The Guardian offers a reader question - “Were people happier in the good old days? And when was that?”
To which the correct answer comes in two parts. The first being the good old days - that’s right now. This moment, this instant. We’re unsure of what the future is going to be although we can assume, with pretty good odds, that it will continue to improve. As long as we don’t elect those who will offer us Venezuela, or Zimbabwe, as a societal pathway. Compared to the past though it is now which is good.
We’re richer, live longer lives, have more choices, are, in general, just the generation of our species living highest upon the hog. At levels quite literally beyond the dreams or imagination of those significantly before us.
Just the one example, given the stories about those Canadian First Nations schools in the current news. The claim is of a 3% or so death rate among the pupils. Dependent upon how we count - infant deaths or all youth or just school age - that’s around the current global rate, the UK rate in the year of this specific author’s birth or possibly well under one tenth of the global historical rate.
It is precisely because things have got so much better that those historical numbers currently shock.
The good old days are now.
However, happier is more complex, one correspondent grasping this point:
People had lower expectations and were less bombarded with images of all the other lives they could be aspiring to.
The nub here is that second important lesson of economics, there are always opportunity costs. The true price of something is what is given up to get it. If we have more choices then the price of gaining any one of them is giving up many more of those alternatives.
This is why all those surveys showing that female - self-reported - happiness has been declining to standard male levels over recent decades. That wholly righteous economic and social liberation of women has led to greater choice and thus higher opportunity costs. As women gain those same choices as men therefore happiness rates converge.
There are those who take this to mean that society should regress, to where those opportunity costs are lower and therefore we would be happier. The correct answer to which is that 50% child mortality rates did not in fact make people happier.
We’ll take the vague unease of having so many choices over parents having to bury half their children, thank you very much, we really do think we’re all truly happier this way around.