Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
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Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
#2A majority of Americans simply are not prosperous.
Having nice things, TV, mobile phones and other similar items reflects the overall product of industry. Those are technically luxuries.
All good, and welcome, but wealth, security needed for happiness us a different thing.
Wealth, in the basic human sense, is all about time and how much of it is availiable for people to assign purpose, rather than have that purpose mandated somehow by others or genuine need.
Happy people use that time in ways that they find rewarding, a core part of happiness.
In a macro sense, we as a nation are prosporous.
In a micro sense, people do not see that prosperity as basic wealth, and it manifests as their personal cost and risk exposure not matched to their income.
This costs them time, and limits on scope of desirable purpose on what portion of "free" time they have.
Having lots of money, that requires vast amounts of time to obtain and or service, is not wealth in the simoke human sense. Sans this basic wealth, happiness is much harder to achieve. Some people get happiness out of work. Most do not, and it ranges from the work being mundane to varied desire to work.
Secure people, not having to dedicate large amounts of time to meet basic needs, can be happy much easier, despite a lack of luxuries in their lives.
TL;DR: Reduce overall personal cost and risk exposure, and the time needed to do that, and happiness metrics will improve.
People need to be people. When they can't be who they are, do qhat they will do, they simply will not be happy no matter the luxuries they may find availiable to them.
Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
#3Humans are social animals. One of the primary drives of most social animals is to get as high up in the status/dominance hierarchy as possible, since this improves an organism's access to mates. Status and dominance are relative to other members of the species and, thus, unrelated to the absolute level of an organism's access to food and other resources.
Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
#4One usually-not-mentioned premise is that even though goods’ costs have typically been going down over time as physical product technology improves, many services (the majority of developed economies) are relatively unaffected by improvements in technology because they rely almost exclusively on labor. Rising inequality will make services more expensive to those on the poorer end. Poor people don’t struggle to get smart phones or food, they struggle to get daycare, medical care, education, etc.
Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
#5Humans are social animals. One of the primary drives of most social animals is to get as high up in the status/dominance hierarchy as possible, since this improves an organism's access to mates. Status and dominance are relative to other members of the species and, thus, unrelated to the absolute level of an organism's access to food and other resources.
Shout out to Jordan Peterson.
Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
#6One usually-not-mentioned premise is that even though goods’ costs have typically been going down over time as physical product technology improves, many services (the majority of developed economies) are relatively unaffected by improvements in technology because they rely almost exclusively on labor. Rising inequality will make services more expensive to those on the poorer end. Poor people don’t struggle to get sm…
I am pretty sure everyone, except for the 1%, struggle to get daycare, medical care, and education.
Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
#7This also ignores increases in costs of living, such as housing, and the destruction of concepts like 'career paths' where someone would be with a company for a long time and build economic and social value within a given area.
Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
#8Humans are social animals. One of the primary drives of most social animals is to get as high up in the status/dominance hierarchy as possible, since this improves an organism's access to mates. Status and dominance are relative to other members of the species and, thus, unrelated to the absolute level of an organism's access to food and other resources.
Except that pretty much no social animal with dominance hierarchy has a ranking function as simple as "status=mates". Most animals track the cost(e.g. more stress, higher metabolic rate) of high status vs the rewards. Which means that in an environment of abundance, the cost often exceeds the rewards.
There's also the phenomenon of reverse hierarchies (essentially, lower ranking members band together to keep anybody from dominating them). Which has at the very least been proposed as an explanation for altruistic behavior in humans, too.
And then there's the point that happiness is not related to status, or access to mates, or even access to resources beyond a certain point.
The world's a bit more complicated than ev. psych suggests.
Edit: No matter if you agree or disagree, Boehm's paper is certainly an interesting read. https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pd...
Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
#9One usually-not-mentioned premise is that even though goods’ costs have typically been going down over time as physical product technology improves, many services (the majority of developed economies) are relatively unaffected by improvements in technology because they rely almost exclusively on labor. Rising inequality will make services more expensive to those on the poorer end. Poor people don’t struggle to get sm…
I am pretty sure everyone, except for the 1%, struggle to get daycare, medical care, and education.
You might want to visit Europe at some point. That's a very specific US problem. (Europe's not problem-free, but access to daycare/medical care/education is much easier to obtain there)
Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
#10The article doesn't mention the horrid isolating effects of decades of urban and corporate sprawl and the effect of the resultant car culture on Americans' psyche.