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John Quiggin's avatar

Relatedly, I've argued that the extensive body of research on the economics of happiness is misguided. As Tolstoy said in relation to familes, it's unhappiness we should be looking at

https://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/12/towards-an-economics-of-unhappiness/

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Haxion's avatar

This is a really fascinating, thought provoking post. I think the broad notion of thinking about the economy in this way helps explain a lot, and it got me thinking about FDR’s four freedoms speech (which to this day I think is the best distillation of liberalism and what it should be that I’ve ever heard). Two are positive goods—freedom of speech and freedom of worship are about choice of what is meaningful—but the other two, freedom from want and freedom from fear, are about avoiding suffering. Essentially the promise FDR was making to the US was not that we would have to pay nothing in suffering to maintain a decent standard of living—such a post scarcity world was unimaginable then on technical grounds, and is pretty damn hard to imagine today—but that the suffering price would be bounded to a level where one still had the ability to be happy, have a meaningful life and pursue the things that would secure that meaning. Honestly I think that’s the social contract we should still aspire to today, and framing it in terms of discomfort instead of money helps make that discussion much more meaningful.

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