How bad is authoritarianism anyways? China and Taiwan’s life satisfaction isn’t that different.
I’m not sure why this is deeply confusing. I don’t think we should be assessing whether or not authoritarian regimes are bad or not based on measures of life satisfaction, and if that is what one wants to do then certainly not contemplating it via a 1v1 comparison of just two countries.
Is the claim that they are not that different on this metric true—where is the source for this and how many alternative sources or similar metrics are there? If true, are all the things that feed into people’s responses to a survey about life satisfaction in these different places the same (how confident are they that they can give their true opinions, and how low have their aspirations or capacity to contemplate a flourishing life become), and are the measures representative of the actual population experience within those countries (what about the satisfaction of people in encampments in China that help sustain the regime and quash dissent)?
Even granted that the ratings really reflect all the same processes going on in each country and that it is representative, Taiwan lives under threat of occupation and invasion, and there are many other differences between the two countries. The case is then just a confounded comparison of 1 country vs 1 other, which is not an especially good comparison of whether the one variable chosen and used to define those countries makes a difference or not.
Fair jabs, but the PRC-Taiwan comparison was because it was the clearest natural experiment that came to mind where different bits of a nation (shared language, culture, etc.) were somewhat randomly assigned to authoritarianism or pluralistic democracy. I’m sure you could make more comparisons with further statistical jiggery-pokery.
The PRC-Taiwan comparison is also because, imagining we want to think of things in terms of life satisfaction, it’s not clear there’d be a huge (war-justifying) loss in wellbeing if annexation by the PRC only meant a relatively small dip in life satisfaction. This is the possibility I found distressing. Surely there’s something we’re missing, no?
I think inhabitants of both countries probably have similar response styles to surveys with these scales. Still, if a state is totalitarian, we should probably not be surprised if people are suspicious of surveys.
Sure, Taiwan could be invaded, and that could put a dampener on things, but, notably, Taiwan is more satisfied than its less likely to be invaded peers of similar wealth and democracy: Japan and South Korea.
I expect one response is, “well, we shouldn’t use these silly surveys”. But what other existing single type of measure is a better assessment of how people’s lives are going?
Taiwan has about a 0.7 advantage on a 0 to 10 life satisfaction scale, with most recently, 5% more of the population reporting to be happy.
Thanks for the response and the links to these graphs. This is just a quick look and so could be wrong but looking into some files from the World Values Survey, I find this information which, if correct, would make me think I would not weight this information into my consideration of whether we should be concerned about a country being annexed even to a level of 1% weight. The population of China is ~1.4 billion. The population of Taiwan is ~24 million. The sample size for the Chinese data seems to be 2300 people. And for Taiwan about 1200. I tried to upload a screenshot which I can’t work out how to do, but the numbers are in the doc “WV6 Results By Country v20180912” on this page https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV6.jsp
I do not think we can have any faith at all that a sample of 2300 people can even come close to representing all the variation in relevant factors related to happiness or satisfaction across the population of China. The ratio of population to respondents is over 600,000, larger than some estimates for the population of Oslo, Glasgow, Rotterdam etc. (https://worldpopulationreview.com/continents/europe/cities)
I may be missing something or making some basic error there but if it is roughly correct, then I would indeed call it silly to factor in this survey result when deciding what our response should be to the annexation of Taiwan. I do not think that such a question is in principle about life satisfaction/happiness, but even if it were I would not use this information.
I’m not sure why this is deeply confusing. I don’t think we should be assessing whether or not authoritarian regimes are bad or not based on measures of life satisfaction, and if that is what one wants to do then certainly not contemplating it via a 1v1 comparison of just two countries.
Is the claim that they are not that different on this metric true—where is the source for this and how many alternative sources or similar metrics are there? If true, are all the things that feed into people’s responses to a survey about life satisfaction in these different places the same (how confident are they that they can give their true opinions, and how low have their aspirations or capacity to contemplate a flourishing life become), and are the measures representative of the actual population experience within those countries (what about the satisfaction of people in encampments in China that help sustain the regime and quash dissent)?
Even granted that the ratings really reflect all the same processes going on in each country and that it is representative, Taiwan lives under threat of occupation and invasion, and there are many other differences between the two countries. The case is then just a confounded comparison of 1 country vs 1 other, which is not an especially good comparison of whether the one variable chosen and used to define those countries makes a difference or not.
Fair jabs, but the PRC-Taiwan comparison was because it was the clearest natural experiment that came to mind where different bits of a nation (shared language, culture, etc.) were somewhat randomly assigned to authoritarianism or pluralistic democracy. I’m sure you could make more comparisons with further statistical jiggery-pokery.
The PRC-Taiwan comparison is also because, imagining we want to think of things in terms of life satisfaction, it’s not clear there’d be a huge (war-justifying) loss in wellbeing if annexation by the PRC only meant a relatively small dip in life satisfaction. This is the possibility I found distressing. Surely there’s something we’re missing, no?
I think inhabitants of both countries probably have similar response styles to surveys with these scales. Still, if a state is totalitarian, we should probably not be surprised if people are suspicious of surveys.
Sure, Taiwan could be invaded, and that could put a dampener on things, but, notably, Taiwan is more satisfied than its less likely to be invaded peers of similar wealth and democracy: Japan and South Korea.
I expect one response is, “well, we shouldn’t use these silly surveys”. But what other existing single type of measure is a better assessment of how people’s lives are going?
Taiwan has about a 0.7 advantage on a 0 to 10 life satisfaction scale, with most recently, 5% more of the population reporting to be happy.
Thanks for the response and the links to these graphs. This is just a quick look and so could be wrong but looking into some files from the World Values Survey, I find this information which, if correct, would make me think I would not weight this information into my consideration of whether we should be concerned about a country being annexed even to a level of 1% weight. The population of China is ~1.4 billion. The population of Taiwan is ~24 million. The sample size for the Chinese data seems to be 2300 people. And for Taiwan about 1200. I tried to upload a screenshot which I can’t work out how to do, but the numbers are in the doc “WV6 Results By Country v20180912” on this page https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV6.jsp
I do not think we can have any faith at all that a sample of 2300 people can even come close to representing all the variation in relevant factors related to happiness or satisfaction across the population of China. The ratio of population to respondents is over 600,000, larger than some estimates for the population of Oslo, Glasgow, Rotterdam etc. (https://worldpopulationreview.com/continents/europe/cities)
I may be missing something or making some basic error there but if it is roughly correct, then I would indeed call it silly to factor in this survey result when deciding what our response should be to the annexation of Taiwan. I do not think that such a question is in principle about life satisfaction/happiness, but even if it were I would not use this information.