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b1shop comments on Be Happier - Less Wrong
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It's the same reasoning as the "avoid conspicuous consumption" lemma, and it could also be applied to education-as-status, lawncare-as-status, fashion-as-status, art-as-status or karma-as-status. Maybe the lesson could be rewritten as "Conspicuous Consumption has Costs on Others"? That seems like an unbiased reading of that study.
But I'm not even sure if I agree with that. If conspicuous consumption encourages others to become productive members of society out of envy, then it has its societal benefits.
You seem to be saying that the rules of the game of wealth-as-status are the same as those for fitness-as-status, to take one of your examples. But this is not at all clear to me. Wealth can be stolen and given away. Wealth can be amassed. Fitness is accessible to most people in a way that wealth is not.
I'd say that it is an overgeneralization of the findings.
In what way is fitness accessible to most people but wealth is not?
Make that "to most people in the developed world", then. If I want more fitness, I just have to exercise more and eat better, which the majority of people in the developed world could afford with little trouble if they wanted to. (Programs like the 5BX take less than half an hour a day -- personally I use Goodbye Couch.) If I want more wealth (and here we're talking about an amount of wealth that can buy "exceedingly expensive watches or yachts", not just a couple hundred more dollars per months) there's very little I can do to reliably achieve that.