this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Every geek I knew in the early 90's was naively evangelizing about the internet ushering in a new age of enlightenment.
I was too, I admit. Am now optimistic about the benefits of a UBI but, with the above humbling experience, guardedly so — the unintended consequences might be impossible to predict.
It is the human condition.
For a while we believed that automation and robots would lead to people not having to work and furthering culture and arts for all of humanity.
People always ignore jealousy and greed, the two most prolific attributes of most worker-ant humans.
A study has undermined the greed angle.
Turns out that (amongst OECD countries) GDP per capita is not correlated with indicators of happiness at all. What is correlated is the degree of income equality...
and here is the great part...
Even for rich people. They too have better lives where there is more equitable income distribution. One day they will hopefully realise.
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_inequality_harms_societies
That study is reinforcing the greed angle, isn't it? If those poor and unhappy people wouldn't all be trying to become rich, but would say "fuck it", let's just live and be happy, it would all be fine.
Nobody could force a few billion people to do slave work for questionable amenities. They just need to stop wanting to be part of the so-called rich and their vision of what progress is. They do it out of greed and wanting to have it all. Technology for everyone. A basic human right, internet and shoes with a name on them.
Nothing speaks against a collective endeavor for progress and science to better the whole. But making it a competition:
The OECD is part of the problem.
Economic Co-operation and Development. Developments for enabling rich people and them competing against each other for resources. Not for creating equal footing. But for creating a controlled slave-market disguised as a developed country.
While you make valid philosophical points they do not invalidate the study or its findings because it is irrelevant to those findings.
Firstly the "happiness" measures include objective factors like incarceration, teenage pregnancy, heart disease.
Secondly, I only mentioned OECD because the data happens to be for OECD countries and therefore cannot be generalized to other countries unless another study is conducted to include them. It is not a stance on the pros/cons of the OECD as you seem to think.
I repeat: the study shows that increasing the GDP does not increase happiness. It has implications for government policy.
Please have a look. It is a peer reviewed data driven study not a random tik-tokker giving their hot take.