Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think
- China’s economy is growing at 8% per year, but its citizens aren’t getting any happier.
- New research from MIT analyzed 33 million posts from Sina Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) and compared their expressed happiness with local pollution levels.
- The study shows that high-pollution days are making Chinese civilians significantly less happy.
As London industrialized in the 19th and 20th centuries, it produced fog—a lot of it. On particularly bad days, London was choked with a thick, yellow-green gas that could kill, making for a fairly miserable climate. So much so, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde once said, “London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don’t know, but the whole thing rather gets on my nerves.”
Now, MIT researcher Siqi Zheng may have an answer for Oscar Wilde: air pollution does actually make people more or serious, or at least less happy. But London’s air has improved over the years—instead, Zheng looked at China, one of the foggier spots on 21st-century Earth.
Prior studies have looked at self-reports of people’s happiness and compared them with air pollution, but these reflections occur after the fact and tend to reflect people’s overall happiness. Zheng and colleagues wondered if there was a better way to determine how much pollution impacted happiness in the moment. Fortunately, human beings love to talk about themselves. Today, people’s self-expression happens the most on social media programs, so Zheng turned to Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. This turned out to be a very rich source of data—Zheng’s sample size consisted of 33 million posts from 589,000 users.
Measuring pollution was a fairly straightforward task. China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection…
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