He makes three interesting points. (Pointer from Jason Collins)
I note many writers I otherwise admire, usually libertarian leaning, are quite averse to the Easterlin conclusion, thinking it will lead us to adopt a luddite policies because growth would not matter in such a world
I am one of those libertarian writers who is averse to happiness research, but my aversion holds regardless of the conclusions reached. Happiness research embodies the claim that you, the researcher (I am not referring here to Falkenstein), can know more than me, the subject, about what gives me happiness. I believe that claim is false. Further, from a libertarian perspective, I believe that claim almost surely will lead you to devalue my liberty.
When an economist tells you a symmetric ovoid contains a highly significant trend via the power of statistics, don’t believe them: real effects pass the ocular test of statistical significance (ie, it should look like a pattern).
See his charts to understand his point. Putting Falkenstein’s point in more colloquial language, I would say that when the data consists of a blob of points, just because the computer can draw a line of best fit does not mean that you have demonstrated the existence of a meaningful linear relationship.
evolution favors a relative utility function as opposed to the standard absolute utility function, and the evidence for this is found in ethology, anthropology, and neurology. Economists from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and even Keynes focused on status, the societal relative position, as a motivating force in individual lives
AND – Why is happiness presumed to be the relevent goal?
The Real Goal, set by various selection forces internal and external to the person (including but not limited to Natural Selection) is to WIN. If you have children who survive to reproduce, you are in one sense a winner, no matter how miserable your life is. (And having no genetic children of my own, I am in this sense a loser, regardless of how generally wonderful my life is.)
Likewise, humans have evolved to seek various sorts of status – so getting status can be winning.
Humans (at least some of us) have evolved to seek out various sorts of challenges – so for at least some people seeking and overcoming various challenges is winning.
The people I dislike the most, regard with the most caution, are the ones who talk about what I do or do not “need”, who want to “make me happy”, or who want to “keep me safe” – these are all covers for “we want to control you in some way”