From: Bernard Hughes (bjhughes@istar.ca)
Date: Wed Nov 11 1998 - 15:29:42 MST
Max M wrote:
> >Add up all the other rich people and your sentence becomes
> >
> >"take all the wealth form the rich and make everyone happy for about 1
> >day."
>
> only if you are stupid enough to take it all.
Oddly enough, this may be the optimum way to make rich people happy. As I have
heard it, studies on happiness show people are happy when features that they
value are increasing. Someone with a constant one million dollar income is
likely to report themselves less happy than someone whose income rises from
10,000 to 20,000. This suggests that getting the rich to start over every decade
may maximize their happiness.
I was at a conference this weekend, "Dennett's Philosophy of Mind". (Dennet is
the author of "Consciousness Explained" and "Darwins Dangerous Idea".) Dennett
reported on one study of happiness in which the highest scoring group were
quadriplegics. The "explanation" was that they were starting from a very low
base, and had long term prospects (with improving technology and all) of steady
improvement.
If this research is accurate, a rational libertarian should voluntarily give
away most of their wealth every so often to maximize happiness. The short term
hit after giving it away is more than compensated for by the long term
opportunity to rebuild from a low base. It is rather counter intuitive though.
How convincing would the research need to be for people on this list to adopt
such a strategy? What would be the economic effects (Robin?)?
-- Bernard J Hughes bernard@timedancer.com Timedancer Systems http://www.timedancer.com -- Creative Laziness at its best --
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:45 MST