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Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness

Scott Alexander/astralcodexten.com

Cassie Pritchard, on Twitter : I get why so many liberals are fundamentally disdainful of democracy these days—it’s because liberalism is exhausted. It’s out of answers. Liberalism won, it delivered the world it promised, and people still aren’t content. They’re not satisfied. So the people must be wrong. We are unfathomably richer than our ancestors. Output per capita in America today is on the order of 900 times greater than before the invention of agriculture, about ~225 times higher than in…

Notes

We’ll start with an elegant mathematical response which will satisfy nobody, then try to address the emotional impact.
rip
If the average serf would have rated his condition 3/10, we should be at 6/10.
funny to think of a serf taking a survey on happiness
You can just keep making people happier and happier by giving them more income, maybe forever. It just takes a lot of cash.
All of the great policies above in Finland/Israel/etc can only buy 0.5 - 1 extra point over the countries that screw them up or pursue the exact opposite policies. Meanwhile, economic growth has earned us three whole points since medieval times. And these are stable; no opposite-party administration can take them away. So long as technological civilization continues to function, we can keep rising and rising, until in 300 years we approach the 10/10 barrier and have to get a new chart. We can say with confidence that we are giving our children and grandchildren better lives.
Interesting to see data suggesting politics may not matter as much as we are led to believe.
people who are doing something extremely different from normal society can be anywhere. Hunter-gatherers are somewhere between 6 and 8 despite their apparent poverty.
As it seems with most things in life, happiness is relative
Interesting data perspectives on happiness. Despite politics infecting our discourse and making us (me) deeply anxious and unhappy when engaging, the actual policy seems to have marginal effect on our happiness.