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The Poor Are Less Happy in Places With More Income Inequality [CityLab.com]

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Lots of factors influence our happiness, and like it or not, behavioral scientists consistently find that money is one of them. But it’s not just our own money that impacts our well-being; the money those around us make matters, too. In one telling study from 1998, a majority of participants said they’d rather make $50,000 and have others bring in half that than make $100,000 and have others take home double. The Joneses do exist, and we kinda hate them.

A new study suggests our prosperous peers bother us even more in places with higher income inequality—an effect that’s especially strong among the poor.

In what they call the “largest investigation of relative income” to date, psychologists Felix Cheung
and Richard Lucas of Michigan State University analyzed the self-reported income and life satisfaction of more than 1.7 million Americans, as gathered by Center for Disease Control and Prevention surveys from 2005 to 2010. Cheung and Lucas then paired this data with Census-based measures of county income (as a proxy for what the Joneses bring in) as well as income inequality.

 

[For more of this story, written by Eric Jaffe, go to http://www.citylab.com/work/20...e-inequality/400001/]

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