Which Inequality Makes People Dissatisfied with Their Lives? Evidence of the Link Between Life Satisfaction and Inequalities

Inequality and Life Satisfaction in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: The Role of Opportunity

“…In other words, income inequality reduces individuals' well-being if opportunities are low, but inequality is not relevant for life satisfaction if opportunities in the country are high. Our finding is in line with the intuition formulated by several authors (i.e., [2,11,19,37,39,50]) according to which SWB may be influenced by inequality in "life chances" and not only by income inequality. Table 1.…”

“…People may dislike inequality if they suffer from it, or when they consider incomes are not based on merits, but could be more tolerant if they have prospects of improving their life conditions. This study tackles a similar issue to Ravazzini and Chávez-Juárez [19] for Europe, however, for a sample of developing countries. Here, we test how differences in social opportunities between countries explain why individuals living in more unequal countries would be more satisfied.…”

“…They empirically found support for their perspective. Ravazzini and Chávez-Juárez [19] studied the relationships between SWB and income inequality, on the one hand, and between SWB and inequality of opportunity, on the other hand, in Europe. Their measure of inequality of opportunity compares the relative importance of inequality due to circumstances over inequality due to effort.…”

“…As explained in Section 2, previous studies have suggested that income inequality may have a different effect on SWB depending on social or political contexts. Previous studies have focused on inequality of opportunities [19], actual social mobility [11], economic freedom [37], and political and civil liberties [2]. Rather than focusing exclusively on economic outcomes, individuals are also affected by other social dispersions such as inequalities in work chances, "power, prestige, education" or gender [23] affecting their personal life more directly.…”

“…Therefore, the relationship between income inequality and SWB could be related to the perception of social mobility [1,18] or the perception of fairness [11]. For Europe, Ravazzini and Chávez-Juárez [19] tackled the issue more directly by computing an index of inequality of opportunity. The authors stressed the positive impact of inequality of opportunity on LS of individuals from the upper class, meaning that equality of chances would threaten their status.…”