Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland Page A

applies only across generations within a single country—you are probably not happier than your parents were, even though you are probably richer. But across countries, what millions of immigrants have always known to be true really is: the people of rich countries are generally happier than the people of poor countries.
    The latest contrarian finding, however, is that moving to that state of greater wealth and greater happiness is decidedly unpleasant. As Angus Deaton, in a review of the 2006 Gallup World Poll, concluded, “Surprisingly, at any given level of income, economic growth is associated with lower reported levels of life satisfaction.” Eduardo Lora and Carol Graham call this the “paradox of unhappy growth.” Two separate studies of China, for example, have found that peasants who move to the city are richer but more frustrated with their income than they had been back on the farm. Palagummi Sainath, an award-winning Indian journalist who made his name when he switched from covering the business titans of “India Shining” to the underclasses who were left behind, tells the same story: Indians who move from impoverished villages to urban slums have a better chance of finding work, but little social security comes with it. And Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have found that the paradox of unhappy growth is particularly true in the first stages of growth in “miracle” economies, such as South Korea or Ireland—the moment when the tigers take their first leap is also the time when their people are unhappiest.
    No one has come up with a definitive explanation of the unhappy growth paradox, but the economists who study it speculate that the uncertainty and inequality of these periods of rapid economic change may be to blame. Even if our country’s economy overall is growing strongly and we are doing well ourselves, we know that we are living through a period of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” That volatility, and the painful consequences it has for the losers, makes even the winners anxious.
    The tension in emerging markets isn’t only psychological. As in the West, a big part of the story of the developing world’s first gilded age is the “friction . . . between capital and labor, between rich and poor” that Carnegie identified more than a century earlier.
    I caught a glimpse of it at a World Bank panel I moderated in Washington, D.C., in September 2011. Manish Sabharwal, the CEO of TeamLease, India’s leading supplier of temporary workers, said one of India’s big challenges was increasing the number of people in the formal economy (as opposed to the black-market economy) working in manufacturing. At just 12 percent of the labor force, low-wage India, astonishingly, has the same percentage of workers in manufacturing as the United States does.
    Stella Li, the vice president of automaker BYD, one of China’s manufacturing stars, jumped into the discussion. “I have the answer,” she told Sabharwal. BYD, she said, had gone into India with high hopes. “We think India is a great place for our second-biggest manufacturing,” she explained, and BYD liked the quality of the Indian labor force: “The employee labor is good—they are working hard, very smart, and quite good.” The problem was political: “They have a strike . . . then they ask for money, it takes a long discussion, they have to stop manufacturing for like one month.” By contrast, she noted, “In China, we have no strike. If they have a strike, the government will get involved, tell workers, ‘I will help you, but go back to work.’”
    At this point, I couldn’t resist asking whether in the authoritarian People’s Republic, harsh measures might be used to force protesters back to work. Strikers might even be sent to jail, I suggested.
    “No,” Ms. Li replied instantly. “It is just the government nicely talking, ‘What do you need? I’m taking care of you. Don’t worry. But you