Asia finds money brings happiness

SINGAPORE: Emerging Asian nations are finding out what developed ones did years ago: money — and the stuff it buys — brings happiness.
Levels of self-reported well-being in fast-growing nations like Indonesia, China and Malaysia now rival those in the US, Germany and the United Kingdom, rich nations that have long topped the happiness charts, according to a Pew Research Center global survey released Friday. It aims to show how rises in national income are closely linked to personal satisfaction.
The pollsters asked people in 43 countries to place themselves on a “ladder of life,” with the top rung representing the best possible life and the bottom the worst. Pew carried out the same survey in 2002 and 2005 in most of those countries, enabling researchers to look at trends over time.
But the data also suggested that there is a limit to how much happiness money can buy. For example, 56 percent of Malaysians rated their life a “seven” or higher on the ladder, significantly more than the 36 percent in Bangladesh, a poor country. Yet the public in Germany, which has far higher gross domestic product per capita than Malaysia, expressed a life satisfaction level of 60 percent, just 4 percentage points more than Malaysia.
While wealth is clearly important to happiness, other research has indicated it is far from the only factor. Women tend to be happier than man, for example, and unmarried and middle-aged people tend to report lower levels of well-being than married and younger people, respectively.