Happy Up
Americans are rich, make no doubt about it. But we're not happy. "Joyless lottery winners" is how a writer for The New Yorker says about us in this nifty piece about recent eudemonistic research. A whole range of activities that people tend to think will make them happy–getting a raise, moving to California, having kids–do not, it turns out, have that effect." No one, it seems, really knows what makes us happy. Of course, "Christ" doesn't enter into the leftist New Yorker's analysis, and, leaning hard as it does toward state action, the writer wants policymakers to take these studies into consideration. On the contrary, I'd argue that these puzzling happiness results points away from state action: If people can't even figure out what will make themselves happy, how is the state going to figure it out for them? Top-down planning never works and its farcical to think otherwise, especially when it comes to something as intensely subjective as the pursuit of happiness.
