Don't humans generally value relative wealth, which would also make it a zero sum game?
E.g., someone in poverty today isn't particularly comforted by knowing they have luxuries that former kings didn't have, like plumbing, because well-being is tied to relative scales
I considered that before posting, but what made me ultimately disagree is that well-being is not objective. It is very often completely subjective.
Consider that fact that at one point in the past you probably thought what you have now would make you happy. And maybe for a short time you were. But invariably that feeling of well-being wanes. You can say your new car is objectively better than your old one, yet after having it a few years it feels exactly like the previous vehicle from the standpoint about how much it contributes to your well-being. If well-being were an objective fact, you'd still feel happier with the new car. Most of the time, we have an innate ability to shift the goalposts, which keeps us continuously striving. To that extent, well-being is all subjective. I'm sure people in 200 years will wonder how we ever got along with our miserable existence without the creature comforts they take for granted.
>You can say your new car is objectively better than your old one, yet after having it a few years it feels exactly like the previous vehicle from the standpoint about how much it contributes to your well-being.
I agree with your point on human psychology, but survivorship bias is relevant here.
One way in which my new car is objectively better is that it has better safety features, which makes me less likely to die in a crash. My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
The correlation is not perfect, but lots of creature comforts actively make us live longer. In addition to the comfort of pooping indoors, indoor plumbing also makes it easier to wash your hands with warm water afterward, harder to trip and fall on the trip to the outhouse, both of which make you live longer. The people who die don't get to psychologically adjust to their premature deaths.
I'm not sure this is the best application of a survivorship bias. I believe the point holds even when survivability is not a factor.
>My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function. Yet when we study psychological well-being, we see the opposite trend except at the very, very end of life when well-being dips. If your assumption were true, wouldn't well-being be expected to continually drop across one's life? (Unless, I suppose, the other assumption is that we bolster that through more consumption.)
I think this is change in how you initially framed the problem. If "better" can be objectively measured and "better" correlates to happiness, then I wouldn't expect it to normalize at all. The fact that it does change implies that subjective well-being doesn't actually hinge on how objectively better something is.
>Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function.
No, sorry, that was not my intent at all. My point was to get you out of thinking of well-being as a purely psychological phenomenon.
Dead people have no well-being at all. Many advances improve our well-being in an objective sense by keeping more of us alive longer. This is not a psychological effect.
And there is definitely survivorship bias. When you survey people about their psychological state, you only survey the ones who aren't too dead to respond.
>And there is definitely survivorship bias. When you survey people about their psychological state, you only survey the ones who aren't too dead to respond
What is the correlation to outcomes? Are you saying a negative outlook correlates to higher survivability so we are primed to view everything through a more negative lens?
That makes sense from an evolutionary psychology point of view, but doesn’t explain why we the well being wanes rather than just stays low from the onset.
A person in poverty in a high-income welfare state does not have a great live, but they are still comforted by the fact that they are not in danger of dying of starvation.
E.g., someone in poverty today isn't particularly comforted by knowing they have luxuries that former kings didn't have, like plumbing, because well-being is tied to relative scales