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Comment by ekidd | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like it might relate to the "hedonic treadmill":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman were among the first to investigate the hedonic treadmill in their 1978 study, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?”. Lottery winners and paraplegics were compared to a control group and as predicted, comparison (with past experiences and current communities) and habituation (to new circumstances) affected levels of happiness such that after the initial impact of the extremely positive or negative events, happiness levels typically went back to the average levels.

If things like winning the lottery or losing a limb tend to have short-term effects on happiness, then it's not surprising that a ~10% change in working hours has little effect. Especially if—as another poster mentioned—you just end up taking the work home.

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Wow, I wonder what effect this has on politics?

It was noted that the Arab Spring was largely not the result of political discontent but the fact food prices were becoming very high [0]. It might be the case that unless the basic livelihood of people is consistently threatened - such as not being able to eat - that they will always put up with the political status quo.

As we're seeing now with the non-existent political reaction to mass surveillance.

[0] http://necsi.edu/research/social/foodcrises.html

Somebody said something about never being more than three meals away from revolution? Makes sense.

For a revolution you need a revolutionary situation in a society, Lenin described two conditions "The bottoms don't want and the tops cannot live in the old way".

It is often connected to food or another word necessity's. That was the case during the "arab spring" and was also the case in 1917 Russia, the main slogan for the Russian revolution being "bread and peace". The Russian people had nothing left to lose and the ruling class had nothing left to give(to sustain their power) thus fulfilling the two conditions.

All you need then is a catalyst. Which in the case of the "arab spring" was when Mohamed Bouazizi set him self on fire.

When it concerns America and mass-surveillance I would see that as a possible catalyst that lacked a revolutionary situation.

Of course a significant contributory factor behind the "hedonic treadmill" is that subjective indications of happiness as survey responses are essentially a proxy for the person's actual emotional state (which of course is largely unmeasurable mental activity). That is of course assuming that happiness actually is a tendency towards certain mental states. People's recollection of how they actually felt during a prior time period is imperfect, and subjective expectations for their maximum possible level of mental satisfaction are subject to revision. Its possible for survey participants to sincerely believe their overall satisfaction is still six out of ten on some crude scale whilst every single measurable or unmeasurable aspect of their mental well being has actually moved in the right direction (fewer anxiety symptoms, higher dopamine levels, less brain activity devoted to sources of irritation, higher confidence etc.)

Of course its also quite possible for participants to forget prior survey responses resulting in participants assigning same cardinal score to their happiness when surveyed in two different time periods, yet being able to unequivocally agree that their happiness (or indeed satisfaction with work) is a fair bit higher in period B than period A.

I don't think we should have expected the temporary news of decreased hours to account for greater happiness, but rather that people filled their newly free time with pursuits that made them happy.

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