Study of Indigenous and Local Communities Reveals Happiness Is Cheap

Many indigenous peoples and local communities around the world lead very satisfying lives despite having very little money. This is the conclusion of a study by the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which shows that many societies with very low monetary income have satisfaction levels of remarkably high living standards, comparable to those in rich countries. countries.

Economic growth is often touted as a sure way to increase the well-being of people in low-income countries, and global surveys over the past few decades have supported this strategy by showing that people in high-income countries have tendency to report higher levels of life satisfaction. than those in low-income countries. This strong correlation could suggest that only in wealthy societies can people be happy.

However, a recent study conducted by ICTA-UAB in collaboration with McGill University in Canada suggests that there may be good reason to question whether this link is universal. While most global surveys, such as the World Happiness Report, collect thousands of responses from citizens of industrialized societies, they tend to neglect people living in small-scale, marginal societies where the exchange of Money plays a minimal role in daily life and livelihoods directly depend on nature.

The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), consisted of a survey of 2,966 people from indigenous and local communities in 19 sites around the world. Only 64% of households surveyed had cash income. The results show that “surprisingly, many populations with very low monetary income report very high average levels of life satisfaction, with scores similar to those in rich countries,” says Eric Galbraith, a researcher at ICTA-UAB and McGill University and lead author of the study. study.

The average life satisfaction score in the small-scale societies studied was 6.8 on a scale of 0 to 10. Although not all societies reported being very satisfied (the averages were also lower than 5.1), four of the sites reported average scores above 8, which is typical of wealthy Scandinavian countries in other surveys, “and this is so even though many of these companies have suffered from the ‘history. of marginalization and oppression.

The results are consistent with the idea that human societies can provide highly satisfying lives for their members without necessarily requiring high levels of material wealth, measured in monetary terms.

“The frequently observed strong correlation between income and life satisfaction is not universal and proves that wealth, as generated by industrialized economies, is not fundamentally necessary for humans to lead happy lives,” says Victoria Reyes-Garcia, ICREA researcher at ICTA-UAB and lead author of the study.

These results are good news for sustainability and human happiness, as they provide strong evidence that resource-intensive economic growth is not necessary to achieve high levels of subjective well-being.

The researchers point out that although they now know that people in many indigenous and local communities report high levels of life satisfaction, they do not know why.

Previous work suggests that family and social support and relationships, spirituality, and connections to nature are among the important factors underpinning this happiness, “but it is possible that the important factors differ significantly from society to society.” ‘other or, conversely, that a small “subset of factors dominates everywhere. I hope that by learning more about what makes life satisfying in these diverse communities, it might help many others to lead more fulfilling lives while tackling the sustainability crisis,” concludes Galbraith.