The substantive implication is, of course, that the more socialist the provision of social welfare, or, similarly, the greater the decommodification accomplished by state policy, the more satisfied are people with their lives. The magnitude of this effect is pronounced.

Also, note that fewer formal work hours at one’s paid employment doesn’t necessarily translate into more leisure time. European countries have reduced formal work hours faster than the United States, but it seems that they have approximately the same amount of leisure time when you factor in unpaid work in the household. If anything, the United States seems to have a slight advantage here. Here’s a comparison between Sweden and the US and here’s a comparsion between Germany and the US.

If leisure time makes people happier, then it’s a mystery to me how we should encourage people to work less, since high taxes and mandatory hour limits don’t seem to do the trick. As for income inequality, this is all that I could find (I believe Will also brought this up at one point):

Using a total of 128,106 answers to a survey question about happiness,’ we find that there is a large, negative and significant effect of inequality on happiness in Europe but not in the US. There are two potential explanations. First, Europeans prefer more equal societies (inequality belongs in the utility function for Europeans but not for Americans). Second, social mobility is (or is perceived to be) higher in the US so being poor is not seen as affecting future income.

I would be curious to know what other research is out there.

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/papers/HappIneqREVApril3.pdf

Most interesting:

“In Europe, the happiness of the poor is strongly negatively affected by inequality, while the effect on the rich is smaller in size and statistically insignificant. In the US one finds the opposite pattern, namely that the group whose happiness seems to be most adversely affected by inequality is the rich. A striking result is that the US poor seem totally unaffected by inequality. Any significance of the inequality coefficient in the US population is mainly driven by the rich.”

It is a crude comparison. Ordinary observation tells you that the US is both more religious and values optimism and cheerfulness a lot more than Western Europe. These factors might overwhelm the anti-hedonic effects of greater income inequality.

(I suspect there is a good way to try to quantify this, but it would be more work than I’m up for.)

My conjecture is that most people would like to get happier (and could) by doing other things. But we are encouraged (by mighty economists among others) to do whatever we want to do by getting more wealth. And, in addition, wealth inequality and the norm in favor of increasing individual wealth have effects that prevent us from doing many things that we would truly like to do.

Is there any evidence at all that policies which encourage more leisure and less wealth accumulation make people happier? Both France and Germany have less inequality and people work less in those countries, but they apparently have lower rates of life satisfaction than the United States. Some data here. This is of course a crude comparison, but I don’t know if any serious research on this topic exists.

The possibility remains open, within Easterlin’s framework, that people would like to “get happy” by other (more reliable) means besides increased wealth.

My conjecture is that most people would like to get happier (and could) by doing other things. But we are encouraged (by mighty economists among others) to do whatever we want to do by getting more wealth. And, in addition, wealth inequality and the norm in favor of increasing individual wealth have effects that prevent us from doing many things that we would truly like to do.

The insight that getting what we want doesn’t make us happy isn’t startling and isn’t a contradiction, but I don’t know why we can’t call it a “paradox.” Is there some technical meaning of paradox I’m missing here?

(1) The individual with the least wealth has more wealth in a high-inequality system than in a low- inequality system.

(2) The one with the lowest wealth and the one with the highest wealth both are better off in an achievabble low-inequality system than in the actual high-inequality system.

(1) Ecomomists have a ridiculously unrealistic model of utility, in that what they talk about has nothing to do with actual happiness.

(2) Its not the least bit paradoxical that studies of self-reported happiness do not find that it is furthered by the wealth increases that mainstream welfare economics demonstrates should produce greater “utility”.

OKAY!

But the possibility remains open that (1) an individual does not reliably get happier when their income increases above $10-15K BUT YET
(2) having wild income inequality in our society reduces the well-being of everyone including the super rich.

I’m happy my to hear that my ideology is wrapped in an appealing package!

“Indeed, we’re about as happy as people have ever been, as far as we can tell.” Yes, as far as we can tell, that is some qualification, no doubt based on careful studies of Mayan survey research.

Will says on the one hand something perfectly reasonable: more material wealth is not happiness. But then he says: but marginally, imperceptibly, it is happiness. It is increasing total happiness by that tiny amount every day that adds up to exponential leaps in happiness measured over centuries and millenia. And if you don’t feel the effects of this imperceptible increase, which is almost nothing, well that’s because it’s imperceptible.

Which amounts to, we have no idea what it is, but we do know it’s increasing every day.

It’s always struck me that Will represents the ideology of an angry middle aged man wrapped in the appealling packaging of exciting liberation. And if some say it’s not very exciting and it’s not really liberation, he’ll respond: yes, and it’s increasing every day!