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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I thought the consensus on money and happiness was something like "Money doesn't buy happiness, but poverty does make you miserable?"

That's my understanding. I think the big fight is over whether relative poverty or absolute poverty is the most important.

Would you say "happy life years" differs in any important respect from "quality adjusted life years," a standard measure in health and medical research?

I see "quality adjusted life years," as a necessary evil, a measure I'm not particularly fond of but that's probably better for what it does than anything else available.

But "happy life years" appear in another context entirely. The question being debated was "has happiness stagnated", with the subtext question of "does more money fail to make people happier (in prosperous western societies)". The answers to that, according to the graph that Ruut Veenhoven includes, are yes and yes. The other question - has life expectancy stagnated - has an emphatic no as an answer, but is unrelated to happiness. "happy life years" just fuses the two questions, without justification.If the debate had been about "happy life years" from the start, then that would have been fine; but as it stands it's a cheat.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I thought the consensus on money and happiness was something like "Money doesn't buy happiness, but poverty does make you miserable?"

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