DISQUS

Will Wilkinson: John Schumaker on Happiness

  • Matt · 2 years ago
    Will, thanks for the press on my review. I tend to "moralize" happiness in my own thinking, and so there is something appealing to me in Schumaker's work, but it is implausibly polemical in places - your suggested "honest" title hits that nail on the head - and there is a Layard-esque sort of philosophical sloppiness. There is something to his points about sustainability (although it probably does not involve getting "back to nature" in any literal sense) - and I take it that the point of dismissing "bad" kinds of happiness as not *really* happiness has to do with the idea that if we really want to be happy over time, our pursuits should be toward sustainable goods.
  • mk · 2 years ago
    "the wealthier people are, the more discretion they have in how they use their time"

    Do we know that this is true in an absolute, not just relative sense? I.e. I definitely agree that very wealthy folks in a society will have more opportunity for leisure, compared to poorer folks.

    But if the whole society gets richer, do the people at the bottom really take more leisure time? Or do they keep working just as hard because, for example, they still care very much that they are on the bottom, and they still want to move up from the bottom?

    I can see how it would be rational to use more leisure time (under some defition of "rational"). But is this how people actually react to increased absolute wealth (when there is no increase in relative wealth)?
  • Will Wilkinson · 2 years ago
    mk,

    Actually, in the U.S. the richer people are, the more they work. See Steven Landsburg's recent Slate piece. But I didn't primarily mean to be talking about "leisure time." Rather, I had in mind the discretion to make a living doing things you enjoy. I really meant to say that the wealthier a society is, the more discretion people living in it have... You can live a very nice life in the U.S. making pottery or arranging flowers or whatever you like for $15,000 a year, if you choose to live in the right place. A context of abundance makes work less like work for more and more people.
  • nursing scrubs · 2 months ago
    great statistical implemention method measuring the attitude of women's and men's.