July 4.

2016-07-04T16:20:19Z

July 4. I'll probably spend all this week catching up on links. I'm tired of last week's subject, so today I want to tie it off well enough that I don't have to write about politics for a while.

First, a reader sends this pdf article that shows unadjusted happiness scores on page 31, and in earlier pages it talks about how difficult it is to measure happiness even by asking people how happy they are.

On the subreddit, a reader makes an interesting argument that cultural myths have an ecology, and functional old myths have been replaced by dysfunctional new myths in the same way that monoculture crops replace a forest. It's a fun metaphor, but to buy into it I'd have to see examples of how the old myths had symbiotic interconnections like species in an ecology, and how the new myths don't.

Another link from a reader, Some stuff economists tend to leave out. The basic idea is that it's easier to model things than to model human emotions, so our whole system is based on economic models that improve the world of things while accidentally making us all unhappy.

Finally, a Hacker News comment thread on a brief article about collapsing trust in government. I think government is being scapegoated for collapsing faith in our whole way of living. But we have nothing to replace it with, only a massive squabble of whatever bad ideas and charismatic leaders are easiest to follow.

July 1.

2016-07-01T13:50:01Z

July 1. Two self-critiques on this week's subject. First, like a lot of public intellectuals, I've been framing this in terms of myth vs reality, as if the problem is that suddenly too many people are behaving mythically. But as soon as Leigh Ann said it I knew it was true: myth is the human default. To challenge ones own mythic instincts with careful observation and rational thinking is a learned skill, and one that not many people have learned in this time or any other time. So the real question is not how society veered from reality into myth, but how our cultural myths have veered from creative to destructive.

Second, I mentioned the lack of evidence that Brexit or Trump will make people's lives better -- but how do we even define that? The best place to start would be subjective happiness, but it's surprisingly hard to find data. I went on Google looking for a ranking of countries based purely on asking people how happy they are, and instead I found stuff like the World Happiness Report, which muddles up subjective happiness with numbers like GDP per capita. That seems like circular logic from people who have already decided that quality of life goes hand in hand with economic development. I mean, I still don't see evidence that Brexit will increase subjective happiness, but we shouldn't assume it will decrease happiness just because it crashes the economy.

On exactly these subjects, a reddit comment argues that zombie fiction reflects a societal death wish:

In many ways the return to a simpler life about survival in a hostile environment, is a fantasy about how to remedy alienation. The feeling of hating one's job and doing it only for the money has never been as prevalent as it is now. Even fifty years ago when many jobs appeared worse, people took a certain pride in them. Today most workers feel like their job is absolutely pointless. That's what they would like to overcome, but they don't know how, so the outlet is an apocalyptic fantasy promising the return to human nature. Imagine living as an animal, or in an ancient tribe instead, as a very natural life where issues like depression don't come up the way they do in our developed way of life.

Ran Prieur

July 4.

July 1.