The middle class is a term that is so nebulous it might as well be meaningless. Families making 60k/year and families making 300k a year both consider themselves middle class and those are very different lifestyle qualities.
There’s plenty of research that shows people are happier when they earn more money than their coworkers. Absolute quality of life improvements don’t translate into happiness nearly as much as we’d hope.
There’s also plenty of research that shows that people’s earnings reflect how happy they are, but only up to a certain point. Different studies have different numbers for that point but it’s pretty much always above the actual median income. After that the line flattens and for some even goes down. So yeah, it’s not always a direct money = happiness but you’d have to be an idiot or intentionally obtuse to say that people wouldn’t be happier if they didn’t have to agonize over how they’ll pay their bills/save for their future.
There’s no amount of money everyone can make that’ll get us all to stop agonizing over bills. Sure, billionaires today generally don’t have that worry but that’s only because they’re richer than everyone else! If everyone was a billionaire then you’d be spending billions to pay your bills.
What would make everyone happy is to achieve post scarcity as a society. The problem with that is that we’d then simply grow in population until scarcity came back. We’re never going to have infinite resources so that will always be possible.
Capitalists, maybe. Most people would be happy with a quality of life equivalent to what the middle class currently experiences.
The middle class is a term that is so nebulous it might as well be meaningless. Families making 60k/year and families making 300k a year both consider themselves middle class and those are very different lifestyle qualities.
There’s plenty of research that shows people are happier when they earn more money than their coworkers. Absolute quality of life improvements don’t translate into happiness nearly as much as we’d hope.
There’s also plenty of research that shows that people’s earnings reflect how happy they are, but only up to a certain point. Different studies have different numbers for that point but it’s pretty much always above the actual median income. After that the line flattens and for some even goes down. So yeah, it’s not always a direct money = happiness but you’d have to be an idiot or intentionally obtuse to say that people wouldn’t be happier if they didn’t have to agonize over how they’ll pay their bills/save for their future.
There’s no amount of money everyone can make that’ll get us all to stop agonizing over bills. Sure, billionaires today generally don’t have that worry but that’s only because they’re richer than everyone else! If everyone was a billionaire then you’d be spending billions to pay your bills.
What would make everyone happy is to achieve post scarcity as a society. The problem with that is that we’d then simply grow in population until scarcity came back. We’re never going to have infinite resources so that will always be possible.
We’re already post scarcity on food, housing, and medicine. So let’s make those free.
Who is going to do all the work to make all that stuff if it’s free?
In a market economy? Government employees.
In a communist economy? People who want to, same as they did for 100,000 years before money was invented.
Government employees are going to take over the farms and grow all the food? That’s not a market economy.
Furthermore if all that stuff is free then why are people still working?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh3xPatEto
- Captain Picard