> Or try another: The metro area with the nation’s worst access to basic
> necessities also has the highest optimism about becoming a better
> place to live. Welcome to McAllen, Edinburg and Mission, Texas.
Daniel Kahneman wrote a great paper where he looked at subjective well-being -- which is typically measured by self-evaluated life satisfaction -- in the US and France. The US has famously high SWB; in France it's famously low. The difference is very large: half a standard deviation, the same size as the difference between an American employed person and unemployed person. DK asked whether this finding is credible and hypothesized that it was not. So he did something clever. He looked at subjective health status (where people rate whether they're in good health). Not surprisingly, across 100+ countries and hundreds of thousands of respondents, the correlation between SHS and SWB is extremely high -- 0.85. People who think they're very healthy are also very likely to say they're highly satisfied with their lives. And the same holds true with the US and France: American SHS is much higher than France's, by about the same margin as with SWB. The problem, of course, is that *objectively* Americans' health status is by almost every measure significantly worse than France's (heart disease, diabetes, obesity, mental health). Kahneman said it is therefore reasonable to conclude that subjective health status is substantially "reality-free" (his term). And since SHS is so tightly correlated with evaluated life-satisfaction, one has to conclude that the latter, too, is, at least cross-culturally, largely "reality-free."
SA