Abstract:
Economic transition lowered happiness on average, but did not affect everyone equally. This paper uses Hungarian survey data to study the impact of religion and economic transition on happiness. Religious involvement contributes positively to individuals’ self-reported well-being. Controlling for personal characteristics of the respondents, money is a less important source of happiness for the religious. The impact of economic transition varies greatly across different groups. The main winners from increasing economic freedom were the entrepreneurs. The religious were little affected by the changes. This implies that greater ideological freedom, measured by a greater social role of churches, may not influence happiness per se.The interpretation I take from this is that in the positive psychology triad of the things the produce happiness (pleasure, meaning, and flow), each of these things is a variable in each person's overall happiness equation, and each component's importance varies between individuals. Money is mostly something we exchange for pleasure, unless you're an entrepreneur, then it produces meaning and flow. If you're religious, the meaning component is bigger so again money is not such a big term. As well, I would imagine that the starting point and absolute difference in the transition makes a difference. That is, if you're starting out second-world (like Hungary, the source of the data in this paper) you're probably not going without food, shelter, or public safety. But if you're in Botswana or for that matter China over the last few decades, you might well have gone from famines and no housing or police to a more developed social environment, there may be a greater impact on happiness.
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