Journal article
The quality of society and happiness: fairness, trust, and community in China
- Abstract:
- Adam Smith argued that ‘moral sentiments’ – the norms, customs and conventions of society - provide a benefit, improving both economic efficiency and well-being. Three important moral sentiments are a perception of fairness, a willingness to trust people, and a sense of community. We analyse representative national socioeconomic surveys of the China Household Income Project (CHIP), containing information that is used to create scores of happiness, fairness, trust, and community for each respondent. Three main hypotheses are tested: that higher reported fairness, higher reported trust, and greater sense of community each raises happiness. Evidence is found for each hypothesis, as well as for related questions, Attempts are made to ascertain whether the associations are causal; some support is found. The evidence is generally consistent with the broader argument that an informal social contract constrains antisocial behaviour and improves wellbeing in ways little studied by economists.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.3MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s10902-024-00724-z
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Journal of Happiness Studies More from this journal
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 7
- Article number:
- 92
- Publication date:
- 2024-08-31
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-12-12
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1573-7780
- ISSN:
-
1389-4978
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Knight and Gunatilaka
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record