Beyond a threshold, income and GDP growth no longer increase human happiness.

Evidence

This way of thinking about living in community flies in the face of the now taken-for-granted-notion of consumerism and enclosure-based economics that dominates our worldview, and the worldview of the “experts” who we must pay to manage the ever more complicated tasks needed (or believed to be needed) to live in a consumer culture. While we clearly need to meet basic material and social needs—food, water, health, housing, and so on—happiness is not dependent on accumulating more and more stuff. Yet we are constantly bombarded with that empty promise. Happiness is, in fact, only linked to satisfaction of material needs to a point, after which the whole principle of growth (in personal income as well as Gross Domestic Product) as the source of human happiness begins to collapse. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1765

Categorization

• XREF: Set against the book’s running critique of the development/enclosure metaphor (ch10, ch31) and of growth-centered economics. — connects to: Illich frames generous shared practices as blessings whose worth bypasses monetary value. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1756; Happiness is unmeasurable and too easily invoked to justify imposed stagnation — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 64; Bauer rejected GDP per capita statistics as misleading measures of development — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1316

Broader Connections

• Happiness is unmeasurable and too easily invoked to justify imposed stagnation #responds-to (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 64
• Bauer rejected GDP per capita statistics as misleading measures of development #complicates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1316