Essay On Income Inequality And Happiness

A study by the psychologists Oishi, Kesebir and Diener (2011), in “ Income Inequality and Happiness”, examine the connection between income inequality and happiness among Americans. The objective of this experiment is to demonstrate the reasons of the American unhappiness after the income inequality occurs. The hypothesis is that the negative correlation between income inequality and happiness of the low-income individual is due to the low observed level of justice and trust (Oishi et al., 2011 p.2).

A group of 53,043 respondents of different ethnicity were randomly selected to participate in this experiment. Questionnaire (The General Social Survey) is used for this experiment. The authors average three possible responses to “Happy” for each survey year, weighted by

The authors point is that the destructive relation between income inequality and happiness affects more poor people than rich people. (Oishi at al., p5). On one hand I agree with the authors on the fact that the poor are the first affected by the negative impact of the relation between income disparity and happiness, because the income disparity can create job and wage insecurity. In fact Job and wage insecurity is increasing, low-income families are rising along with the vulnerabilities that creates, guaranteed pensions are becoming a thing of the past, health benefits are tough, personal debt is greatly increasing, training are declining, and precarious employment are growing. On top of all that the political class is more self-centered and indifferent to the people. This is the great risk shift, the transferring of risk from organizations to individuals. And it makes sense that happiness declines with increasing risk and