No. 33287Anonymous 29th August 2024 Thursday 7:18 pm33287Is Happiness Essentially A Zero Sum Game?
I remember a Peep Show episode where Jerremy says something like "Stop hogging all the happiness". I often think about what I would do if I could quantum leap back in time and change my life. But then I think wouldn't I be stealing from other people? For example if were to go back in time and get a better job, somebody else would lose that opportunity. If I were to marry the woman I want, somebody would have to lose her. If I mined bitcoin in 2009 and invested £10,000 in bitcoin in 2011, then sold in 2021 for £40,000 a coin, where would all that money come from? Surely somebody would have to lose out.
TL/DR, is there a limited amount of happiness in the world?
It's a good question, philosophically, but in brief I think the answer is no, because happiness is not necessarily a physical commodity. It is not a substance mined out of the earth and then circulated like currency. There are many ways to achieve happiness, and I know it sounds completely bullshit, I think the best way truly is learning to be content with what you do have, focusing on self actualisation, and the practice of self love. That doesn't take anything from anyone.
Of course that assumes you already have the basic essentials of food, a roof over your head, and basically okay health etc, I don't mean simply jedi mind tricking yourself into enjoying life if you are in a shit situation. But very often the thing that prevents us from happy is merely this yearning for more that we can't satisfy, and the Buddhists have it right in terms of learning not to succumb to those base desires.
Maybe it's useful to think, if there's a limited amount of happiness, is there a limited amount of suffering? Where does unhappiness come from?
>If I mined bitcoin in 2009 and invested £10,000 in bitcoin in 2011, then sold in 2021 for £40,000 a coin, where would all that money come from?
I pondered this for a while, but for a literal answer, I think it would be the accumulated electricity bills of everyone who mined the coins paid, somehow circulated back to you with extra on top from all the times people paid exchange fees and bought at higher rates, and all that.
Money is made up though innit, crypto demonstrates that.
It's bullshit, man. I used to think "I I store all the depression so it'll improve others lives!" but that's only a justification to stay miserable. There's some narcisisctic element to it that I'm not minded to untangle right now - but it really is some 'woe is me, but I'm doing it for you!' sort of thing going on. As though that gives you some authority, some control, some self-righteous martyrdom that I can't quite pinpoint right now.
Happiness is neither a finite resource nor is it pareto-optimal.
In other words, if your absolute dream woman who was meant for you is now with somebody else, doesn't mean that whoever is with her is as happy as you would have been with her. It's even possible that that lad, by getting together with who was supposed to be your dream woman, didn't meet his absolute dream woman that he would have been the happiest with. It's all relative. One man's lump of coal is still another man's diamond.
Also, getting a better job, that you would've been good at, instead of somebody who now has it doesn't mean they're as good as you would have been at it, or that they are as happy or productive as you would have been.
And forget Bitcoin. Just think of all the things we were promised. A decentralised virtual currency that would be super stable and not at the whim of central banks. A universally accepted means of payment. A safe haven from market crashes and global financial crises. Not a thing of it has come true. Nor would anybody in their right mind buy their grocery shopping with Bitcoin, and there's nowhere you pay for your package holiday or your car with it, nor has it been very stable, with some of the wildest swings in value of any asset class ever conceived. Crypto is utter fucking shite. Of course, if you'd put all your savings into it in 2011, your net worth would today exceed the GDP of some third world countries. But many people have also lost a chunk of their savings by doing what retail investors always do, and that is getting in at the top and then watching it all turn to shit in a crypto winter.
The economy isn't (on the whole) zero sum. If I want to buy a thing, it implies that I value having the thing more than keeping the cash. If a shopkeeper puts something on a shelf, it implies that he wants the price on the tag more than he wants to keep the thing. By making that transaction, we're both better off and the total amount of value in the world has increased.
The technical term for this is a Pareto improvement. Not all transactions are a Pareto improvement - there's certainly lots of fraud and abuse and wrongdoing in the world - but the vast majority of transactions are Pareto improvements, including things like exchanging your labour for a wage. We're all vastly better off for having a modern economy that produces lots of goods and services, rather than scratching around in the dirt for roots and tubers or chasing rabbits with a pointy stick. The economy isn't optimal or ideal, but most of what happens in the economy is good for humanity as a whole.
Happiness is a different matter, because it's an entirely subjective internal state. If I derive happiness from status competition, then my neighbours getting richer will make me less happy; my happiness is zero-sum, even if their increase in wealth has no impact whatsoever on my wealth. In that framework, the only way for me to win is for other people to lose, because that's how I've chosen to define the rules of the game. Conversely, if I derive happiness from acts of charity, then making myself poorer will (within reason) make me happier - buying myself a nice car would just make me feel guilty, but I'd feel good about buying a load of goats for Africans or giving out soup to the homeless.
In practice, most of the things that make people happy don't have very much to do with money. Being poor is definitely bad for your mental wellbeing, but unless you're desperately skint, then spending more time with friends and family or more time on your hobbies will have a far bigger impact on your wellbeing than an increase in your income.
> Not all transactions are a Pareto improvement - there's certainly lots of fraud and abuse and wrongdoing in the world - but the vast majority of transactions are Pareto improvements, including things like exchanging your labour for a wage.
Strictly speaking, that only applies if you make the assumption that all other parameters are the same. In OP's example, Person A may be more skilled or productive at the same job than Person B. And Person B may also value his free time more than Person A and will want to work fewer hours and still be happy with the resulting less pay and more free time. So it's not completely as straightforward as saying that by taking a job from person B and giving that same job under the same work conditions to person A you will cause the same loss of utility for B as the amount of increase in utility that Person A will experience. Or even within the same person, the loss of utility from having to work eight hours a day and not getting to sit at home in their jammies is often not balanced out by the utility they get from their pay.
It's like any equation system. The more variables you introduce, the more lifelike it becomes, at the expense of being increasingly complex and unpredictable. It's usually when you add the idea of utility being subjective that the concept of pareto efficiency reaches its limits.
The world had no jet planes in 1824 even if you pooled all the worlds’ resources together you couldn't build an airbus A320 neo. The fact that it has a price tag equivalent to the wealth of nations then (100 million) is no coincidence. The reality is part of why inflation happens is that there is more useful and valuable resources than the day before. Inflation on a global scale is a measure of progress. Because there are more useful thing than the day before means we live a better quality of life. The great kings of the middle ages could only dream of the simple luxury of a cheeky weekend in Ibiza which is in the reach of nearly every person alive in Britain today.
Someone created every piece of useful technology out of thin air and everyone for lack of a better term has made us all happier, they increased the quantity of happiness available in the system by bringing the masses even something as small as the opportunity to clean their teeth with important new ingredients.
Not all productivity is just drones competing over the same jobs of shuffling things around between each other. Some of it is actually about making the world better than is.
I think some more obvious examples of happiness not being zero sum can be found in disease prevention and labour saving technologies. There are lots of gains to be made in human happiness simply by reducing suffering and toil.
