairly robust to confounding factors and different kinds of soci
by _delirium 13y ago
Empirically, however, societies with higher income inequality have lower happiness (and this is fairly robust to confounding factors and different kinds of society, and even shows up internally when comparing different time periods of the same society, e.g. when you look at different U.S. decades). Perhaps in principle it's possible to have a happy and highly unequal society (in sci-fi this is commonly imagined as involving happiness drugs or VR), but we haven't seen one yet.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoEmpirically, however, societies with higher income inequality have lower happiness... Could you link to some data on this? Ideally something other than "The Spirit Level", which basically just observes that many negative traits are correlated and then puts inequality on the x-axis.
- _delirium 13y agoA fairly arbitrary sampling of studies (there are many on more specific subjects, if you're interested in researching more specific aspects of the question): * A general literature survey as of 1995, of the evidence on whether increasing the incomes of everyone (with no change in relative incomes) improves overall happiness: http://ibe.eller.arizona.edu/docs/2010/Martinsson/easterlin95.pdf http://ibe.eller.arizona.edu/docs/2010/Martinsson/easterlin9... * Income inequality and happiness 1972-2008 in the U.S. and causal hypotheses: http://inside.bard.edu/~luka/documents/Oishi-Kesebir-Diener-InequalityandHappiness-PsychScience.pdf http://inside.bard.edu/~luka/documents/Oishi-Kesebir-Diener-... * Relationship between regional inequality, happiness, and confounding factors in Japan: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953610000791 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953610... * Empirical alignment of utilitarian happiness-maximization and other desiderata often seen as opposed: http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22129/JHS_11_2010_605.pdf http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22129/JHS_11_2010_605.pdf
- yummyfajitas 13y agoThese are more of the same - vague correlations without any causal analysis. The ones based on happiness surveys are even worse, since there is no way to know whether a score of 7 happiness points (on a scale of 1 to 10, or whatever the scale of the survey is) for someone in Denmark in 1976 is comparable to a score of 7 happiness points for someone in Japan in 1996.
- _delirium 13y agoIncorrect— they have causal analysis.