4 ms·

You have spent way too much time on Hacker News. Gross Domestic Happiness was coined in 1972 and the idea exists way beyond that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

You have spent way too much time on Hacker News. Gross Domestic Happiness was coined in 1972 and the idea exists way beyond that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness For example, the US Constitution proudly proclaims that "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" are unalienable rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_Happiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_...

dkural 10y ago
Gross Domestic Happiness is enhanced by caring about things beyond human flourishing for many people. Many people care about the environment. GDH was in fact invented precisely to capture dimensions beyond that of human material improvement (more dams, more houses, etc.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  A clean environment is a luxury good most people didn't even know they wanted until economies advanced enough to make them an option. To see a present-day version of this difference, one need only look at China. That's how Americans viewed the environment before WWII. If you watch the evolution of, say, the Sierra Club, its focus has shifted to reflect the changes in values over time It's very interesting. One of the really fun! things about Micheal Crichton's "State of Fear" is his curmudgeonly way of bringing out the denial of the nearly axiomatic assumption these days of environmental purity being a path to happiness.
  - quadrangle 10y ago
    You're confusing "didn't even know they wanted" with "took for granted". In the pre-industrial era with much lower populations, human-sourced massive environmental pollution wasn't common. Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments and only learned to make it an issue when the clean environments started to disappear in places.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      No. "Didn't know they wanted." There has been a protracted and concerted propaganda effort to change consciousness about this subject. What makes a Theodore Roosevelt exceptional is that he listened to John Muir decades before that kind of thinking was commonplace. I think there was a long span of time where you could set rivers on fire, cut the air in cities with a knife and become sickened or killed by drinking water from a pubic well. The Thames was a severe, dangerous public nuisance in the time of Samuel Pepys ( who happened to write about it ). This became a "thing" only since WWII. People used open-belt farm machinery. 90% of electrical linemen died on the job. You could buy machine guns at paint stores, or by mail. "Safety" as a discipline is quite recent. Environmentalism is even more recent. My Dad worked for a Bell company and was decades ahead of the general flow of safety, and we picked up our trash as we left campsites, when most didn't. Of course the Boy Scouts had this as a practice, but it was otherwise not mainstream. "The past is a different country; they did things differently there." - L.P. Hartley.
      - quadrangle 10y ago
        From my comment: "… pre-industrial … most people …" etc. There's been probably as much or more protracted and concerted propaganda from industrialists (who have more wealth and power to spread their messages) as the environmental sort. You're just fantasizing if you think there have been large populations of people who lived next to rivers on fire and horribly polluted air and water and litter and yet "didn't know they wanted" a clean environment. They may not have had the political terminology to talk about it, but basically nobody likes living in trash. The whole failure of large populations not to pick up their litter etc. makes complete sense to anyone who understands social-psychology, game theory etc. It's in no sense evidence that people liked living with litter or didn't want an unlittered environment. The environmental movement correlates strongly with the increasing amount of pollution and other environmental issues in the world. This is not arbitrary coincidence. It also involves things like increased understanding of the impacts of pollution from advances in scientific knowledge.
        ArkyBeagle 10y ago
dec0dedab0de 10y ago
You have spent way too much time on Hacker News. That's probably the most truthful statement I've ever read on here.
leodeid 10y ago
Nit: The inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence. None of those things are broadly recognized as rights in the Constitution. I have been unable to determine to what extent referencing the Declaration of Independence is permissible in questions related to constitutional law. I'm inclined to believe that it depends on the party involved. (Scalia certainly objects to Declaration of Independence having legal sway [1]. Surprisingly to me, Clarence Thomas goes the other way [2].) [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-138.ZD1.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-138.ZD1.html [2] http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/373697/clarence-thomas-originalism-and-declaration-independence-matthew-j-franck http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/373697/clarence-th... - I wasn't able to find a clear opinion from Thomas citing the DoI, but I am not good at searching through opinions.
- astrodust 10y ago
  I stand corrected, but in any case, the very founding of the country was, in stark contrast to basically every country on Earth that had ever existed to that point, declaring that the "pursuit of happiness" is of utmost importance. That says something about what America was striving to be, and comments like the one that sparked this thread show how absurdly far from that goal America has slid.

dkural 10y ago

Gross Domestic Happiness is enhanced by caring about things beyond human flourishing for many people. Many people care about the environment. GDH was in fact invented precisely to capture dimensions beyond that of human material improvement (more dams, more houses, etc.)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
A clean environment is a luxury good most people didn't even know they wanted until economies advanced enough to make them an option. To see a present-day version of this difference, one need only look at China. That's how Americans viewed the environment before WWII. If you watch the evolution of, say, the Sierra Club, its focus has shifted to reflect the changes in values over time It's very interesting. One of the really fun! things about Micheal Crichton's "State of Fear" is his curmudgeonly way of bringing out the denial of the nearly axiomatic assumption these days of environmental purity being a path to happiness.
- quadrangle 10y ago
  You're confusing "didn't even know they wanted" with "took for granted". In the pre-industrial era with much lower populations, human-sourced massive environmental pollution wasn't common. Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments and only learned to make it an issue when the clean environments started to disappear in places.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    No. "Didn't know they wanted." There has been a protracted and concerted propaganda effort to change consciousness about this subject. What makes a Theodore Roosevelt exceptional is that he listened to John Muir decades before that kind of thinking was commonplace. I think there was a long span of time where you could set rivers on fire, cut the air in cities with a knife and become sickened or killed by drinking water from a pubic well. The Thames was a severe, dangerous public nuisance in the time of Samuel Pepys ( who happened to write about it ). This became a "thing" only since WWII. People used open-belt farm machinery. 90% of electrical linemen died on the job. You could buy machine guns at paint stores, or by mail. "Safety" as a discipline is quite recent. Environmentalism is even more recent. My Dad worked for a Bell company and was decades ahead of the general flow of safety, and we picked up our trash as we left campsites, when most didn't. Of course the Boy Scouts had this as a practice, but it was otherwise not mainstream. "The past is a different country; they did things differently there." - L.P. Hartley.
    - quadrangle 10y ago
      From my comment: "… pre-industrial … most people …" etc. There's been probably as much or more protracted and concerted propaganda from industrialists (who have more wealth and power to spread their messages) as the environmental sort. You're just fantasizing if you think there have been large populations of people who lived next to rivers on fire and horribly polluted air and water and litter and yet "didn't know they wanted" a clean environment. They may not have had the political terminology to talk about it, but basically nobody likes living in trash. The whole failure of large populations not to pick up their litter etc. makes complete sense to anyone who understands social-psychology, game theory etc. It's in no sense evidence that people liked living with litter or didn't want an unlittered environment. The environmental movement correlates strongly with the increasing amount of pollution and other environmental issues in the world. This is not arbitrary coincidence. It also involves things like increased understanding of the impacts of pollution from advances in scientific knowledge.
      - ArkyBeagle 10y ago

dec0dedab0de 10y ago

You have spent way too much time on Hacker News. That's probably the most truthful statement I've ever read on here.

leodeid 10y ago

Nit: The inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence. None of those things are broadly recognized as rights in the Constitution. I have been unable to determine to what extent referencing the Declaration of Independence is permissible in questions related to constitutional law. I'm inclined to believe that it depends on the party involved. (Scalia certainly objects to Declaration of Independence having legal sway [1]. Surprisingly to me, Clarence Thomas goes the other way [2].) [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-138.ZD1.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-138.ZD1.html [2] http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/373697/clarence-thomas-originalism-and-declaration-independence-matthew-j-franck http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/373697/clarence-th... - I wasn't able to find a clear opinion from Thomas citing the DoI, but I am not good at searching through opinions.

astrodust 10y ago
I stand corrected, but in any case, the very founding of the country was, in stark contrast to basically every country on Earth that had ever existed to that point, declaring that the "pursuit of happiness" is of utmost importance. That says something about what America was striving to be, and comments like the one that sparked this thread show how absurdly far from that goal America has slid.