Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Selfishness, Greed and CapitalismFigure 16 Gross national income and self-reported happiness‘very happy’ or ‘quite happy’ (%)100NZ95IrelandCanada Denmark SingaporeBelgium NetherlandsFranceUK SwedenAustraliaUSANorwaySwitzerland90Finland AustriaKoreaCzech Rep.JapanSpain85PortugalItaly GermanyHong Kong80 SloveniaIsrael75Greece20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000Gross national income PPP 2008 ($) R 2 = 0.2908they do not test their other criteria to see whether nationalincome plays a part. Often it does. For example, there is astronger link between trust and GDP than there is betweentrust and inequality, but this relationship is never testedin The Spirit Level. Although they show a graph similar toFigure 11 to support their claim that ‘happiness levels failto rise further as rich countries get still richer’ (Wilkinsonand Pickett 2009: 8), they never check whether this is trueamong their group of rich countries. There is actually apositive and statistically significant relationship betweenGDP and happiness (shown in Figure 16) and – crucially,but also overlooked in The Spirit Level – there is no associationbetween inequality and happiness.Wilkinson and Pickett claim that economic growth‘has largely finished its work’ and that the differences betweenrich countries must therefore be the result of some146