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Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

Wealth is objectively a poor measure of a good life, past a threshold. Scientific studies have shown that yes, up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security), improving wealth improves happiness. After that, reported levels of happiness do not really change with wealth.

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And better studies later have shown that the threshold is just the knee in a log curve. Happiness improves with wealth on a logarithmic scale.

There's a dramatic difference in having the kind of money that allows you to look forward to retirement and having the kind of money that allows you to alleviate the boredom of you and your closest 5 friends by taking a 6 week retreat to Bali.

A six week retreat to Bali might alleviate the surface boredom, but it will just self-medicate the emptiness that causes the boredom, though.

After the knee wealth is not the major factor in happiness, other factors take over like friends, relationships, weak tie relationships, etc etc etc. If you want to be happy optimizing for wealth only makes sense under the knee.

After that, it's other factors, and extreme wealth may even harm those due to inequality.

Sounds like your argument is that wealth is objectively a good measure of a good life. Below some level of wealth, your life sucks, above it, it's great.

You're just pointing out that it's not linear, but sigmoidal. There's a range at which small changes in wealth rapidly improve or deteriorate ones life, but outside of that range, being much poorer makes your life suck only marginally more, and being wealthier makes your life improve marginally more.

I think it is a mistake to optimize for happiness instead of life satisfaction. The latter is more durable and manifests as more productive social outcomes, since it is strongly correlated with self-actualization. There is no upper bound on life satisfaction with respect to income.

Overfitting for happiness is actively destructive to people being able to achieve their individual potential.

>up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security),

Assuming future security means affording cutting edge healthcare, this puts you in the 95th, if not the 99th, percentile of the world.

Not if you life in a first world country that provides universal healthcare.

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