
Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/opinion/happiness-inequality-prosperity-.html
======
coldtea
The title is a little out of date. Prosperity has been increasing in the 20th
century, but has not increased for a few decades.

Sure, crap like gadgets is now cheaper, but buying a house, giving your kids
an education, and so on have increased. In the 40s and 50s a middle class
household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income
earner. Such a house now would be on the verge of bankruptcy. And that's not
even adding in the decline of working class jobs, and the instability of most
modern careers (outside of IT which still has it good).

~~~
randomdata
_> In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the
house be bought) by a single income earner._

Has that really changed?

A manufacturing business in my area is currently hiring everyone who shows up
to an interview. They pay they are offering isn't wonderful (at least if you
concept of money has been warped by the IT industry), but you should expect to
make around $40,000 per year to start. Perusing the real estate listings, I
see a three bed, two bath detached home near to that business listed at
$139,000.

Rule of thumb says you shouldn't spend more than three times your income on
housing, but many suggest you can go as high as five times income. We're at
3.4 times income. It's not ideal, but it seems doable, especially if you want
to live like it is the 1940s. The cost of cell phone each month can easily
apply $50-100 more to your mortgage payment each month instead.

I will point out that our example job is one that you can walk into and start
today. If you take a little more care and look around and risk a few
rejections before finding work, there are plenty of jobs that pay considerably
more. In those cases, one person buying a home should not be an issue
whatsoever. A $45,000 income would provide the necessary amount for the three
times income rule of thumb to buy this home in question.

~~~
slv77
Households today spend more on cell phones and communication but also spend
less on fine china, dress clothes and food. When you net out all the pluses
and minuses households today spend much more on housing, healthcare, daycare,
transportation (two cars, for two jobs) and education.

When you look closely the two bed, two bath detached home it’s likely in a
school district that is underperforming and while the home may be slightly
larger than those in the past it’s 30+ years old.

This is detailed elegantly in the Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren.

The thing that is crazy is that there is any debate in the subject. Real
productivity growth has averaged 2% for the last 100 years in the US. Early in
the last century they they were speculating that if productivity growth kept
up at that rate their grandchildren would only need to work a couple of hours
a week and what would they do with all their free time?

How did we get here?

~~~
roenxi
gp actually answered that with "especially if you want to live like it is the
1940s".

There is a quiet denial about how luxurious modern living is. People just
flat-out underestimate how much work it takes to keep the infrastructure of
the modern world in place and humming - traditional infrastructure, IT grids,
distribution of goods and services (particularly maintaining an enormous fleet
of wheeled vehicles).

I know a lot of people who are poorer than I am but spend more, because they
just don't clamp down on things like car usage, sending money to their
children, pets and ordering a daily coffee. The only thing that will force
them to live a simple lifestyle is literally having no money.

Sometimes people maneuver into a position where they have no choice, because
they make bad long-term lifestyle choices early on, but so far the evidence is
that human demand for stuff and services is infinite. People use their spare
hours to gather and consume more.

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
Ah yes. The poor are poor because of poor morals, instead of you, who is of
good moral standing.

The poor are poor due to lack of money. This is caused by increasing costs of
healthcare, education and houses, you know those basic things needed to live.
And by a capitalistic class taking about 95% of all gains from productivity
increases. Saying millions of people are poor because because of bad morals is
disgusting and completely false.

~~~
hueving
Ugh, poor money management skills have nothing to do with morals. It's fine to
say someone has poor money management skills just like it's fine to say
someone has poor C++ coding skills.

Creating a budget and sticking to it requires behavioral changes that take
time to sink in.

It's extremely unlikely that you make the perfect amount of money to cover
your exact needs that result in you being broke. It's much more likely that
people adapt to a system of spending all money that comes in on whatever
'priority item' pops into their mind because they lack the skill and/or
discipline of budgeting. This is evident in higher income people as well that
suffer from lifestyle creep.

Again, this has nothing to do with morals. It's just a statement about the
appalling lack of financial education in the vast majority of the US
population.

~~~
scarface74
I think you and the original poster are in violent agreement Reread his post
all of the way through.

------
r00fus
The article cites income increase but doesn't talk about the necessary factors
even if you're only talking numbers:

1) real inflation (ie, cost of living has skyrocketed due to rent/medical)
outweighs any income increases.

2) overall wealth was not accounted for - in fact many Americans are living
paycheck to paycheck, probably far more than at any corresponding postwar
period in the US.

In short "prosperity" != income. Ignoring things like cost of living and the
high possibility of surprise bankruptcy due to medical emergencies lead to a
very inaccurate picture.

~~~
TuringNYC
Well said, and the easiest metric you could look at w/r/t cost-of-living is
the _average income : house price_ ratio. What was once withing reach for most
educated workers is now often a fantasy for the rich. Unfortunately it is also
what the lion's share of paychecks is often spent on.

~~~
daniel_levine
Real GDP per capita covers this. Inflation encompasses cost of living.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA)
Missing a breakdown by quartile, but it's the right metric

~~~
r00fus
Does GDP per capita actually compare to median income? Sounds more like it
uses mean income which is skewed by extremes (e.g. high earners).

~~~
aylmao
This. An incredibly rich top 0.1% percent could skew GDP per capita a lot, but
a happiness index not so much.

Simplifying things to the extreme, take 100 people where half of them earn $1
and are unhappy and half $2 and are happy. Give one person a $150 raise-- you
just doubled the GDP but at best increased happiness by 1%.

It is no secret that a small percent of people have been getting very rich
[1].

[1]:
[https://money.cnn.com/2011/02/16/news/economy/middle_class/i...](https://money.cnn.com/2011/02/16/news/economy/middle_class/index.htm)

------
lordnacho
It would be weird for happiness to increase with prosperity. Think how much
more stuff we have than people in the stone age. We should all be delirious
with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material
wealth.

Any description of happiness that makes sense would have to say that it's some
sort of local comparison, across various axes: how am I doing compared to
previously/expectations/other people?

This is why when you acquire some new gadget, you say you're happy. You can
now mow your lawn, which you couldn't before. Going forward, you expect to be
able to mow your lawn. If your lawnmower breaks, you're sad. If it doesn't, a
working lawnmower was already priced in.

This is why billionaires like Elon can be unhappy, too. Otherwise they would
be bouncing off the walls giddy with joy all the time.

~~~
lutorm
This is why happiness can only be reached by learning to appreciate what you
have. You're much better off pondering how lucky you are to have, and how
miserable you'd be without, the things you already have, rather than how happy
you'd be with things you don't. The latter is an illusion.

~~~
refurb
Exactly this.

The human psyche has its pluses and minuses. The fact is, humans are never
satisfied with what they have, they always want more.

This is good when it comes to driving progress. We’d never have gone to the
moon if we were satisfied with just colonizing the earth.

At the same time, it’s the root of a lot of unhappiness. People have grand
expectations for their life - and fall into depression if they never reach
them, despite the fact their life is far richer than most people experience.

------
mjevans
This also ignores increases in costs of living, such as housing, and the
destruction of concepts like 'career paths' where someone would be with a
company for a long time and build economic and social value within a given
area.

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed, claims for increase in prosperity seem pretty illusionary.

Headline: Most Americans are one paycheck away from the street

Subheading: Some 63% of people can’t deal with a $500 emergency

The website is CBS Market, fairly respectable, draws on several plausible
studies.

Link: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-
pay...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-paycheck-
away-from-the-street-2016-01-06)

~~~
jandrewrogers
This has largely been debunked -- the questions asked were not about their
access to sufficient funds. For example, the _median_ American household has
$1000 per month in disposable income ("beer money") after all typical living
expenses. This fact alone should immediately raise questions about the
assertion that the _majority_ of households can't afford $500 in one-time
cost, emergency or not.

The major source for this assertion is that most American's don't have $500 in
savings accounts. Which is true. What is also true is that a large percentage
of Americans with plenty of emergency cash don't even _have_ a savings account
-- it is an anachronism from a bygone era. Most Americans no longer own
savings bonds either.

My emergency cash is in a checking account, like many Americans, so by the
measure used in this article, I am completely broke.

~~~
panopticon
A Bankrate[1] survey found that only 37% of respondents could cover a <=$1,000
emergency with savings (note: savings, not a "saving's account"). They did,
however, add that another 23% could cover the expense by spending less on
other things.

Given that, I'd say a large percentage of Americans do _not_ have plenty of
emergency cash. That's not to say most of America is "one paycheck away from
the street" like the parent comment quoted...

[1]: [https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/survey-how-
american...](https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/survey-how-americans-
contend-with-unexpected-expenses/)

~~~
orangecat
_A Bankrate[1] survey found that only 37% of respondents could cover a
<=$1,000 emergency with savings (note: savings, not a "saving's account").
They did, however, add that another 23% could cover the expense by spending
less on other things._

The exact wording of the question is going to have a significant impact on the
results and what they mean. In the real world, if I incur an unexpected $500
expense I'd put it on my credit card, which would get automatically paid from
my checking account at the next billing cycle. It's not clear if that would
incorrectly categorize me as not being able to afford it.

~~~
enraged_camel
Certain types of expenses cannot be put on credit card though.

------
opportune
One usually-not-mentioned premise is that even though goods’ costs have
typically been going down over time as physical product technology improves,
many services (the majority of developed economies) are relatively unaffected
by improvements in technology because they rely almost exclusively on labor.
Rising inequality will make services more expensive to those on the poorer
end. Poor people don’t struggle to get smart phones or food, they struggle to
get daycare, medical care, education, etc.

~~~
tapatio
I am pretty sure everyone, except for the 1%, struggle to get daycare, medical
care, and education.

~~~
groby_b
You might want to visit Europe at some point. That's a very specific US
problem. (Europe's not problem-free, but access to daycare/medical
care/education is _much_ easier to obtain there)

~~~
igol
Sort of. It is probably better but if you don't have stable living conditions,
which many people don't, that affects everything else. So you can say that
people have access to daycare, but if you involuntarily have to move around a
lot that is a real overall decrease in quality of that daycare.

------
maxxxxx
People feel happier when they feel secure. We have nicer gadgets now but life
is also more stressful because finding a stable long-term career is more
difficult.

~~~
analog31
Indeed, thinking about my own life, I hoard wealth because of the risk of an
event such as a medical emergency, unemployment, or my kids not being able to
launch their own careers.

~~~
aylmao
I find this interesting and it reminds me of a friend of mine who is Finnish.
After college, she moved back to Finland, knowing she wouldn't make as much
money there as she would in the USA.

But she also mentioned she wouldn't need to. There, she didn't have to worry
about saving money for her kid's college and a medical emergency was
affordable without touching into life savings. Buying a house was the big she
could think of saving money towards.

------
TangoTrotFox
It's easy to understand why people may not believe that prosperity has
increased across the board. I also used to believe this, but after looking at
the data I'm not entirely sure what it is that drives our perception. This [1]
paper from the urban institute is something I found precisely when looking to
put specific numbers to the hollowing out of the middle class and the overall
decline, or at least stagnation, of prosperity.

The paper does describe that hollowing out in clear detail. In 1979 the middle
class controlled 46% of all income and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%.
Today (as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% and the middle class's
share of society has been reduced to 26%. There's even been a chiseling out in
the size of the middle class declining from 38.8% to 32%. And that's pretty
much where most articles tend to leave off the state of economic change. It's
all true and it sounds pretty grim.

But context, as always is, is everything. This is the change in the size of
each economic group from 1979 to 2014 as a percent of the total population:

\- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%

\- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%

\- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%

\- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%

\- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%

The reason the top's share of income has increased is because people are
moving, at an incredibly rapid pace, from the lower classes the upper classes.
Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and
'massaging' \- though I think the paper is extremely transparent in their
methodology. But if one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the
political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. I found this all eye opening to
the point that it actually changed my worldview. Economically we are doing
something _very_ right.

[1] - [https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-
and-...](https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-
upper-middle-class)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stance)

~~~
lotsofpulp
I wouldn't define $100k for a family of 3 as upper middle class. And a big
part of what defined class is how much control you have in your life. If you
have to work 80 hours a week and get $100k that's far different than working
40 hours a week and getting $100k. Another thing is how secure your position
is. Are you at risk of being outsourced? Is your job going to be automated?
Are you in construction with temporary employment that can disappear at any
time? Do you live in an area where you have other employment prospects and
your children have the opportunity to have a good education and make good
friends?

All of these are more important for the class discussion than a snapshot of
income, in my opinion. What is probably happening is that long term wealth is
building in certain zip codes, where the chances of success are larger and
larger compared to other zip codes, also why it costs so much more to live in
a handful of urban areas than other places. The competition for these high
performing places causes quite a bit of insecurity.

~~~
scarface74
_I wouldn 't define $100k for a family of 3 as upper middle class_

If your household income is $100K, you're close the 4th quartile of income.

[https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-
pe...](https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-percentiles/)

Many households in the US see six figures as an unattainable dream.

~~~
dagw
I think the point is that there is more to 'class' than money. If you're a
single income family in a low cost part of the country where the working
person is pulling in $100k working 40 hours a week in a stable and secure job,
then you're definitely upper middle class.

If on the other hand you're a dual income family in one of the more expensive
parts of the country and both of you work 60 hour weeks in a very insecure job
market to clear a combined $100k then you're probably not upper middle class.

------
chiefalchemist
Prosperity is a proxy for consumption. We measure it and then we pursue it. We
are so convinced that we've shortened financial wealth down to wealth, and
have completely forgotten there are different type of wealth. For example,
spiritual wealth.

Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of
consumption. Western culture and power structure is wired to create financial
wealth, not dismiss it.

~~~
aylmao
> Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of
> consumption.

This is true after a certain point. It's independent of consumption, but
there's an amount of wealth we need to attain to meet a baseline of material
needs that's are simply necessary.

As the grandkid of a woman who couldn't afford shoes, a living space or
sometimes even food when she was young, I can attest that my grandma's (and my
family's) life got much better and happier once they were able buy food,
clothes and a house. My grandma is very happy now that she can travel and get
to be marveled by the beauties of our home country with money she saves and my
aunts/uncles give her.

As much as we shouldn't pursue material wealth for the sake luxury,
superficiality and consumerism, we shouldn't dismiss it as completely unliked
from happiness because up to a point it is the source of lots stability and
security.

~~~
chiefalchemist
No doubt there's a baseline. There's also a point of diminishing return. Few
have a lot. A lot have little. And both camps are less and less happy. This
can't go on forever.

------
toasterlovin
Humans are social animals. One of the primary drives of most social animals is
to get as high up in the status/dominance hierarchy as possible, since this
improves an organism's access to mates. Status and dominance are relative to
other members of the species and, thus, unrelated to the absolute level of an
organism's access to food and other resources.

~~~
groby_b
Except that pretty much _no_ social animal with dominance hierarchy has a
ranking function as simple as "status=mates". Most animals track the cost(e.g.
more stress, higher metabolic rate) of high status vs the rewards. Which means
that in an environment of abundance, the cost often exceeds the rewards.

There's also the phenomenon of reverse hierarchies (essentially, lower ranking
members band together to keep anybody from dominating them). Which has at the
very least been proposed as an explanation for altruistic behavior in humans,
too.

And then there's the point that happiness is not related to status, or access
to mates, or even access to resources beyond a certain point.

The world's a bit more complicated than ev. psych suggests.

Edit: No matter if you agree or disagree, Boehm's paper is certainly an
interesting read.
[https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pd...](https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf)

~~~
toasterlovin
> Which means that in an environment of abundance, the cost often exceeds the
> rewards.

The problem is that environments of abundance basically do not exist, because
the population of a species quickly grows to consume any excess. The situation
that humans in the developed world face is novel. We are not evolved to deal
with abundance because abundance has only ever occurred during the brief gap
between when we invented a new technology and when the population has expanded
to fill the new, larger ecological niche which that technology enabled.

~~~
groby_b
Uh, yes, they do exist. The example of human cultures that comes to mind are
Melanesians which IIRC had relative abundance of natural resources. In the
animal kingdom, Bonobos are probably the prime example.

And IIRC, in both cases the reaction to abundance wasn't overpopulation, but
the development of a sharing trait. (Because it reduces the cost incurred by
unnecessary competition)

In the case of Melanesians, they were at some point taken over by relatively
resource-poor Polynesians. (Inequality will cause trouble). Bonobos escaped
that problem since they have no competitors in their natural habitat, and they
evolved a somewhat interesting mechanism to cope with any of the smaller
conflicts that might pop up. (E.g. access to _favorite_ food instead of just
normal food). If you're not familiar with it, I recommend reading up on it :)

~~~
toasterlovin
I would love to read a link about the Melanesians if you have one.

The only way a population doesn't expand to consume available resources is if
there is something else which is controlling population growth. For many
species, that would be predation. But humans are an apex species, so that's
not a factor.

Disease is another possibility. The bubonic plague kept European populations
below the malthusian limit for a long time in Europe. But not long enough to
really have an effect on our evolved traits. Generally speaking, it's
difficult for disease to be a significant problem without agriculture and the
population density that it allows. But the consensus is that people who lived
in agricultural societies pretty much universally had poor diets (ie, they
were living at the Malthusian limit).

The other major factor that would prevent human populations from reaching the
Malthusian limit is violence. But violence is usually committed for the
purpose of increasing or maintaining status. Either by killing competitors
within the tribe or by stealing women and resources from other tribes.

------
badrabbit
I find the idea of prosperity==happiness a bit silly. Being satisfied with the
quality of life you have does not equate happiness.

The list is quite long but to name a few: horrible personality
disorders,childhood trauma,relationship issues(opposite
sex,parent,society,coworkers,etc...),physhical health ailments and so on...
All these can become obstacles to happiness and throwing money at them to the
most part does not help overcome these issues.

Here is my question: 1) isn't happiness a bit overrated? 2) is happiness
really all that important? 3) if prosperity is happiness then why are there so
many happy poor people in 3rd world countries?

------
hcnews
I am not onboard with the idea that humans need to be happy 100% of the time.

I am going to be unhappy, even frustrated trying to improve things or create
new things (as an artist or engineer). Healthy unhappiness, as I see it, is
required for evolution/human-advancement.

------
paulpauper
_In a poor country with low inequality, rising national income should make
people happier, and of course reducing poverty is a good in and of itself. But
in a wealthy, unequal country like today’s America, gains in national income
can decouple from well-being._

The problem is the individual cannot perceive this. The typical person cannot
perceive unemployment falling a few tenths of a percent or personal income
rising a quarter of a percent. if income is rising as fast an inflation, then
it may be impossible to notice. You can buy a bigger Iphone and Netflix, but
healthcare, rent, and tuition keeps going up.

------
axilmar
Happiness happens when one can live in a stress-free environment.

Nowadays, we have a lot of stress, because the requirements an individual has
to fulfil in order to survive have skyrocketed.

------
modells
Prosperity may have increased a lot for those at the top, but there's never
been so many people living on freeway on-ramps until now. For the low end, it
keeps getting worse-and-worse in the real world while academic happy-clappy
about how "great" everything is. UBI or French Revolution 2.0, so far the
majority of rich have chosen social upheaval, Holocene exinction and climate
obliteration.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
What is your view based on? I'd have assumed that absolute number of homeless
would increase over time, but the rate of homelessness would be declining. I
was surprised to see that, at least from this [1] research, that we are
progressing fast enough that even the absolute number of homeless are also
declining! Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from those data is that
though absolute homelessness is decreasing, the number of homeless people
moving to shelters is increasing. This means data that uses shelters alone as
a metric could easily be quite misleading.

You also have to keep in mind that areas such as California have some of the
highest homeless rates in the entire nation, so if your perception happens to
be based on areas such as this - it's going to be skewed. It'd be like gauging
prosperity by looking at what's happening in Monaco.

[1] - [https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-
ca...](https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-
care/homelessness-u-s-trends-demographics)

~~~
ionised
Homelessness in the UK at least has been rising every year for the last 7
years.

------
ionised
Everything I know and read gives me the impression that while the world's poor
are better off today than they ever have been, their overall share of the
wealth and bargaining power is ever decreasing since the post-WWII years.

People now have smartphones and expensive TV's and financed cars but all the
important things in life are consolidating in fewer and fewer hands.

GDP increases higher and higher, and the actual economic gains go to fewer and
fewer people in ever larger amounts.

Education and healthcare has become prohibitively expensive, the financial
services industry concocts ever more complicated financial instruments to
disguise their greedy quarterly-focused predatory profiteering.

House prices and rent in places where the jobs can be found are skyrocketing,
made worse by a free-for-all of foreign property purchases.

The products we used to buy and own and now being leased out to us and our
control over devices we have in our own homes has been slowly and quietly
taken away from us. We are not even allowed to fucking legally repair shit
we've paid for a lot of the time.

Bribery and corruption have even been legalised in the US and the group that
can reverse that obscene series of decision are the ones benefiting from it.

The copyright industry is basically a cartel of middle-men at this point,
doing nothing other than causing the stagnation and loss of our cultural
history.

And to top it all off every 'free' western nation is spying on its own
citizens and arming its police all in the name of 'terrorists', despite
terrorist attacks being rare occurrence.

I feel like all we have done with our progress is create a new aristocracy and
pave the way for a new type of feudalism.

------
ahallock
Taking breaks from social media, particularly Twitter, has increased my
happiness. Social media platforms are blackholes of negativity. They're also
addictive and very empty because of lack of real interaction. Sometimes I feel
like I'm living life vicariously through other people's photos, videos, and
memes. It's uncanny.

------
mnm1
So happiness and poverty are relative. Isn't that obvious to anyone who has
ever traveled, studied other cultures, or even our own culture? I know that's
not the norm, but it's a fairly obvious observation. Many of the people in
America's ghettos have, in absolute terms, much more wealth than much of the
developed and developing world, yet they are much less happy than many of the
latter people. Each cohort is comparing themselves with the people around
them, not with people in far away countries. In America, poor people are
surrounded by hate and cruelty, constantly in fear for their lives and
livelihood. This is usually not the case in places where people are happy yet
make much less in absolute terms (although sometimes it is even there).
There's much more to life than money, especially when money is tight.

------
petermarks
Where is the explanation, let alone the data, to support the claim that
happiness has not increased? There’s a compelling data driven chapter in
Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now that makes the opposite argument. It also
makes a compelling argument that people aren’t bothered by inequality in
itself. It’s an amazing book that everyone should read and has genuinely
changed my world view for the better.

------
chewz
Why would anyone assume that there is connection between prosperity and
happiness? The less you have, the less you want - the more happier you are.

------
ggm
Aspirational marketing works. We have stuff, we just all want more stuff a
notch above the stuff we have. The glamour advertising for watches feeds
belief were entitled to a $20,000 Chopard.

It doesn't help that the disparity in pay board to shop floor is wider than
back in the day of servants.

Redirecting mental effort to no material life is hard. Plus the economy tanks
when we don't spend.

------
ddingus
A majority of Americans simply are not prosperous.

Having nice things, TV, mobile phones and other similar items reflects the
overall product of industry. Those are technically luxuries.

All good, and welcome, but wealth, security needed for happiness us a
different thing.

Wealth, in the basic human sense, is all about time and how much of it is
availiable for people to assign purpose, rather than have that purpose
mandated somehow by others or genuine need.

Happy people use that time in ways that they find rewarding, a core part of
happiness.

In a macro sense, we as a nation are prosporous.

In a micro sense, people do not see that prosperity as basic wealth, and it
manifests as their personal cost and risk exposure not matched to their
income.

This costs them time, and limits on scope of desirable purpose on what portion
of "free" time they have.

Having lots of money, that requires vast amounts of time to obtain and or
service, is not wealth in the simoke human sense. Sans this basic wealth,
happiness is much harder to achieve. Some people get happiness out of work.
Most do not, and it ranges from the work being mundane to varied desire to
work.

Secure people, not having to dedicate large amounts of time to meet basic
needs, can be happy much easier, despite a lack of luxuries in their lives.

TL;DR: Reduce overall personal cost and risk exposure, and the time needed to
do that, and happiness metrics will improve.

People need to be people. When they can't be who they are, do qhat they will
do, they simply will not be happy no matter the luxuries they may find
availiable to them.

~~~
noobermin
>In a macro sense, we as a nation are prosporous.

>

>In a micro sense, people do not see that prosperity as basic wealth, and it
manifests as their personal cost and risk exposure not matched to their
income.

This isn't a magical mystery. It's very simple to explain. Wealth is a power
law. An average is the most useless metric to use yet everyone still does it.
In the same country with Manhattan, you have people with lead filled pipes and
raw sewage on their front lawns because wealth is not distributed evenly.

And this isn't by accident. Wages for most working people have not kept up
with inflation, and wages diverged from productivity since a little before the
Reagan area. [0] The value people create doesn't evaporate, it goes to the
top.

[0] [https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-
historic-d...](https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-
divergence-between-productivity-and-a-typical-workers-pay-why-it-matters-and-
why-its-real/)

------
benkarst
Why don't you spend 20 minutes reading my article that has a false premise?

-NY Times

~~~
sctb
Could you please start posting substantive comments?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

