[lbo-talk] more back-asswards perceptions

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon May 10 17:50:27 PDT 2010


On May 10, 2010, at 7:09 PM, SA wrote:


> 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."

Cf.:

<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Awfulness.html>

Americans may be some of the least healthy people in the rich part of this world, but we sure do feel good about ourselves!

That’s one of the more interesting revelations in the 2009 edition of the OECD’s Social Indicators. Americans lead the world in obesity, lag the world in life expectancy and infant mortality—yet 89% of us report ourselves to be in excellent health, just behind the world’s biggest health-boasters, New Zealanders, who beat us by a point in self- reported health, but who outlive us by more than two years.



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