I’d rather trust individuals to make their own purchasing decisions, and let the market experiment and figure out what is best, than reorganize society on non-market principles and let a committee determine what people should and should not want.

Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Finding happiness and purpose? I don’t need an academic paper to tell me happiness is difficult to attain.

> Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Finding happiness and purpose?

If this involves things like burning absurd amounts of fossil fuels and shoving new phones down our throat every year, it is absolutely our shared problem that you are bad at allocating resources.

Edit: my → our shared

>> Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges?

Sure.

But if people don't really know what makes them happy, maybe they'll buy a lot of useless stuff ?

Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy? I mean yeah, there's a lot of tragic and unhappy people out there, but is it enough that we need to question the nature of our society?

I, and most people I know, are pretty happy. Not every choice I make turns out well, but at least it's my choice and I accept the consequences. There are a few chemically depressed people in my social circle, but it's pretty clear to me that they would be depressed no matter how you reorganize society.

>> Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy?

Decision and experience: why don't we choose what makes us happy?

""Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective well-being and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioral-decision theory. In particular, we examine many, somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that underlies popular support for consumer sovereignty and other forms of autonomy in decision-making (e.g. marriage choice), namely, the assumption that people are able to make choices in their own best interests. "

http://mail.im.tku.edu.tw/~myday/teaching/1001/SMM/S/1001SMM...

>> I mean yeah, there's a lot of tragic and unhappy people out there, but is it enough that we need to question the nature of our society?

There's really a lot of unnecessary suffering, and also unrealized potential.

And is the nature of our society so sacred that it's beyond questioning ?

Because it's not a smart move, historically speaking.

Speaking historically, we seem to have a rather large number of examples where societies were reorganized to take away individual decisionmaking (ostensibly for their own good) and they've all gone rather horribly.

BTW, that paper didn't have any numbers in it, and didn't really help answer the question "Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy?" The biases it enumerated are I am sure common, but do they dominate the lives of the majority of people? I am doubtful, especially if the proposal is "we will take away all your troubles, just let us make all your major life decisions for you (including, almost always, the ability to revoke the deal)".

I suppose that educating people, especially helping the understand themselves better, is key here.

Letting, or expeting, someone else to make you deeply happy when you don't know what would be it yourself leads to the agency problem. That is, how that someone else knows what your best.interest is, and why observe it.

People have other motives than their own happiness.