This is a good essay, and I largely agree with its conclusions. I do, however, contest a few of your points:
1) Regarding “Over the longest time spans we have data for, the correlation between economic growth and increases in happiness is weak to nonexistent.”
I think that the evidence of a correlation between economic growth and increase in happiness is actually quite strong:
2) Regarding “ We have no way to directly measure human well-being.”
If we cannot measure it, then how can we get more of it. Progress Studies as a discipline cannot offer much to society if we cannot measure progress. While it is true that there is not one incontestable means to measure material progress, I think that there are many, and they are all strongly correlated with per capita gdp:
Love this essay, but there's something profoundly unsatisfying about saying "this thing is definitely happening, but we can't measure it". I have been pretty critical when I've seen that in other fields ("it's happening all around us, I swear; it just hides from the data collectors"). Perhaps one thing the progress movement should focus on is better quantifying the thing they (we) intend to improve.
I'm open to suggestions! But the only thing worse than not measuring something is pretending to measure it when you're not. So I'd rather have no direct metrics than bad metrics, especially when we have a lot of proxy metrics and they're mostly all telling the same story.
Schopenhauer made the observation that our basic desires (like reproduction) don’t make us happy. This is similar to your observation, but I think he sided with happiness over reproduction.
A lot of psychological responses are log-proportional, which allows us to comprehend vast ranges. E.g., loudness of sound. Not surprising if happiness is proportional to the log of well-being in some sense
I think it was Daniel Pink in his book Drive that said, human beings perform best and experience greatest satisfaction when
1. We see in control of our lives
2. We learn create master new things
3. We contribute to improving the world.
Autonomy, mastery and purpose together.
This is a good essay, and I largely agree with its conclusions. I do, however, contest a few of your points:
1) Regarding “Over the longest time spans we have data for, the correlation between economic growth and increases in happiness is weak to nonexistent.”
I think that the evidence of a correlation between economic growth and increase in happiness is actually quite strong:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/does-material-progress-lead-to-happiness
2) Regarding “ We have no way to directly measure human well-being.”
If we cannot measure it, then how can we get more of it. Progress Studies as a discipline cannot offer much to society if we cannot measure progress. While it is true that there is not one incontestable means to measure material progress, I think that there are many, and they are all strongly correlated with per capita gdp:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/evidence-of-progress
Love this essay, but there's something profoundly unsatisfying about saying "this thing is definitely happening, but we can't measure it". I have been pretty critical when I've seen that in other fields ("it's happening all around us, I swear; it just hides from the data collectors"). Perhaps one thing the progress movement should focus on is better quantifying the thing they (we) intend to improve.
I'm open to suggestions! But the only thing worse than not measuring something is pretending to measure it when you're not. So I'd rather have no direct metrics than bad metrics, especially when we have a lot of proxy metrics and they're mostly all telling the same story.
I agree completely. I present a number of metrics here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/evidence-of-progress
Schopenhauer made the observation that our basic desires (like reproduction) don’t make us happy. This is similar to your observation, but I think he sided with happiness over reproduction.
As I understand it, nothing made Schopenhauer happy
"Note that happiness scores are proportional to the logarithm of income."
This is interesting as power arguably increases linearly with wealth.
A lot of psychological responses are log-proportional, which allows us to comprehend vast ranges. E.g., loudness of sound. Not surprising if happiness is proportional to the log of well-being in some sense
Yes, good point ... I think what I wanted to get at is that psychology can sometimes trick us to not see important mechanisms.