http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/04/25/will-wilkinson/the-artificiality-of-happiness/ Big Ideas for a Better World Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:24:11 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 hourly 1 http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/04/25/will-wilkinson/the-artificiality-of-happiness/comment-page-1/#comment-72770 Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle » Blog Archive » John Schumaker on Happiness Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:27:06 +0000 http://www.cato-unbound.org/?p=468#comment-72770 [...]  Ruut Veenhoven has toyed with similar ideas. But, funnily enough, he has argued that the collapse of that one of the reasons that individualistic, materialistic cultures have greater measured happiness because they are more like hunter-gatherer societies in important respects than are the very hierarchical, immobile, agricultural societies of yore. That is, the environment-psychology mismatch between traditional agricultural societies and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, is larger than the mismatch between contemporary consumer cultures and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s provocative. In any case, as I argued against Veenhoven in our Cato Unbound exchange, I don’t think happiness is exactly a “natural” state, and the environmental mismatch views don’t take human cultural malleability seriously enough. Anyway, I think Shumaker might be right about work. Which is why it is imperative that we maximize rates of economic growth: the wealthier people are, the more discretion they have in how they use their time. The division of labor is the solution to the problems it creates.      [...] [...]  Ruut Veenhoven has toyed with similar ideas. But, funnily enough, he has argued that the collapse of that one of the reasons that individualistic, materialistic cultures have greater measured happiness because they are more like hunter-gatherer societies in important respects than are the very hierarchical, immobile, agricultural societies of yore. That is, the environment-psychology mismatch between traditional agricultural societies and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, is larger than the mismatch between contemporary consumer cultures and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s provocative. In any case, as I argued against Veenhoven in our Cato Unbound exchange, I don’t think happiness is exactly a “natural” state, and the environmental mismatch views don’t take human cultural malleability seriously enough. Anyway, I think Shumaker might be right about work. Which is why it is imperative that we maximize rates of economic growth: the wealthier people are, the more discretion they have in how they use their time. The division of labor is the solution to the problems it creates.      [...]

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