Does economic status correlate with well being? How do you define well being? Interesting questions and someone at the American Psychological Society (sorry, I have no idea who they are) did a study (summary here) on just this subject:
Our thesis is that well-being should become a primary focus of policymakers, and that its rigorous measurement is a primary policy imperative. Well-being, which we define as peoples’ positive evaluations of their lives, includes positive emotion, engagement, satisfaction, and meaning (Seligman, 2002). Although economics currently plays a central role in policy decisions because it is assumed that money increases well-being, we propose that well-being needs to be assessed more directly, because there are distressingly large, measurable slippages between economic indicators and well-being.
