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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I find studies that control for almost all aspects of life to be unreliable. Once we artificially normalize human existence so that stay at home mothers and young single men of different races, incomes, and locations are the same, then income rank is predictive. Ok. But let us put that aside.

And per the study, the large effect in life satisfaction is that a 10% increase in rank (going from 40/200 to 20/200) is worth ~1.8% increase in satisfaction.

Almost all of happiness is not explained by income competition. So why is the status game the only thing that drives all our seemingly pro-social behavior? Why should I think my problems describing Utopia, if I have them, are fundamentally me being hypocritical about zero-sum status games?

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Matthew Gentzel's avatar

Isn't the study listed is direct evidence for the claim? People are directly saying how satisfied they are, and then you can look at what variables are the most predictive of the satisfaction they claim. If those other variables are more predictive than what people say is predictive, then that is pretty strong evidence. Concrete data, concrete prediction, easy to falsify (e.g. if absolute wealth explained satisfaction more than rank, etc.)

This then helps explain why you can't get agreement on utopia: because the status elements are zero-sum regardless of material well-being.

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