Human happiness is oftentimes more strongly connected to our relative than to our absolute status. Frank points out that in surveys, people with higher incomes report higher degrees of happiness. One might think this is related to absolute levels of income, except that people with comparable relative status report comparable levels of happiness regardless of their absolute wealth: upper-income Nigerians are just as happy as their German counterparts, despite the economic gap separating them. One compares oneself not globally to some absolute standard of wealth, but relative to a local group
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