I was surprised that this post didn’t talk about inequality, which is a common metric used to show the world is getting worse.
The research on happiness seems to suggest that often our life satisfaction is not based solely on standard of living, but in relative standard of living compared to our peers.
This suggests a few things:
If everyone’s standard of living raises together, it won’t do much to raise happiness.
If a few people’s standards of living raise more than others, this will make people less happy on average.
If we have more perception of people with higher standard of living than us, our happiness will go down (and if we have more perception of people with standard of living worse than us, it will go up).
I was surprised that this post didn’t talk about inequality, which is a common metric used to show the world is getting worse.
The research on happiness seems to suggest that often our life satisfaction is not based solely on standard of living, but in relative standard of living compared to our peers.
This suggests a few things:
If everyone’s standard of living raises together, it won’t do much to raise happiness.
If a few people’s standards of living raise more than others, this will make people less happy on average.
If we have more perception of people with higher standard of living than us, our happiness will go down (and if we have more perception of people with standard of living worse than us, it will go up).