The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [32]
A survey by the Pew Research Center found that even as the Republican candidate John McCain headed for disaster in the presidential election of November 2008, 37 percent of Republicans rated themselves as “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats. A similar trend has held since 1972, when the General Social Survey started asking the question. This is true around the world. Apparently, it has to do with the left’s guilt. A study by psychologists at New York University found that the right-left happiness gap increases with deepening income inequality. This suggests people on the right are better at rationalizing inequality as a normal feature of life and feel less guilty about it.
But improve people’s economic outlook and chances are you will make them happier. More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, former East Germans remained unhappier than their fellow citizens from the western side. They would have been even less satisfied were it not for the income boost following unification. East Germans’ satisfaction with life rose about 20 percent between 1991 and 2001. Much of that jump was due to the freedoms gained with the demise of their police state. But a 60 percent increase in household income also played a part.
The gross domestic product of the Russian Federation declined by a quarter between 1990 and 1995, as the Soviet Union fell apart. Unsurprisingly, Russians’ reported satisfaction with life dropped 17 percent. Analyzing the surge in male suicides following the dismemberment of the former USSR, researchers concluded that a $100 increase in per capita GDP lowered the suicide rate among Russian males by somewhere between 0.14 percent and 0.20 percent. Similarly, an increase of one percentage point in the share of the population who held a job reduced male suicides by about 3 percent.
Consider how unhappy you would feel if you had to live with nothing but dirt under your feet. In 2000 the government of the state of Coahuila in northern Mexico launched a program called Piso Firme, or Firm Floor, that offered people living in homes with dirt floors up to fifty square meters of concrete cement flooring, at a cost to the government of about 1,500 Mexican pesos—equivalent to about $150 at the time, one and a half months’ income. Families would be told in advance of the delivery date so they could prepare the rooms to be covered. Large trucks rolled through poor neighborhoods, pouring cement from house to house, leaving each family to smooth it down.
A few years after the cement was laid, researchers from the World Bank and two American universities deployed across the shanty-towns of Torreón, the state capital, armed with portable scales and medical testing paraphernalia to measure how it changed people’s lives. Dirt floors are a breeding ground for worms and several types of protozoa. Children catch parasites from them, suffer from diarrhea, and become malnourished. Anemia is common, as are developmental disabilities. The researchers weighed and measured the kids. They took stool samples. They pricked the kids’ fingers to check for anemia. And they subjected them to cognitive development tests. Parents were asked about how well babies recognized basic words for animals, household items, and the like. Older children were made to relate pictures to words. Then the researchers asked mothers about how satisfied they were with their lives.
To assess the impact of the new floors, they compared the health and well-being of families in Torreón with those in its twin city of Gómez Palacio, which is part of the same metropolitan area but happens to lie across the state line in neighboring Durango—where the program wasn’t available. The researchers found that paving floors led to a 78 percent drop in parasitic infestations among children. Diarrhea cases declined by half and the prevalence of anemia plummeted four fifths. Children in homes where cement