Happiness
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While I suspect that life is better with more amusement, this doesn’t feel obvious by itself. There are accounts of folks in Native American societies fleeing assimilation into Colonial society, while it does not seem many, if any, colonials who assimilated to Native American society attempted to flee.^[from discussion with John Fate Faherty] Not to mention the fact that we do think some Value in boredom, and more important is our ultimate goal of Happiness.
“But Stevenson and Wolfers scoured the literature for what longitudinal studies there were, and found that in eight out of nine European countries, happiness increased between 1973 and 2009 in tandem with the country’s rise in GDP per capita.24 A confirmation for the world as a whole comes from the World Values Survey, which found that in forty-five out of fifty-two countries, happiness increased between 1981 and 2007.25 The trends over time close the books on the Easterlin paradox: we now know that richer people within a country are happier, that richer countries are happier, and that people get happier as their countries get richer (which means that people get happier over time).” (Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now)
^993f33
Another attempt to debunk the Easterlin Paradox. But are we measuring Happiness correctly? Also, this isn’t decisive that all countries exhibit this behavior. What’s the pattern in the ones that do not?