So one way to live a good life is to move to a growth-oriented country in your youth and to a retirement-oriented country in your old age. In this way you get the benefits of both.
“The earliest records of joint-stock companies appear in China during the Tang and Song dynasties” [1].
What the Dutch pioneered were tradeable shares, which in turn massively increased the amount of capital a society could rally from its population.
The concept is exactly the philosophical implications of what a "good" life even is. How you can maintain and sustain a "good" life in a world where everyone else is trying to do the same. How your "good" life will sometimes be in tension with other people's, and how it'll even change for you as you live it.
"Wealth" is a terrible measure of a "good" life, but for some reason it's the dominant one in the modern world.
"Money does not bring happiness" is a trope that rich people would like poor people to believe. I don't think poor people fall for it, though.
After that, it's other factors, and extreme wealth may even harm those due to inequality.
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.
Overfitting for happiness is actively destructive to people being able to achieve their individual potential.
Assuming future security means affording cutting edge healthcare, this puts you in the 95th, if not the 99th, percentile of the world.
A billionaire is not orders of magnitude happier than a millionaire. But a millionaire is much happier than someone who is worried about being able to pay rent, afford food, etc.
Thus, the solution to maximize happiness is to distribute wealth evenly.
If happiness is only weakly correlated with economics then it is poor policy to use economics as a lever to increase happiness. Life satisfaction, on the other hand, is correlated with economic opportunity. It is also more durable than happiness.
Sorry, but I don't buy this. Equating stress about whether my company's stock price stays about $200 with stress about whether I will be able to afford a meal for my children is simply not on the same level.
Billionaires may choose to be emotionally involved in their financial situation, but a person in poverty has no choice. A bit of mindful meditation will solve the former problem; only money can solve the latter.
I don't have sympathy for them either. I'm working hard enough to make my own [slightly] more modest life balance and wishing I had some of the toys they do, but I can't afford.
Like the commenter you're replying to I know people who live in poverty who are very happy and lead fulfilling lives. I also know people who are millionaires who are constantly stressed for multiple reasons; including financial and non-financial reasons.
Re wealth distribution, that works for a generation or two maybe, but you do need people to actually work eventually. Otherwise you get the Europe situation where everybody wants benefits, 6 weeks of vacation and a 30 hour work week. That's great, but when China and the US are slobbering to take over every industry (or obsolete them, or reinvent them), what are you going to do?
My preference would be better services, and driving the cost of basic goods down to zero.
I love when people use this as an argument. As far as I can tell “the Europe situation” is the most successful model for social and economic governance the world has produced so far.
This of course treats the whole issue in a very technocratic, whiggish way whereas the real disagreements between these groups is not like that at all.
No. Living simply is the cornerstone of many philosophies and religions going back thousands of years. Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Epicureanism, Stoicism are all pretty aligned on this broad “money does not bring happiness” theme. I tend to think there is wisdom here. You’re not going to win the game of monopoly against the people who already own all the real estate. You win by choosing to play a different game.
You can look at the wealthy and get a sense of this. A lot of the artistic output of the 1920s was from rich people who had realized this: "Catcher in the Rye" is about a rich kid who finds life meaningless, and "The Great Gatsby" kills himself when he can't get love. (I think a lot of the current malaise comes from the rich people ["elites"] of that era discovering their meaningless existence--hence Postmodernism, and the rest of us buying into their assessment.) Trust-fund kids are known to go off the rails. The English upper class had a purposelessness (see Dorothy Sayers' main character of her mysteries, a the guy that Jeeves' serves; both again from the same period). In our own day, Elon Musk seems like a guy who is running around like mad, subconsciously covering the emptiness inside. Or our own culture, which is the wealthiest in the history of the world, yet we have rampant ADHD, depression, anxiety, and widespread drug abuse (I see more marijuana dispenseries than liquor stores--we cannot even relax without drugs).