A Ciencia da Felicidade 4

"How are we to interpret the difference between the income-happiness relationships in time series and cross section? Here Frey and Stutzer cite Richard Easterlin, an early student of these relationships who argued that in the consumption domain, variance in measured happiness appears to be explained almost entirely by variations in relative consumption, with virtually no variance attributable to variations in absolute consumption. (An exception to this generalization occurs in very poor countries, where real consumption growth over time is associated with significant gains in measured happiness.) (…) Because of the strong methodological orientation toward the analysis-of-variance framework among psychologists, it was perhaps natural for them to assess a factor’s importance by the proportion of variance in the dependent variable that it explains. Economists, in contrast, are strongly oriented toward the multiple regression analysis framework, and for that reason are more inclined to assess a variable’s importance by the size of its estimated slope coefficient. For present purposes, it is the latter metric that seems by far the more appropriate. Among the factors over which people have some personal control, there is perhaps no other that affects measured happiness levels more strongly than relative consumption. That Frey and Stutzer understand this point is evident from their discussion of this issue in their recent survey article in the Journal of Economic Literature. In their book, however, they often repeat the psychologist’s misleading claim that variations in relative income have only negligible impact on happiness."