A study from the notorious socialists at the Harvard Business Review analyzed data from the Gallup World Poll and the World Top Incomes Database and found that in countries with a large degree of wealth inequality, “levels of life satisfaction” go down, and “negative daily emotional experiences” go up, for all populations, including the richest. While life satisfaction was negatively related to increased income inequality, we did not find a relationship between positive emotional well-being and inequality at the very top of the income distribution.

This is probably because the things that make up positive emotional experiences have little to do with income and rank. But the flip side of daily positive emotional experiences are negative emotional experiences — and we did find that these rise along with the incomes of the top 1%. In societies where the richest hold most of the country’s income, people were more likely to report feeling feeling “stressed,” “worried,” or “angry” on the day before the survey. So, on aggregate, as the incomes of the 1% pull away from those of the rest, people’s overall life satisfaction is lower and their day-to-day negative emotional experiences are greater in number. Income Inequality Makes Whole Countries Less Happy [Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Nattavudh Powdthavee/Harvard Business Review]

Read more here Income inequality makes the 1% sad, too

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​Last night, President Barack Obama gave his eighth and final State of the Union address. He was optimistic about the nation’s future, angry with the current Republican presidential hopefuls and admitted personal failings of his own. Here’s what to read. First, The Full Address Tonight marks the eighth year I’ve come here to report on the State of the Union. And for this final one, I’m going to try to make it shorter. I know some of you are antsy to get back to Iowa. [ Medium ] And For Those Short On Time, The Address In Four Minutes With that out of the way, here’s what the pundits thought. An Annotated Transcript A handful of Washington Post political reporters dove into the president’s own words to suss out what he said, and what he actually meant. Politico reporters take a close look at some of the claims Obama made over the course of his speech.

The verdict? Mostly true. [ Politico ] As the economic crisis has receded, it has created a space that cultural anxieties now fill. Conservatives now focus on immigration in a way they haven’t since Pete Wilson and Pat Buchanan ran for president in 1996. Democrats stress gun control to a degree they haven’t since the early Clinton years. Terrorism has returned to center stage not merely because of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, but because fear of economic calamity no longer looms so large. As a wartime president, he has resembled his hated predecessor George W Bush, in execution if not design. He will leave office as Bush did: passing on to his successor two wars – one the longest in American history, the other a reboot of the conflict he promised to end. Unlike in previous speeches, Obama did not […]

Read more here What To Read And Watch About Obama’s Last State Of The Union Address

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Lenovo is on top of a shrinking market; only Apple is shipping significantly more machines this year than last, according to trade group numbers. HP is sinking fastest among the big players, but still in #2. The rest of the market (“Other”) seems to be evacuating the bowels of modern life entirely, losing 20% its size last year. Both analysts blamed the drop in PC sales on a combination of factors: an economic slowdown in China; a strong US dollar; and the continuing growth of smartphones and other mobile devices. IDC also noted that free Windows 10 upgrades may have hurt PC vendors as consumers chose to upgrade their OS without forking out for new hardware. However, both analysts expect sales to pick up in 2016 as businesses—by far the largest market for PCs—start to upgrade to Windows 10.

Read more here PC sales drop to 2007 levels, and some blame Windows 10

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