At American Public Media’s Marketplace, Kai Ryssdal and Rob Schmitz discuss a recent study from the University of Southern California which suggested that rising incomes in China are failing to bring greater happiness to broad swathes of the population. Rising prices and growing income inequality appear to be undermining any expected gains, and may be sowing the seeds of social unrest.
Ryssdal: … Somebody’s making money.
Schmitz: Right. Developers are obviously making a lot of money. And of course the government of China itself is getting rich and that’s something that irks a lot of the people I spoke to. In the past five years, much of China’s economic growth has come from building infrastructure. The party has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this and most of these contracts have gone to state-owned companies. So in other words, the government is giving money to itself. So one man I spoke to was really frustrated with this.
Man speaking
Ryssdal: “Nothing’s OK,” right? Everything is not all right.
Schmitz: Nothing is OK. So he’s saying that the Communist party originated from the poor, but now has basically left the poor behind. He’s a security guard who makes $5 a day and he lives in a 30-square-foot apartment with his wife and his daughter and he isn’t happy at all. So I asked him. I said how could the government improve the situation in China. And so get this, he said that China should start a war.
Ryssdal: No, come on. Really?
Schmitz: Yeah. And I said with whom and he said it doesn’t matter.
The Los Angeles Times reported the study’s release last week, and described China’s use by economists as “a real-life laboratory to study how money, inequality and change are tied to our satisfaction with life”.
Easterlin and his fellow economists based their findings on six surveys on life satisfaction in China, most of them conducted by Western firms. The fall and rise of happiness levels in China mirror the trends seen in Russia and other European countries transitioning from communism, Easterlin said.
But what makes China especially interesting is that happiness levels dipped and rose while incomes were soaring, showing that joblessness can drag happiness levels down even as national wealth is on the rise. The results echo earlier studies that have found that growing wealth does not tend to increase happiness because expectations rise along with it. People also tend to compare their wealth with others’.
“If somebody got a higher salary this year than last, he might not be happy,” Jiaotong University professor Wang Fanghua told The Times last year. “But if his income is better than his friends’, then he will be happy.”
At TIME, Austin Ramzy noted that Bo Xilai’s gestures towards addressing economic inequality helped build his broad popularity among Chongqingers.
When Bo Xilai, the rising Chinese Communist Party official who was purged in March, gave his last public comments before disappearing into detention, he was wrong about a lot of things. That bit about not being under investigation, for instance. But one line he uttered has the clear ring of truth, and it poses a serious issue for China’s leadership as it attempts to navigate this year’s political transition, the economic slowdown and the ripples loosed by Bo’s removal. Bo revealed that China’s Gini coefficient — a statistic that measures the gap between rich and poor — had entered into worrying territory. He described the number, which hasn’t been made public in more than a decade, as over 0.46. Anything higher than 0.4 is considered dangerously high and capable of fueling unrest.
In Chongqing, where Bo was Communist Party secretary for 4½ years, he made building economic protections like subsidized housing for the megacity’s poorest residents one of the tenets of his “Chongqing model.” The wholesale corruption he and his family have been accused of may have steered the wealth gap in the wrong direction, but Bo understood the political importance of appearing to care about the problem, just as he knew the appeal of cracking down on crime and reviving Mao-era culture.
