Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono Federico

Author:Pistono, Federico [Pistono, Federico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: life, jobs, Robots, happiness, unemployment
ISBN: 9781300326977
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2012-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

As you can see, things start to get very complicated.

While these studies looked at how the economic factors play a role in people’s happiness between different countries, one could wonder what happens to people within the same country? Is there a correlation? Of which kind? And how significant is it?

Nobel laureate economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Angus Deaton at Princeton University recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 144 that addresses just that. They reported on their analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organisation. The study concluded that their life evaluations – that is, their considered evaluations of their life against a stated scale of one to ten – rose steadily with income. So the research shows that, within a country, income does correlate positively with Life Satisfaction. However, there is a catch. Life Satisfaction does not increase proportionally with income, but with its logarithm. Here’s where the chapter on exponential growth gives us again a big help. Say you make $30,000 a year. An increase of $30,000 gives you a great bump in the rise of the ladder of Life Satisfaction. But as you climb up the ladder, you have to exponentially increase the amount of money you make in order to make a dent on your Life Satisfaction curve. Therefore, for a person making $100 million, another million or two will not matter that much, but a billion will.

On the other hand, their reported Quality of Emotional Daily Experiences (experiences of joy, affection, stress, sadness, or anger) levels off after a certain level. Income above $75,000 annually does not lead to more experiences of Emotional Happiness (or Well-being), nor to further relief of unhappiness or stress. Below this income level, respondents reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness and stress, implying the pain of life’s misfortunes, including disease, divorce, and being alone, is exacerbated by poverty.

In conclusion, it appears that money can buy you Life Satisfaction, but not Emotional Well-being. Lack of money can cause both dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

Where does this lead us? As we have started to see, this happiness business is getting more complicated that expected, so before jumping to conclusions there are a few things to understand about it.

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