5 ms·
> Human beings looove to look at relative quality of life. And feel much better if everybody is equally poorer rather than higher baseline, but even higher extr
by madacol 4y ago
> Human beings looove to look at relative quality of life. And feel much better if everybody is equally poorer rather than higher baseline, but even higher extremes.
Do you have some data to back that up? Or any study?. My hypothesis is that most of those people think the world is mostly a zero-sum game, and they think the best way to improve their lives is to redistribute wealth more uniformly.
> For example my country in Soviet era was piss poor. But people managed to get by and find happiness.
I'm sorry, but that's an euphemism for dying and suffering. And be mindful that you, or your family, have survivorship bias. There are studies that show correlations between happiness and GDP
I am from Venezuela, sadly, my memory is fresher. My dad needlessly died before hand because the government decided that a local pandemic (pre covid, 2017) didn't exist, the pandemic was in conflict to their statistic goals, so they acted as if it didn't existed and let it roll without restrains. And there were more common dramas like family and friends malnourished, and criminals rampaging the city (BTW, one time they entered into my house armed and tied me up while they robbed, and multiple times robbed my family's small businesses with guns). There are 2 main reasons why criminality exploded in the last decade, the economy shrunk more than 50%, and criminals weren't punished, in fact, some were even armed as guerrillas in favor of the ruling party. The line between police and criminal was as blurry as ever, I've never seen a police acting like thugs so shamelessly without any care, they knew there was no punishment whatsoever
- mantas 4y agoCurrent trend is that money does not buy happiness, but lets you run away from sorrow. It's 2 separate attributes rather than 2 ends of the same one. People can easily live stress-free swimming in money yet don't be happy. Or be miserable due to crappy situation yet find happiness at the same time. P.S. Venesuela is a truly sad case. Yet another example what leftist economical miracles lead to. Unfortunately too many people in West still wish that upon themselves :D
- madacol 4y agoI can imagine money having diminishing returns on happiness, so there's a line beyond which money stops correlating strongly with happiness. Though I've read that if we redistribute equally our global wealth, we would be waaay below that hypothetical line, hence, for now, we should still be growing the pie, at least if we believe in equality. But I think I see your point now, for the people currently beyond that line, subjective views of the world dominates their desires, so the axis where we want progress are now more diverse among individuals, and progress in one axis tend to harm progress on other axis, hence why there's more conflict
- mantas 4y agoMoney helps with reducing misery. But it helps little to improve happiness. When you can afford warm, dry and comfy shoes, that will take you out of damp misery. But comfy feet won't make you happy day in, day out. People have subjective views of how they define progress too. For me, splitting the pie equally sounds like retrograde soviet nostalgia. I don't believe equally sharing the pie makes the world any better. Productive people (actually productive) should get bigger piece of the pie than slackers. On top of that, functioning market is important to find ideas that work. Otherwise it's straight to failure of central planning.
- madacol 4y agoI agree with everything you said there So I think our difference relies in how much our happiness is tied to relating to others And I'm not sure how we can answer that. But I do feel my happiness rarely relies on relating to others, instead it relies more in socializing (laughing out loud or playing games with friends), and by making progress towards my moralistic goals, mostly with the point of view centered at society, our species, or all life beings