pjeby comments on Missed opportunities for doing well by doing good - Less Wrong

10 Post author: multifoliaterose 21 July 2010 07:45AM

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Comment author: pjeby 22 July 2010 02:30:49AM 4 points [-]

People only know your real income from your profession and the toys you buy.

And yet, the study didn't ask people how they perceived their rank, it simply ranked them by actual income.

So again, I don't see how you can create this implication out of thin air from the study.

Heck, the study doesn't even prove that high income rank creates happiness - it could just as easily be that the happiest people within a peer group will also tend towards the highest income.

Comment deleted 22 July 2010 12:19:46PM [-]
Comment author: pjeby 22 July 2010 02:58:41PM 3 points [-]

But that combined with the empirical fact that rich people do buy things that make it obvious how rich they are

Wrong. People who want other people to think they're rich engage in conspicuous consumption. Actual rich people (at least first-generation rich), not so much.

For example, you could give people a $1,000,000 income but stipulate that they had to give it all away to charities of their choice, and make it near-impossible for them to reliably tell anyone that they had done this.

That would be quite useless, if you haven't first determined whether it's relative happiness increasing relative income, or vice versa.

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