Tasting Freedom: Happiness, Religion and Economic Transition

Paper is here, by Orsolya Lelkes (2006.) Emphases mine.

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.

No Relationship Between Population Size and Per Capita Income

I had always been curious about this, thinking that perhaps there would be a positive correlation; being part of a big country opens up a big market to you, and (one might reason) if a population can function as a large unified country, that means that somehow, culture and institutions are functioning well and this will affect economics. But this is not the case. There was no relationship between population and per capita income, which also implies that over time there is no relationship between population and growth rate.

Of course there are population outliers, but even after I took out all the countries with populations of over 100 million (there are 12) no relationship appeared. In any event, from a policy-making standpoint, it's not clear what this would've meant anyway. (Quick! Join together with bigger countries so we'll get higher GDP!)

There has been work done on population growth rate (below, source), showing a negative relationship; interesting but not surprising, likely relating to demographic transition. Additionally, one of the effects of being in a country is that of the same currency across the population, so a separate question would be whether monetary union regions grow faster than non-union regions, but there are far fewer data points there.

Is There Evidence That Prizes Influence Outcomes?

Some time ago I proposed that there be development prizes (halfway between the Nobel and the X-Prize) for development and democracy milestones.

But now the question is, do we have evidence that they actually influence their respective fields of endeavor? A brief search makes no mention of this, but then again, many of the bigger, older prizes don't have clear measurable goals.

Incentives in Social Engineering

"If we miss the goals, who is going to punish us?" asked Esther Duflo, a development expert (and Macarthur Fellow, and Clark awardee) at M.I.T. "Nobody is going to come from Mars and say, 'You didn’t reach the goals, so we will invade' — there is no onus." The article addresses accountability problems with the U.N.'s approaches to fighting poverty. Maybe we need an X-Prize for measurable, realistic milestones in development?

Oddly, the types of private institutional giving discussed in the second link above (for example, the Gates Foundation) is proving difficult to get off the ground in the rising Number Two economy, China - not just because Chinese billionaires are cheap, but because the Chinese government doesn't want competition, even if it means faster improvement for its citizens.