Is Happiness Conservative?

James Kwak asks if Is Happiness Conservative?. Kwak looks at some happiness research which is seen as a surrogate for economic utility.

The unsurprising thing is that of satiation. Once basic needs are met, there is not much marginal benefit to material things. Kwak calls this adaption:

But you can also draw some conservative implications from the research. For one thing, a central principle of the research is adaptation: people tend to adapt to the situation they’re in. Once you have the basic necessities, if your income goes up, you quickly adapt to it, so the added income doesn’t make you happier.

The important thing to realise that we are social beings. We live in societies. We are not an aggregation of individuals each striving for own sole benefit. Kwak proposes a socialist approach to community building:

Another possible implication is that, if we want to promote happiness, government should encourage the formation and strengthening of community organizations. While this may not necessarily sound conservative today, the conception of society as composed of tightly knit local groups was historically a conservative one, while the progressive movement (formerly known as the workers’ movement) was framed much more in classically economic terms: getting people more money for fewer hours of work.

Kwak assumes that the Capitalist economy exists for the benefit of all. He does not question why communities have been broken down. The ideology of Capitalism blinds him to the atomisation of human society for Capitalist profit.

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