If I'm a roofer living in a working class neighborhood, I'm not measuring my status against super-rich CEOs or Hollywood superstars, I'm looking at how my relatives, neighbors, friends, associates, and fellow roofers are doing.
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...happiness as felicity contains multitudes: a sweet and humble sense of well-being that comes from productive labor in harmony with one's nature and the world, mixed with gratitude for one's good fortune and satisfaction at being able to share the fruits of one's labor.
When Thomas Jefferson penned the Mighty Declaration, happiness was more than "being in the zone" or an internal state that accompanies smiling and laughing. Happiness was frickin' virtuous! Happiness was akin to felicity, a sense of wellbeing that comes from fruitful labor in harmony with the world.
Rational Choice Theory (RCT) is not a theory about human nature. It's an idealized model that helps economists and political scientists make hypotheses and predictions..."Rational" doesn't mean uninfluenced by "desires, novelty, status" or what have you. It means choosing actions that somehow help achieve goals
...American adults read, on average, 10-15 minutes a day - not counting perusing posts on social media, which probably falls under the category "using the computer for leisure". Of course, "on average"covers a lot of variation, from the non-readers to occasional binge readers to voracious readers.
Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.” - Google CEO Sundar Pichai
It doesn't take much to trigger the SC blues: basically you reach a threshold of unfavorable self-comparison and bam! Perhaps the SC blues is subject to a dose effect: the misery of social comparison doesn't keep ramping up with exposure to ever more dazzling people.
"Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d _ 0.93) on the Things–People dimension."
- Su, Rounds and Armstrong (2009) Men and things, women and people: A meta-analysis of sex differences in interests.
That biology influences personality isn't saying personality is fixed or that biology has a bigger effect than other types of influence. Predispositions can be minimized, neutralized or reversed. Personal experience, socialization, and workplace culture are incredibly important. No one is denying that.
...the Diversity Memo's author says that, on average, women are more open, people-oriented, gregarious, anxious, and agreeable than men and men are more thing-oriented, systemizing, assertive, and status-driven. He further notes that biology accounts only partly for these gender differences, many of which are small, and there is considerable overlap between men and women.
Recently a Google engineer was fired for writing a very long memo about gender differences and its implications for company diversity policy. There was an uproar and he got fired. This post addresses a single word in that memo: neuroticism.
Another sense of happiness is about experiencing positive emotions. Gallup has a survey for that too – and it seems that experiencing positive emotions and being satisfied with life don't necessarily go together: country rankings are completely different.
Arguments against the Deserving Rich:
- Retaining wealth is undeserved when others are in need.
- Most wealth is acquired through exploitation and force.
- Even if ability and hard work generate wealth, luck is the ultimate cause because a person's wealth-producing qualities are a product of favorable circumstances.
- Lots of hard-working people remain poor.
- Lots of people get rich because of connections or lucky breaks.
- Size matters. No one deserves to be filthy rich.
Assuming some degree of inequality is compatible with the principle of fairness, on what basis would some people deserve more than others? In surveys and lab studies, participants have generally considered it fair to reward ability, effort, and moral behavior with more stuff. But when people are presented with hypothetical scenarios of economic good fortune, they're fine with "brute luck" as a source of riches. No begrudging the lottery winner.
Here's a possible variation on the Fat Man version: A trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you might be able to stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only chance to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge, hopefully onto the track, killing him for sure to possibly save five. Should you proceed?
Moral indignation has served us well throughout the evolution of our species, keeping free-riders and rule-breakers in check, maintaining group cohesion, helping us reproduce and thrive. It is deeply embedded in our nature. Yet moral indignation is a response tendency that gets us into all sorts of trouble. Like love of sweets, it is a natural inclination to be managed and restrained.
...dissent potentiates a process that may lead us closer to the truth of things. Even when dissent is stupid and wrong-headed, it can make you think.
Here we have the conflict between a moral imperative of treating people as ends in themselves and a pragmatic imperative of treating people as means to an end. But what if the pragmatic end is also a moral good?
For some people, the mere possibility of achieving a goal matters more than favorable opportunities. A chance, not necessarily a good chance.
Given the personal pain exacted by goal failure, we develop "optimization heuristics" to increase the likelihood of success and provide a psychological cushion for when we fail. One heuristic is to maintain sufficient goal diversity to insure a sense of control, optimism, and competency in at least a few life domains. So if we suck at x, at least we know we're good at y.