بررسی ادراک مطلق فقر در مقابل ادراک نسبی فقر با استفاده از یک پرسشنامه متقابل کشور

Questionnaires eliciting the absolutist vs relativist perception of poverty are administered to 1941 undergraduate students in eight countries – Bolivia, Brazil, Italy, Kenya, Laos, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. We find that the perception of poverty expressed by a large fraction of respondents exhibits both absolutist and relativist concerns, with the former components prevailing over the latter. High-income countries exhibit a significantly more pronounced relativist attitude. Personal characteristics such as past experience of material hardship and relative standard of living play a germane role in shaping respondents’ views.

There is growing interest in the way relative status and interpersonal comparisons affect our life. A number of contributions show that happiness, life satisfaction and ‘utility’ are influenced by what we enjoy/achieve relative to others. Firstly formalized through Duesenberry’s (1949) relative-income hypothesis, the idea that the inability to ‘catch-up with the Joneses’ has a negative impact on well-being is at the base of Hirsch, 1976 and Frank, 1985 analysis of consumption behavior and demand for positional goods, is the cornerstone of the sociologic approach to relative deprivation (Runciman, 1966, Stouffer et al., 1949 and Townsend, 1979) and is adduced as explanation to the Easterlin Paradox, – i.e. the constant trend in self-reported happiness despite the increase in mean income (Easterlin, 1974). Clark, Frijters, and Shields (2008) provide an excellent survey of the literature exploring the impact of relative income on happiness and well-being.