A2 Politics & The Nation
Their parents accused of spying for Russia, what happens to the children?...............................................................A3 Oregon police reopen Gore investigation .............................................A4
The World
Israel allows more goods to enter Gaza.................................................A6 Holder meets in Kabul with Karzai .......................................................A8
Economy & Business House passes financial overhaul; Senate leaders postpone vote ......A10 Cassano defends actions at AIG...........................................................A10 Government agencies urged to save money by banding together.....A11
CORRECTIONS
In today’s Local Living section, which was printed in advance, a July 3 Going Out Guide listing for the Laurel Independence Day Celebration at Granville Gude Park includes an incorrect time for the parade. The parade be- gins Saturday at 11 a.m. The item also incorrectly refers to the cel- ebration as happening Sunday; as the header indicates, all the events are Saturday.
The game summary with a baseball box score in the June 28 Sports section, on the Chicago Cubs’ 8-6 victory the previous day over the Chicago White Sox, incorrectly said that Armando Rios of the White Sox struck out to end the game. Armando Rios is retired. The player who struck
·· E-mail
corrections@washpost.com. out is Alex Rios.
The headlines on a June 18 Page One article about a Su- preme Court decision incorrectly indicated that the ruling would allow employers to eavesdrop on workers’ conversations on work- issued telephones and com- puters. The decision did not ap- ply to private employers, and it did not involve real-time mon- itoring. It held that a police chief was justified in searching the text messages sent and received by an officer who was using his equipment for personal commu- nications while on duty. The opinion also specified that a su- pervisor must have “a legitimate work-related purpose” to con- duct such a search.
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THURSDAY, JULY 1, 2010 Senate panels back tougher oil regulations
Bills would raise penalties for spills, remove liability caps
by Juliet Eilperin
Two key Senate committees ap- proved legislation Wednesday that would change the way the federal government regulates off- shore oil drilling and penalizes companies for oil spills, demon- strating lawmakers’ eagerness to respond to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Both measures passed on bi-
partisan voice votes. One, ap- proved by the Energy and Natu- ral Resources Committee, would raise the civil and criminal penal- ties for a spill, require more safe- ty equipment redundancies, boost the number of federal safe- ty inspectors and demand addi- tional precautions for deep-water drilling. The other, passed by the Environment and Public Works Committee, would remove oil companies’ $75million liability limit and retroactively remove the liability cap for BP and the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The legislation will now head to the Senate floor. On the House
Money buy happiness? It’s a down payment.
Global study finds high correlation, but many other factors play roles
by Rob Stein
Money, it turns out, really can by you happiness — or at least one form of it, according to the biggest study to examine the rela- tionship between income and well-being around the world. Pulling in the big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall — whether they are young or old, male or female, or living in cities or remote villages, the survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries found. But the survey also showed
that a key element of what many people consider happiness — pos- itive feelings — is much more strongly affected by factors other than cold, hard cash, such as feel- ing respected, being in control of your life and having friends and family to rely on in a pinch. “Yes, money makes you happy
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— we see the effect of income on life satisfaction is very strong and virtually ubiquitous and univer- sal around the world,” said Ed Di- ener, a professor emeritus of psy- chology at the University of Illi- nois who led the study. “But it makes you more satisfied than it makes you feel good. Positive feel- ings are less affected by money and more affected by the things people are doing day to day.” Previous studies had suggested
that money was associated with happiness. But the relationship appeared weak, and earlier work tended to focus on individual countries and global evaluations of life without parsing out the ef- fects on specific positive and neg- ative emotions or examining dif- ferences across nations. The new survey — the first large international study to dif-
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Kenneth Feinberg told the House that a fund for gulf oil spill victims will make initial payments equal to six months of reimbursement.
side, lawmakers have begun de- bating a bill that would impose additional safeguards on offshore and onshore drilling, and the Natural Resources Committee is preparing to take up a bill that would radically overhaul federal regulation and oversight of off- shore drilling. As waves caused by Hurricane
Alex slowed cleanup operations, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy
and Commerce subcommittee on energy and the environment, said BP failed to mention the prospect of a hurricane or tropical storm affecting any potential oil spill in the response plan it submitted to federal authorities for the gulf a year ago. “The BP plan had walruses in the gulf but no hurricanes,” Mar- key said. “Walruses haven’t been in the gulf in a few million years, while a hurricane is just a few
How income correlates with happiness Money can buy one component of happiness, well-being, according to a Gallup poll of 132 countries. A few countries, in order of gross domestic product per capita, and how their citizens evaluated their lives:
Selected countries with higher feelings of well-being (Example: The U.S. ranks first in GDP per capita, 19th in social/psychological prosperity, 16th in best possible life and 26th in positive feelings.)
GDP per capita
United States Denmark New Zealand Costa Rica
Higher feelings of well-being 1
5
22 41
Lower feelings of well-being India
Ghana Nepal
Tanzania
61 68 76 89
SOURCE: Gallup World Poll
ferentiate between overall life satisfaction and day-to-day emo- tions — makes that crucial dis- tinction, allowing researchers to explore the elusive concept of happiness in much greater nu- ance. “It’s sort of a new era for the study of well-being,” said Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. The reason for the distinction is probably that when people are asked whether they are “happy,” the first thing they do, wherever they are, is take stock of their lives by comparing themselves to their equivalent of “the Joneses” using the most obvious measure: income, several experts said. “When people evaluate their
life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity,” Kah- neman said. “That was unexpect- ed.”
But day-to-day positive feelings depend a lot on other things, which also turn out to be fairly universal and therefore help clar- ify what makes people content, several researchers said. “The thing I think is exciting about this is money can make you feel better in a limited way,” said Barbara L. Fredrickson, a profes- sor of psychology at the Univer- sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But positive feelings like en- joyment and laughing can do a whole lot more for people. They can help people grow and learn and become a more resilient, bet- ter version of yourself.” The new survey, dubbed the
“first representative sample of planet Earth,” was conducted by Gallup and involved detailed questioning in 2005 and 2006 of 136,839 residents age 15 and old- er. The samples in each country were designed to be nationally representative and represent about 96 percent of the world’s
Social/psycholo- gical prosperity (feeling respected, having good friends)
19
13 12
6
85 51 88 58
1 9 18
46 70 69 86
Closest to idea of best possible life
16
Positive feelings (such as joy, laughter)
26 7
1 4
63 68 50 52
THE WASHINGTON POST
population. “What makes this paper so im-
portant is the sample is so huge and covered the entire world,” said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a profes- sor of psychology at the Univer- sity of California at Riverside. “It’s really interesting that if you look at countries that are so dif- ferent — from rural villagers to people living in a city like Stock- holm — they are all about the same in terms of what makes peo- ple happy.” The researchers gathered in-
formation about a long list of at- tributes, including income, whether basic needs such as food and shelter were met, what con- veniences the subjects owned and whether they felt their psycholog- ical needs were satisfied. The sur- vey asked people to rate their lives on a scale from zero for the worst possible life to 10 for the best. They also reported whether they experienced enjoyment, smiling, laughing, sadness, de- pression or anger the previous day, whether they felt respected and had family or friends they could count on in an emergency, and how free they were to choose their daily activities, learn new things or do what “one does best.” Life satisfaction was directly and strongly correlated with in- come, with the impact felt equally among all ages, men and women, and rural villagers and urban dwellers in virtually every corner of the globe, the researchers re- ported in the Journal of Person- ality and Social Psychology. Al- though money also influenced emotions, the effect was much weaker. Both positive and nega- tive emotions tended to be affect- ed much more in relation to other psychological and social factors, such as feeling respected, having autonomy, strong social support and working at a fulfilling job. “What we didn’t know before is
the extent to which life evalua- tion and emotional well-being are so distinct,” Kahneman said. “When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word — it’s happiness. People do not distinguish.” The findings “are really signifi-
cant” because “we are finally able to answer the big questions, such as ‘What is a good society?’ ” Shi- gehiro Oishi, an associate profes- sor of psychology at the Univer- sity of Virginia, wrote in an e- mail. “If the goal of a society is to raise the daily enjoyment of its citizens, then, it seems critical to devise ways to increase the rela- tional wealth of nations (e.g., stronger social network).”
steinr@washpost.com
hundred miles from the spill site right now. This is yet another example of BP serial complacen- cy.”
BP spokesman Andrew Gowers declined to comment on the mat- ter.
Also on Wednesday, the Envi- ronmental Protection Agency re- leased its first round of testing re- sults on the toxicity of oil dis- persants, saying initial findings suggest that the dispersant BP is using in the gulf is less harmful than oil and does not pose as sig- nificant an environmental threat as the leak does. In a telephone news confer-
ence, Paul Anastas, the EPA’s as- sistant administrator for re- search and development, said it was “too early to draw conclu- sions” about the long-term im- pact of Corexit 9500, the dis- persant BP has applied to break up oil spewing from the downed Deepwater Horizon rig. The agency has yet to analyze the im- pact of dispersants mixed with oil and instead tested the applica- tion of eight types of dispersants to marine animals in a lab set- ting. “We need more data to decide
whether it’s necessary to switch dispersants,” Anastas said.
eilperinj@washpost.com
Obama accuses GOP of being ‘out of touch’ with Americans
by Anne E. Kornblut and Dan Balz
racine, wis. — President Oba- ma launched a broad attack against Republican lawmakers Wednesday, accusing them of be- ing “out of touch” with ordinary Americans as he sought to capi- talize on recent remarks that many in the Democratic Party view as potentially costly gaffes. Obama took the rare step of singling out House Republican leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) for comments he made this week to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in which he likened pending fi- nancial legislation to “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” “He can’t be that out of touch with the struggles of American families,” Obama told an audi- ence during a town-hall-style meeting here, a city with extraor- dinarily high unemployment. “And if he is, he has to come here to Racine and ask people if they think the financial crisis was an ant.” In an interview, Boehner fired
back at the White House, saying “they’re the ones who are out of touch” and defending his critique of the legislation and the admin- istration’s priorities. “The American people want us to deal with the economy and jobs,” he said. “And what have they dealt with? They’ve dealt with health care. They’ve dealt with cap-and-trade. And then they’ve gone overboard with the financial regulatory bill. Growing the size of government, taking more from the American people at a time when Americans want them to focus in on the economy.” The rhetorical volleys helped
frame the debate that will dom- inate the fall elections. Boehner and other Republicans say that Obama has unleashed a torrent of government spending and reg- ulation that threatens the econo- my and Americans’ personal free- doms. The president and his Demo-
cratic allies say that Republican indifference could have turned the recession into a depression and that the GOP is more inter- ested in protecting banks and big corporations than struggling families. In addition to Boehner, Obama took on Rep. Joe L. Barton (R- Tex.), who suggested this month that White House efforts to force oil giant BP to set aside $20 bil- lion to pay damages to Gulf Coast residents amounted to a “shake- down” for which he was “ashamed.” “The top Republican on the en-
ergy committee even had the nerve to apologize to BP,” Obama said. “Apologize to BP!” Obama acknowledged that
Barton, under pressure from GOP leaders, retracted the apolo- gy but added: “He meant it.” In Racine, Obama seemed to be enjoying himself, by turns rid- iculing his rivals and prodding them. He took a handful of ques- tions. Not one voter asked him about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the firing last week of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Af- ghanistan.
kornbluta@washpost.com balzd@washpost.com
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