Spend the last two evening with Dr Zhang Luyang 张陆洋, a professor from Fudan University. He is one of the leading academic on venture capital in China. I learn a lot from him about the venture scene in China and makes me rethink about China in the short time we spend together.

I reach a stage where I know enough to know I don’t really know whats’ going on. So I won’t talk about venture capital in China here like an expert (I am not!).

However, something else he said over dinner is worth repeating. It goes something like this:

“Pick 10 random people from Singapore and China, Singaporeans are likely to be better. But 1 out of 10 Chinese is better than 9 out of 10 Singaporeans”.

Go ponder over it.

via Dani Rodrik

In economics we think that happiness increases with lifetime wealth, albeit at a decreasing rate. But recent research on happiness fails to show a steep gradient between incomes and self-reported life satisfaction. But this work has typically focused on rich countries. In a recent paper, Angus Deaton uses Gallup poll data for a large number of countries and uncovers–to my surprise, at least–that people in poor countries are indeed less “happy” on average than people in rich countries.

Here is the relationship, broken down by age group.