TY - JOUR
T1 - Money and Morale
T2 - Growing Inequality Affects How Americans View Themselves and Others
AU - Hout, Michael
N1 - Funding Information:
I thank James A. Davis, Claude Fischer, Tom Smith, Bruce Western, and Yu Xie for their comments on various versions of this article. The opinions, interpretations, and errors are my own. I did the research reported here while I was Natalie Cohen Professor of Sociology and Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. In the course of my research, I received the financial support of the Natalie Cohen Sociology Chair, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Berkeley Population Center (NICHD R21 HD056581). The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute Of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institutes of Health, or other funders.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, © 2015 by The American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Copyright:
Copyright 2015 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/1/1
Y1 - 2016/1/1
N2 - Dozens of past studies document how affluent people feel somewhat better about life than middle-class people feel and much better than poor people do. New analyses of the General Social Surveys from 1974 to 2012 address questions in the literature regarding aggregate responses to hard times, whether the income-class relationship is linear or not, and whether inequality affects happiness. General happiness dropped significantly during the Great Recession, suggesting that the income-happiness relationship might also exist at the macro level. People with extremely low incomes are not as unhappy as a linear model expects, but there is no evidence of a threshold beyond which personal happiness stops increasing. Comparing happiness over the long term, the affluent were about as happy in 2012 as they were in the 1970s, but the poor were much less happy. Consequently, the gross happiness gap by income was about 30 percent bigger in 2012 than it was in the 1970s. A multivariate model shows that the net effect of income on happiness also increased significantly over time.
AB - Dozens of past studies document how affluent people feel somewhat better about life than middle-class people feel and much better than poor people do. New analyses of the General Social Surveys from 1974 to 2012 address questions in the literature regarding aggregate responses to hard times, whether the income-class relationship is linear or not, and whether inequality affects happiness. General happiness dropped significantly during the Great Recession, suggesting that the income-happiness relationship might also exist at the macro level. People with extremely low incomes are not as unhappy as a linear model expects, but there is no evidence of a threshold beyond which personal happiness stops increasing. Comparing happiness over the long term, the affluent were about as happy in 2012 as they were in the 1970s, but the poor were much less happy. Consequently, the gross happiness gap by income was about 30 percent bigger in 2012 than it was in the 1970s. A multivariate model shows that the net effect of income on happiness also increased significantly over time.
KW - General Social Survey
KW - happiness
KW - income inequality
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U2 - 10.1177/0002716215596973
DO - 10.1177/0002716215596973
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84949639184
SN - 0002-7162
VL - 663
SP - 204
EP - 228
JO - Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
JF - Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
IS - 1
ER -