Standard economic theory would suggest close linkages between income, broader measures of the quality of life and 'utility'. To some extent it is hard to test the link between income and utility given the way that utility is proxied by economists, but we do have measures of objective and subjective wellbeing as a potential guide. When we look at broader measures of objective and subjective wellbeing in both rich and poor countries today, the relationship to absolute income is perhaps surprisingly weak. Turning to the past, we know that most people were in an absolute income sense very poor, and faced a considerably lower broad quality of life using objective measures. However, the link between these two factors is not as straightforward as sometimes assumed. At the same time, from the preoccupations of political thinkers and others, it does appear that relative (rather than absolute) income has long been a concern, and that concerns with absolute income at the national level appear to center around avoiding absolute deprivation rather than the advantage of ever more consumption goods. In short, there is plentiful evidence that people in the past were nearly all absolutely poor and broadly worse off according to other objective quality of life measures, less evidence that these two were intimately linked, even less that everyone was miserable, and less again that those who did feel miserable felt so because they were absolutely poor. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Blackwell Publishing in its journal Kyklos.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? You can create a compilation of all publications of a group of people, say alumni of a program, your students or memers of an association.