Here’s why I like the New Yorker. It offer provocative thought provoking journalism. This piece covers a conundrum: We’ve increased our wealth, often at great cost, yet we’re no happier than we were in the 1950s. We’ve given up leisure time and done a great deal of environmental damage to support greater consumption. I’d say we’ve bought into the advertiser’s BS, bought into envy and cut back on what really makes us happy. I think our relationships, our interconnectedness is much more key to happiness. That’s exactly what we gave up. Families often have both parents working and no one home with the kids. There is a price to be paid for all the time we’ve dedicated to making money.
Several theories have been offered to explain why the United States is, in effect, a nation of joyless lottery winners. One, the so-called “hedonic treadmill” hypothesis, holds that people rapidly adjust to improved situations; thus, as soon as they acquire some new delight—a second house, a third car, a fourth-generation iPhone—their expectations ramp upward, and they are left no happier than before. Another is that people are relativists; they are interested not so much in having more stuff as in having more than those around them. Hence, if Jack and Joe both blow their year-end bonuses on Maseratis, nothing has really changed and neither is any more satisfied.
America’s felicific stagnation shouldn’t be ignored, Bok argues, whatever the explanation. Growth, after all, has its costs, and often quite substantial ones. If “rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier over the last fifty years,” he writes, “what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep on doubling and redoubling our Gross Domestic Product?
”To suggest that the U.S. abandon economic growth as a policy goal is a fairly far-reaching proposal. Bok concedes as much—“The implications of this critique are profound”—but he insists that all he’s doing is attending to the data. He takes a similarly provocative and, again, empirically driven position in a chapter titled “What to Do About Inequality.” His answer is, in a word, “Nothing.”
via What can policymakers learn from happiness research? : The New Yorker.
We need to look less at what makes us rich and more at what really makes us happy.
