Quote: Original post by LessBread
I see, so Kahneman's metaphysical findings are superior to his empirical findings.

How would he explain this: Costa Rica is world's greenest, happiest country

It was a study of americans. There is clearly cultural significance involved in the results (see your own link). Everybody wants to be rich and "have stuff" in the US. Down south, people are just happy to be alive and have family. The poorest people I've ever met (in the DR) were also the happiest.

Comparitevly, the poorest people I've met in the US seemed on the whole to be miserable.

I think the first thing he'd likely say is that that "happiness" is the remembered happiness more so than the experiental one. I think it fits with the colonoscopy example, where when asked how the procedure was, the happier patient was the one who had the longest stretch of "no pain" towards the end of the procedure, even though that patient had experienced a higher amount of total pain during the procedure. One conclusion of that experiment was that it may be wise to add a default stretch of a couple of minutes of relatively painless time to the end of each procedure. That's not to say that the experienced happiness of Costa Ricans couldn't be number one as well.

As to my personal evaluation of his findings: My income just went down another 20% in the last hour (across-the-board paycut). I'm definitely less happy right now than I was before.

A 20% pay cut? Ouch!

20% is huge. My pay has remained stable over the last year, but the size of the department I work for has gone from nine down to five; I am definitely less happy as a result of having way too much work and not being able to dedicate time to tasks to ensure quality. I am not able to do what I am good at, because I am dealing with overflow work from staff that have been cut. I have a feeling those in charge did not read Layoffs are Bad for Business (Newsweek).

For me, happiness comes from feeling productive and satisfied that what I am producing (Be it a service, a piece of code, a process, a relationship with a vendor etc.) is representative of the quality I expect from myself. The money is irrelevant, as long as I make enough to afford food+booze+rent and can afford to see live music once in a while, get out to the movie theater, etc. I'd be happier making less money, if I could actually spend time working on training programs and documentation. Instead I'm inundated with the minutiae of the departed - shoehorned into responsibilities because I was a warm body, not because it was a good fit.