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Modern Economic Growth, Culture, and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from Arctic Alaska

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Abstract

The life satisfaction of the indigenous population in Arctic Alaska is quite high, perhaps higher than that of the U.S. population in general. Is wage employment brought by modern economic growth responsible for their high life satisfaction? Probably not. Interestingly, we find that household wage income and job opportunities per working-age Native are negatively associated with their life satisfaction. In contrast, non-wage income, which does not involve the sacrifice of time that can be used for subsistence activities, is positively associated with life satisfaction. A household’s involvement in these traditional activities is found to be positively associated with life satisfaction as well. The findings challenge the common preconception about the effects of modernization and point to the importance of the non-wage subsistence activities as a preferred substitute for wage employment to this indigenous population. A combination of Christian religious beliefs and indigenous spiritual beliefs is also positively associated with their life satisfaction.

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Fig. 1

(Data Source: SLiCA; number of observations = 530)

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Notes

  1. In addition, according to the wave 4 of the World Values Survey conducted in the U.S. in 1999, only 35.2% of the U.S. general population ranked themselves as 9 or 10 on a 10-point-scale question for life satisfaction.

  2. The terms life satisfaction and happiness are used interchangeably in this paper and refer to satisfaction with life as a whole.

  3. According to the US Census Bureau, the land areas of the North Slope Borough, Northwest Arctic Borough, and Nome Census Area are around 88,820, 35,630, and 22,960 square miles, respectively.

  4. Most of the Yup’ik people live in the Nome Census Area.

  5. According to the 2000 Census, the percentages of the indigenous population in the North Slope Borough, Northwest Arctic Borough, and Nome Census Area are around 68, 83, and 75, respectively.

  6. According to the 2000 Census, the national average percentage of the working-age population that was out of labor force is around 36. Therefore, the national average percentage is similar to the average percentage in the regional centers.

  7. Some villages are connected to regional centers by ice roads constructed on frozen rivers in winter.

  8. There were 12 regional corporations and over 200 village corporations at the time of the Act. The 13th regional corporation was later created for Alaska Natives who no longer resided in Alaska. In Arctic Alaska, the regional corporations are Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC), Northwest Arctic Native Association (NANA) and the Bering Straits Native Corporation (BSNC).

  9. The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) was created in 1976 as a state sovereign wealth fund to save a portion of nonrenewable oil revenues for future public needs. In 1980, the Alaska Legislature enacted the permanent fund dividend program to distribute a portion of the Permanent Fund earnings to all residents in Alaska.

  10. Non-wage income also includes Aid to Families with Dependent Children (ADFC), public assistance, and retirement and disability payments.

  11. The percentage of four-wheeler or ATV ownership was considerably lower in the North Slope Borough because the percentage of households using four-wheelers or ATVs was lower in that region. The percentage of wage employment was also slightly lower in the North Slope Borough than in the other two regions.

  12. The share of transfer income in total household income of the U.S. general population was only 8%. The data on household income for the indigenous population in Arctic Alaska are from the SLiCA, and those for the U.S. general population are from the US Census 2000.

  13. According to Zeimbekis (2011), in the nineteenth century, angakkuuniq (shamanism) was the core of Iñupiaq beliefs and practices. Shamanism is embedded in a framework of cosmological beliefs and practices, according to which not only human beings but also animals are sentient beings that have to be respected. The Iñupiat consider the introduction of Christianity as a break with the past: the missionaries taught that only human beings had souls. Today, many of the Iñupiat follow Christianity but they continue to observe some rules of respect to non-human beings: they observe shamanic features in some forms of Christianity (Burch 1994).

  14. Even though the North Slope villages are among the state’s most remote communities, the borough government heavily subsidizes public utilities, lowering the cost of living (Saylor and Haley 2007).

  15. The Red Dog Mine is located about 90 miles northwest of Kotzebue.

  16. The other two dimensions of SWB are affect and eudaimonia. Affect, defined as a person’s feeling or emotional states, is measured with reference to one point in time. Eudaimonia considers a person’s meaning and purpose in life.

  17. In comparison, in Greenland, only one in four of a closely related indigenous group chose the top response category in the same survey.

  18. In Alaska, eligible households (i.e., households living in communities that hardly have access to retail stores and relying on hunting and fishing for subsistence) may be able to purchase hunting and fishing equipment with SNAP program benefits (Alaska Department of Health and Social Services 2019). However, SNAP benefits are not included as income in the SLiCA.

  19. We also looked into the total number of traditional activities by adult household members and the average/total number of traditional activities by all of the other adult household members. The regression results turned out to be consistent.

  20. It should be noted that the set of the activities asked at the individual level and those asked at the household level are not exactly the same (see Appendix Table 1), so we cannot compare the numbers between the two levels.

  21. Most of the Yup’ik in this study live in Nome, Savoonga, and Stebbins, three communities in the Nome Census Area. Even though we are not able to identify which subethnicity these Yup’ik people belong to, we notice that Savoonga is a Sibberian Yup’ik community (Fall et al. 2013).

  22. The answers range from “didn’t have necessary skills or qualifications for the jobs that were available” (i.e., unemployed), retired, and in school, to “out hunting or fishing” (included in the “other” category). This question about employment status in the SLiCA is very different from those in other surveys on general populations. Therefore, it is not clear whether this has the same meaning as those conventional questions directly asking about an individual’s employment status.

  23. The social support index and the family ties index are the same as those in Martin (2012).

  24. Two of the whaling communities that do not belong to the North Slope Borough are Kivalina and Savoonga. The former is located in the Northwest Arctic Borough, and the latter is located in the Nome Census region.

  25. The dummy for the North Slope Borough is omitted in the regression analysis.

  26. A multi-level model was also considered given the structure of the data. However, it has been suggested, in various studies, that a small number of groups with small group sizes will lead to invalid estimates in multi-level models (e.g., Maas and Hox 2005; Moineddin et al. 2007; Hox 2010). In this study, we only have 20 communities and the majority of the communities have fewer than 20 individuals (ranging from 5 to 122 individuals). Therefore, applying a multi-level model is not that beneficial. The results from multi-level ordered logit regressions will be provided for interested readers upon request.

  27. The small number of clusters (i.e., 20) may lead to a downwards-biased cluster-robust variance matrix estimate. Therefore, we also run another set of regressions with robust standard errors non-clustered. In general, the results from the two sets of regressions are consistent.

  28. It has been found that men are more involved in subsistence harvesting activities while women are more likely to participate in the cash economy. Studies have also shown higher female out-migration rates in rural Alaska villages, and most of the women move to regional centers (e.g., Howe et al. 2014; Martin 2009). Despite the small sample size, we performed regression analysis for individuals living in regional centers and those living in villages separately to check if the effect of being female differs between them. We find that the effect is significantly negative in the regressions for those living in villages and it is negative but marginally insignificant in the regressions for those living in regional centers. This is somewhat consistent with the fact of the higher female out-migration rates in villages.

  29. We found that household wage income is significantly correlated with both the proportion of household members working full-time (correlation coefficient = 0.562, p value = 0.000) and the proportion of household members working part-time (= 0.213, p value = 0.000).We tried to replace household wage income with these two variables in the regression analysis. Their coefficients are both negative but statistically insignificant at the 10% level.

  30. We find the number of types of equipment/tools purchased to be significantly correlated with the average number of types of traditional or subsistence activities by adult household members as well (correlation coefficient = 0.218, p value = 0.000).

  31. We also find the correlation between household wage income and the types of traditional or subsistence activities to be positive and significant (correlation coefficient = 0.150, p value = 0.000).

  32. Unfortunately, we are unable to find questions that directly ask about the productivity of the traditional activities. Presumably, the productivity of these activities should be positively associated with the purchasing of equipment/tools.

  33. The government mostly shuts down during the whaling season.

  34. We also tried to include the interaction between the two sharing variables but the coefficient on the interaction term turned out to be not significant as well.

  35. Interestingly, the association becomes significant when regional dummies are excluded, suggesting that the relationship is fully explained by the regional differences.

  36. Because of the high correlation between the individual-level number of traditional activities and the household-level score for involvement in subsistence activities (correlation coefficient = 0.604), we do not include them in the same model. In addition, we tried to replace the household-level involvement score with either of its components, the household-level number of traditional activities and household-level subsistence harvests. We found that they are both significantly positively correlated with individual life satisfaction.

  37. The result on non-wage income in this study together with that in Berman (2018) implies that cash transfers to indigenous populations can indeed improve both their objective economic conditions and their subjective perceptions of quality of life.

  38. Martin (2005) investigates the determinants of each of eight satisfaction domains.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Richard Easterlin for comments and his guidance as my research advisor; Jeffrey Nugent, John Strauss, Cheng Hsiao, Kelsey O’Connor, and seminar participants at the University of Southern California, the Western Economic Association International (WEAI) meeting, and the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) meeting for helpful comments; and the University of Southern California for financial assistance. The draft was reviewed and approved by the data provider (i.e., the SLiCA team) to make sure that it does not violate the confidentiality of respondents participating in the survey or create any potential concerns.

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  1. Fengyu Wu

    Present address: Eudaimonia Institute, Wake Forest University, 2599 Reynolda Road, Winston-Salem, NC, 27106, USA

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    Fengyu Wu

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Table 4 Definition of variables
Full size table
Table 5 Correlation matrix for variables of culture attachment
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Table 6 Principal component analysis for household-level involvement in subsistence activities
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Table 7 The distribution of household income among the five income sources by size of income
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Wu, F. Modern Economic Growth, Culture, and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from Arctic Alaska. J Happiness Stud 22, 2621–2651 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00335-4

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