In the three-minute video below, Kate Pickett talks about why life life expectancy, happiness, and the variable that links them, stress, aren’t strongly related to national income averages within different developed countries.
See more at Equality Trust.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 8
EW — November 27, 2011
FYI: dead link (the one to the article, 2nd line)
Agradson — November 27, 2011
study from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, it sort of does — up to
about $75,000 a year. The lower a person's annual income falls below that
benchmark, the unhappier he or she feels. But no matter how much more than
$75,000 people make, they don't report any greater degree of
happiness.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628,00.html#ixzz1exIyn3py
Yrro Simyarin — November 27, 2011
I'm actually *really* curious to see their controls. I imagine that all of the things they associate with income inequality would contribute to inequality itself. Drug users and the mentally ill are going to have a hard time finding work in a relatively competitive society. Sounds fairly tricky to separate causation, and I'd love to see how they did it.
The reviews I have read of the Spirit Level have been less than flattering, but they were all on on admittedly libertarian-leaning economists' sites. See http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/02/spirit-level-is-junk-science.html I'm willing to admit, however, that they might be somewhat biased.
Mae Spires — November 28, 2011
"[...] contributes to a whole host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of mental illness, drug use, obesity, infant death, imprisonment, and interpersonal trust."
I don't think that higher rates of interpersonal trust would be considered negative outcomes. Most likely the negative outcome is *lower* rates of interpersonal trust.