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Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

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Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#181

Post by todd8 »

MarkMc wrote: post #155
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The title is a little out of date.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…

Person A says prosperity not increased for the middle-class since the 1970's, person B says it has. Do they have to rely on historical data, or is there some experiment they could perform to determine who is right? For example, suppose I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's. I would subsidise their housing and education costs, but they would pay more for clothes and food and air t…

I was in college in the 70s, so yeah, it was a fun time for me when I think back on it. Who wouldn’t want to hear Aerosmith live in a club with maybe 80 people there before their first album.

But I walked to class cold and wet on many days. Gortex hadn’t been invented and I couldn’t afford a car. When I got my first real job I bought a car, but I carried a toolbox in the trunk. Cars broke down frequently and with no cell phones you were on your own if the car stopped running. A car accident could kill you in a 35 mph crash. I also carried a state highway map and a city map of around 100 pages in a spiral bound book because there was no GPS.

The best medicine available seems primitive by comparison to today. I had classmates that wore leg braces due to childhood polio. People were still dying from rabies, TB, and even Smallpox. There were cholera pandemics. No MRI, no CAT scans.

I was studying programming. I had to walk to campus at night to punch cards. No internet, no terminal, just a place to drop off cards so that you could pick up your output in the morning.

I was middle class in the 70s so I had it much better than many others. Most of us grew up with a single wired phone in the house, only one full bathroom, one black and white TV that received three channels, no DVD, no CDs.

A VCR player in 1975 was big and heavy and cost over $5000 in today’s dollars so none of us owned one.

Ubiquitous discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice made it harder for many to be middle class like I was.

Even in the 1970s, life was still much much better for me than my parents that had grew up on small farms during the dustbowl days of the Great Depression.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#182

Post by taneq »

technobabble wrote: post #85
ianai wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused by “hollowed out Maslows pyramid of needs”

I see the confusion. Based on Maslow's hierarchy (pyramid) of needs, one needs to start at the bottom (physiological) and build up from there like a foundation. Because factors, both internal and external to ones lives, erode at access to basic needs, ones life loses stability, hence the "hollowing" out part. A better metaphor would be turning Maslow's hierarchy/pyramid instead into a tower. (in retrospect this wasn'…

I think you're onto something, but it's that the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy are pretty much completely satisfied these days for all but the poorest people, so the meaning of those levels are eroded. Once upon a time, a good stew and a husk of bread were enough to make you feel genuinely satisfied with your life. These days a delicious greasy dinner with ice cream for dessert barely registers because you're chasing mates and self-actualisation and stuff.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#183

Post by sixstringbudha »

MarkMc wrote: post #155
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…

Person A says prosperity not increased for the middle-class since the 1970's, person B says it has. Do they have to rely on historical data, or is there some experiment they could perform to determine who is right? For example, suppose I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's. I would subsidise their housing and education costs, but they would pay more for clothes and food and air t…

> I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's

Do I also get a dozen brothers and sisters? Eat food, drink water and breath air without having to constantly worry about being them polluted or toxic?

> would only have a black-and-white TV with 4 stations and a gramophone record player..

Sure. I would rather have a gramaphone record player or cassete player (which is more like 70s i think) that played ABBA or BoneyM than a 4k lcd tv that plays Lady gaga or Justine beiber or what ever crap that is "trending" today.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#184

Post by ionised »

Everything I know and read gives me the impression that while the world's poor are better off today than they ever have been, their overall share of the wealth and bargaining power is ever decreasing since the post-WWII years.

People now have smartphones and expensive TV's and financed cars but all the important things in life are consolidating in fewer and fewer hands.

GDP increases higher and higher, and the actual economic gains go to fewer and fewer people in ever larger amounts.

Education and healthcare has become prohibitively expensive, the financial services industry concocts ever more complicated financial instruments to disguise their greedy quarterly-focused predatory profiteering.

House prices and rent in places where the jobs can be found are skyrocketing, made worse by a free-for-all of foreign property purchases.

The products we used to buy and own and now being leased out to us and our control over devices we have in our own homes has been slowly and quietly taken away from us. We are not even allowed to fucking legally repair shit we've paid for a lot of the time.

Bribery and corruption have even been legalised in the US and the group that can reverse that obscene series of decision are the ones benefiting from it.

The copyright industry is basically a cartel of middle-men at this point, doing nothing other than causing the stagnation and loss of our cultural history.

And to top it all off every 'free' western nation is spying on its own citizens and arming its police all in the name of 'terrorists', despite terrorist attacks being rare occurrence.

I feel like all we have done with our progress is create a new aristocracy and pave the way for a new type of feudalism.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#185

Post by collyw »

MarkMc wrote: post #155
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…

Person A says prosperity not increased for the middle-class since the 1970's, person B says it has. Do they have to rely on historical data, or is there some experiment they could perform to determine who is right? For example, suppose I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's. I would subsidise their housing and education costs, but they would pay more for clothes and food and air t…

Really you would need people to live each of the lives and get them to judge afterwards rather than just ask what they would prefer when they only really have experience of teh current version.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#186

Post by sophistication »

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…

I think this paper is one of the most interesting results in this regard:

> Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction

> https://www.jstor.org/stable/41062232

Of course, the relation is not perfect because there are probably more than half a dozen other major things that can go wrong; most prominently disease, relationship and work situation.

I could imagine that dissatisfaction due to disease also largely comes from comparison with others. If everybody is healthier, then more minor diseases have a stronger negative effect on life satisfaction; so not much is gained.

Work satisfaction might have improved, but the hedonic treadmill probably also diminishes the returns in that case.

I could imagine that relationship satisfaction has decreased with the loss of the classical gender roles and culture regulating all of that. E.g. it is known that premarital promiscuity results in decreased marriage satisfaction:

http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wordpress/wp-content/uplo...

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#187

Post by wozniacki »

todd8 wrote: post #181
MarkMc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person A says prosperity not increased for the middle-class since the 1970's, person B says it has. Do they have to rely on historical data, or is there some experiment they could perform to determine who is right? For example, suppose I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's. I would subsidise their housing and education costs, but they would pay more for clothes and food and air t…

I was in college in the 70s, so yeah, it was a fun time for me when I think back on it. Who wouldn’t want to hear Aerosmith live in a club with maybe 80 people there before their first album. But I walked to class cold and wet on many days. Gortex hadn’t been invented and I couldn’t afford a car. When I got my first real job I bought a car, but I carried a toolbox in the trunk. Cars broke down frequently and with no…

Perhaps the deficit of happiness can be better explained by one of Peter Thiel's most excellent reductionist observations:

  The countercultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we
  landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three 
  weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when
  progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. [1][2]
Perhaps, for too long, the left has engulfed and held hostage our cultural ideas of progress and advancement. And perhaps that has imbued us with a certain stripe of ideological stagnation not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also the debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself and its relevance to the overall happiness of our society.

Perhaps our dominant leftist culture's 'ideological stagnation index' is the unmeasured metric that could explain why we feel the way we feel despite technological progress.

Thiel on the same topic:

  Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology.
  You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science. 
  It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction 
  movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, 
  Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you
  would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to 
  be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world 
  where actually believing that a better future is possible that 
  you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is 
  actually radically countercultural.[1]
[1] Glenn Beck and Peter Thiel On How To Change What's Politically Cool

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM&t=3m22s

[2] Technology Stalled in 1970

http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled...

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#188

Post by ionised »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #122
modells wrote: post #88

Prosperity may have increased a lot for those at the top, but there's never been so many people living on freeway on-ramps until now. For the low end, it keeps getting worse-and-worse in the real world while academic happy-clappy about how "great" everything is. UBI or French Revolution 2.0, so far the majority of rich have chosen social upheaval, Holocene exinction and climate obliteration.

What is your view based on? I'd have assumed that absolute number of homeless would increase over time, but the rate of homelessness would be declining. I was surprised to see that, at least from this [1] research, that we are progressing fast enough that even the absolute number of homeless are also declining! Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from those data is that though absolute homelessness is decreasing, t…

Homelessness in the UK at least has been rising every year for the last 7 years.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#189

Post by wavefunction »

sixstringbudha wrote: post #183
MarkMc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person A says prosperity not increased for the middle-class since the 1970's, person B says it has. Do they have to rely on historical data, or is there some experiment they could perform to determine who is right? For example, suppose I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's. I would subsidise their housing and education costs, but they would pay more for clothes and food and air t…

> I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's Do I also get a dozen brothers and sisters? Eat food, drink water and breath air without having to constantly worry about being them polluted or toxic? > would only have a black-and-white TV with 4 stations and a gramophone record player.. Sure. I would rather have a gramaphone record player or cassete player (which is more like 70s i think…

The 70s had a fair amount of pollution and crime above what we experience now. I'm guessing the OP didn't graduate with decades of student loans though. Or a five year loan for that car of theirs.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#190

Post by maccard »

sixstringbudha wrote: post #183
MarkMc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person A says prosperity not increased for the middle-class since the 1970's, person B says it has. Do they have to rely on historical data, or is there some experiment they could perform to determine who is right? For example, suppose I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's. I would subsidise their housing and education costs, but they would pay more for clothes and food and air t…

> I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's Do I also get a dozen brothers and sisters? Eat food, drink water and breath air without having to constantly worry about being them polluted or toxic? > would only have a black-and-white TV with 4 stations and a gramophone record player.. Sure. I would rather have a gramaphone record player or cassete player (which is more like 70s i think…

> Eat food, drink water and breath air without having to constantly worry about being them polluted or toxic?

Sorry but you have a very rosy view of the 1970s. Would you drink this water [0]? Or fill your car with leaded Gas [1]? Use asbestos in your building [2]? DDT on your fresh food? [3] Air quality around the world is vastly superior to the 70s (people are still suffering because of it [4]).

> than a 4k lcd tv that plays Lady gaga or Justine beiber or what ever crap that is "trending" today.

It's your choice. Your 4k TV today can still play Abba or boney M, and many other bands you couldn't afford. A record cost $3 in 1970, which adjusted for inflation is about $19. For the same (adjusted) cost as an album a month in 1970 you can have access to basically every artist from the 70s (Spotify) along with most TV shows (nrtflix/) and still have enough change for a beer to go with it. Nobody is forcing you to leave your TV tuned into listen to Bieber. There was also a deluge of crap in the 1970s that you just weren't exposed to. There is also plenty of great music being produced now that can easily be found.

[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/3769068219/... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestosis [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT [4] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076728-people-today-ar...

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