Modern Economic Growth, Culture, and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from Arctic Alaska
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Modern Economic Growth, Culture, and Subjective Well‑Being: Evidence from Arctic Alaska Fengyu Wu1,2 Accepted: 18 November 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The life satisfaction of the indigenous population in Arctic Alaska is quite high, perhaps higher than that of the U.S. population in general. Is wage employment brought by modern economic growth responsible for their high life satisfaction? Probably not. Interestingly, we find that household wage income and job opportunities per working-age Native are negatively associated with their life satisfaction. In contrast, non-wage income, which does not involve the sacrifice of time that can be used for subsistence activities, is positively associated with life satisfaction. A household’s involvement in these traditional activities is found to be positively associated with life satisfaction as well. The findings challenge the common preconception about the effects of modernization and point to the importance of the non-wage subsistence activities as a preferred substitute for wage employment to this indigenous population. A combination of Christian religious beliefs and indigenous spiritual beliefs is also positively associated with their life satisfaction. Keywords Subjective well-being · Life satisfaction · Economic growth · Subsistence activities · Culture · Indigenous population
1 Introduction It is hard for those accustomed to warmer climes to imagine a more hostile and forbidding environment than Arctic Alaska. However, when asked in the Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic (SLiCA) in 2002–2003 about their satisfaction with life as a whole, more than half of the indigenous inhabitants of this area chose “very satisfied”, the top category out of five. The data from the 2000, 2002, and 2004 U.S. General Social Survey show that only
* Fengyu Wu [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
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Present Address: Eudaimonia Institute, Wake Forest University, 2599 Reynolda Road, Winston‑Salem, NC 27106, USA
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F. Wu
31.3% of individuals, representing the U.S. general population, chose “very happy” when responding to the question “taken all together, how would you say things are these days— would you say you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?”1 Although differences in survey questions on life satisfaction or happiness2 make comparisons difficult, it is likely that the indigenous people living in Arctic Alaska are happier than the U.S. population in general. The indigenous population of Arctic Alaska, mostly the Iñupiat and Yup’ik, were predominantly hunter-gatherers until a half-century ago and have retained many of their ties to nature and traditional values. It is commonly assumed that the evolution of hunter-gatherer societies brought by modern economic growth raises subjective well-being (SWB) because industrialized societies largely meet human needs by, for example, providing employment opportunities and wage income as well as more formalized social
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