26 ms·

Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

190 points by tysone 8y ago

ddingus 8y ago
A 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.
- noobermin 8y ago
  >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 isn't a magical mystery. It's very simple to explain. Wealth is a power law. An average is the most useless metric to use yet everyone still does it. In the same country with Manhattan, you have people with lead filled pipes and raw sewage on their front lawns because wealth is not distributed evenly. And this isn't by accident. Wages for most working people have not kept up with inflation, and wages diverged from productivity since a little before the Reagan area. [0] The value people create doesn't evaporate, it goes to the top. [0] https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-divergence-between-productivity-and-a-typical-workers-pay-why-it-matters-and-why-its-real/ https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
toasterlovin 8y ago
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.
- tapatio 8y ago
  Shout out to Jordan Peterson.
  - dang 8y ago
    Please don't do this here.
- groby_b 8y ago
  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.pdf https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pd...
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    > 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.
opportune 8y ago
One 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.
- tapatio 8y ago
  I am pretty sure everyone, except for the 1%, struggle to get daycare, medical care, and education.
  - groby_b 8y ago
    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)
    - igol 8y ago
      Sort of. It is probably better but if you don't have stable living conditions, which many people don't, that affects everything else. So you can say that people have access to daycare, but if you involuntarily have to move around a lot that is a real overall decrease in quality of that daycare.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    Think outside your US bubble please. What you say is not even remotely true in most European countries.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    Probably more like the top 10%.
- petermcneeley 8y ago
  Inequality dramatically matters in any realm where there is a finite resource. I do not comprehend how articles are written with the idea that relative wealth has no effect on prices.
mjevans 8y ago
This 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.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Indeed, claims for increase in prosperity seem pretty illusionary. Headline: Most Americans are one paycheck away from the street Subheading: Some 63% of people can’t deal with a $500 emergency The website is CBS Market, fairly respectable, draws on several plausible studies. Link: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-paycheck-away-from-the-street-2016-01-06 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-pay...
  - jandrewrogers 8y ago
    This has largely been debunked -- the questions asked were not about their access to sufficient funds. For example, the median American household has $1000 per month in disposable income ("beer money") after all typical living expenses. This fact alone should immediately raise questions about the assertion that the majority of households can't afford $500 in one-time cost, emergency or not. The major source for this assertion is that most American's don't have $500 in savings accounts. Which is true. What is also true is that a large percentage of Americans with plenty of emergency cash don't even have a savings account -- it is an anachronism from a bygone era. Most Americans no longer own savings bonds either. My emergency cash is in a checking account, like many Americans, so by the measure used in this article, I am completely broke.
    - panopticon 8y ago
      A Bankrate[1] survey found that only 37% of respondents could cover a <=$1,000 emergency with savings (note: savings, not a "saving's account"). They did, however, add that another 23% could cover the expense by spending less on other things. Given that, I'd say a large percentage of Americans do not have plenty of emergency cash. That's not to say most of America is "one paycheck away from the street" like the parent comment quoted... [1]: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/survey-how-americans-contend-with-unexpected-expenses/ https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/survey-how-american...
Phantasmagoria 8y ago
The 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.
coldtea 8y ago
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. And that's not even adding in the decline of working class jobs, and the instability of most modern careers (outside of IT which still has it good).
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Indeed, though reading the article a bit more closely, it has a certain subtext of "look workers, money doesn't buy happiness, that's why we, the elites, stopped paying you any more. Learning the lesson!"
- technobabble 8y ago
  To further your analogy, it sometimes feels that the Maslow's hierarchy of needs is "hollowed out" at the bottom of the pyramid, and to keep the hollowing out disguised, companies and advertisers divert attention to the top of the pyramid i.e. "look how everything's awesome! Take your complimentary beer".
  - ianai 8y ago
    I’m confused by “hollowed out Maslows pyramid of needs”
    - fenwick67 8y ago
      I think they have it flipped
      - solitus 8y ago
        Yeah, I agree!
    - technobabble 8y ago
r00fus 8y ago
The article cites income increase but doesn't talk about the necessary factors even if you're only talking numbers: 1) real inflation (ie, cost of living has skyrocketed due to rent/medical) outweighs any income increases. 2) overall wealth was not accounted for - in fact many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, probably far more than at any corresponding postwar period in the US. In short "prosperity" != income. Ignoring things like cost of living and the high possibility of surprise bankruptcy due to medical emergencies lead to a very inaccurate picture.
- TuringNYC 8y ago
  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.
  - daniel_levine 8y ago
    Real GDP per capita covers this. Inflation encompasses cost of living. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA Missing a breakdown by quartile, but it's the right metric
    - r00fus 8y ago
      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).
      - aylmao 8y ago
        This. An incredibly rich top 0.1% percent could skew GDP per capita a lot, but a happiness index not so much. Simplifying things to the extreme, take 100 people where half of them earn $1 and are unhappy and half $2 and are happy. Give one person a $150 raise-- you just doubled the GDP but at best increased happiness by 1%. It is no secret that a small percent of people have been getting very rich [1]. [1]: https://money.cnn.com/2011/02/16/news/economy/middle_class/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2011/02/16/news/economy/middle_class/i...
maxxxxx 8y ago
People feel happier when they feel secure. We have nicer gadgets now but life is also more stressful because finding a stable long-term career is more difficult.
- analog31 8y ago
  Indeed, thinking about my own life, I hoard wealth because of the risk of an event such as a medical emergency, unemployment, or my kids not being able to launch their own careers.
  - aylmao 8y ago
    I find this interesting and it reminds me of a friend of mine who is Finnish. After college, she moved back to Finland, knowing she wouldn't make as much money there as she would in the USA. But she also mentioned she wouldn't need to. There, she didn't have to worry about saving money for her kid's college and a medical emergency was affordable without touching into life savings. Buying a house was the big she could think of saving money towards.
- grasshopperpurp 8y ago
  Exactly right! Prosperity doesn't mean anything without security. It does't mean anything if you know that you can lose it all the moment you exhale, or you could lose it all by getting sick. DH Lawrence wrote about this the last time inequality was this high (1928). https://kalliope.org/en/text/lawrence2001061123 https://kalliope.org/en/text/lawrence2001061123
lordnacho 8y ago
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 people? This is why when you acquire some new gadget, you say you're happy. You can now mow your lawn, which you couldn't before. Going forward, you expect to be able to mow your lawn. If your lawnmower breaks, you're sad. If it doesn't, a working lawnmower was already priced in. This is why billionaires like Elon can be unhappy, too. Otherwise they would be bouncing off the walls giddy with joy all the time.
- lutorm 8y ago
  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.
  - refurb 8y ago
    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.
  - solitus 8y ago
    Sounds like Stoicism.
  - lmpostor 8y ago
    That is excellent advice on an individual basis, but I don't think that is the point when the goal is to try and establish a broader perspective and evaluate a societal shift. I mean that is exactly what a manager tells you when they cut hours, increase work, and dumpster workplace morale. They have very obvious financial incentive to provide less for the same output and there is no determinable metric of what is "reasonable". You're much better off in this case in actively searching for a better job if it is affecting your day to day life negatively. People seem to forget that consistently throughout history that the societal shift has fallen so far negatively that it has resulted in the final resort of being solved by violent revolution.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
Prosperity is a proxy for consumption. We measure it and then we pursue it. We are so convinced that we've shortened financial wealth down to wealth, and have completely forgotten there are different type of wealth. For example, spiritual wealth. Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of consumption. Western culture and power structure is wired to create financial wealth, not dismiss it.
- aylmao 8y ago
  > Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of consumption. This is true after a certain point. It's independent of consumption, but there's an amount of wealth we need to attain to meet a baseline of material needs that's are simply necessary. As the grandkid of a woman who couldn't afford shoes, a living space or sometimes even food when she was young, I can attest that my grandma's (and my family's) life got much better and happier once they were able buy food, clothes and a house. My grandma is very happy now that she can travel and get to be marveled by the beauties of our home country with money she saves and my aunts/uncles give her. As much as we shouldn't pursue material wealth for the sake luxury, superficiality and consumerism, we shouldn't dismiss it as completely unliked from happiness because up to a point it is the source of lots stability and security.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    No doubt there's a baseline. There's also a point of diminishing return. Few have a lot. A lot have little. And both camps are less and less happy. This can't go on forever.
hcnews 8y ago
I am not onboard with the idea that humans need to be happy 100% of the time. I am going to be unhappy, even frustrated trying to improve things or create new things (as an artist or engineer). Healthy unhappiness, as I see it, is required for evolution/human-advancement.
benkarst 8y ago
Why don't you spend 20 minutes reading my article that has a false premise? -NY Times
- sctb 8y ago
  Could you please start posting substantive comments? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
paulpauper 8y ago
In a poor country with low inequality, rising national income should make people happier, and of course reducing poverty is a good in and of itself. But in a wealthy, unequal country like today’s America, gains in national income can decouple from well-being. The problem is the individual cannot perceive this. The typical person cannot perceive unemployment falling a few tenths of a percent or personal income rising a quarter of a percent. if income is rising as fast an inflation, then it may be impossible to notice. You can buy a bigger Iphone and Netflix, but healthcare, rent, and tuition keeps going up.
badrabbit 8y ago
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?
modells 8y ago
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.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  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, the number of homeless people moving to shelters is increasing. This means data that uses shelters alone as a metric could easily be quite misleading. You also have to keep in mind that areas such as California have some of the highest homeless rates in the entire nation, so if your perception happens to be based on areas such as this - it's going to be skewed. It'd be like gauging prosperity by looking at what's happening in Monaco. [1] - https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-care/homelessness-u-s-trends-demographics https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-ca...
  - ionised 8y ago
    Homelessness in the UK at least has been rising every year for the last 7 years.
ahallock 8y ago
Taking breaks from social media, particularly Twitter, has increased my happiness. Social media platforms are blackholes of negativity. They're also addictive and very empty because of lack of real interaction. Sometimes I feel like I'm living life vicariously through other people's photos, videos, and memes. It's uncanny.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
It's easy to understand why people may not believe that prosperity has increased across the board. I also used to believe this, but after looking at the data I'm not entirely sure what it is that drives our perception. This [1] paper from the urban institute is something I found precisely when looking to put specific numbers to the hollowing out of the middle class and the overall decline, or at least stagnation, of prosperity. The paper does describe that hollowing out in clear detail. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% and the middle class's share of society has been reduced to 26%. There's even been a chiseling out in the size of the middle class declining from 38.8% to 32%. And that's pretty much where most articles tend to leave off the state of economic change. It's all true and it sounds pretty grim. But context, as always is, is everything. This is the change in the size of each economic group from 1979 to 2014 as a percent of the total population: - Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8% - Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4% - Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32% - Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1% - Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8% The reason the top's share of income has increased is because people are moving, at an incredibly rapid pace, from the lower classes the upper classes. Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging' - though I think the paper is extremely transparent in their methodology. But if one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. I found this all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview. Economically we are doing something very right. [1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  I wouldn't define $100k for a family of 3 as upper middle class. And a big part of what defined class is how much control you have in your life. If you have to work 80 hours a week and get $100k that's far different than working 40 hours a week and getting $100k. Another thing is how secure your position is. Are you at risk of being outsourced? Is your job going to be automated? Are you in construction with temporary employment that can disappear at any time? Do you live in an area where you have other employment prospects and your children have the opportunity to have a good education and make good friends? All of these are more important for the class discussion than a snapshot of income, in my opinion. What is probably happening is that long term wealth is building in certain zip codes, where the chances of success are larger and larger compared to other zip codes, also why it costs so much more to live in a handful of urban areas than other places. The competition for these high performing places causes quite a bit of insecurity.
mnm1 8y ago
So happiness and poverty are relative. Isn't that obvious to anyone who has ever traveled, studied other cultures, or even our own culture? I know that's not the norm, but it's a fairly obvious observation. Many of the people in America's ghettos have, in absolute terms, much more wealth than much of the developed and developing world, yet they are much less happy than many of the latter people. Each cohort is comparing themselves with the people around them, not with people in far away countries. In America, poor people are surrounded by hate and cruelty, constantly in fear for their lives and livelihood. This is usually not the case in places where people are happy yet make much less in absolute terms (although sometimes it is even there). There's much more to life than money, especially when money is tight.
ggm 8y ago
Aspirational marketing works. We have stuff, we just all want more stuff a notch above the stuff we have. The glamour advertising for watches feeds belief were entitled to a $20,000 Chopard. It doesn't help that the disparity in pay board to shop floor is wider than back in the day of servants. Redirecting mental effort to no material life is hard. Plus the economy tanks when we don't spend.
chewz 8y ago
Why would anyone assume that there is connection between prosperity and happiness? The less you have, the less you want - the more happier you are.
axilmar 8y ago
Happiness happens when one can live in a stress-free environment. Nowadays, we have a lot of stress, because the requirements an individual has to fulfil in order to survive have skyrocketed.
ionised 8y ago
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.
petermarks 8y ago
Where is the explanation, let alone the data, to support the claim that happiness has not increased? There’s a compelling data driven chapter in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now that makes the opposite argument. It also makes a compelling argument that people aren’t bothered by inequality in itself. It’s an amazing book that everyone should read and has genuinely changed my world view for the better.

190 points by tysone 8y ago

A 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.

noobermin 8y ago
>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 isn't a magical mystery. It's very simple to explain. Wealth is a power law. An average is the most useless metric to use yet everyone still does it. In the same country with Manhattan, you have people with lead filled pipes and raw sewage on their front lawns because wealth is not distributed evenly. And this isn't by accident. Wages for most working people have not kept up with inflation, and wages diverged from productivity since a little before the Reagan area. [0] The value people create doesn't evaporate, it goes to the top. [0] https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-divergence-between-productivity-and-a-typical-workers-pay-why-it-matters-and-why-its-real/ https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...

toasterlovin 8y ago

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.

tapatio 8y ago
Shout out to Jordan Peterson.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't do this here.
groby_b 8y ago
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.pdf https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pd...
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  > 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.

opportune 8y ago

One 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.

tapatio 8y ago
I am pretty sure everyone, except for the 1%, struggle to get daycare, medical care, and education.
- groby_b 8y ago
  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)
  - igol 8y ago
    Sort of. It is probably better but if you don't have stable living conditions, which many people don't, that affects everything else. So you can say that people have access to daycare, but if you involuntarily have to move around a lot that is a real overall decrease in quality of that daycare.
- Kiro 8y ago
  Think outside your US bubble please. What you say is not even remotely true in most European countries.
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  Probably more like the top 10%.
petermcneeley 8y ago
Inequality dramatically matters in any realm where there is a finite resource. I do not comprehend how articles are written with the idea that relative wealth has no effect on prices.

mjevans 8y ago

This 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.

joe_the_user 8y ago
Indeed, claims for increase in prosperity seem pretty illusionary. Headline: Most Americans are one paycheck away from the street Subheading: Some 63% of people can’t deal with a $500 emergency The website is CBS Market, fairly respectable, draws on several plausible studies. Link: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-paycheck-away-from-the-street-2016-01-06 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-pay...
- jandrewrogers 8y ago
  This has largely been debunked -- the questions asked were not about their access to sufficient funds. For example, the median American household has $1000 per month in disposable income ("beer money") after all typical living expenses. This fact alone should immediately raise questions about the assertion that the majority of households can't afford $500 in one-time cost, emergency or not. The major source for this assertion is that most American's don't have $500 in savings accounts. Which is true. What is also true is that a large percentage of Americans with plenty of emergency cash don't even have a savings account -- it is an anachronism from a bygone era. Most Americans no longer own savings bonds either. My emergency cash is in a checking account, like many Americans, so by the measure used in this article, I am completely broke.
  - panopticon 8y ago
    A Bankrate[1] survey found that only 37% of respondents could cover a <=$1,000 emergency with savings (note: savings, not a "saving's account"). They did, however, add that another 23% could cover the expense by spending less on other things. Given that, I'd say a large percentage of Americans do not have plenty of emergency cash. That's not to say most of America is "one paycheck away from the street" like the parent comment quoted... [1]: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/survey-how-americans-contend-with-unexpected-expenses/ https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/survey-how-american...

Phantasmagoria 8y ago

The 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.

coldtea 8y ago

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. And that's not even adding in the decline of working class jobs, and the instability of most modern careers (outside of IT which still has it good).

joe_the_user 8y ago
Indeed, though reading the article a bit more closely, it has a certain subtext of "look workers, money doesn't buy happiness, that's why we, the elites, stopped paying you any more. Learning the lesson!"
technobabble 8y ago
To further your analogy, it sometimes feels that the Maslow's hierarchy of needs is "hollowed out" at the bottom of the pyramid, and to keep the hollowing out disguised, companies and advertisers divert attention to the top of the pyramid i.e. "look how everything's awesome! Take your complimentary beer".
- ianai 8y ago
  I’m confused by “hollowed out Maslows pyramid of needs”
  - fenwick67 8y ago
    I think they have it flipped
    - solitus 8y ago
      Yeah, I agree!
  - technobabble 8y ago

r00fus 8y ago

The article cites income increase but doesn't talk about the necessary factors even if you're only talking numbers: 1) real inflation (ie, cost of living has skyrocketed due to rent/medical) outweighs any income increases. 2) overall wealth was not accounted for - in fact many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, probably far more than at any corresponding postwar period in the US. In short "prosperity" != income. Ignoring things like cost of living and the high possibility of surprise bankruptcy due to medical emergencies lead to a very inaccurate picture.

TuringNYC 8y ago
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.
- daniel_levine 8y ago
  Real GDP per capita covers this. Inflation encompasses cost of living. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA Missing a breakdown by quartile, but it's the right metric
  - r00fus 8y ago
    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).
    - aylmao 8y ago
      This. An incredibly rich top 0.1% percent could skew GDP per capita a lot, but a happiness index not so much. Simplifying things to the extreme, take 100 people where half of them earn $1 and are unhappy and half $2 and are happy. Give one person a $150 raise-- you just doubled the GDP but at best increased happiness by 1%. It is no secret that a small percent of people have been getting very rich [1]. [1]: https://money.cnn.com/2011/02/16/news/economy/middle_class/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2011/02/16/news/economy/middle_class/i...

maxxxxx 8y ago

People feel happier when they feel secure. We have nicer gadgets now but life is also more stressful because finding a stable long-term career is more difficult.

analog31 8y ago
Indeed, thinking about my own life, I hoard wealth because of the risk of an event such as a medical emergency, unemployment, or my kids not being able to launch their own careers.
- aylmao 8y ago
  I find this interesting and it reminds me of a friend of mine who is Finnish. After college, she moved back to Finland, knowing she wouldn't make as much money there as she would in the USA. But she also mentioned she wouldn't need to. There, she didn't have to worry about saving money for her kid's college and a medical emergency was affordable without touching into life savings. Buying a house was the big she could think of saving money towards.
grasshopperpurp 8y ago
Exactly right! Prosperity doesn't mean anything without security. It does't mean anything if you know that you can lose it all the moment you exhale, or you could lose it all by getting sick. DH Lawrence wrote about this the last time inequality was this high (1928). https://kalliope.org/en/text/lawrence2001061123 https://kalliope.org/en/text/lawrence2001061123

lordnacho 8y ago

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 people? This is why when you acquire some new gadget, you say you're happy. You can now mow your lawn, which you couldn't before. Going forward, you expect to be able to mow your lawn. If your lawnmower breaks, you're sad. If it doesn't, a working lawnmower was already priced in. This is why billionaires like Elon can be unhappy, too. Otherwise they would be bouncing off the walls giddy with joy all the time.

lutorm 8y ago
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.
- refurb 8y ago
  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.
- solitus 8y ago
  Sounds like Stoicism.
- lmpostor 8y ago
  That is excellent advice on an individual basis, but I don't think that is the point when the goal is to try and establish a broader perspective and evaluate a societal shift. I mean that is exactly what a manager tells you when they cut hours, increase work, and dumpster workplace morale. They have very obvious financial incentive to provide less for the same output and there is no determinable metric of what is "reasonable". You're much better off in this case in actively searching for a better job if it is affecting your day to day life negatively. People seem to forget that consistently throughout history that the societal shift has fallen so far negatively that it has resulted in the final resort of being solved by violent revolution.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

Prosperity is a proxy for consumption. We measure it and then we pursue it. We are so convinced that we've shortened financial wealth down to wealth, and have completely forgotten there are different type of wealth. For example, spiritual wealth. Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of consumption. Western culture and power structure is wired to create financial wealth, not dismiss it.

aylmao 8y ago
> Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of consumption. This is true after a certain point. It's independent of consumption, but there's an amount of wealth we need to attain to meet a baseline of material needs that's are simply necessary. As the grandkid of a woman who couldn't afford shoes, a living space or sometimes even food when she was young, I can attest that my grandma's (and my family's) life got much better and happier once they were able buy food, clothes and a house. My grandma is very happy now that she can travel and get to be marveled by the beauties of our home country with money she saves and my aunts/uncles give her. As much as we shouldn't pursue material wealth for the sake luxury, superficiality and consumerism, we shouldn't dismiss it as completely unliked from happiness because up to a point it is the source of lots stability and security.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  No doubt there's a baseline. There's also a point of diminishing return. Few have a lot. A lot have little. And both camps are less and less happy. This can't go on forever.

hcnews 8y ago

I am not onboard with the idea that humans need to be happy 100% of the time. I am going to be unhappy, even frustrated trying to improve things or create new things (as an artist or engineer). Healthy unhappiness, as I see it, is required for evolution/human-advancement.

benkarst 8y ago

Why don't you spend 20 minutes reading my article that has a false premise? -NY Times

sctb 8y ago
Could you please start posting substantive comments? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

paulpauper 8y ago

In a poor country with low inequality, rising national income should make people happier, and of course reducing poverty is a good in and of itself. But in a wealthy, unequal country like today’s America, gains in national income can decouple from well-being. The problem is the individual cannot perceive this. The typical person cannot perceive unemployment falling a few tenths of a percent or personal income rising a quarter of a percent. if income is rising as fast an inflation, then it may be impossible to notice. You can buy a bigger Iphone and Netflix, but healthcare, rent, and tuition keeps going up.

badrabbit 8y ago

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?

modells 8y ago

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.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
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, the number of homeless people moving to shelters is increasing. This means data that uses shelters alone as a metric could easily be quite misleading. You also have to keep in mind that areas such as California have some of the highest homeless rates in the entire nation, so if your perception happens to be based on areas such as this - it's going to be skewed. It'd be like gauging prosperity by looking at what's happening in Monaco. [1] - https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-care/homelessness-u-s-trends-demographics https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-ca...
- ionised 8y ago
  Homelessness in the UK at least has been rising every year for the last 7 years.

ahallock 8y ago

Taking breaks from social media, particularly Twitter, has increased my happiness. Social media platforms are blackholes of negativity. They're also addictive and very empty because of lack of real interaction. Sometimes I feel like I'm living life vicariously through other people's photos, videos, and memes. It's uncanny.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

It's easy to understand why people may not believe that prosperity has increased across the board. I also used to believe this, but after looking at the data I'm not entirely sure what it is that drives our perception. This [1] paper from the urban institute is something I found precisely when looking to put specific numbers to the hollowing out of the middle class and the overall decline, or at least stagnation, of prosperity. The paper does describe that hollowing out in clear detail. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% and the middle class's share of society has been reduced to 26%. There's even been a chiseling out in the size of the middle class declining from 38.8% to 32%. And that's pretty much where most articles tend to leave off the state of economic change. It's all true and it sounds pretty grim. But context, as always is, is everything. This is the change in the size of each economic group from 1979 to 2014 as a percent of the total population: - Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8% - Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4% - Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32% - Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1% - Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8% The reason the top's share of income has increased is because people are moving, at an incredibly rapid pace, from the lower classes the upper classes. Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging' - though I think the paper is extremely transparent in their methodology. But if one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. I found this all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview. Economically we are doing something very right. [1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...

lotsofpulp 8y ago
I wouldn't define $100k for a family of 3 as upper middle class. And a big part of what defined class is how much control you have in your life. If you have to work 80 hours a week and get $100k that's far different than working 40 hours a week and getting $100k. Another thing is how secure your position is. Are you at risk of being outsourced? Is your job going to be automated? Are you in construction with temporary employment that can disappear at any time? Do you live in an area where you have other employment prospects and your children have the opportunity to have a good education and make good friends? All of these are more important for the class discussion than a snapshot of income, in my opinion. What is probably happening is that long term wealth is building in certain zip codes, where the chances of success are larger and larger compared to other zip codes, also why it costs so much more to live in a handful of urban areas than other places. The competition for these high performing places causes quite a bit of insecurity.

mnm1 8y ago

So happiness and poverty are relative. Isn't that obvious to anyone who has ever traveled, studied other cultures, or even our own culture? I know that's not the norm, but it's a fairly obvious observation. Many of the people in America's ghettos have, in absolute terms, much more wealth than much of the developed and developing world, yet they are much less happy than many of the latter people. Each cohort is comparing themselves with the people around them, not with people in far away countries. In America, poor people are surrounded by hate and cruelty, constantly in fear for their lives and livelihood. This is usually not the case in places where people are happy yet make much less in absolute terms (although sometimes it is even there). There's much more to life than money, especially when money is tight.

ggm 8y ago

Aspirational marketing works. We have stuff, we just all want more stuff a notch above the stuff we have. The glamour advertising for watches feeds belief were entitled to a $20,000 Chopard. It doesn't help that the disparity in pay board to shop floor is wider than back in the day of servants. Redirecting mental effort to no material life is hard. Plus the economy tanks when we don't spend.

chewz 8y ago

Why would anyone assume that there is connection between prosperity and happiness? The less you have, the less you want - the more happier you are.

axilmar 8y ago

Happiness happens when one can live in a stress-free environment. Nowadays, we have a lot of stress, because the requirements an individual has to fulfil in order to survive have skyrocketed.

ionised 8y ago

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.

petermarks 8y ago

Where is the explanation, let alone the data, to support the claim that happiness has not increased? There’s a compelling data driven chapter in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now that makes the opposite argument. It also makes a compelling argument that people aren’t bothered by inequality in itself. It’s an amazing book that everyone should read and has genuinely changed my world view for the better.