Reading Week 3

The video about whether or not rich people are happier raises a lot of interesting points. At first I was skeptical about how conclusive this data was and about the speciousness of Justin's claims. I wondered about what kinds of questions he asked, and when he asked about whether people have felt love or boredom, I was skeptical because those terms are subjective. The piece of data that convinced me was when he asked about physical pain, which is something tangible that people do not like no matter what country they live in, and when I saw that people in wealthier countries experienced less physical pain, I could see how his theory was possible because people in wealthier countries have better access to better medical care, so something like a cut or a scrape could easily be fixed with a band-aid whereas people in extremely poor countries do not necessarily have first aid kids that we find basic, so these kinds of cuts are bound to cause longer lasting pain in them. At the same time, I did not really understand the evidence against the "people in richer countries are happier" theory. I can understand the Cornell professor's theory about the antlers, about how the elk having antlers gives him an advantage in the fight, but once the other animal gets antlers, the elk does not have the advantage anymore. I don't understand how that necessarily connects to countries. Like if China and India catch up to the United States in terms of wealth, that just means that China and India would be just as happy as the United States. I don't understand how that disputes the data about richer countries being happier. Another interesting point that they brought up was about aglomoration. I agree with Justin when he made the point about people choose to immigrate from Mexico to the United States only to make themselves poorer rather than the other way around, proving that people feel they would be happier in a richer country because they would be surrounded by wealth. He also extended this point to his own personal experience when he talked about putting his daughter in a harder school where he's deliberately setting his child up to fail against her classmates so she could expose herself to smart people and learn from them. The question the data asked about whether or not people would prefer to live in a 4000 square foot house in a neighborhood where everyone else had 6000 houses or a 3000 square foot where everyone else had 2000 square foot houses proved this point.

Discussion Questions
1. If you were doing the happiness survey, what kinds of questions would you ask people? How would you ensure that these questions truly measured happiness, which is a completely subjective concept?
2. If you were asked whether you would rather make 100000 dollars a year when everyone else in your neighborhood made 150000 a year or make 800000 when everybody else made 5000000, what would you choose and why?
3. Do you feel the aglmoration theory is contradictory to the theory that richer people are happier? Why or why not?
4. What arguments would you make against the fact that richer people are happier?