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Not that you didn't do a great job though! I waved a red fan both times
(Cross-post from http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevol... )
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The paper shows that life satisfaction of East Germans correlated with pay raises. It is important to keep in mind that East Germans' incomes were mostly below the national average. For this group the correlation is intuitive.
The question is whether the correlation also holds for incomes above national average. If that is true then GDP is an adequate proxy for happiness. Otherwise, the GDP needs to be complemented with a measure of income distribution / inequality / disparity. I suspect the latter is true.
I have to say that I was a bit disappointed by the affirmative group. I think the debate would have been more instructive if the affirmative had been better prepared. Professor Sachs, who I came to see, was really off topic. They really never managed to make a strong case that any of the problems they were pointing out amounted to a failure of America at the pursuit of happiness, especially in the face of all the observable success.
It wasn't until the debate was almost over, when the topic of poverty was brought up, that Sachs quoted some statistics that gave me pause. The by-country comparison of the percentage of people reporting that they did not have sufficient funds to purchase food did sound quite high in the U.S. compared to other industrial countries. Of the problems the affirmative pointed out, I think the issue of poverty in this country, based on those statistics he read, would have been their best bet for framing some particular problem as a failure of the whole relative to other rich countries, even if it is not something that affects the majority of Americans. It was certainly better than Stevenson's arms race or Sachs's displeasure with the current political situation, and that part of the debate was just getting started when the whole thing came to an end.