Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness

Cassie Pritchard, on Twitter:I get why so many liberals are fundamentally disdainful of democracy these days—it’s because liberalism is exhausted. It’s out of answers. Liberalism won, it delivered the world it promised, and people still aren’t content. They’re not satisfied. So the people must be wrong. We are unfathomably richer than our ancestors. Output per capita in America today is on the order of 900 times greater than before the invention of agriculture, about ~225 times higher than in 1 CE, and about the same (225 times) higher than Europe in 1000 CE. If measurable productivity were really the greatest object of human society, then we shouldn’t just be a little bit happier than people in the distant (or even recent!) past—we should be ecstatic. We should already be living in a utopian age of overwhelming contentment. We should be currently experiencing a kind of paradise. The Kingdom of Heaven, as liberalism conceives of it, has already been made real on Earth. We are living…