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Recently on Marginal Revolution:\xa0Are the Amish unhappy?

The average levels of life satisfaction [among the Amish] was 4.4; just above the neutral point\u2026the Amish fall lower than members of many other groups. In a study of more than 13 thousand college students from 31 nations, for example, only students from Kenya (whose average life satisfaction was 4.0) scored lower than the Amish (Diener & Diener, 1995).

Sounds like Amish people are quite unhappy. This came as a surprise to me, since I\u2019d heard from\xa0Jonah Lehrer\xa0and\xa0Business Insider\xa0that the average Amish person is as happy as the average non-Amish billionaire, proving once and for all that community and old-fashioned values are more important than money:

As an illustration of the striking disconnect between money and happiness, the average life satisfaction of Forbes magazine\u2019s 400 richest Americans was 5.8 on a 7-point scale. Yet the average life satisfaction of the Pennsylvania Amish is also 5.8, despite the fact that their average annual salary is several billion dollars lower.