If nothing really matters in China, if even overcoming horrible problems doesn't make the Chinese better off, then what's the use of favoring or opposing any public policy? After all, America also shows no rise in average happiness since the 1950s, despite:
1. A big rise in real wages.
2. Environmental clean-up (including lead--does Flint matter?)
3. Civil rights for African Americans
4. Feminism, gay rights.
5. Dentists now use Novocain (My childhood cavities were filled without it)
6. 1000 channels in glorious widescreen HDTV
7. Blogs
I could go on and on. And yet, if the surveys are to be believed, we are no happier than before. And I think it's very possible that we are in fact no happier than before, that there's a sort of law of the conservation of happiness. As I walk down the street, grown-ups don't seem any happier than the grown-ups I recall as a kid. Does that mean that all of those wonderful societal achievements since 1950 were absolutely worthless?
But there are exceptions. I recall reading that surveys showed a rise in European happiness in the decades after WWII, and Scott reports that happiness is currently very low in Iraq and Syria. So that suggests that current conditions do matter.
The following hypothesis will sound really ad hoc, but matches the way a lot of people I know talk about their lives. Suppose people's happiness is normally calibrated around the sort of lifestyle that they view as "normal." As America got richer after 1950, it all seemed very normal, so people didn't report more happiness. Ditto for China during the boom years. Everyone around you was also doing better, so you started thinking about how you were doing relative to your neighbors. But Germans walking through the rubble of Berlin in 1948, or Syrians doing so today in Aleppo, do see their plight as abnormal. They remember a time before the war. So they report less happiness than during normal times.
I have long thought this about the happiness literature. When you ask someone, "how happy are you on a scale from 1 to 10?" what does 1 mean? What does 10 mean? When I answer that question I instinctively place 1 as the worst day of my first world life and 10 as the best. I suspect others do the same.
It doesn't occur to me that life could be much much worse than what I would give as 1.
Also See SlateStar's post: Things Probably Matter
Also See SlateStar's post: Things Probably Matter
