This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Surprisingly, many populations with very low monetary incomes report very high average levels of life satisfaction, with scores similar to those in wealthy countries,” said Eric Galbraith, the lead author of the study which was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), found that people in the 19 isolated communities reported an average “life satisfaction score” of 6.8 out of 10 “even though most of the sites have estimated annual monetary incomes of less than US$1,000 (£800) per person”.
Those four communities are the Kolla Atacameña in Argentina (8.0); the Pãi Tavyterã/Guarani in Paraguay (8.2); the Riberinhos in Brazil (8.4) and farmers in the Western Highlands of Guatemala (8.6).
The UK statistics body points out that the mean is much higher than the median average (£125,000) because of “the uneven distribution of wealth across the population”.
The ICTA-UAB report says its findings are “good news for sustainability and human happiness, as they provide strong evidence that resource-intensive economic growth is not required to achieve high levels of subjective wellbeing”.
“The strong correlation frequently observed between income and life satisfaction is not universal and proves that wealth – as generated by industrialised economies – is not fundamentally required for humans to lead happy lives,” said Victoria Reyes-Garcia, a researcher at ICTA-UAB and senior author of the study.
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