kerkko.fi

 

Union Membership and Middle-Class Income
Media_httpthinkprogre_dcarh

In the US, right-wing legislators continue their attack on labor unions. These politicians ignore one simple fact: unions were a major force in building and sustaining the great American middle class, and as they declined, so has the middle class. CAP’s Karla Waters and David Madland showed in a report first published in January 2011 that as union membership has steadily declined since 1967, so too has the middle class’s share of national income, as the super-rich have taken a larger share of national income than any time since the 1920s.

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/03/unions-income-inequality/
Filed under: Capitalism Class War Economy Income Labor Middle Class Unions Wages
 

200 Countries, 200 Years
Hans Rosling tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers, all in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Rosling shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.
Filed under: Economy Globalization History Income Life Expectancy Progress Prosperity Wealth
 

Money makes you and me happy

Media_httpgaryhaqfile_fxfdq

Money really can buy you happiness -- or at least one form of it, according to the biggest study to examine the relationship between income and well-being around the world. Pulling in the big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall -- whether they are young or old, male or female, or living in cities or remote villages. The survey, dubbed the "first representative sample of planet Earth," was conducted by Gallup and involved detailed questioning in 2005 and 2006 of 136,839 residents age 15 and older in 132 countries throughout the world. The samples in each country were designed to be nationally representative and represent about 96 percent of the world's population.

"Yes, money makes you happy; the effect of income on life satisfaction is very strong and virtually ubiquitous and universal around the world," said Ed Diener, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Illinois who led the study. "But it makes you more satisfied than it makes you feel good. Positive feelings are less affected by money and more affected by the things people are doing day to day." Previous studies had suggested that money was associated with happiness, but the relationship appeared weak. Earlier work tended to focus on individual countries and global evaluations of life without parsing out the effects on specific positive and negative emotions or examining differences across nations.

The new survey -- the first large international study to differentiate between overall life satisfaction and day-to-day emotions -- makes that crucial distinction, allowing researchers to explore the elusive concept of happiness in much greater nuance. "When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity," said Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. "That was unexpected."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/01/AR2010070100039.html

Filed under: Economics Happiness Income Money Well-being
11
To Posterous, Love Metalab
statistics for vBulletin