Reply #50: Eh. My personal belief:

[Igel]

meeting and exceeding expectations, assuming basic needs are met. And basic needs are basic indeed.

You expect to be poor, make peace with it, but having kids is what fulfills you (per your culture), you're happy being poor with kids. You expect to be a quadriplegic, and get use of your hands ... you're happy. You expect to be above average, you need to exceed what others are doing. You expect to have a career and happy family, neither a career nor a happy family in isolation works for you.

You're in a house you're paying for, steady but unglamorous job, 2 kids, healthy, you'd expect to be happy, since you're well-off by global standards; but if the house is small or others have much larger ones, your job is deadended, your culture says have lots of kids, you're going to be miserable. The people you compare yourself with may not be your actual peers, but those you *want* to be your peers: hence 'social climbing'.

So I think the researchers are partly right, but I suspect that working out causation requires getting data that's very difficult to get at.