Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> So — suppose we give this sort of combined well-being survey to a random sample of people, and also measure what products and services they've used and purchased. From this dataset, we could make reasonable statistical inferences about the amount of well-being increase or decrease associated with a certain product or service among a certain class of people.

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".

Whether or not well-being is as easy to measur, your assumptions about free-market as a stand-in for well-being does not have a solid foundation.

> 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.

Fair enough. But I think most people are skeptical the government is in a better position to determine what makes them happiest. Government edicts/propaganda may, in fact, do the opposite merely by virtue of being edicts/propaganda.

Perhaps we should take a good look at countries where people are happiest, and at how their governments are run.

only applies when countries have similar demographics. e.g. most countries are a magnitude smaller than the US(except for China, India). Most countries have a much more homogeneous population(e.g. China, India). Best comparison I can think of is EU vs US, and if you can show that Europeans are happier, then that calls for a very limited central government that is not elected, and states can model themselves after European countries. Scale and demographics are important.

Sounds like you are a supporter of limited government involvement.

That post wasn't meant in that way. I'm a supporter of decentralization, a strong local government and a weak federal government (city/county > state > federal), but I wanted to demonstrate how difficult it is to compare different countries. Which was evidently worthy of a downvote :shrug:.

> Psychology is littered with well-demonstrated examples of humans acting against self-interest.

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.

+1! I'd also add that social media seems to have a disproportionate effect on happiness and aspirations, so finding a moderator for social media should be a focus as well. Not as in censorship, but eg. being able to trace news articles back to source, allowing people to weight information/advice from friends, encouraging cross-pollination of memes rather than constructing bubbles etc.

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