单选题
This year two new surveys have thrown up a lot of fresh data on how the world really feels. And they have, so the pollsters say, cast some unexpected light on the link between wealth and happiness.
Ever since social scientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that mansion-dwelling American millionaires are barely happier than Masai warriors in huts, some economists have been downplaying the link between cash and contentment. In a 2005 book, Richard Layard, a British scholar, said family circumstances, employment and health all mattered more to a sense of well-being than income. Rich countries might be happier than poor ones, but beyond a threshold, the connection weakens, and more cash would not buy more happiness—so the theory goes.
The new polls cast some doubt on that school of thought. Gallup"s pollsters asked a standard question: how satisfied are you with your life, on a scale of nought to ten? In all the rich places, most people say they are happy. In all the poor ones, people say they are not. As Angus Deaton of Princeton University puts it, a map of the results looks like an income plot of the world. The pattern also seems to hold true within countries, as well as between them.
The other new survey, by Ipsos, confirms the picture. The Ipsos poll is not strictly comparable to Gallup"s because (for the first time) it asks questions of what Ipsos calls "leaders and shapers of public opinion", mostly business people and politicians. This group has distinctive views—it takes a loftier view than the general population. In poorer countries, top people"s attitudes are far more optimistic than those of the general population. In Europe and America, the attitudes of the elite are roughly in line with—or slightly more pessimistic than—society as a whole.
In fairness, the "new happiness" economists, such as Mr. Layard, never claimed there was no connection at all between money and feeling good. What they have said is that once people climb out of poverty, the link is weak, and may not work at all above a certain point, as one British pundit put it, extra money "is now proved beyond doubt not to deliver greater happiness, nationally or individually". The evidence for this comes from surveys in most rich countries, which show that happiness has been flat for decades, even though incomes have risen sharply.
On the face of it, the new findings are a counter-point to the earlier data. If the richest countries report greater "happiness" than moderately rich ones, that would suggest there is no quantifiable level of income at which extra cash fails to deliver extra contentment. Still, the latest findings don"t invalidate the historic experience of particular countries—like the United States—which have surged to greater levels of wealth without experiencing any rise in general levels of reported happiness.