TY - JOUR
T1 - Happy without money
T2 - Minimally monetized societies can exhibit high subjective wellbeing
AU - Miñarro, Sara
AU - Reyes-García, Victoria
AU - Aswani, Shankar
AU - Selim, Samiya
AU - Barrington-Leigh, Christopher P.
AU - Galbraith, Eric D.
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union?s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (BIGSEA, Grant Agreement No 682602). The authors would like to thank the local enumerators that helped collect the data in the Solomon Islands and Bangladesh, as well as the communities in the study sites for access, hospitality and patient collaboration. We are grateful for the statistics support received from A. Vazquez Fari?as and A. Espinal Berenguer from the statistical support service of UAB, to R. Heneghan for assistance with the visualization code, and to I. Savin for useful comments on the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Miñarro et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/1
Y1 - 2021/1
N2 - Economic growth is often assumed to improve happiness for people in low income countries, although the association between monetary income and subjective well-being has been a subject of debate. We test this assumption by comparing three different measures of subjective well-being in very low-income communities with different levels of monetization. Contrary to expectations, all three measures of subjective well-being were very high in the least-monetized sites and comparable to those found among citizens of wealthy nations. The reported drivers of happiness shifted with increasing monetization: from enjoying experiential activities in contact with nature at the less monetized sites, to social and economic factors at the more monetized sites. Our results suggest that high levels of subjective wellbeing can be achieved with minimal monetization, challenging the perception that economic growth will raise life satisfaction among low income populations.
AB - Economic growth is often assumed to improve happiness for people in low income countries, although the association between monetary income and subjective well-being has been a subject of debate. We test this assumption by comparing three different measures of subjective well-being in very low-income communities with different levels of monetization. Contrary to expectations, all three measures of subjective well-being were very high in the least-monetized sites and comparable to those found among citizens of wealthy nations. The reported drivers of happiness shifted with increasing monetization: from enjoying experiential activities in contact with nature at the less monetized sites, to social and economic factors at the more monetized sites. Our results suggest that high levels of subjective wellbeing can be achieved with minimal monetization, challenging the perception that economic growth will raise life satisfaction among low income populations.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85099885636&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244569
DO - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244569
M3 - Article
C2 - 33439863
AN - SCOPUS:85099885636
VL - 16
IS - 1 January
M1 - e0244569
ER -
