This is a story of two villages — one in which people tended to be content with their material possessions and one in which people did not.
During part of a Costa Rican study abroad program this summer, I spent five days in a 60-person village called El Sur de Turrubares. About a decade ago, people from the village formed a cooperative group, borrowed money and opened an eco-lodge. The lodge, which caters to environmental tourists, provides much of the income for the community, and villagers work together to operate and maintain it.
The result is a poor yet tightly knit community with minimal variation in socio-economic status.
Near El Sur is a larger village called Bijagual, where there is not a community emphasis on cooperation. Locals told my class Bijagual has more economic activity, and people, on average, have more income and wealth than their counterparts in El Sur, but they also faced increased socioeconomic stratification.
In order to investigate the relationship between success and material satisfaction, some of my classmates conducted a study of villagers’ contentment with the size of their houses. While every house in El Sur had a single story, some people in Bijagual had two story houses and the houses were, on average, larger. Yet a mere 16 percent of those surveyed in Bijagual stated they were content with the size of their house.
In contrast, 72 percent of respondents from El Sur indicated contentment.
Based on this metric, it seems relative, not absolute, economic success is indicative of material satisfaction.
While this finding came from a small study based on just two villages, this idea has been supported by other researchers. In a 2008 study, Richard A. Easterlin found a correlation between income and happiness existed within countries but not necessarily across countries. That is, he did not find that a country’s relative wealth was indicative of its inhabitants’ happiness.
An increase in a country’s gross domestic product is traditionally viewed as a clear indicator of positive change. But if absolute economic success is not indicative of happiness, then this metric loses much of its importance.
