Manda gets serious

The following are some quotations from Bill McKibben's book "Deep Economy"


'The economist Richard Layard, in his pathbreaking book Happiness, lays out the matter almost as an equation. "Both income and companionship have declining marginal returns," he says. The evidence shows that "increases in income produce large hedonic gains in developing countries," small and variable gains in Europe, and, "at least over a fifty-year post-war period, negative gains in the United States." Community follows precisely the opposite pattern: increased companionship "yields more happiness in individualistic societies, where it is scarce, than in collectivist societies, where it is abundant." What this means is: if you are a poor person in China, you have plenty of friends and family around all the time; perhaps there are five people living in your room. Adding a sixth doesn't make you much happier. But adding enough money that all five of you can eat some meat from time to time pleases you greatly. By contrast, if you live in a suburban American home, buying another coffeemaker adds very little to your quantity of happiness--indeed, trying to figure out where to store it, or wondering whether you picked the perfect model, may decrease your total pleasure. But since you live two people to an acre, a new friend, a new connection, is a big deal indeed. We have a surplus of individualism and a deficit of companionship, and so the second becomes more valuable.'
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'Of course, it's obvious to most of us that having friends is better than not; but the data show that for people in the rich world, having connections with others is much better than having more money....It's not so hard, then, to figure out why happiness has declined here even as wealth has grown.'
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'When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose works on "flow" helped launch the study of human satisfaction, studied dozens of activites to see what actually made Americans happy, he found that volunteer work of all kinds generated "high levels of joy, exceeded only by dancing."...This sounds silly and soft-headed to some of us, but only because we've so internalized the economist's idea of the human being as a self-contained want-machine bent on "maximizing utility." Think about your own life: which moments mattered most?'
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'The knowledge that you matter to others is a kind of security that no money can purchase.'