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How many hours should people work? I am pretty sure you, and everyone you know, has asked that question. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, I can actually show with how many working hours people are most satisfied on average. And the results are pretty strange. In short, while mothers can be satisfied with their life while working long or short hours, fathers become unsatisfied with their life when they work shorter hours. You can check out the results in this graph, which shows how the life satisfaction of each group is related to working hours. To put this

In every society, some have more income than others. In some societies, some have much more income than others. But are people that live in more equal societies happier with their life? The prevailing view is that income inequality breeds unhappiness. But does someone from Sweden really wake up in the morning to thank god that she does not live in a country with more inequality? Probably not… Indeed, empirical studies that compare whether countries with more inequality have a happier population showed mixed results. Some found that indeed, countries with more inequality have a more satisfied population. But others

Imagine a population of wolves and sheep. Wolves eat sheep. The wolve population grows, as long as there are sheep. But once the wolves have eaten all the sheep, the wolves starve and die. When the wolves are gone, the sheep population can recover. This is a basic prey and predator model. Essentially, it shows how trade union power is linked to inequality, trade unions are the wolves and inequality is the sheep. Using data from 12 countries over 100 years, I can show with my co-author Louis Chauvel that trade unions recruit more members after inequality has been high.

In a recent paper I wrote, I can show that when more income inequality exists in a country, people also start to accept more income inequality. This means that when inequality increases in a country, after 3 to 4 years, people have adapted their social justice views to this and have accepted the increased inequality. This shows why people are not more outraged by rising inequality, they simply seem to have a strong tendency to get used to it. For the article, please access this link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11211-016-0276-8