{"id":791,"date":"2008-04-17T21:12:26","date_gmt":"2008-04-18T03:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/?p=791"},"modified":"2008-04-17T21:16:38","modified_gmt":"2008-04-18T03:16:38","slug":"happy-happy-joy-joy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/?p=791","title":{"rendered":"Happy Happy Joy Joy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com\/2008\/04\/16\/the-economics-of-happiness-part-1-reassessing-the-easterlin-paradox\/\">This<\/a> is amazing:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Arguably the most important finding from the emerging economics of happiness has been the Easterlin Paradox.<\/p>\n<p>What is this paradox? It is the juxtaposition of three observations:<\/p>\n<p>1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people.<br \/>\n2) But, rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much).<br \/>\n3) As countries get richer, they do not get happier.<\/p>\n<p>Easterlin offered an appealing resolution to his paradox, arguing that only relative income matters to happiness. Other explanations suggest a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hedonic treadmill,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in which we must keep consuming more just to stay at the same level of happiness.<\/p>\n<p>Either way, the policy implications of the Paradox are huge, as they suggest that economic growth may not raise well-being by much.<\/p>\n<p>Given the stakes in this debate, Betsey Stevenson and I thought it worth reassessing the evidence.<\/p>\n<p>We have re-analyzed all of the relevant post-war data, and also analyzed the particularly interesting new data from the Gallup World Poll.<\/p>\n<p>Last Thursday we presented our research at the latest Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, and we have arrived at a rather surprising conclusion:<\/p>\n<p>There is no Easterlin Paradox.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read it.  It&#8217;s a beautiful example of how absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence (you paying attention, atheists?)<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I always suspected this was bullshit for a variety of reasons.  Primarily lifespan.  Even if we assume that the typical person has a fixed mean level of happiness &#8212; say 14 Abigails per year &#8212; then a longer life means more happiness over the integral from birth to death.  A lifespan of 50 years means 700 Abigails of happiness while a lifespan of 80 years means 1120 Abigails.<\/p>\n<p>Sociologists.  I don&#8217;t think they think about these things very hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is amazing: Arguably the most important finding from the emerging economics of happiness has been the Easterlin Paradox. What is this paradox? It is the juxtaposition of three observations: 1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people. 2) But, rich societies tend not to be happier than poor &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/?p=791\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Happy Happy Joy Joy<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BzKF-cL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}