A study of 20,000 20- to 64-year-olds

Answer choices

1. A

   Goes Against1% picked this

   People with high incomes are consistently more satisfied with their incomes than are people in

   This violates what we were just told. This makes it sound like the causal difference-maker for income satisfaction is absolute income, not relative, if wealthy people are more satisfied than middle class people. The paragraph would have us expect that within a wealthy neighborhood, the less-wealthy would be unsatisfied. In a middle class neighborhood, the more-wealthy would be satisficed.

   1%
2. B

   Out of Scope: older / younger1% picked this

   Older people are generally more satisfied with their incomes than are

   The causal difference maker for satisfaction was "doing better, relative to your neighbors". Is there a common sense connection that older people are generally doing better relative to their neighbors than younger people? No, that's a bit of a stretch.

   1%
3. C

   Goes Against23% picked this

   Satisfaction with income is strongly correlated

   The paragraph told us that satisfaction was caused by how you ranked within your neighborhood, not how your neighborhood ranked overall.

   23%
4. D

   Out of Scope3% picked this

   In general, people's income levels have little effect on their level of satisfaction with life

   Out of Scope: life as a whole We were only talking about satisfaction with income levels, so we don't have support for talking about satisfaction with "life as a whole".

   3%
5. E

   Correct73% picked this

   An increase in everyone's incomes is not likely to greatly increase people's levels of satisfaction

   Why this is right

   This aligns with the idea that relative differences matter, not absolute differences. If you are already unsatisfied with your income, because your next door neighbors are wealthier than you, and all three of you start getting $1000 a month in universal basic income, that won't change your assessment, because your relative position to your neighbors hasn't changed. Since increasing everyone's incomes would change absolute income, not relative income, we wouldn't expect it to affect satisfaction with income much, since we were told that satisfaction with income doesn't track well with absolute income but does track very well with relative income.

   Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   73%