Re: Re: Re: Pritchard On Liberal Happiness

In early July, Cassie Pritchard argued on Twitter that liberalism had failed; it bet the farm on economic progress making people happier, but although it delivered impressive economic progress, happiness had failed to follow.In late July, I countered that Pritchard had made a mistake by comparing happiness to income, when the literature instead supports a correlation of happiness with log(income). Add the log term, and most happiness-income relationships reappear, and liberalism goes back to looking pretty good.Last week, Pritchard responded on her Substack. I don’t have the interest to give this the full treatment it requires, but she deserves some response, so I’ll make a few points.Pritchard argues that the effect of income on happiness, though real, is small:In short, a correlation does exist, and it’s plausibly causal. But it’s pretty small.How small? Well, Alexander cites another article from Killingsworth that gives us the correlation across the entire dataset of individual…