A nation's general "happiness" compared to "wealth"

Great Debates
1

We recently traveled to Kenya, and I had a couple of impressions about what I saw of their society. I was hoping folk would be willing/able to discuss my impressions, and possibly recommend additional resources. This is not an area in which I have any expertise, so please educate me rather than criticize my ignorance in phrasing - or my misperceptions. And I readily acknowledge that I’m no student of Kenyan society.

We started/stopped in Nairobi, but spent no time in the center of town. The people we saw and encountered in the outskirts of Nairobi, and especially outside of Nairobi and in other cities and rural areas, generally impressed us as CONSIDERABLY less wealthy than comparable Americans. The middle class generally lived in apartments rather than separate homes, and did not appear to have anywhere near the possessions that many Americans take for granted. (One fellow traveller defined “middle class” outside the US as persons who have stuff they do not NEED. I thought that an interesting definition.)

And, below the middle class, there were huge swaths of the population who appeared “poorer” than even the poorest Americans. Very few Kenyans owned cars. Most everyone had electricity - but not enough to run refrigerators, so they bought food fresh daily - often walking distance to obtain it. And just about everyone owned a cellphone. Not every house had TV.

I had 2 general observations which impressed me as quite different than what I experience in America:

First, my impression was that most folk spent considerable time and effort trying to address their basic NEEDS - getting food for today, getting their kids to school, trying to obtain some hard currency. Because they had to work so hard to address their needs, I did not perceive them as focusing on WANTS - a car, designer clothes, etc. The kinds of aspirations I see as so common among my neighbors.

Secondly, I perceived a much greater level of COOPERATION among people than the emphasis on personal rights than I perceive in the US. As a basic example, Nairobi have very few traffic lights and stop signs. Yet traffic managed to move somehow, without tons of honking, flipping drivers off, or fender benders. And folk I talked with couldn’t imagine why EVERYONE would need their own car. It was enough that someone had a car (or motorcycle) that others could use when needed. Several folk I spoke with said within their village/neighborhood/apartment building - they would help out folk who needed help, and keep trouble-makers in line. They couldn’t imagine NOT knowing who your neighbors were.

Yet, despite being so “poor”, and having to work so hard to care for their basic needs, people didn’t appear “unhappy.” And I heard no one express jealousy of western levels of wealth.

So, am I just being paternalistically ignorant in presuming that this “poorer” population is not necessarily “unhappier” than wealthy western nations? If they were to consistently have their needs provided for, would they then begin aspiring after wants?

It was just so striking to see how a community could be ordered so differently than ours, yet seem to function quite well. I’ve tried to search some info as to national happiness vs wealth, but ran across info that was either too superficial or too granular for my curiosity.

Apologies if this OP impresses anyone as naive, prejudiced, or poorly phrased. I hope I offered enough to stimulate a worthwhile discussion.

2

Whole books have been written on your topic.

There’s an old saying that happiness is the inverse of the gap between expectations and reality.

Something like 80% of Americans think they’ll be in the top 10% of wealth by retirement. They’re almost all wrong. They will be monster disappointed and therefore unhappy. And the daily struggle to chase what’s ever farther out of reach is stressful and unrawarding.

The Nigerians expect rather little, but their expectations are in line with their reality. Which tends to make the net economic contribution to total happiness far more positive than in the USA.

3

I’m not sure that Nigerians on average are happier than Americans are, despite expecting less. By this scale at least they rate 93rd compared to America at 15th. (Methods)

My own take though is that after basic needs, including food and safety, are met, most of us have a happiness center of mass that is hard to perturb for long. Suddenly get a lot more money? Luxuries? Happier for a bit but then it is your normal and you return to your own personal set point. Likewise for losses.

Obviously from that scale there are some national differences so circumstance of the society do matter some. I just think less than many of us would think.

4

As a northern European, I wanted to address this. I believe that the owning of your own house is a very distinct American goal. Most people I know who are middle class, or even fairly well off live in apartments. That’s because we want to live in cities and not suburbs.
Of course, there are large groups that want to live in Suburbia, and they tend to be middle class, since owning a house is out of reach for the lowest 20% earners. But living in an apartment is not a marker of class.
ISTM that middle class choosing apartment-dwelling is normal in large cities in the U.S. but maybe not outside the big metros?

5

The difference, I think, is that due to various laws and traditions, the vast majority of apartments in the United States are rentals, while the majority of apartments in many other countries are what Americans call “condos”, meaning that they are owned by their residents. That means that to Americans, apartment dwellers are usually tenants, which puts them in a generally lower class than homeowners, while in Europe and elsewhere, apartment dwellers are usually homeowners themselves.

6

FYI, my trip was to Kenya. Tho both are relatively wealthy on an African scale.

7

D’oh! Thank you for correcting my sloppiness before it propagated too far.

8

First of all, the wealth of a nation can be deceptive if 97% of it is controlled by 1% of the population. Secondly, the daily war to acquire, keep, and enlarge economic wealth often can be so stressful as to have the inverse effect on one’s state of happiness. Social stability is also a big factor.

9

Kenya rated lower on that scale. 109. Again America 15th on the source I had used but checking primary source has dropped in 2024 to 23rd.

In general all of Africa scores low.

Proposed factors to explain regional differences in these self perceptions of happiness include:

GDP, life expectancy, having someone to count on, a sense of freedom, generosity and perceptions of corruption

Also though there is the following, which I looked up to support your perception of American culture being much more individual focused (and we do stand out from most other countries in that way) but also we are more likely to say that today is a good day, especially compared to other wealthy countries. Or at least we did in 2015.

Oh, to devil in the details, details of changes by age groups regionally is really interesting in that Happiness Report.

10

Yes. My impression was that a VERY SMALL percentage of Kenyans were quite wealthy. Not sure how their rations compare to the US.

I did not get the impression that the majority of folk were conducting such a “daily war”. The necessities were available - they just required regular effort/maintenance.

Not sure how much of an effort was generally made to “enlarge wealth.” The biggest factor several folk told me was the high cost of education - trying to improve their kids’ chances. But the social stability - and communal support - impressed me as a tremendous favorable factor.

Thanks for the WHO cite, Dseid. I’ll give it a thorough review.

Yes. I believe there was the common urge of young folk to move to cities. Outside of the biggest cities, there were VERY few/no apartment bldgs.

11

I think this is the key.

Here, I think we’ve got something of a vicious circle happening (or virtuous, depending on what perspective you’re looking from) where we have surplus income, we use it to get stuff we don’t strictly speaking, need, and then we get some kind of boost of prestige, self-worth, excitement, etc… And people like that. So they want more. And they notice what others around them have, and want that too, because not having it makes them feel inferior. Which makes them somewhat discontent, if not unhappy, and they strive for more stuff. Lather, rinse, repeat. And retailers/manufacturers know this intimately- that’s part of why there are new and improved models all the time and why so much of the advertising is lifestyle-oriented. Nobody’s buying a Lexus because of the really high performance or the cool features; they’re buying it because it’s a Lexus and everyone else knows it. Now if they’re already in the Lexus vs. Acura market, then it often comes down to actual differences between the cars themselves.

So we basically get in a sort of individual cycle of wanting more stuff, getting more stuff, and never quite being content with any of it.

I suspect in Kenya, there is, like you say, such a emphasis on the activities of daily life that nobody really has any spare cash or time to sit around and be unhpapy about the fact that their neighbor has nicer clothes, or a newer car, or that their car is “embarrassing”, even though it might be in fine working order, just old and beat up. They’re just content to get enough to eat, have a roof, etc. Basically a more holistic concept of “hunger makes the best sauce” .

12

Except that the premise is untrue. There is in fact measurably less happiness in Kenya on average.

Please note, this does NOT argue that more stuff results in more happiness.

I would argue that the lesser happiness in Kenya reflects the great inequality there number one. Seeing some with lots of stuff and power while you are struggling to have your basic needs met and have little power, is not a recipe for happiness. High degrees of political corruption also contribute to a lack of happiness.

My WAG is that once basic needs are met those issues are more contributory to average happiness than higher GDP and more stuff. And social connections, a sense of being part of a community with some greater purpose than your self.

13

As Tolstoy almost said, each country is unhappy in their own way. Caricaturing mightily …

Americans are generally atomized discontented overworked overspent undersatisifed economic-droids who don’t recognize that’s what’s missing from their life is social / communal / family, not economic.

Kenyans (etc) are generally struggling economically in the face of crime and corruption and very difficult logistics, but have family and community enough to make it all worthwhile … enough.

14

The other thing to consider is that the average Kenyan or person in a low-wealth nation may be more in touch with nature and the elements of nature and the “animal self” (for lack of a better term) than the highly-developed West.

We all have our inner animal that needs nature, etc. and it’s easy for a Westerner to be unconsciously unhappy when spending 20 hours inside a building or office/home each day and half the day in front of a big blue-light emitting digital screen.

15

Africa is of course a huge and diverse continent, but I still would like to invite the one resident of that continent that I know is on our board, @MrDibble, whose country, South Africa, scores 83 on that index list, to offer some perspectives.

16

Everybody needs to have their basic needs met to be happy.

Beyond that, people are more unhappy if they see their neighbours have much more than they do. In societies where people have about the same amount of stuff, this is not an issue. If differences are constantly in your face and widely advertised, it can become relevant.

Socializing and social structures also increase happiness. But much of happiness, some 50-60%, (or so I have read) is genetic and some people are just more agreeable than others, even after different experiences.

17

South Africans are, on the whole, an unhappy lot. For lots of good reasons, including spectacularly high crime, poverty, unemployment and inequality rates as well as a failure for things to get as good as they were promised after Apartheid (although the are actually better than they were). And “community” is no compensation when a lot of communities here are very, very broken.

That score tracks for me.

18

I wonder how readily the 80+ year old Harvard longitudinal study can be extrapolated to other countries and other cultures – ie, is it a basic tenet of humanity that community matters most for our happiness?

This kind of topic always reminds me of a parable I’d heard a very long time ago:

I’ve long defined the American Dream as: working too hard at a job you don’t particularly like … in order to buy an endless surfeit of shit you really don’t need … in a vain effort to keep up with people who – in the main – you don’t actually like.

19

To support that with data, and to extend some:

Yet even as the whole countries become less happy, happiness inequality deceases when GDP increases along with income inequality:

It seems to me that the only way to square that circle is that the vast majority, the 99% plus, are all similarly less happy comparing themselves to the far off top with power and stuff they will never have, while more power and stuff doesn’t drive the top to any higher happiness than their intrinsic baselines.

(Thanks @MrDibble for the input.)

20

“But on Pretzel Day…well, I like Pretzel Day.”