published 8 months ago (15.03.2009 17:06)
The correlation of income and happiness
I rediscovered this chart in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s talk on flow at TED. The green dots show income, the red dots perceived happiness. I’m certainly no statistics pro, but it looks like the correlation is zero (these are figures for the US).
Even if there’s hardly any money, people aren’t necessarily unhappy. Instead, happiness spreads to both sides – there are very happy and very unhappy countries. It seems like the Latin American and East Asian people are much less affected by little available money than the Eastern European – compare the happiness of Brazil, the Domenican Republic and Vietnam to Macedonia, Lithuania and Bulgaria. They have roughly the same purchasing power.