The relationship between wealth, happiness and inequality

ECONOMISTS, trying hard to dispel a stubborn reputation as a gloomy bunch, have become fascinated with the relationships between wealth, inequality and happiness. There is evidence, at both an individual and a country level, of a relationship between income and happiness. Rich Denmark is happier than poorer China. But there are interesting wrinkles within that. As part of a report on measuring well-being published on October 12th, the OECD has crunched data from the Gallup World Poll, which asked people around the world how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale of one to ten, to reveal that the unhappiest Danes are much jollier than the unhappiest Chinese. But taken as a whole, the happiness gap (the gap between the least and the most satisfied) seems to have a weak relationship with income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient. That is odd, since many people automatically assume that inequality leads to misery.