> We should all be delirious with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material wealth. I actually do think it's plausible for happines

> We should all be delirious with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material wealth. I actually do think it's plausible for happiness to increase with material wealth, but not because we're delirious with joy now, but rather because life was really, really, _really_ fucking horrible for the vast majority of human history (by our standards today). Significantly, we can't actually measure happiness, and have to rely on "reported happiness", which is pretty much by definition anchored to expectations and thus not appropriate for long-term comparisons. Your point applies here: you wouldn't expect reported happiness to change directionally, on average.