Ruut Veenhoven, with the assistance of Renee
van Schoonhoven and Piet Ouweneel
Paper presented at
the 12th Work Congress of Sociology in Madrid July 1990.Working Group Social
Indicators and Quality of Life. Session 7, Social trends and Inequality.
ABSTRACT
Cross-national
studies on happiness have focused on differences in level of happiness. The
focus of this paper is on spread in
happiness in the nation, also called ‘inequality in happiness’. Inequality in
happiness in nations can be measured by the size of the standard deviation of
responses to survey questions about the ‘overall appreciation of one’s
life-as-a-whole’.
This paper considers spread in
happiness in 28 countries around 1980. Contrary to notions of a ‘divided’
society none of these countries shows a bi-modal distribution of happiness. All
distribution are uni-modal, but the distributions are not equally flat. There
are considerable differences in size of the standard deviations. These
differences are not a statistical artifact of variation in level of happiness
and appear quite constant through time.
Inequality
in happiness appears to be greater in the socio-economically most unequal
countries and smaller in politically democratic and economically developed
nations. Contrary to expectation, inequality in happiness appears to be more
closely linked to social equality among rich nations than among not-so-rich
ones.