>Brad, does that mean we're thirty times happier >than our ancestors?(posted 8758 days ago)Doug
Nope.
For one thing, such a measured increase in material wealth makes sense for those of us in the middle (or upper) class in the industrial core only: the invention of the jet airplane adds to your quality of life only if you're rich enough to take plane flights.
For another, happiness is not that closely related to wealth, as Richard Easterlin keeps on arguing.
On the other hand, suppose you threatened to take me back in time and have me born not in 1960 but in 1860. I would pay everything I have to avoid it, for I would be dead of pneumonia at the age of 5...
And I, at least, cannot think of anyone in 1900 whom I would regard as being as well-off in a material-welfare sense as I am today...
Contributed by Brad DeLong (delong@econ.berkeley.edu) on March 17, 2000.