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Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

nytimes.com

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Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#61

Post by eanzenberg »

coldtea wrote: post #14

The title is a little out of date. Prosperity has been increasing in the 20th century, but has not increased for a few decades. Sure, crap like gadgets is now cheaper, but buying a house, giving your kids an education, and so on have increased. In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner. Such a house now would be on the verge of bankruptcy. A…

Prosperity sure has increased all the way up to 2018 in the US, whether you like it or not. The median person today lives with luxuries that a Rockefeller was privy to 100 years ago.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#62

Post by r00fus »

daniel_levine wrote: post #47
TuringNYC wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said, and the easiest metric you could look at w/r/t cost-of-living is the average income : house price ratio. What was once withing reach for most educated workers is now often a fantasy for the rich. Unfortunately it is also what the lion's share of paychecks is often spent on.

Real GDP per capita covers this. Inflation encompasses cost of living. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA Missing a breakdown by quartile, but it's the right metric

Does GDP per capita actually compare to median income? Sounds more like it uses mean income which is skewed by extremes (e.g. high earners).

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#63

Post by slv77 »

randomdata wrote: post #49
coldtea wrote: post #14

The title is a little out of date. Prosperity has been increasing in the 20th century, but has not increased for a few decades. Sure, crap like gadgets is now cheaper, but buying a house, giving your kids an education, and so on have increased. In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner. Such a house now would be on the verge of bankruptcy. A…

> In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner. Has that really changed? A manufacturing business in my area is currently hiring everyone who shows up to an interview. They pay they are offering isn't wonderful (at least if you concept of money has been warped by the IT industry), but you should expect to make around $40,000 per year to start.…

Households today spend more on cell phones and communication but also spend less on fine china, dress clothes and food. When you net out all the pluses and minuses households today spend much more on housing, healthcare, daycare, transportation (two cars, for two jobs) and education.

When you look closely the two bed, two bath detached home it’s likely in a school district that is underperforming and while the home may be slightly larger than those in the past it’s 30+ years old.

This is detailed elegantly in the Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren.

The thing that is crazy is that there is any debate in the subject. Real productivity growth has averaged 2% for the last 100 years in the US. Early in the last century they they were speculating that if productivity growth kept up at that rate their grandchildren would only need to work a couple of hours a week and what would they do with all their free time?

How did we get here?

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#64

Post by toasterlovin »

groby_b wrote: post #8
toasterlovin wrote: post #3

Humans 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…

> Which means that in an environment of abundance, the cost often exceeds the rewards.

The problem is that environments of abundance basically do not exist, because the population of a species quickly grows to consume any excess. The situation that humans in the developed world face is novel. We are not evolved to deal with abundance because abundance has only ever occurred during the brief gap between when we invented a new technology and when the population has expanded to fill the new, larger ecological niche which that technology enabled.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#65

Post by refurb »

lutorm wrote: post #35
lordnacho wrote: post #26

It would be weird for happiness to increase with prosperity. Think how much more stuff we have than people in the stone age. We should all be delirious with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material wealth. Any description of happiness that makes sense would have to say that it's some sort of local comparison, across various axes: how am I doing compared to previously/expectations/other pe…

This is why happiness can only be reached by learning to appreciate what you have. You're much better off pondering how lucky you are to have, and how miserable you'd be without, the things you already have, rather than how happy you'd be with things you don't. The latter is an illusion.

Exactly this.

The human psyche has its pluses and minuses. The fact is, humans are never satisfied with what they have, they always want more.

This is good when it comes to driving progress. We’d never have gone to the moon if we were satisfied with just colonizing the earth.

At the same time, it’s the root of a lot of unhappiness. People have grand expectations for their life - and fall into depression if they never reach them, despite the fact their life is far richer than most people experience.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#66

Post by randomdata »

torpfactory wrote: post #60
randomdata wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner. Has that really changed? A manufacturing business in my area is currently hiring everyone who shows up to an interview. They pay they are offering isn't wonderful (at least if you concept of money has been warped by the IT industry), but you should expect to make around $40,000 per year to start.…

I think folks are spending quite a bit more on things they need which used to be much cheaper. Healthcare and higher education come to mind as expenses which have started to eat the average family's budget much more than in the past. The medicine is much better today than in the 50's of course. We ought to include a full picture of required spending in relation to housing costs.

On the other hand, essential costs like food and clothing have dropped substantially over time. In the 40s and 50s food and clothing accounted for approximately 50% of one's disposable income. Now it is closer to 30%.

But your comment does raise an interesting question: If I were to hypothetically spend $100,000 for an optional status symbol like a Ferrari or higher education and can no longer afford to own a home due to that purchase, does that indicate a problem with the housing market?

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#67

Post by petermcneeley »

thedufer wrote: post #57
petermcneeley wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is questioning the economic growth from 40s to 80s (Golden Era). Its the growth (and inequality) after that period that is in question. The concern now is the economic prospects for the millennial and future generations.

The first post in this thread explicitly compares the present to the 40s. It seems somewhat unreasonable to expect ams6110 to foresee you moving the goalposts.

The original post refers to the golden era as well and its decline. "Prosperity has been increasing in the 20th century, but has not increased for a few decades." No goalposts are changing.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#68

Post by _8j50 »

I find the idea of prosperity==happiness a bit silly. Being satisfied with the quality of life you have does not equate happiness.

The list is quite long but to name a few: horrible personality disorders,childhood trauma,relationship issues(opposite sex,parent,society,coworkers,etc...),physhical health ailments and so on... All these can become obstacles to happiness and throwing money at them to the most part does not help overcome these issues.

Here is my question: 1) isn't happiness a bit overrated? 2) is happiness really all that important? 3) if prosperity is happiness then why are there so many happy poor people in 3rd world countries?

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#69

Post by duderific »

toasterlovin wrote: post #54
maxxxxx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"get as high up in the status/dominance hierarchy as possible," I don't think that's true. A lot of people are OK with getting high enough to have a life they view as decent. Only very few want to get as high as possible.

Everywhere I look, I see people struggling to drive a nicer car, have nicer clothes, live in a better neighborhood, etc. That is all status seeking.

Everywhere I look, I also see people not struggling in that way. And they generally seem happier than the ones trying desperately to climb the ladder.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#70

Post by randomdata »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #43
greenhatman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>giving your kids an education Only if you insist on universities. You can get an education almost for free on the internet.

What a weird comment. There are a huge number of fields where you simply can't avoid "insisting" on universities. Try being a particle physicist outside a university lab. Try being any kind of medical professional without going to med school. Try being a lawyer with going to law school.

I'd be surprised if those careers represented more than 1% of the workforce combined. Do 100% of parents need to provide money to their adult offspring on the slim chance they decide that they are going to enter into a field that expects a degree but is not lucrative enough to justify paying for said degree by oneself?

You've found the outliers, but the vast majority of people will never find themselves in that kind of work to begin with.

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