scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Journal ArticleDOI

Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all

01 Jun 1995-Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (North-Holland)-Vol. 27, Iss: 1, pp 35-47
TL;DR: In this article, the authors suggest that the material norms on which judgments of well-being are based increase in the same proportion as the actual income of the society, and that raising the incomes of all does not increase the happiness of all.
Abstract: Today, as in the past, within a country at a given time those with higher incomes are, on average, happier. However, raising the incomes of all does not increase the happiness of all. This is because the material norms on which judgments of well-being are based increase in the same proportion as the actual income of the society. These conclusions are suggested by data on reported happiness, material norms, and income collected in surveys in a number of countries over the past half century.

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters
Posted Content
TL;DR: The authors report how the economic variables income, unemployment and inflation affect happiness and how institutional factors, in particular the type of democracy and the extent of government decentralization, systematically influence how satisfied individuals are with their life.
Abstract: Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important insights for economics. We report how the economic variables income, unemployment and inflation affect happiness as well as how institutional factors, in particular the type of democracy and the extent of government decentralization, systematically influence how satisfied individuals are with their life. We discuss some of the consequences for economic policy and for economic theory.

3,071 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
03 Dec 2004-Science
TL;DR: The DRM's utility is shown by documenting close correspondences between the DRM reports of 909 employed women and established results from experience sampling, and an analysis of the hedonic treadmill shows its potential for well-being research.
Abstract: The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) assesses how people spend their time and how they experience the various activities and settings of their lives, combining features of time-budget measurement and experience sampling. Participants systematically reconstruct their activities and experiences of the preceding day with procedures designed to reduce recall biases. The DRM's utility is shown by documenting close correspondences between the DRM reports of 909 employed women and established results from experience sampling. An analysis of the hedonic treadmill shows the DRM's potential for well-being research.

2,933 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors found that people often make choices that bear a mixed relationship to their own happiness, and that their choices do not necessarily reflect their "true" preferences, and an exclusive reliance on choices to infer what people desire loses some of its appeal.
Abstract: For good reasons, economists have had a long-standing preference for studying peoples' revealed preferences; that is, looking at individuals' actual choices and decisions rather than their stated intentions or subjective reports of likes and dislikes. Yet people often make choices that bear a mixed relationship to their own happiness. A large literature from behavioral economics and psychology finds that people often make inconsistent choices, fail to learn from experience, exhibit reluctance to trade, base their own satisfaction on how their situation compares with the satisfaction of others and depart from the standard model of the rational economic agent in other ways. If people display bounded rationality when it comes to maximizing utility, then their choices do not necessarily reflect their "true" preferences, and an exclusive reliance on choices to infer what people desire loses some of its appeal. Direct reports of subjective well-being may have a useful role in the measure

2,783 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A detailed review of the literature on subjective well-being and its determinants can be found in this paper, where the authors highlight a range of problems in drawing firm conclusions about the causes of SWB; these include some contradictory evidence, concerns over the impact on the findings of potentially unobserved variables and the lack of certainty on the direction of causality.

2,586 citations


Cites background from "Will raising the incomes of all inc..."

  • ...As noted by Easterlin (1995), if the relative income effect dominates the absolute income effect, this would explain why cross section data show that wealthier individuals within a society are happier, but that average SWB levels remain constant as all members become wealthier....

    [...]

Proceedings ArticleDOI
26 Apr 2010
TL;DR: This work model personalized recommendation of news articles as a contextual bandit problem, a principled approach in which a learning algorithm sequentially selects articles to serve users based on contextual information about the users and articles, while simultaneously adapting its article-selection strategy based on user-click feedback to maximize total user clicks.
Abstract: Personalized web services strive to adapt their services (advertisements, news articles, etc.) to individual users by making use of both content and user information. Despite a few recent advances, this problem remains challenging for at least two reasons. First, web service is featured with dynamically changing pools of content, rendering traditional collaborative filtering methods inapplicable. Second, the scale of most web services of practical interest calls for solutions that are both fast in learning and computation.In this work, we model personalized recommendation of news articles as a contextual bandit problem, a principled approach in which a learning algorithm sequentially selects articles to serve users based on contextual information about the users and articles, while simultaneously adapting its article-selection strategy based on user-click feedback to maximize total user clicks.The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we propose a new, general contextual bandit algorithm that is computationally efficient and well motivated from learning theory. Second, we argue that any bandit algorithm can be reliably evaluated offline using previously recorded random traffic. Finally, using this offline evaluation method, we successfully applied our new algorithm to a Yahoo! Front Page Today Module dataset containing over 33 million events. Results showed a 12.5% click lift compared to a standard context-free bandit algorithm, and the advantage becomes even greater when data gets more scarce.

2,467 citations

References
More filters
Posted Content
TL;DR: The literature on subjective well-being (SWB), including happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect, is reviewed in three areas: measurement, causal factors, and theory.
Abstract: The literature on subjective well-being (SWB), including happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect, is reviewed in three areas: measurement, causal factors, and theory. Psychometric data on single-item and multi-item subjective well-being scales are presented, and the measures are compared. Measuring various components of subjective well-being is discussed. In terms of causal influences, research findings on the demographic correlates of SWB are evaluated, as well as the findings on other influences such as health, social contact, activity, and personality. A number of theoretical approaches to happiness are presented and discussed: telic theories, associationistic models, activity theories, judgment approaches, and top-down versus bottom-up conceptions.

10,021 citations


"Will raising the incomes of all inc..." refers background in this paper

  • ...The following gives a brief summary of the model and evidence....

    [...]

  • ...A number of ingenious experimental studies in social psychology have provided empirical support for this proposition (Brickman and Campbell, 1971; Diener, 1984). in income history might be expected to give rise to similar differences in living level norms -higher norms for the affluent and lower…...

    [...]

  • ...Although the effect of income is often small when other factors are controlled, these other factors may be ones through which income could produce its effects. . . (Diener, 1984, p. 553; see also Andrews, 1986, p. xi; for a seemingly contrary reading of the literature, see Lane, 1993)....

    [...]

  • ...Diener (1984) provides a valuable survey including more. recent work on both measurement and theory....

    [...]

  • ...In a survey done by Diener (1984) of well over 200 studies on the measurement and determinants of subjective well-being only two references appear to articles in economics journals....

    [...]

Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: The literature on subjective well-being (SWB), including happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect, is reviewed in this article in three areas: measurement, causal factors, and theory.
Abstract: The literature on subjective well-being (SWB), including happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect, is reviewed in three areas: measurement, causal factors, and theory. Psychometric data on single-item and multi-item subjective well-being scales are presented, and the measures are compared. Measuring various components of subjective well-being is discussed. In terms of causal influences, research findings on the demographic correlates of SWB are evaluated, as well as the findings on other influences such as health, social contact, activity, and personality. A number of theoretical approaches to happiness are presented and discussed: telic theories, associationistic models, activity theories, judgment approaches, and top-down versus bottom-up conceptions.

7,799 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 1974
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the association of income and happiness and suggest a Duesenberry-type model, involving relative status considerations as an important determinant of happiness.
Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the association of income and happiness. The basic data consist of statements by individuals on their subjective happiness, as reported in thirty surveys from 1946 through 1970, covering nineteen countries, including eleven in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Within countries, there is a noticeable positive association between income and happiness—in every single survey, those in the highest status group were happier, on the average, than those in the lowest status group. However, whether any such positive association exists among countries at a given time is uncertain. Certainly, the happiness differences between rich and poor countries that one might expect on the basis of the within-country differences by economic status are not borne out by the international data. Similarly, in the one national time series studied, for the United States since 1946, higher income was not systematically accompanied by greater happiness. As for why national comparisons among countries and over time show an association between income and happiness that is so much weaker than, if not inconsistent with, that shown by within-country comparisons, a Duesenberry-type model, involving relative status considerations as an important determinant of happiness, is suggested.

4,235 citations


"Will raising the incomes of all inc..." refers background or result in this paper

  • ...When Japan’s population near the start of this period is classified into three income groups, average happiness in the highest group is substantially greater than in the lowest (Easterlin, 1974, Table 5)....

    [...]

  • ...The answer to this question can now be given with somewhat greater assurance than twenty years ago (Easterlin, 1973; Easterlin, 1974)....

    [...]

  • ...Together with the results for the earlier part of the post-World War II period, the 3 Issues in the measurement of subjective well-being are discussed in Easterlin (1974)....

    [...]

  • ...Clearly, major political events (war, political turmoil, revolution) may influence happiness (Easterlin, 1974)....

    [...]

Posted Content
TL;DR: The Penn World Table as discussed by the authors is a set of national accounts economic time series covering many countries and its expenditure entries are denominated in common set of prices in a common currency so that real quantity comparisons can be made, both between countries and over time.
Abstract: The Penn World Table displays a set of national accounts economic time series covering many countries. Its expenditure entries are denominated in a common set of prices in a common currency so that real quantity comparisons can be made, both between countries and over time. It also provides information about relative prices within and between countries, as well as demographic data and capital stock estimates. This updated, revised, and expanded Mark 5 version of the table includes more countries, years, and variables of interest to economic researchers. The Table is available on personal computer diskettes and through BITNET.

3,160 citations


"Will raising the incomes of all inc..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Eighteen European countries are included plus the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Argentina, and the Union of South Africa....

    [...]

  • ...For the United States, on which the most work has been done, the most comprehensive studies of historical experience are those of Smith (1979) and Campbell (1981, ch. 3)....

    [...]

  • ...Trends in life satisfaction in nine European countries from 1973 to 1989 are much like that just reported for happiness in the United States (Fig....

    [...]

  • ...6 These observations on cultural influences on international happiness comparisons underscore the importance of national time series evidence, such as that emphasized 6 Some evidence from international comparisons suggests that cultural influences may also operate in a way observed in United States data....

    [...]

  • ...An analysis of survey responses for blacks and whites in the United States indicates that blacks have a tendency to choose more extreme response categories (Bachman and O’Malley, 1984)....

    [...]

Trending Questions (1)
Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all?

No, raising the incomes of all does not increase the happiness of all. The paper explains that while higher incomes do increase happiness on an individual level, the overall happiness of a society is not affected because material norms increase in proportion to income.