A survey of over 17,000 Chinese people has
found that optimistic expectations are the key to making people happy with
their lot in life.
Imagining
a rosy future is key to present-day happiness, new research conducted in China
has found.
The
study, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization,
surveyed over 17,000 Chinese people in 2002 on happiness and optimism for the
future.
“It
turns out that people’s expected future health has about one sixth the effect
on current happiness as their actual current health,” said Professor Frijters
from The University of Queensland School of Economics.
“We
found that the poorest group was the happiest. People in the countryside had
incomes less than a third of that of people in the cities, but still 62 percent
of the rural respondents said they were happy or very happy, while only 56
percent of the urban respondents were at least happy,” he said.
Interestingly,
the most miserable group in China were the migrants who had come to the cities
from the countryside. While they were earning more than double what those ‘back
home in the countryside’ were earning, only 44 percent of them were happy, the
study found.
Despite
this, on average, the Chinese were about as happy as individuals from a
European middle-income country like Croatia.
Frijters
said the most important factor behind the high levels of happiness in China
could be attributed to “extremely high” expectations of future incomes.
“Over
65 percent of all the respondents expected an improvement in their income in
the coming years and those who expected an improvement were almost a full point
happier (on a five-point scale) than those who expected a reduction in income,”
he said.
Expectations
of higher future incomes also turned out to be more important to the Chinese
than either their actual income, their health, whether they were married, or
whether they had a job, Frijters found.
“Given
that growth-rates are still eight percent in 2012 and will probably keep up for
quite a while yet, our research suggests there is no good reason to expect
Chinese political instability in the near future,” he said.
The
article can be found at: Frijters P et al. (2012) Are
optimistic expectations keeping the Chinese happy?
AsianScientist
Source: UQ.
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