Monetized
Tabatha Pasqua
I am having trouble embedding Javascript code into my Squarespace blogs. I am trying to embed videos from my Rumble channel since they are more easily monetized than Youtube. Can somebody please help me?
I embedded the Rumble code in the exact same way I did Steller, but the videos are not appearing. Each title in my blog should be followed by a Rumble video. The code is appearing on my Squarespace dashboard showing that they were embedded correctly, however the videos are not visible or playable on my website.
Economic growth is often assumed to improve happiness for people in low income countries, although the association between monetary income and subjective well-being has been a subject of debate. We test this assumption by comparing three different measures of subjective well-being in very low-income communities with different levels of monetization. Contrary to expectations, all three measures of subjective well-being were very high in the least-monetized sites and comparable to those found among citizens of wealthy nations. The reported drivers of happiness shifted with increasing monetization: from enjoying experiential activities in contact with nature at the less monetized sites, to social and economic factors at the more monetized sites. Our results suggest that high levels of subjective well-being can be achieved with minimal monetization, challenging the perception that economic growth will raise life satisfaction among low income populations.
Copyright: 2021 Miarro et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Many studies have explored the possible role of monetary income in raising SWB. A consistent trend has been noted between SWB and the logarithm of the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) [17], which implies that the strongest effect of income on SWB occurs among low-income countries (Fig 1). Household income has also been correlated with the life satisfaction of individuals within communities [6, 17], a finding that has been echoed in some low income, non-Western settings [18]. The income-SWB association is consistent with a priori expectations, given that income in monetized societies provides for essential human needs and access to services and amenities.
However, there are reasons to question a fundamental role of monetary income in determining SWB. A large body of literature has explored the observation that many countries do not appear to become happier as they grow richer, a finding known as the Easterlin Paradox [21]. The Easterlin Paradox throws doubt on the strength of the causal relationship between income and SWB. In addition, most of the work on driving factors of SWB has its origins in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies [22], which may not be representative of SWB drivers in other contexts. Furthermore, because income is quantified with money-denominated market exchange values, studies of the income-SWB relationship necessarily exclude non-monetized, subsistence-based societies.
While it can be argued that purely non-monetized societies no longer exist, a number of minimally-monetized societies do persist. In such societies people produce enough to satisfy their own needs, with only minor trade or barter for non-essential goods and services [23]. According to the widespread understanding that income matters more for the SWB of people at low income levels, one would expect that people in minimally-monetized economies would show low SWB. Yet, the fact that happiness is a universal feeling [24, 25] suggests that income may be just a substitute for other sources of happiness, an assumption that is easier to notice in settings where money has little or no use. Here we examine how SWB varies in societies with different degrees of monetization through the use of multiple SWB measures.
We use three independent measures to assess complementary but distinct psychological dimensions of SWB [26]. The three measures were chosen to control against potential issues with regard to cultural differences in understanding the questions, self-reporting, and interviewer bias. The first measure, cognitive life evaluation, is the most widely used aspect of SWB, typically assessed using a single question. This question is phrased in a few different forms, of which we use the Satisfaction with Life question (SWL). Emotional well-being, or affect, refers to the mood resulting from a particular experience and can be considered as the momentary experienced emotional state [27]. The second measure, affect balance, was obtained by asking interviewees what emotions they had experienced throughout the previous day, and calculated as the difference between positive and negative emotions. The third measure, momentary affect, was obtained by querying subjects by telephone at random times about their emotional state.
Satisfaction with life (A) is measured on a 0 to 10 scale. Affect balance (B) is given on a scale from -1 (participants only reported negative emotions) to 1 (participants only reported positive emotions), with vertical lines representing the standard deviation. Momentary affect (C) shows the proportions of positive and negative affect as bars above and below zero, respectively. The index of monetization at each site (D) was calculated from the reported percentages of purchased food and fishing catch sold outside the community. Asterisks indicate significant differences between the sites (S1 and S6 Tables) and the sample size for each metric and site is shown in each panel.
This study was approved by the ethics committee board of the Autonomous University of Barcelona under the reference number CEEAH 4119. All participants were informed of the nature and possible consequences of the study and agreed freely to participate by giving either written or orally recorded consent.
Data collection took place in coastal communities in the Solomon Islands and Bangladesh. In each country, we worked on two sites, one rural and one urban. The sites were selected to exemplify different societal models, cultural values, and to provide substantial variation in the degree of monetization. Both the Solomon Islands and Bangladesh are listed as Least Developed Countries by the UN and strongly rely on small-scale fisheries for their food security and livelihoods. By focusing on small-scale fishing communities, we ensured that all sites have the possibility to have some level of subsistence without money. The selected sites contrast in their level of market integration, i.e. from purely self-sufficient to local trading of fishery products to export. Depending on their number of households, between two and six communities were sampled within each site to cover the sample size targets. Communities within each site were selected for logistical reasons (e.g. we had contacts, communities were willing to collaborate, etc.), while keeping homogeneity in the number of inhabitants and livelihoods and covering the main ethnicities or religious affiliations present in the study sites.
SWL, affect balance and the data used to calculate the local income and construct the monetization index were collected via structured interviews (N = 678). Since the logistic limitations associated with the remote sites made conducting a pilot study to estimate variation in answers unfeasible, the minimum sample size per site was established at 120 [31]. Participants were selected by random sampling from a household list of residents obtained from community leaders in the Solomon Islands, and by convenience sampling in Bangladesh due to the larger village sizes and lack of complete household registries. To reduce sampling error, communities in Bangladesh were spatially divided in a grid and convenience sampling was performed by enumerators in randomly selected areas within the grid. Mean age of participants was 37.2 13.8, from which 567 (83.6%) were male and 111 (16.4%) were female. This gender asymmetry was due to difficulty in finding female participants, especially in Bangladesh where the proportion of female participants was only 8.5%. Despite our efforts to overcome the inherent logistic hurdles, the external validity of our findings is likely lower for the study sites in Bangladesh.
The structured interviews lasted between 30 and 45 minutes and were designed to collect data about participants' fishing practices, sociodemographic factors, and connectedness with the global market. Participants were asked to rate their life satisfaction (which was asked as the first question of the survey to avoid biasing the participants), and respond to affect questions about the previous day, i.e. how they felt with regard to a selection of positive and negative emotions [32].
Of the standard life evaluation questions, SWL was employed because it uses the simplest and most straight-forward wording [30, 33]. SWL is measured on a 11-point scale and is the measure adopted by the World Values Survey [11]. Another life evaluation method, used by the Gallup World Poll, is the Cantril ladder question. The Cantril ladder, also measured on a 11-point scale, has been shown to produce slightly lower scores than the SWL; however, the two measures display a very high correlation (R = 0.94) when asked to the same people, and were found to produce essentially identical country rankings and very similar correlates, including the effect of income [30]. After pilot testing in the Solomon Islands, it was determined that the SWL question was easier to understand to participants. SWL data were used as reported by participants.
Participants' momentary affect was assessed via the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) [36]. This method provides direct assessments by querying research subjects at random times throughout the day. By prompting participants to answer questions about their current mood and activities, this measure avoids potential recall bias, and identifies subjective experiences that complement the emotions captured by the affect balance measure.
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