A new research jour­nal chal­lenges pub­lic assis­tance pro­grams, and argues that aid pro­grams should con­sider other qual­ity of life issues besides money. The new study gives some research to prove that “Money can’t buy happiness”

From the Press Release that we found at Sci­ence Daily, we learn more of the study from Pro­fes­sor Mar­i­ano Rojas.

These find­ings by Pro­fes­sor Mar­i­ano Rojas from Mexico’s Fac­ul­tad Lati­noamer­i­cana de Cien­cias Sociales are pub­lished online in Springer’s jour­nal, Applied Research in Qual­ity of Life.

The reduc­tion of poverty is one of the main con­sid­er­a­tions in the design of both domes­tic and foreign-aid pro­grams. To date, the focus of these pro­grams has been to get peo­ple out of poverty by increas­ing their buy­ing power and there has been an assump­tion that rais­ing people’s income trans­lates into greater well-being. Pro­fes­sor Rojas chal­lenges this assump­tion and argues that mea­sures of life sat­is­fac­tion should also be taken into account when design­ing and eval­u­at­ing poverty-abatement programs.

Pro­fes­sor Rojas used data from a yearly national sur­vey run by the Uni­ver­sity of Costa Rica cov­er­ing the years 2004–2006. In addi­tion to ques­tions about house­hold income and depen­dency on house­hold income, he added more sub­jec­tive ques­tions about life sat­is­fac­tion in gen­eral, as well as sat­is­fac­tion with health, job, fam­ily rela­tions, friend­ship and self, as well as the com­mu­nity environment.

The major­ity of peo­ple rated their lives as sat­is­fac­tory or more than sat­is­fac­tory. Not all peo­ple who were con­sid­ered ‘poor’ expe­ri­enced low life sat­is­fac­tion and not all peo­ple who were not con­sid­ered ‘poor’ were happy with their lives. Pro­fes­sor Rojas observed that only 24 per­cent of peo­ple clas­si­fied as ‘poor’ rated their life sat­is­fac­tion as low. Fur­ther­more, 18 per­cent of peo­ple in the ‘non-poor’ cat­e­gory also reported low life sat­is­fac­tion. It is there­fore clear that poverty alone does not define an individual’s over­all well-being and it is pos­si­ble for some­one to come out of poverty and remain less than sat­is­fied with his life. On the other hand, a per­son can be sat­is­fied with his life even if his income is low, as long as he is mod­er­ately sat­is­fied in other areas of life such as fam­ily, self, health, job and economic.

Pro­fes­sor Rojas argues that social pro­grams need to rec­og­nize that well-being depends on sat­is­fac­tion in many domains of life, and that many qual­i­ties and attrib­utes need to be con­sid­ered when design­ing these pro­grams, includ­ing leisure, edu­ca­tion, the com­mu­nity and con­sumer skills (learn­ing to spend higher income sensibly).

Like

Unlike