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If you banned everything that causes people more pain than good, half the economy would evaporate overnight.
by koboll 7y ago
If you banned everything that causes people more pain than good, half the economy would evaporate overnight.
- luckydata 7y agoI thought the economy existed in the service of human happiness, not the other way around.
- logicchains 7y agoJust because something makes you unhappy, doesn't mean it makes everybody unhappy.
- WanderPanda 7y agoJust because something makes you unhappy, doesn't mean it serves the economy.
- ben_w 7y agoIs that a bad thing? Regardless of the fraction, if something really does cause more harm than benefit, we will by definition be better off without it, no?
- orangecat 7y agoIf something causes more harm than good, then we would be better off in a hypothetical world where it was magically erased from existence. In the real world, the negative effects of trying to forcibly ban it can easily be worse. See: drugs.
- logicchains 7y ago>more harm than benefit The "harm" Facebook causes is subjective. Some people actually get a lot of pleasure out of it; not everybody is an introverted, neurotic techie.
- atq2119 7y agoThe studies linking Facebook usage to unhappiness don't restrict their samples to "neurotic techies".
- stickfigure 7y ago...and use deeply suspect methodologies.
- logicchains 7y agoThey also don't account for the fact that Facebook usage is correlated with screen usage, which is correlated with happiness, so the effect they measured could just be the effect of screen use. "We found that teens who spent more time seeing their friends in person, exercising, playing sports, attending religious services, reading or even doing homework were happier. However, teens who spent more time on the internet, playing computer games, on social media, texting, using video chat or watching TV were less happy. In other words, every activity that didn’t involve a screen was linked to more happiness, and every activity that involved a screen was linked to less happiness. The differences were considerable: Teens who spent more than five hours a day online were twice as likely to be unhappy as those who spent less than an hour a day." - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzn9d3/cell-phones-linked-to-unhappiness https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzn9d3/cell-phones-linked...