I think the obvious response is that material wealth is only well correlated with life satisfaction up to about 100k/yr or so. And only certain sub-categories o

I think the obvious response is that material wealth is only well correlated with life satisfaction up to about 100k/yr or so. And only certain sub-categories of that wealth have any sort of durable correlation at all. If every segment of society would agree that they rate as "reasonably happy/satisfied" then I'd agree that your assumed standards actually mean something, but that's just not the case. And we don't have great historical satisfaction data to compare with.