Poverty in developed countries may never be overcome, simply because the rich no longer … need the poor to get rich. … The misfortune of being exploited has been succeeded by the still worse misfortune of no longer being exploitable.
Tag Archive: happiness
Bruckner on the good life, money, and the unequal world of work
It’s better not to have children
Children rarely make a net contribution to a parent’s (self-assessed) levels of happiness (and remember, people tend to overestimate their happiness levels). In anonymous surveys, most parents report regretting having children. Seventy percent of people would not have had children if they knew what it would be like
Links: Vampire facelifts/Happiness/Neuroenhancers/Climate change/…
‘Vampire Face-Lifts’: Smooth at First Bite (NYT)
Plumping out nasiolabial folds with your own blood platelets. Not tested. Not FDA approved. “This is another gimmick that people are using to make themselves stand out on the Internet in a real dog-eat-dog part of medicine.”
The Corporate Pursuit of Happiness (Fast Company)
Stanford business school teaches students the virtues of marketing products with the promise of happiness. Happiness is just “another commodity deployed to sell something.”
The duty to be happy
By the duty to be happy, I thus refer to the ideology peculiar to the second half of the twentieth century that urges us to evaluate everything in terms of pleasure and displeasure, a summons to a euphoria that makes those who do not respond to it ashamed or uneasy. A dual postulate: on the one hand, we have to make the most of our lives; on the other, we have to be sorry and punish ourselves if we don’t succeed in doing so. This is a perversion of a very beautiful idea: that everyone has a right to control his own destiny and to improve his life. How did a liberating principle of the enlightenment, the right to happiness, get transformed into a dogma, a collective catechism?
The unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy
Kristina describes Victoria as “Possibly the most annoyingly loud, optimistic, cheerful person you will ever encounter. With an incredibly high-pitched, overly exaggerated Southern accent and a specialty in church music, she is the poster child for America.” Fortunately, I missed the episode of American Idol on which Victoria appeared and was eliminated.
Misc Links 1/19/11
Cancer breakthrough — or nightmare? (CNN)
A simple blood test that detects minute quantities of cancer cells in the blood “could just as easily start a cancer epidemic. … The conventional wisdom is people either have a disease or they do not. But, in fact, there are a lot of people somewhere in between.” H. Gilbert Welch on overdiagnosis.
Intelligence and physical attractiveness (Science Direct)
If women prefer intelligent men because they have higher incomes and status, and if men prefer physically attractive females, eventually the two traits merge. Study finds physically attractive people are more intelligent.
Misc Links 12/29/10
‘Death panels’ alive — and that’s good news for all of us (MSNBC)
“If Terri Schiavo taught us anything … “ By noted bioethicist Arthur Caplan (12/29)
Health care economics and the relationship between doctor and patient (KevinMD)
What’s wrong with the way medicine is practiced? By a pediatrician who decided to quit her practice (12/29)
Are married people happier? Are parents?
These research findings, of course, fly in the face of our cultural dogma that proclaims it impossible for people to achieve an emotionally fulfilling and healthy life unless they become parents. And that’s a problem, because the vast majority of American men and women eventually have children, yet conditions in our society make it nearly impossible for them to reap all the emotional benefits of doing so.
This mess we’re in – Part 2
Source: Moore’s Lore Part one of this post noted Paul Krugman’s take on the health care legislative process and the political practice of soliciting money in exchange for votes. Beneath these surface issues, however, there’s a deeper sense of disillusion with 20th century progress and with a lack of purpose to modern life. We may…
