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Tuesday, 01 May 2007 18:03 |
 | | Carl S. Milsted, Jr. |
Does money buy happiness?
The communitarians say no, or, at least, they say that additional money beyond a rather low threshold of basic needs buys very little. More to the point, they say the tremendous increase in national income has bought very little happiness compared to the happiness lost because of a breakdown of our communities. And I tend to agree with them.
However, I would question how tremendous the growth in per-person
income really is. Sure, as measured by GDP divided by population,
people are way wealthier than they were one or more generations ago. We
can see this wealth all around us: faster computers, bigger houses,
SUVs instead of automobiles, better air conditioning, more restaurants,
more tropical fruit, less smog, etc.
All this is true, but we must not be bedazzled by the numbers. Not all
is linear. And there are hidden losses of effective income that donít
show up in the GDP figures.
Take computers, for instance. My 2.4 GHz computer has a clock speed 40
times faster than my first Wintel box, a 60 MHz Pentium. However, the
programs I use do not run 40 times faster. Boot-up time is similar.
Microsoft Word runs maybe two or three times faster. Internet surfing
is definitely faster, but it is nowhere near the 5 megabits per second
advertised by my cable company. It can still take half a minute to
resolve an IP address ó a time comparable to the dialup days.
There are many technical reasons for these disappointments. Spam clogs
the Internet. Virus-protection software uses up the CPU. A modern CPU
has a much longer pipeline (think: having an assembly line for doing
math) than an old Pentium; when operation B depends on the result of
operation A, we have to wait for this longer pipeline to clear.
(Imagine a car assembly line where you sometimes have to wait for a car
to finish before starting the next car.) Finally, modern software is
much more loosely written. Much of the speed of modern processors is
wasted running poorly optimized code.
I apologize for getting so technical, but sometimes it requires a bit
of digging deeper to compare the effective income of different eras.
And this pattern holds for many areas of the economy.
Take cars. They last longer, accelerate faster and get better mileage.
However, they are also smaller, and much harder to repair. Once upon a
time you could get a station wagon that carried as much as a modern
large SUV. And that station wagon handled much better: smoother ride,
quieter, and no roll-over risk.
Or take food. Calories are way up. Eating out is commonplace. Tropical
fruits are abundant at temperate-zone grocery stores. Fresh lobster is
available a thousand miles from Maine. On the other hand, most of the
produce is overly hybridized and raised on chemicals. You have to go to
a farmerís market or grow your own if you want a real tomato. I havenít
tasted a real peach in years. (Remember real peaches ó those fruits
with fuzz on the outside, red fiber around the seed, and real taste?)
Much of the salmon is farm raised, with nutritional characteristics far
different from the wild variety. The conditions under which food
animals are raised are not polite dinner conversation. That foamy
product referred to as ìbreadî bears scant resemblance to what people
once baked for themselves. And donít get me started about margarine vs.
old-fashioned butter ...
I could go on, but letís go back to bread. Once upon a time, most
Americans baked their own bread. It was fresh, with no preservatives,
and tasted wonderful ó and thatís before the fresh butter was added.
The same goes with most baked goods. Itís pathetic what often passes
for a cake or cookie these days. In general, a much larger fraction of
production was done at home than today, and the quality was usually far
higher than what lies on most store shelves.
And this is a major problem with using GDP to measure national
prosperity. GDP measures money. If Couple A opts for a single-income
lifestyle with one spouse doing lots of production at home, such as
cooking, while Couple B opts for a two-income lifestyle, with less home
production and more purchased services such as eating out, Couple B
contributes considerably more to GDP. But Couple B may not be more
prosperous. You have to go to a fairly expensive restaurant to match
the quality of food made from scratch with ingredients from the local
farmerís market. And it takes very expensive daycare to match the
quality of child rearing possible by a stay-at-home parent.
To properly use income figures between eras, we would need to estimate
the monetary value of products and services made at home. And to
compare accurately, we would need to value those products to comparable
products on the market today. Yesterdayís garden produce should be
measured against todayís organic market. Yesterdayís homemade food
should be measured against the fresh made products at organic grocery
stores. Home child rearing should be compared to modern daycare
facilities which have a very high staff to child ratio.
Donít get me wrong; I am not trying to play grumpy old man here.
National prosperity has increased. In some areas the level of
prosperity has increased tremendously: number of television channels,
quality of television picture, quality of care for the mentally
retarded, prevalence of air conditioning, and much more. But there are
areas where prosperity has decreased, where many have forsaken quality
for economy.
So when asking about the effect of wealth on happiness, we do need to
be careful when measuring wealth. And this applies to personal
decisions as well as for policymaking. If that shiny new car and high
definition television arenít buying you the happiness you expected,
look carefully at what you have scrimped on to afford these modern
goodies.
ï
Carl S. Milsted Jr., former chairman of the Libertarian Party of
Buncombe County, may be contacted at cmilsted-at-holisticpolitics.org.
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