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Comment by smokedetector1 | Hacker News Reader

What you are describing is only one way of living a comfortable life. It is not an "objectively better" life than someone who has enough money to meet their needs and finds balance and joy in other places. For example, more fulfilling work, more opportunities to vacation, more peace of mind in a more communal society, better access to nature. Money only "objectively improves" your life up to a certain point.

Another tendency I find anti-intellectual is appealing broadly to "science" or "economics" to make claims that neither field supports.

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Is GDP per capita a good measure or individual wealth in a country? If you don't like GDP, is PPP a good measure? If not PPP, what measure do you like? How have those measures changed over the past 20 years? How much did America's value on that measure change in the past 20 years? How much did Europe's?

When I speak of "science", I'm only speaking about using numbers to measure and compare. As it turns out, it doesn't really matter which metric you use. GDP, PPP, you name it - America went up substantially more than Europe over the past 20 years. A continent that used to be an economic peer is now a few notches poorer. If the trend continues, by the time I'm old, Europe will be poor compared to America, full stop. Just another region full of third world countries.

You can read https://ecipe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ECI_24_PolicyBr... if you like or find your own sources. All the ones I've found say the same thing about the last 20 years. But if you can find some that say Europe is improving its economic standing compared to America, I'd be interested in reading them! I'm very open to having my mind changed by evidence!

I don't think you understand my point of view and also smokedetector1's with whom I wholeheartedly agree.

Economics and money is just numbers. It's not a measure of happiness in life. I just want to have enough money to not worry in life, I don't care about having much more than others. Doing a job I enjoy in a place I enjoy is worth much more to me. Would Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world be happier than me? I don't think he is, he's always angry about something. I wouldn't want to trade places with him. Having that kind of money is a burden, never being able to just walk around and discover a new town without a security detail, or partying until 6am without journalists capturing everything I do.

A big house doesn't make me (much) happier. A car definitely doesn't, driving really stresses me out (and I have a lot of driving experience having lived in many countries). We have great public transport here and that's enough for me because I live in the city.

And economics isn't really an exact science in my book. It's a social science, psychology based on human constructs. Which are different here in Europe anyway (more socialist). We chose to make the world work like this but it could be different too. More fair.

I moved to a lower wage country to have a better life and I'm a lot happier now. I will never be rich but I don't care. It's not a race to be the top, I want everyone to have a good life.

You can measure happiness with numbers. You can measure anything with numbers. I've welcomed you to provide your favorite happiness metric. But instead you insist that happiness cannot be measured in numbers. Anti-science attitude on display.

You cannot measure everything with numbers. Many things in life cannot even be ordered[0]. Lives are different. Yes, some are just worse/more challenging than others, but in general people and their experiences are wayyyyyyy too complex and multivaried to be projected onto the real line. Only by narrowing your understanding and experience of life to measurable phenomena like bank account balance can you actually do the comparison you're looking for. And then you've all but ruined your life.

To address your point, GDP per capita is not a good metric capturing happiness, for several reasons. Most trivially, because it does nothing to reflect the distribution of wealth. A country could (purely hypothetically ;) ) have massive GDP per capita but the benefits flow mainly to the top.

Even putting that aside, a culture with massive GDP but where the citizens don't have the time, peace, values, and social structures to enjoy life is not a happy society.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_order

The inverse of the Gini coefficient is a good measure.

In a country where everybody is dead, the inverse of the Gini coefficient is infinity.

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