Nornagest comments on How to Be Happy - Less Wrong

129 Post author: lukeprog 17 March 2011 07:22AM

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Comment author: Nornagest 17 March 2011 10:02:54PM *  2 points [-]

The wealth/happiness mapping has the disadvantage of being easily politicized, since it bears directly on the utilitarian calculations informing optimal tax rates. I only know of one nation that explicitly claims to optimize happiness, but I'd be surprised if all the drivers of variability in the data were entirely unbiased; certainly some related metrics seem to be intended primarily as normative rather than descriptive.