Transcript
CAROL GRAHAM: You've primarily heard about how happiness research can contribute to how we think about policies in the developed world—primarily the United States, but also Europe. My own work concentrates primarily on the developing economies, and I'm one of the few people that's conducted large-scale happiness surveys in the developing economies.
And, for the most part, what we find is that the determinants of happiness are very similar in the developing economies. So the same things that make people happy here, like good health, stable employment and marital status, education, lower levels of crime and insecurity, matter to people's happiness in the developing world as well. This isn't a big surprise.
I'll tell you a bit more about that in a couple minutes, but what I want to do briefly is frame this by showing how research on happiness can help us explain one of the real policy puzzles in today's development debate, which is the long and very contentious debate on the effects of globalization on poverty and inequality worldwide. And there's a big gap between the assessments by experts, technical economists who assess the aggregate benefits about globalization on poverty and inequality and generally give very positive assessments, and the very negative assessments of the average layman in poor countries and also the very extremely negative view by the much more vocal critics, as witnessed by protestors from Seattle to Prague.
So why the discrepancy? Why, on the one hand, do most technical assessments of the benefits of globalization find that the aggregate benefits for the poor in the Third World are good and yet there's so much negative talk about it?
Well, first of all, our traditional income-base measures miss a lot about what's going on. We have standard poverty head counts or Gini coefficients which measure inequality, and they don't change much over time, particularly Gini coefficients. So, for example, if you think about Chile, which is an example of an economy or country that globalized over the past three decades, it really inserted itself into the world economy, and it's been very successful, and it's changed dramatically in three decades, both the structure of its economy and structure of its society, and yet the Gini coefficient in Chile, in the 1960s and today, is roughly the same.
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