We should measure well-being instead of failing to measure economic productivity
bengoertzel.substack.com
bengoertzel.substack.com
Well-being is probably a third-order effect from a strong economy, good healthcare / social care, culture and a variety of other factors. But because it is a third-order it is very hard to measure the impact of policy, because:
* They are 'arms length' from policy changes.
* The indexes are slow to respond to changes.
* They are noisy and affected by unrelated factors (i.e. does a colder winter decrease happiness?)
* A policy which improves well-being today could very well decrease well-being far into the future (e.g. increasing a countries spending and decreasing tax).
But in one direction you have more wealth enabling people to live better, and on the other direction you have people with better lives being able to work better. It is very clear those effects do not have the same intensity.
/sarcasm
If you're in a small country richer people in the neighboring country seem about as likely to have the same effect. On the other hand, if you're in a large country and they live in a different city you're not running into them.
An issue with nationalism is that nations are in some ways very real and in some ways fake.
It is also not clear how one should calculate this - for example you could have white americans of german dissent violently disagreeing in issues of Trump, or hell, this about civil war. You could have people of different background hold very similar opinions.
Perhaps national happiness (since that is the level of society being discussed) is a joint function of cultural AND financial homogeneity? Many poor countries with high cultural homogeneity have tremendous financial heterogeneity (e.g., wealthy strongmen and their lackeys), which leads to unhappiness.
There are more ways that people want to be normal than just cultural and financial. For example, I would also posit that people with more common personality traits are probably happier. However, money and culture seem to cover a large fraction of how people perceive normality.
The former colonial nations do always show up high in every index, but that's correlation because they're in Europe. The colonised Finland and Ireland are always in there too.
https://www.socialprogress.org/global-index-2022-results
Looking at US states:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/247034/hawaii-tops-wellbeing-re...
…I have no idea what's going on here. Is this native marketing for Wyoming?
You improve your position relative to other nations both ways!
This is a great example of how focus on metrics can lead to a race to the bottom.
Better yet, save money and don't even bother importing the happiness. Just sow misery, and your country will have better and better stats!
That said, a good metric obviously mesures power on this planet so it must be something like how fast an economy can build a space station or advanced military equipment.
Im not saying there arent nice things in France but it s not as fun to be in than HK, anecdotally.
It's pretty hard to game economic measurements as a whole. Metrics with smaller scope are generally much easier to game so while they may be a slightly more accurate measurement initially, they may be more vulnerable to corruption.
Two immediate examples:
Healthcare and GDP.
Military Spending and GDP.
If a genie wish made everyone healthy and brought about world peace, The US's GDP would drop, quite dramatically!
Would it? 'We must invest in a strong military to keep the peace!' and 'Everyone is healthy, lets invest in preventative care and longevity to keep it that way!'
Every time I suggest this, however, I seem to be downvoted into oblivion and poopooed by the Europeans on the forum. I guess a more isolationist policy isn't that great of an idea after all.
But Europeans liked to believe that WW2 had somehow “shown the world” that wars were unwinnable bla bla bla while really the US just installed a giant protectorate system on Europe and kept it under their nuclear umbrella (one which the continent largely decided to maintain after 1991).
So yes, there are Europeans who understand (and should) that European prosperity was bought with an American military umbrella, one which we don’t pay for.
But - the Trumpian argument that this architecture is “useless” is also wrong in my view. The system was constructed to benefit the US, and so it did. The problem is that after 1991 everyone got sloppy, and capital took enormous control over politics of the US and the West in general (since there were no enemies but only “opportunities for investment”) and this led to a series of poorly thought out disasters - including China in GATT/WTO hoping it would democratize, etc.
But it’s on the implementation that things went haywire.
Because pre-fracking the US was so dependent on foreign energy, adventurism was encouraged in Iraq which led to a major geopolitical disaster (and a huge sink for the country’s resources). In that respect, yes the expansionist policy went totally overboard, due to poor leadership and planning and unrealistic political objectives.
Overall I think: - the overall architecture is sound. The US dominates and reaps benefits for it, while in my opinion maintaining peace through strength - but Europe should be spending enormous amounts more in military power - something like 5% of GDP at least - so it has a realistic chance to defeat Russia on the battlefield on its own - if that happened then the US could probably reduce its military spending (im not even sure they would because of the issues you listed though).
The various unemployment metrics used to be highly correlated, but they've diverged in recent decades.
And you can absolutely dial up GDP without dialing up median income per capita as well.
The government got really mad and decided, in true Singaporean fashion that the only logical solution was to create their own metric and ranking. One where, coincidentally they were #1/#2 happiest instead of #1/2 unhappiest. A completely different set of people felt equally vindicated by this.
Like, someone can compare their well-being at San Francisco versus Paris and see which one is better but that would be a comparison of well-being for them which won't necessarily hold for Parisians and SanFranciscans of a different income level or with different cultural values - while wealth can be compared directly in a mostly objective manner (e.g. adjusting for purchasing parity).
I could imagine it going a few different ways. Maybe every day when you wake up and have not frozen to death, you already feel accomplished, so start the day with a win. Or maybe there's a certain resilience already in people who would choose to continue to live in such a climate. Or maybe you just don't have much time to care much about your neighbors' negative qualities when there are homes to keep warm.
Maybe you can just afford to complain more about everything else when you don't have the weather as an easy (and unifying) adversary to complain about.
That one's hardly far into the future, more like the next election cycle.
Policies that improve well being today and screw us in the far future would be more like resource depletion, pollution, ecological destruction.
What tools are necessary to achieve good well-being should be the topic of research and political debate.
I think the problem we have today is that, politicians in particular, are only interested in the metrics that make their preferred tools look good. So a hard line socialist is inclined to ignore the benefits a free market provides and focus solely on how state-run programs can solve everything. On the flip-side, conservatives see a strong economy, put all their faith behind the free market, and ignore the proven effectiveness social programs have in areas where capitalism struggles like healthcare.
Cubed? f°g°h(x) ?
It means an effect of an effect of an effect of the original thing. "X because Y because Z because original thing A."
Think like Five Whys and so on.
In this case it's shorthand for "not a direct outcome but most likely correlated"
You start working out regularly.
First order effect: you get healthier.
Second order effect: you feel more confident.
Third order effect: you start going out on the weekends more.
B causes C (second order)
C causes D (third order)
After 3 decades of US etc. travelling backwards on nearly every index despite economic expansion, and people are still buying it.
TL;DR: are any of these countries you're referring to not capitalist countries that just export misery?
This is not the gotcha you think it is.
Unfortunately, no, you can't. There are lots and lots of problems. Just a few off the top of my head:
1. The effects of products are not uniform across the population. Alcohol, for example, catalyzes well-being for some people, but for others it has a dramatic negative effect.
2. The effects of consumption on well-being change with the time horizon over which you measure them. Eating ice cream might improve my subjective well-being today, but harm it tomorrow when it has a deleterious effect on my health.
3. Externalities. Owning a private jet might improve my subjective well-being, but harm everyone else's with its noise and emissions.
Measuring economic output is actually a not-entirely-unreasonable proxy for measuring well-being because in a free market people presumably make rational choices and spend their money in a way that maximizes their well-being. The problem is not that the proxy is wrong, the problem is that people turn out not to be very good at making these choices. It's not entirely their fault. A big part of the problem is information asymmetry: producers know a lot more about the potential negative outcomes of their products than consumers do.
I think a much better way to tackle this problem is with education and stronger consumer disclosure laws rather than trying to change the metric to something as poorly defined as "well-being catalysis".
> in a free market people presumably make rational choices and spend their money in a way that maximizes their well-being.
There is no particular reason to presume this is true, and many reasons to presume it is not.
Psychology is littered with well-demonstrated examples of humans acting against self-interest. 1) People are consistently willing to incur personal cost for the benefit of a perceived community, and are even willing to incur personal cost to punish those working against it. Community recognition is not required to observe this behavior. 2) People are quite susceptible to marketing. The history of the American tobacco industry is a great example.
The assumption that self-interested rational entities leads to a healthy or productive society has been similarly discredited. The Honduran Free Trade zones and Eddie Lampert's catastrophic reorganization of Sears are great counterexamples.
That is often claimed, but it is far from clear that it is actually true. The problem is that in order to make this assessment at all, someone has to decide what a person's self-interest actually is. There is no universal objective measure of self-interest because different people want different things (this is the reason trade works at all).
> People are consistently willing to incur personal cost for the benefit of a perceived community, and are even willing to incur personal cost to punish those working against it. Community recognition is not required to observe this behavior.
Sure. But how is this working against self-interest? I for one like being part of a strong, cohesive community. But I also recognize that building community requires effort, and that effort incurs a cost. So who are you to say that the cost I personally bear to shoulder my share of that burden is "acting against my self-interest"?
> People are quite susceptible to marketing
One man's marketing is another man's education.
> The history of the American tobacco industry is a great example.
Sure, but that was, in retrospect, an example of the tobacco industry just flat-out lying to people. If you want to argue that society benefits from having some mechanism to discourage willful deception I certainly won't argue with that.
But even a case as clear-cut as tobacco still has grey areas. People still smoke despite the fact that the risks are now well known. If someone knows the risks and still chooses to take them on because they'd rather have a nicotine buzz than a long buzz-free life, who are you and I to tell them that they are wrong? Because once you take that step it's a very slippery slope from there to not allowing anyone to take any risks at all.
A large problem with metrics is that they have a tendency of becoming a goal of their own. Instead of them being used as mere indicators, we end up with entire countries whose sole goal is to eternally increase their GDP - to the extent that it ends up harming the general population.
People do not solely exist to generate revenue, and it is about time we stop pretending they do.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/07/11/new-ze...
I read this in Project to Product:
"As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right." --Jeff Bezos
What countries are you talking about? I don't know of a single country that does this.
This has become less so only fairly recently.
>We confirm that both mortality and morbidity have a negative effect on GDP per capita growth. The effect of reducing mortality by 10 percent is that of adding at least 9.6 percentage points to GDP per capita growth over a period of about one quarter century, according to [13] bounding strategy.
We saw this in the early days of both Wuhan and later NYC. The beds overfilled, then the hallways, then it start spilling into surrounding streets, and then the armed forces had to be called in to set up makeshift hospitals.
There's a physical limit to how many people can fit inside a hospital, and that limit is the saturation point, at least in my definition.
It's possible that a mildly sick patient became a moderately sick patient because they received some disease while within the premises that they otherwise wouldn't have.
And in an extreme scenario, hospitals could possibly kick out moderately sick patients to accommodate even more severely sick patients, which could cause the former to spread diseases to otherwise healthy people. But this seems highly likely.
Trying to change that means going from a productivity driven economy to a social wellbeing driven economy (as per government economic policies).
That's quite a shift, in line with the idea of universal basic income.
This is a pernicious straw-man. No county focuses only on GDP. No government focuses only on GDP.
Unemployment, interest rates, inflation, balance of payments, national debt etc, are all prominent indicators in any economy.
And show me a country that doesn’t also measure educational achievement, crime rates, divorce statistics, birth rates, suicides, alcohol consumption… the list is endless.
The only people who want an alternative to GDP are the ones who mistakenly think that the economy or society can be summed up in a single measure.
Increasing well-being is a laudable goal, but it's nebulous in concept and in specifics even more tricky. "Well being" belongs in the world of political or philisophical discourse, but as a basis for economic planning is probably not going to be useful.
But now that we mention politics, we already have proxies for measurement of well-being. In western democracies the people vote for the politicians (or policies) that they believe will increase their well-being. So the polls and vote tallies are one form of measurement. One of the government's roles, as policy maker, is to balance the needs of the people with the ability to provide those needs.
These are both useful lines of reasoning in some conquests but I don't find them so in this one.
The result was always too many variables creating an impenetrable mess of logic with no practical value. The research was almost unproductive economic activity except it made the researchers realize we are terrible at macro level measure of anything but movement of literal things.
Inferring numbers today from past economic truth is not intelligent guidance but biasing inequality into the system from past imperialism. A whole lot of our rich would not be without our government meddling. What I don’t need is government pissing off the world to normalize business conditions for aristocrats who don’t do real work of keeping themselves alive.
https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
Some highlights:
-National income and national happiness are different, but are positively correlated
-Average levels of happiness have been rising internationally for decades, with the notable exception of the united states
-While economic inequality has been rising in countries like the US, happiness inequality has been falling. From a happiness perspective, our lives are less unequal than they were decades ago.
It is like the classic experiment of a monkey being outraged when given less treats than another monkey, despite having more treats than they otherwise would have.
It is all tied to expectations
For example, if everybody where you work gets a 20% year end bonus and you get a 5% bonus you would probably be unhappy even though you got a bonus.
I think it is tied to the expectation of fairness and the perception of fairness.
If you expect to get the same bonus, and you perceive you were slighted, you will probably be unhappy.
Perspective plays a huge part.
That's not to say people don't have valid grievances, but there is a huge amount of cognitive dissonance, and large gaps between expectations and reality.
Take the parent example of US inequality. Low earners are unhappy that they make so much less than US high earners. Well that's unfair! However, they certainly don't gain much comfort by being a high earner globally. That's not unfair, that is deserved!
"Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to someone else today"
I’m not sure GDP is as wacky right now, e.g. https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/all-poverty-is-energy-pov...
I do strongly agree that we should be clear that we care about GDP because it lets us buy more quality of life (in many cases, literally more life), and if GDP diverged from providing that we should stop caring about GDP
I’m not sure I buy that the right metric is hedonic well-being though; the issues with Mills’ Hedonic Utilitarianism are well-known, and I don’t want to prescribe heroin or wireheading for everyone to maximize their subjective happiness. I think some metric of Eudaimonic Utility is probably more what we want.
What are the factors of human flourishing? How do we measure and improve those? Things like health, education (in the broadest sense including trades/crafts), economic security/opportunity, physical safety, community, etc.
One can easily imagine higher-GDP configurations that trample most of the populace on the above, and we should not choose those merely because “growth is good”.
Being paid in some way for this work is one way for people to support the creator/teacher/builder. This will add to economic activity and continue to grow the economic pie.
No one looks back on their life and wishes they spent more time laying on the couch.
So while economic productivity/growth is a crude measure for sure, it might be the best one we've found so far.
Clearly true. Now, how many people look back on their life and wish they had spent more time building their business rather than spending time with family, friends, etc?
Even more fundamental to the human condition is our social nature. Living a life that prioritizes that is what drives true happiness.
I do. Most of the "social time" has been wasted: some projects I did each bring me more lasting happiness that even all the time spent with family and friends put together.
Everything everyone does is by definition in pursuit of satisfying some internal motivation, and it doesn't seem reasonable to me to second-guess other people's choices for the purpose of optimizing their happiness against external criteria -- only for the purpose of preventing externalities that harm our own pursuit of happiness.
Attempting to create macro-scale metrics that attempt to approximate the optimality of of individuals' subjective experience, rather than measuring objective consequences of their manifest behavior -- like their actual economic activity -- seems both too abstract to be useful and too susceptible to manipulation by those with ulterior motives.
So I agree that economic productivity is the best measure, but for quite different reasons.
Couldn't disagree more. The most joyous time in the past few years has been when I took half a year off work and pretty much spent it playing video games or hanging out with my wife.
In fact the joyous times in my life have been when I have no responsibilities and can just get drunk with my friends. Unfortunately the best way to meet good, fun people is to be involved with some kind of productive activity, but as we get older none of us have time for each other anyway.
I hate responsibility and I somewhat hate being productive because once other people see you're capable, they start expecting more of you, and that's the last thing I want
This is one of the most insightful comments I've read for a while, and this one liner perfectly summarize your reply.
The economic metric treadmill looks something like "we want to measure 'economic productivity', which is a term that has a colloquial meaning". Second, create a formal definition that almost, but not quite, matches the colloquial meaning. Third, try to measure it in the past using available proxy metrics. Fourth, try to measure it in the present using new proxy metrics. Fifth, try to measure it in the future by introducing new measurements.
The sixth and most complex phase is to stitch together all those measurements as though they are measuring the same thing, and then via sleight of hand to use the colloquial meaning of the name of the metric to derive some sort of conclusion.
Now we get to play the game of repeating steps 3, 4, and 5 in order to draw interesting and new conclusions, and best of all, to try to guide policy decisions to increase "economic productivity" by instead guiding policy decisions to increase the metric for "economic productivity", yielding results that are invariably nonsensical.
Once you see this pattern it becomes impossible to not see it everywhere in econometric research. Even things like "GDP" or "DJIA" are insanely stitched-together pseudo-metrics that we just pretend are actually measuring something but are completely disconnected from reality because of their use in policy-making.
There's been some research I've heard of in the area about people who won the lottery or have some life altering accident, somehow nothing changes how happy they are in the long run. Wonder if the evidence still supports that.
You can build a house with 20 bedrooms but you can still only sleep in one, and you've just created a new problem to manage: cleaning all of them.
You can buy a 1$ million car but it's not a 100 times more comfortable or faster, nor does it do anything in a traffic jam. It'll bore you after 2 weeks as it becomes the new normal.
It doesn't. Bereavement, disability, unemployment all make people less happy over the long term
Economics would be a more reliable field if it incorporated the work of people like the founder of ecological studies, G. Evelyn Hutchinson:
https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/4200-the-founder-of-...
This becomes even more relevant as the global human population starts running up against basic resource constraints in many places.
Self selection and lack of random controls will always thwart such an effort.
It is still an interesting concept philosophically, and worthy of consideration.
I'm not too sure where the line is between a well being catalysis metric and old fashioned utils.
It is well understood that people can over or under pay for the utility of their purchases.
There's really no happiness without fulfilling basic human needs like health, education, security, etc. That cannot be achieved without a healthy economy.
It's very easy for someone living in a "first world" country to take fundamental stuff for granted. I know I did before moving from Europe to Mexico years ago.
‘We get X if we measure Y with Z side-effects’ however? I can only get so excited.
The disutility of labor or somesuch thing.
Somewhere in the middle is where the ‘rubber meets the road’ and all.
Sen's work, in turn, has its philosophical ground in the work of Martha Nussbaum on "capability based ethics".
The capabilities approach, by keeping things local, tries to avoid requiring that different cultures all have the same values as tends to happen with utilitarian approaches and materialism.
1. https://daily-philosophy.com/martha-nussbaum-and-the-capabil...
Here is her list of the ten most-important capabilities and a brief description of each:
https://daily-philosophy.com/martha-nussbaum-and-the-capabil...
I'm not sure well being metrics currently (or perhaps can ever even in principle) fit the bill.
The nominal money GDP increases by 6%
Population increases by 1.5%
That leaves 4.5% that is either inflation or productivity. If we determine that inflation was 3% then we know that productivity grew by 1.5%. We don't necessarily aim to measure productivity (I mean, we do, but even if we did not) we would still end up with a productivity number, once we had subtracted out population growth and inflation.
You'll see this in consumption culture, specifically of non-essentials. Consumption for the sake of consumption, fueled by non-stop marketing. Going into a mall and buying lots of useless shit. Or the online version of it.
You'll also see it in work culture. It is of absolute vital importance that you have a job, but absolutely nobody cares about whether its adds value.
The only requirement is that money changes hands, irrespective of "value" or "well-being". Somebody once said that roughly 50% of our economy is effectively just keeping each other busy.
Isn't it highly suspicious how decades of improvements in economic productivity have always converted to "more stuff" but not once have improved work conditions? Say, shorter work days/weeks? That would do a lot for "well-being" but is obviously not the point of our economy.
There isn't really a point other than to keep it going. If there's no point, no metric makes sense.
We have a tendency to use indicators irresponsibly. Economic productivity measures can be useful for understanding specific circumstances, like the output of an industrial sector. The broader and more abstract we extend them, the more unmoored it's meaning.
This is also true if we'll being measures, probably.
Steady two-percent growth is exponential growth. The "exponent" is 1.02.
The old motte-and-bailey tactic, nice!
If he thinks productivity metrics are "voodoo", wait til he learns more about those measurements of happiness and well-being. It hurts that we don't have a good way to measure well-being rigorously and consistently, but given that we do not it seems like step one should be to get to the point where we can do that, and only then should we consider whether we should replace existing measurements and paradigms with it.
The main issue is how to measure it properly?
It seems to me a better policy argument would be emphasize these over productivity, or maybe propose to improve the measures in some way if warranted.
One tiny section on how easy it would be to run an economy wide correlational well being study with product use, whole ignoring the multitude of problems with that. The biggest one being correlational data is mostly trash.
Edit: Clearly no one is offended, hyperbole is a lost art form, and happiness is at all-time highs judging by the responses I got.
That seems a large stretch when describing someone called "blocked_again" asking "is this sarcasm?"
Happiness is a better metric of how well the economy is producing happiness.
GDP is is a better metric of how well the economy is producing products.
This of course ignores the core questions of IF the economy produces happiness, CAN he economy produce happiness, and how the relationship might work.
This is what is being measured. It is the "real" progress happening in the economy. There's no circular logic, you can measure multiple things at once.
Economy is but one factor that maybe feeds into happiness.
Productivity measurement is hard. The author points to many of the difficulties. We (economists) have been aware of many of these difficulties since the 1930’s or earlier.
No one in this literature thinks “hedonic adjustments get it exactly right!” to take just one example. Instead they think more along the lines of: this is the best solution we can come up with to this very hard problem.
For an informed, recent survey of the difficulties and the importance of getting these questions right, try Syversen and De Loecker’s survey “an industrial organization perspective on productivity” from the recent Handbook of Industrial Organization, available for free via the NBER working paper series.
Why might you care? Here is one fact from that survey: within a narrowly defined industry category, the difference in measured output from the 5th to the 95th percentiles of the productivity distribution can be a factor of 2! To emphasize: two firms with the same measured inputs, but one produces twice as much output than the other. This is visible across many industry categories. It’s a fascinating problem and well worthy of study.
The original author should probably also read “the sad truth about happiness scales” from the Journal of Political Economy in 2019. Such scales are unidentified in quite a fundamental way and the results they give are essentially meaningless.
Having seen inside a few organizations of various types, I am shocked that the difference is so small.
Find the “right” industry and I bet you can make it really horrible.
that's just a property of the normal distribution: if you know the difference between 5 and 95, you know the rest of the curve.
What does it rhyme with?
- Companies that pour their effort into fine tuning their websites and adverts based off of what their analytics tells them. Years later their product dies and nobody really says why. [Narrator: All the best designers and developers left as the product and company slowly turned soulless.]
- City planners that make deals with builders for suburban housing which increases the tax base. Decades later they're stuck dealing with the outsized infrastructure maintenance costs for things like sewer lines without the proper density to afford them.
- Prisons, schools, and hospitals get mandates from the state to include a fruit with every breakfast. Individually packaged jam fits the poorly written bill, so that's what we all get.
And on and on.
The point is, there are things we need to do and problems we need to address that are frustratingly hard to define and agree upon, but the answer is not to wave them away. The answer is the opposite. To head right into them and try to really make a difference without getting lazy.
I could, easily, in an afternoon mention dozens of quantifiable proxies for different aspects of a good life. I'm very sure that countries with the technical prowess of Apple and Tesla are capable of achieving better instruments of our collective wellbeing.
What we need are economists with courage and resolve. There is obviously something horrible going on across the world right now even if GDP keeps growing.
Yeah. If we're failing at measuring productivity, are we going to succeed at accurately measuring well-being? Not likely.
You can make a rich person 100 times richer and overall prosperity is probably decreasing. But you can't really make someone 100x happier (especial if there already relatively happy), all that money maybe made the rich person 1.0001x happier (or even <1x). Seems like given this sort of difference in happiness and financial wealth measuring the latter has a built in aspect of relative equality. For those who care about creating societies that benefit the whole population, this is an enticing possibility.
But the title emphasizes measuring happiness, while pointing out that our measurement of productivity is flawed. But measuring happiness/well-being is going to be far more flawed.
The case for optimizing for happiness and well-being does not depend on our being able to measure it more accurately.
The real challenge IMHO, is that most people don't like the answers or want to make improvements.
Building and maintaining social connections is very important.
Exercise and healthy diet are very important.
Personally helping others is very rewarding.
Comparing yourself to others is very detrimental.
Fixating on things and people you dislike is very detrimental.
Most of these are things that people are told as a child and struggle to do. Most of them you can't buy, outsource, or regulate.
My personal axe I like grinding is TV. The average American watches 20+ hours of TV a week. On average, I don't think it helps their long term happiness and I don't think it is restful.
I think most people would be happier if they literally stared at a wall or slept instead, let alone if they did some of the things I listed above.
https://adam.nz/2001/zen-tv-experiment/
I don't agree with everything written in that essay and reject the Zen aspect but it was definitely a life-changing moment for me.
The last 3 years have thought us that you can't live in a dream world. There is a reality and it will bite you in the a**.
That's fucking it.