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> Yup, and it shows that most people are happy but still think that most other people are unhappy This (and alike) conclusion is likely wrong. If there is a

> Yup, and it shows that most people are happy but still think that most other people are unhappy This (and alike) conclusion is likely wrong. If there is a societal/cultural/political expectation to project happiness, people will say they are happy. Many people wouldn’t say they are unhappy to a stranger. Fun fact, sociologists in Russia asking people nowadays “how do people around you feel? good/bad/worried/etc.” exactly because getting sincere answer to “how do you feel?” is impossible.

p-e-w 3y ago
This explanation is so obvious that I consider any study or chart that doesn't scream this at the reader in big red letters to be nothing short of propaganda. The conclusion those "researchers" would like to draw is that the world is better than "the people" think, when the far more plausible interpretation is that the world is so horribly bad that people are scared to even talk about how they feel.
- zuppy 3y ago
  I found a book a while ago, that made me change my perspective about how I see the world as a whole. This is the book, it's called Factfulness: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37850908-factfulness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37850908-factfulness There are a lot of bad things that happen around us (war, hunger, discrimination, etc), but we are at the best time in the entire human history, even with that. Compared with every metric in history, we are better. Even where it's bad, it's less bad than it used to be.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    > Compared with every metric in history, we are better. That claim alone should immediately make you doubt the metrics being used. In fact, it's easy to find dozens of metrics for which this isn't true. Housing affordability being a very obvious example. And the average democracy index has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years IIRC. Environmental pollution also most certainly isn't "at the best time in the entire human history". You've fallen for propaganda, I'm afraid.
    - 411111111111111 3y ago
      I haven't read the book but my assumption would be that they're thinking at larger sample sizes than you're currently thinking off. The last 50 decades have probably been the golden years of western civilization and democratic freedom, despite the evidence of decline within the last few years
      - foldr 3y ago
        If the claim is only true over spans of time on the order of lifetimes, then it’s not much comfort.
    - hpaavola 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index shows that average democracy index has not been going downwards for 15 consecutive years.
      - Kbelicius 3y ago
        Where? It says that world average in 2006 was 5.52 and in 2022 it was 5.29. That is clearly a downward movement.
        hpaavola 3y ago
        "has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years" that was the claim. It's not been going down for 15 consecutive years as there has been ups and downs during the past 15 years. The overall trend is down, but going downwards for 15 years in a row is not true.
        inexcf 3y ago
        You ignored the "15 consecutive years". Not that it matters much, but it went from 5.52 to 5.55 to 5.46 to 5.55 and then down to 5.29 since 2016. It was a bit of a pedantic point but it's 6 consecutive years.
  - shafyy 3y ago
    I've heard this book cited many times, and people saying that the "bad" things we see are just the news cycles and very temporary, and in general we're better off (e.g. "The richest person has the same iPhone as you and uses the same kind of toilet"). Sure, some things are "objectively" better, like lower child mortality and so on. But happiness is so subjective. It's entirely possible that when we were hunter gatherers, the average person was happier, even though child mortality and life expectancy were considerably lower. It's easy to think that access to high tech like iPhones and a toilet to shit in makes people happy, but I don't think this is the case.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Not to nitpick, but if you haven't used a $700 bidet toilet, no, rich people actually do have a better kind of toilet. $700 isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things, but heated seats are niiice.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - wincy 3y ago
        I bought myself one of these fabled toilet seats about six years back and yes, it’s cured all the unpleasant health issues I had previously assumed were just a sad inevitability of having a butt. Also sitting on a cold toilet seat is now particularly jarring. What a luxury! I highly recommend!
    - rubyn00bie 3y ago
      Go without a toilet, a refrigerator, or clean water for a year and tell me how happy you are… I think this idealization of “hunter gatherer” society is absolutely insane. It’s like arguing the moon is made of cheese. People were likely not happy being hungry, scared, and afraid most of fucking the time.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        I'm going to assume that the person that thinks their least happy is one of the following. A person that had 'happiness' and now is in a less secure position. A person surrounded by happy people, but doesn't feel that way themselves. Relative privation does weird things to people.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > we are at the best time in the entire human history I constantly see this claim and I have really grown to hate it. It is a simple lie, in three ways, and thirds one is the worst. Firstly, the statement is only true if you compare human history over hundreds of years. So you comparing modern society to people who haven't discovered soap and hygiene. If that is your benchmark, even USSR looks good if you compare it to 1500's - at least you had real medical system and toilets. Clearly medieval social order in not our benchmark of success, no-one is arguing we should bring back the inquisition, burning witches and bloodletting. It is not actually true if you compare human experience over last few decades - look at suicide rates and debt burden amongst young people, climate change, etc. Second reason your claim is terrible, is it conflates social order and technological progress. So when I question social policies, like why did I alone pay more tax in UK in 2015 than the entire corporation of Starbucks, people go - 'things have never been so good, so current social policies should not be questioned.' Well, things get better because technology get's better. Even in USSR technology got better. So if all you knew was living in USSR, you'd be making the same argument, and it would be equally valid/invalid. Third reason this is terrible, is it fails to take into account inertia. So in Britain we question the way our railways are run, and this argument gets throw around. But majority of railways were built in Victorian Era, under completely different social order. American economy was made great decades ago, when corporate tax rates were like 3x higher, education was free, etc. We are just living off success of the past, it does not mean current social order, which is different, will lead to success.
    - badpun 3y ago
      > American economy was made great decades ago, when corporate tax rates were like 3x higher, education was free, etc. American economy was made great when America was practically the only developed country in the world that wasn't devastated (in the literal sense of the word) by the WWII. It was trivially easy to outcompete everyone else and flood the world with US exports, which triggered the US Golden Era, during which uneducated people working jobs that could be learned in half a day could afford to live in detached houses - something to this day completely unheard of in the rest of the world.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    > we are at the best time in the entire human history, even with that. I've heard this ad naseum during my whole life. The word they always forget is "materially". People are on average better off materially than ever before (maybe), but that is far from taking into account what it means to be human and what life is. One example is that we have better quality beds than ever before in history, but maybe that doesn't matter since people in the past had tougher skin and didn't need better beds. These "best time in human history" doesn't take into account things such as freedom, purpose in life, dignity and any other factors of life that cannot be measured, because scientists can not deal with things that aren't measurable.
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      Speaking as a scientist, I agree with you. So I'd point the finger more at VCs and MBAs and techbros who think that if something doesn't generate money, it is worthless.
    - p-e-w 3y ago
      Indeed. This is actually the cardinal error of all social sciences. "We can't measure the stuff that matters, so we measure what we can measure instead, and then use those measurements to draw conclusions about the stuff that matters." Economics, sociology, and psychology fall into this trap all the time, with disastrous consequences for policy.
    - ramblenode 3y ago
      I saw some comment above lauding the progress we've made because "we consume more goods and services"--which feels farcical to me. Like great, we consume more junk food than at any time in history AND more diabetes and heart medication--what a win. Both get added to GDP, though. Like tires spinning in the mud...
  - rgbgraph 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - ramblenode 3y ago
    > Compared with every metric in history, we are better. I call this the "Hobbes fallacy" and it seems to be in vogue among a certain literati a la Steven Pinker who have taken up the task of proving that lay people's pessimism and anxiety are unfounded. I propose an alternative: that when we expand the timeline of humanity back far enough, many of the improvements in the modern era disappear and are seen to only be improvements from local minima occuring during the last several hundred or thousand years. Go back further to pre-agricultural times when big game and forage were still abundant and hadn't been depleted from population growth. Humans had excellent health, a modal survival after childhood comparable with modern humans, easily obtainable food, few working hours, lots of social support, living with friends and family. Nowadays that type of lifestyle would be an idyllic luxury for many. After the resource crunch and transition to sedentary agriculture you start seeing lifespan and health plummet, food insecurity, caste societies, endemic war, slavery. These things were not widespread for most of human history, just the agriculture era, which can be viewed as a time of unusual scarcity that created a high degree of competition and adaptation. Technology has merely clawed back much of what used to be the common human condition.
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  I remember an analogue phenomenon in recent years on UK election polls. They would consistenly underestimate Conservative votes, because conservative voters would shy away from publicly admiting their voting intentions.
- trgn 3y ago
  The reverse is true too though. A lot of people love to complain. Small examlle, A ton of workplaces, if you have small talk, people will yammer on how busy they are (they're not).same with anything else. when you look in your heart, you actually find yourself pretty satisfied, that's not that uncommon either.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  That's a very pessimistic view, that the world is "horribly bad" is subjective, and as it has been said, contradicts objective metrics. This graph by itself is hard to interpret anyways. Though pessimistic, your interpretation is a valid one, but so is the optimistic "people are happier than you think they are" conclusion. More neutrally, I think the chart is more about social expectations that have little to do with how bad the environment is. For example, I would expect people who believe in a religion that says that life on earth is horrible and ones goal is to reach heaven to say that they are unhappy even if they are doing fine. That's because no matter how they feel, this is earth and not heaven, and true happiness is unreachable. Anyways, too many possibilities to interpret this without additional data.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    > that the world is "horribly bad" is subjective, and as it has been said, contradicts objective metrics The metrics themselves may be objective, but which metrics you apply is very much subjective, and a potent tool for spinning propaganda. You don't even have to lie, you just have to be selective about which facts you present. And the great news is, the world is so incredibly complex that for literally anything you can find some metric that will present it in a positive light (or in a negative light, depending on which message you want to convey).
fiso64 3y ago
It's not strangers approaching random people on the street, it's an anonymous survey in which you have to willingly participate, so I don't think any of these expectations could have significantly affected this statistic.

p-e-w 3y ago

This explanation is so obvious that I consider any study or chart that doesn't scream this at the reader in big red letters to be nothing short of propaganda. The conclusion those "researchers" would like to draw is that the world is better than "the people" think, when the far more plausible interpretation is that the world is so horribly bad that people are scared to even talk about how they feel.

zuppy 3y ago
I found a book a while ago, that made me change my perspective about how I see the world as a whole. This is the book, it's called Factfulness: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37850908-factfulness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37850908-factfulness There are a lot of bad things that happen around us (war, hunger, discrimination, etc), but we are at the best time in the entire human history, even with that. Compared with every metric in history, we are better. Even where it's bad, it's less bad than it used to be.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > Compared with every metric in history, we are better. That claim alone should immediately make you doubt the metrics being used. In fact, it's easy to find dozens of metrics for which this isn't true. Housing affordability being a very obvious example. And the average democracy index has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years IIRC. Environmental pollution also most certainly isn't "at the best time in the entire human history". You've fallen for propaganda, I'm afraid.
  - 411111111111111 3y ago
    I haven't read the book but my assumption would be that they're thinking at larger sample sizes than you're currently thinking off. The last 50 decades have probably been the golden years of western civilization and democratic freedom, despite the evidence of decline within the last few years
    - foldr 3y ago
      If the claim is only true over spans of time on the order of lifetimes, then it’s not much comfort.
  - hpaavola 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index shows that average democracy index has not been going downwards for 15 consecutive years.
    - Kbelicius 3y ago
      Where? It says that world average in 2006 was 5.52 and in 2022 it was 5.29. That is clearly a downward movement.
      - hpaavola 3y ago
        "has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years" that was the claim. It's not been going down for 15 consecutive years as there has been ups and downs during the past 15 years. The overall trend is down, but going downwards for 15 years in a row is not true.
      - inexcf 3y ago
        You ignored the "15 consecutive years". Not that it matters much, but it went from 5.52 to 5.55 to 5.46 to 5.55 and then down to 5.29 since 2016. It was a bit of a pedantic point but it's 6 consecutive years.
- shafyy 3y ago
  I've heard this book cited many times, and people saying that the "bad" things we see are just the news cycles and very temporary, and in general we're better off (e.g. "The richest person has the same iPhone as you and uses the same kind of toilet"). Sure, some things are "objectively" better, like lower child mortality and so on. But happiness is so subjective. It's entirely possible that when we were hunter gatherers, the average person was happier, even though child mortality and life expectancy were considerably lower. It's easy to think that access to high tech like iPhones and a toilet to shit in makes people happy, but I don't think this is the case.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Not to nitpick, but if you haven't used a $700 bidet toilet, no, rich people actually do have a better kind of toilet. $700 isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things, but heated seats are niiice.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - wincy 3y ago
      I bought myself one of these fabled toilet seats about six years back and yes, it’s cured all the unpleasant health issues I had previously assumed were just a sad inevitability of having a butt. Also sitting on a cold toilet seat is now particularly jarring. What a luxury! I highly recommend!
  - rubyn00bie 3y ago
    Go without a toilet, a refrigerator, or clean water for a year and tell me how happy you are… I think this idealization of “hunter gatherer” society is absolutely insane. It’s like arguing the moon is made of cheese. People were likely not happy being hungry, scared, and afraid most of fucking the time.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      I'm going to assume that the person that thinks their least happy is one of the following. A person that had 'happiness' and now is in a less secure position. A person surrounded by happy people, but doesn't feel that way themselves. Relative privation does weird things to people.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > we are at the best time in the entire human history I constantly see this claim and I have really grown to hate it. It is a simple lie, in three ways, and thirds one is the worst. Firstly, the statement is only true if you compare human history over hundreds of years. So you comparing modern society to people who haven't discovered soap and hygiene. If that is your benchmark, even USSR looks good if you compare it to 1500's - at least you had real medical system and toilets. Clearly medieval social order in not our benchmark of success, no-one is arguing we should bring back the inquisition, burning witches and bloodletting. It is not actually true if you compare human experience over last few decades - look at suicide rates and debt burden amongst young people, climate change, etc. Second reason your claim is terrible, is it conflates social order and technological progress. So when I question social policies, like why did I alone pay more tax in UK in 2015 than the entire corporation of Starbucks, people go - 'things have never been so good, so current social policies should not be questioned.' Well, things get better because technology get's better. Even in USSR technology got better. So if all you knew was living in USSR, you'd be making the same argument, and it would be equally valid/invalid. Third reason this is terrible, is it fails to take into account inertia. So in Britain we question the way our railways are run, and this argument gets throw around. But majority of railways were built in Victorian Era, under completely different social order. American economy was made great decades ago, when corporate tax rates were like 3x higher, education was free, etc. We are just living off success of the past, it does not mean current social order, which is different, will lead to success.
  - badpun 3y ago
    > American economy was made great decades ago, when corporate tax rates were like 3x higher, education was free, etc. American economy was made great when America was practically the only developed country in the world that wasn't devastated (in the literal sense of the word) by the WWII. It was trivially easy to outcompete everyone else and flood the world with US exports, which triggered the US Golden Era, during which uneducated people working jobs that could be learned in half a day could afford to live in detached houses - something to this day completely unheard of in the rest of the world.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > we are at the best time in the entire human history, even with that. I've heard this ad naseum during my whole life. The word they always forget is "materially". People are on average better off materially than ever before (maybe), but that is far from taking into account what it means to be human and what life is. One example is that we have better quality beds than ever before in history, but maybe that doesn't matter since people in the past had tougher skin and didn't need better beds. These "best time in human history" doesn't take into account things such as freedom, purpose in life, dignity and any other factors of life that cannot be measured, because scientists can not deal with things that aren't measurable.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Speaking as a scientist, I agree with you. So I'd point the finger more at VCs and MBAs and techbros who think that if something doesn't generate money, it is worthless.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    Indeed. This is actually the cardinal error of all social sciences. "We can't measure the stuff that matters, so we measure what we can measure instead, and then use those measurements to draw conclusions about the stuff that matters." Economics, sociology, and psychology fall into this trap all the time, with disastrous consequences for policy.
  - ramblenode 3y ago
    I saw some comment above lauding the progress we've made because "we consume more goods and services"--which feels farcical to me. Like great, we consume more junk food than at any time in history AND more diabetes and heart medication--what a win. Both get added to GDP, though. Like tires spinning in the mud...
- rgbgraph 3y ago
  [flagged]
- ramblenode 3y ago
  > Compared with every metric in history, we are better. I call this the "Hobbes fallacy" and it seems to be in vogue among a certain literati a la Steven Pinker who have taken up the task of proving that lay people's pessimism and anxiety are unfounded. I propose an alternative: that when we expand the timeline of humanity back far enough, many of the improvements in the modern era disappear and are seen to only be improvements from local minima occuring during the last several hundred or thousand years. Go back further to pre-agricultural times when big game and forage were still abundant and hadn't been depleted from population growth. Humans had excellent health, a modal survival after childhood comparable with modern humans, easily obtainable food, few working hours, lots of social support, living with friends and family. Nowadays that type of lifestyle would be an idyllic luxury for many. After the resource crunch and transition to sedentary agriculture you start seeing lifespan and health plummet, food insecurity, caste societies, endemic war, slavery. These things were not widespread for most of human history, just the agriculture era, which can be viewed as a time of unusual scarcity that created a high degree of competition and adaptation. Technology has merely clawed back much of what used to be the common human condition.
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
I remember an analogue phenomenon in recent years on UK election polls. They would consistenly underestimate Conservative votes, because conservative voters would shy away from publicly admiting their voting intentions.
trgn 3y ago
The reverse is true too though. A lot of people love to complain. Small examlle, A ton of workplaces, if you have small talk, people will yammer on how busy they are (they're not).same with anything else. when you look in your heart, you actually find yourself pretty satisfied, that's not that uncommon either.
GuB-42 3y ago
That's a very pessimistic view, that the world is "horribly bad" is subjective, and as it has been said, contradicts objective metrics. This graph by itself is hard to interpret anyways. Though pessimistic, your interpretation is a valid one, but so is the optimistic "people are happier than you think they are" conclusion. More neutrally, I think the chart is more about social expectations that have little to do with how bad the environment is. For example, I would expect people who believe in a religion that says that life on earth is horrible and ones goal is to reach heaven to say that they are unhappy even if they are doing fine. That's because no matter how they feel, this is earth and not heaven, and true happiness is unreachable. Anyways, too many possibilities to interpret this without additional data.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > that the world is "horribly bad" is subjective, and as it has been said, contradicts objective metrics The metrics themselves may be objective, but which metrics you apply is very much subjective, and a potent tool for spinning propaganda. You don't even have to lie, you just have to be selective about which facts you present. And the great news is, the world is so incredibly complex that for literally anything you can find some metric that will present it in a positive light (or in a negative light, depending on which message you want to convey).

fiso64 3y ago

It's not strangers approaching random people on the street, it's an anonymous survey in which you have to willingly participate, so I don't think any of these expectations could have significantly affected this statistic.