"When Growth Outpaces Happiness"
Richard A. Easterlin, New York Times, September 27, 2012
"CHINA’s new leaders, who will be anointed next month at the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress in Beijing, might want to rethink the Faustian bargain their predecessors embraced some 20 years ago: namely, that social stability could be bought by rapid economic growth.
...
"Starting in 1990, as China moved to a free-market economy, real per-capita consumption and gross domestic product doubled, then doubled again. Most households now have at least one color TV. Refrigerators and washing machines — rare before 1990 — are common in cities.
"Yet there is no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier, according to an analysis of survey data that colleagues and I conducted. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately.
...
"It is startling to find that Chinese people’s feelings of well-being have declined in a period of such momentous improvement in their economic lives. After all, most policy makers would confidently predict that a fourfold increase in a people’s material living standard would make them considerably happier.
"And yet, piecing the surveys together, we found a U-shaped pattern of happiness over time, with life satisfaction declining from 1990 to the first part of this decade, and then recovering by 2010 to a level somewhat below the 1990 value. What explains the “U” at a time of unprecedented economic growth?"
Richard A. Easterlin, New York Times, September 27, 2012
"CHINA’s new leaders, who will be anointed next month at the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress in Beijing, might want to rethink the Faustian bargain their predecessors embraced some 20 years ago: namely, that social stability could be bought by rapid economic growth.
...
"Starting in 1990, as China moved to a free-market economy, real per-capita consumption and gross domestic product doubled, then doubled again. Most households now have at least one color TV. Refrigerators and washing machines — rare before 1990 — are common in cities.
"Yet there is no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier, according to an analysis of survey data that colleagues and I conducted. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately.
...
"It is startling to find that Chinese people’s feelings of well-being have declined in a period of such momentous improvement in their economic lives. After all, most policy makers would confidently predict that a fourfold increase in a people’s material living standard would make them considerably happier.
"And yet, piecing the surveys together, we found a U-shaped pattern of happiness over time, with life satisfaction declining from 1990 to the first part of this decade, and then recovering by 2010 to a level somewhat below the 1990 value. What explains the “U” at a time of unprecedented economic growth?"
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