
The relationship between money and happiness - SQL2219
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/money-happiness-large.html
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kweinber
This was a great example of design hindering interpretation. The graph’s
diagonal/diamond shape made legibility much harder. A traditionally oriented
graph would have been trivial to read and correlation more obvious.

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crusso
I think they were trying to show something meaningful with the orientation by
having their "Trend Line" be the one horizontal metric.

I didn't really understand how they came up with that as a trend line.

I agree that they made an obvious decision to give design preference over
legibility. My first glance at the page was "this is neat", but as I tried to
wrap my brain around the data, my thoughts changed to "what an unnecessary
mess".

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redblacktree
I was physically turning my head 45 degrees to the right to figure out what
was going on in the graph.

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lordnacho
Well, in the attempt to make a snazzy graph the designer has actually obscured
what the data show. People are used to the most desirable point being at a
corner on this kind of thing, not in the middle of the side.

Regarding what it's showing I have some real reservations about the
satisfaction score. It's pretty subjective how happy a person is, and it's not
actually that easy to translate the question into foreign languages. Just
consider in English:

\- Are you happy?

\- Are you generally happy?

\- Are you satisfied with life?

\- Are you overjoyed?

All these things mean something similar but cannot easily be translated to all
other languages in the study.

Plus there's a question of how people really think about the question. If I'm
living in Scandinavia I will constantly be bombed with the results of this
exact type of study. Maybe I won't think so hard when I consider what the
answer should be. Because I know it, I read it in the paper.

On the income side, you could argue that the score should be the median
income, not the average. There's a number of small, rich countries where a few
people are insanely rich. I think Equatorial Guinea showed up on one of those
GDP/C lists last time I looked.

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zwischenzug
I happened to study this in my History degree back in 1995 (I took
'quantification in history' because I liked math, then utterly sucked at it.
But I digress).

Happiness is an extremely tricky subject, and the Latin America thing brought
back memories of discussions about whether LA countries and cultures simply
self-identified as happy, or whether they really were happier. I always
thought just asking people if they were happy was a really dumb way of
comparing levels of happiness, and that more objective measures of
populations, like number of suicides (however problematic in itself, eg a
reluctance in some cultures to identify death as suicide) was more reliable.

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tspiteri
What this chart shows to me is that GDP is not a good measure of people's
wealth. For example Luxembourg is shown as an outlier because it has a very
high GDP but not a similarly high satisfaction score. And I think that is
because the economy of Luxembourg is largely banking, where the money will
just belong to a rich few, not to the average people.

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zwischenzug
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see how happiness correlates to distribution of
GDP rather than size of GDP.

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IkmoIkmo
Would like to see this measured with either gdp per capita ppp, or better
median wages, preferably adjusted for local purchasing power.

Gdp per capita doesn't take into account different purchasing powers locally.
Nor does it take into account income inequality. i.e., the influence of a few
people on the happiness measure is negligible compared to their influence on
the income statistic.

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zeth___
Singapore having $80k as the baseline is laughable. The median is $30k.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income)

It drops from 3rd to 18th, Qatar drops from second to 23rd.

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m12k
Yeah, low overall satisfaction isn't that surprising in a 'rich' country if
the reality is a crazy-rich aristocracy while the majority live like serfs.

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noisem4ker
A potentially interesting additional axis would be income inequality. One very
wealthy person among the poor can skew the average GDP considerably, but
happiness is relative to a fixed maximum and doesn't distribute the same way
over the population. Qatar might be an example of this.

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realPubkey
How did they measure happiness? If they just asked people, I think this only
shows the different answer-cultures in each country.

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mcnicholm
Considering Brazil and Mexico make up cities that cover the top ten in murder
but appear to show positively in this graph, I'm skeptical.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rat...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate)

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telesilla
I've spent significant time in South America and I can categorically say that
people are happier and friendlier that the northern americans. Being in a
high-crime area doesn't mean you don't have life satisfaction, with your
extended family living nearby and your basic needs met, and the fine weather
and food.

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spacehome
This is one of the worst data visualization graphs I've seen in my entire
life. I had to rotate my monitor 45 degrees to have any idea what was going
on.

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Orinocco
Iran is on the graph twice..

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sbmthakur
The graph looks good. Any idea, what did they use to construct it?

