- According to a chain-quantity index measure, which best approximates actual quantity of things produced, per capita output of consumer durables in the United States increased by nine times between 1925 and 1998 (Sherby 2000).
- The literature on the measurement of happiness and well-being is now vast. See Weimann, Knabe, and Schob (2015) for an overview.
- Sen ([1985] 1999, p. 3) points out the complexities involved in measuring happiness utility as follows: “You could be well-of without being well. You could be well without being able to lead the life you want to lead. You could have the life you wanted, without being happy. You could be happy, without having much freedom. You could have a great deal of freedom, without achieving much. We can go on.”
- In an attempt to replace the monetary measure of well-being represented by per capita gross national income, some countries, most famously Bhutan, have begun to use the recent research on happiness as the basis for a more sophisticated measure of economic development—something like gross national happiness.
- See also Layard (2005) on the failure in America of indices of happiness to increase with increasing productivity, income, and wealth.
- Blanchflower and Oswald found a similar insensitivity of happiness to increases in income in the case of Britain over the same period.
- Ofer suggests that this ofers support for the “hedonic treadmill” hypothesis, according to which people increase their expectations, but not their levels of satisfaction, as income rises.
- Easterlin analyzed survey data from seventeen Latin American countries between 1994 and 2006.
- Reports of “life evaluation” were, however, to a greater extent correlated with income. The relation between income and well-being thus difered depending on whether subjects were asked to report on their afective states or to evaluate their lives. I would suggest that questions that ask about life evaluation incline respondents to take a thirdperson viewpoint on their lives, assessing how their lives might look to others. This thirdperson perspective might well prompt subjects to place themselves in an “objective” status hierarchy and evaluate their lives according to their relative position within that hierarchy. That hierarchy need not just be internal to a country—it can also be a perceived global hierarchy encompassing people in other countries. For instance, a Turkish person, asked to evaluate her life, might think about how it objectively compares with that of an imagined middle-class American or German, on the one hand, and, say, an Egyptian on the other. Moreover, the concept of life evaluation immediately evokes quantitative assessment—a number that measures how much a life is valued. I suspect that income—the most immediately accessible quantitative measure of the worth of a life—would quite naturally come to mind as a rough proxy for a quantitative rating of life evaluation. Self-assessment of emotional well-being, by comparison, seems better insulated from tendency for money to serve in that way as a stand-in and, therefore, arguably provides a better gauge of welfare. Also, research by Pew, as part of its global attitudes project, shows that in measures of life satisfaction (roughly the same measure as life evaluation), emerging economies have converged on the advanced economies, even as the prospects of economic development converging between the emerging and advanced world have diminished (Pew Research Center 2014). In 2014, 54 percent of respondents in rich countries rated themselves between 7 and 10 on a 10-point scale measuring life satisfaction, while 51 percent of those in emerging economies did so. This suggests that for life satisfaction, as well as subjective well-being, income matters most up to the point at which basic needs are met, after which it begins to lose relevance.
Notes to Pages 16–18
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