How the Economy affects happiness. Empirical Finding from Argentina.

VICTORIA GIARRIZZO; DARDO FERRER

Handbook of Happiness Research in Latin America

Intern.Handbook Quality-Life

Lugar: Distrito Federal; Año: 2015; p. 193 - 204

During recent decades economics has tended towards a systematic research into how happiness is perceived and valued by people. The evidence that more wealth and higher levels of material welfare are not necessarily associated with bettering how satisfied people are with their lives showed the need for a deeper understanding of the causes of happiness and its links with the economy. Therefore, after being absent from economics for over 100 years, since the 1980s economists have once again paid attention to this variable. Backed by the development of more robust statistics and more rigorous methodologies, research into happiness multiplied in economic science, especially during the past decade. Although there is still some theoretical vacuum that on one hand does not allow the economics of happiness to be called a sub-discipline of science, and on the other hand to design public policies in terms of the results that were obtained, the methodological and empirical advances are significant, becoming essential tools to understand: a) the nature of the link that people establish between the existential and economic spheres; b) to what extent do the variables that make up the economic subsystem, such as incomes, employment, housing, or access to consumption of goods and services, improve individual satisfaction; or c) when, and under what conditions, do these components become an impairment for persons to experience feelings or perceptions of happiness.The purpose of this paper will be to present three empirical surveys of economics and happiness carried out in Argentina during 2012. The overall results of these investigations show that around 75% of the inhabitants say they are ?happy?. On an intensity scale, where 1 means that happiness is absolutely lacking to 10 where happiness is complete, the average happiness declared by the population was 6.7 points. But on the other hand economic welfare perception was very low: 76% of the same individuals in the surveys rate it as ?weak?, ?bad? or ?very bad?, revealing a profound gap between the aggregate valuations of happiness and the aggregate valuations of economic welfare.Far from being conclusive, these results are of a preliminary nature. Nevertheless they are a step forward to know about individual assessments of life, to understand the impact that economic variables have on them, and to detect how perceptions of happiness and the subjective perceptions of welfare may diverge. From these and other results that were obtained it will be shown that, at least in Argentina, the economy does not appear to be decisive for happiness, but that there are situations where it can clearly signal the economy as a major conditional factor in order to perceive this situation of being satisfied with life.