Research On "Easterlin Paradox" And Countermeasures To Enhance Happiness Of Residents

Enhancing residents’ happiness is the ultimate goal of economic growth.Foreign scholars have found that residents’ happiness does not seem to improve with the deep growth of the economy.This phenomenon is known as the "Easterlin paradox",that is,when the per capita income of a country increases,the level of happiness does not increase.At present,in view of this problem,most of the relevant researches focus on the correlation with residents’ subjective well-being from a single perspective such as economic income.However,subjective well-being is often affected by many factors.Therefore,the conclusion of a single perspective is often constrained by many preconditions and does not have enough persuasiveness.Therefore,the subjective well-being is studied from a multi-disciplinary perspective,which is urgent to study sense.Social comparison,as a popular theory affecting subjective well-being,has attracted wide attention of scholars at home and abroad in recent years.Therefore,this study attempts to connect the absolute income theory of economics category with the social comparison theory of sociology field by means of interdisciplinary methods,and try to explore the influencing factors of subjective well-being from different perspectives.The research from the perspective not only answers the classic proposition in the field of Economics-"Easterlin paradox",but also pays attention to the influence of social factors other than economics on subjective well-being.Based on China’s general social survey data in 2015(CGSS 2015),using ordered probit model,this paper constructs "happiness equation" by combining economic income factors and social comparison factors,and empirically analyzes the synergistic effect of economic income and social comparison on Residents’ subjective happiness.The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)absolute income and relative income are still one of the important factors that affect residents’ subjective well-being,and income gap has a significant negative impact on Residents’ subjective well-being.(2)there is a positive impact on the number of years of education and residents’ subjective well-being,with the increase of residents’ years of education,the probability of feeling their own happiness increases.(3)social comparison has a significant impact on Residents’ subjective well-being,and the impact is with the self-assessment of social class of the respondents.(4)in the horizontal relative socialcomparison,the subjective well-being of the sample group who thinks that their social class is higher than their peers will be significantly positively affected by the social class,but the sample group who thinks that their social class is lower than their peers will have a significant negative impact on their subjective well-being.Based on the analysis of the above conclusions,as absolute income and relative income are still important factors affecting residents’ subjective well-being,and "Easterlin paradox" is established in the current microeconomic level in China.Based on these results,this paper puts forward relevant policy suggestions for improving residents’ subjective well-being from the aspects of improving residents’ economic income,health,education and the intergenerational mobility.