Читать книгу Wealth - Yuval Elmelech - Страница 24

In addition to the conversion trait of wealth, both asset ownership and wealth function as important determinants of various measures of well-being. Despite never really making its way into mainstream sociology, quality of life (QOL) has long been a topic of sociological research (see Land 1975; Ferriss 2004; Nevarez 2011). The QOL literature studies subjective measures of well-being and their relationship with so-called objective conditions such as income and wealth. For example, Veenhoven’s (2000) model of QOL identifies two general categories of individual micro-level measures: the “life-ability of the individual” includes such attributes as health (physical and mental), life expectancy, and human capital (education), whereas “appreciation of life” includes such subjective measures of well-being as happiness, overall life satisfaction, and satisfaction with various domains of life (e.g. housing, neighborhood, and marriage). There is ample evidence to indicate that asset ownership and wealth are associated with both dimensions of QOL, but establishing the direction of the causal relationship between the two sets of measures (wealth and QOL) has long been a challenge for the research community. More recently, our understanding of this relationship has been furthered by the growing availability of longitudinal data on wealth and the concomitant development of more advanced econometric methods. By taking into consideration household asset ownership and net worth in addition to the “usual suspects” (level of education, marital status, income, and so on), the models generated through these econometric methods enable researchers to observe the “net effect” of each independent variable on QOL outcomes.