Of course, but wealth production and happiness certainly trade off against one another, don't they? E.g. if corporations get their employees to be more productive, those employees will (likely) produce more wealth and be less happy.

You could imagine a production-possibility frontier representing the maximum levels of economic growth and happiness that are achievable. In some cases, taking steps to increase economic growth will also incidentally increase happiness. (E.g. if your employees are working 80-hour weeks, decreasing the number of hours they work will make them both more productive and more happy.) But it seems unlikely that the societal configuration that's optimal for economic growth and the societal configuration that's optimal for current happiness are the exact same societal configuration.

An argument for optimizing for economic growth, possibly at the expense of current happiness, goes something like: economic growth tends to be exponential, and pushing even harder for it will probably increase the multiplier in the exponent, so the returns you get for optimizing for it will snowball exponentially. And it's easy to see how these returns could trivially be converted in to happiness later on if the growth takes the form of automating the heck out of everything.

Of course, economic growth isn't obviously good. I'm definitely interested in whether economic growth is a net positive or negative, because knowing this would influence a lot of my everyday life decisions. For example, is it a bad idea to make an edit improving Wikipedia?

We already have MANY times enough spare wealth for no-one in the world to starve, yet somehow people still do.

Sure, but it seems likely that switching to an economic system where everyone was guaranteed food and shelter would significantly hamper economic growth. BTW, I recommend this tangentially related article.

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