By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024.
Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the oppor...
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inequality
How great is the U.S., really?
This piece was coauthored with Travis Manuel. This is a cross-post from the Clearer Thinking blog.
According to YouGov polling, 41% of people in the United States think that it is the greatest country in the world. Others see the U.S. as a place full of arrogance, violence, and inequality. So, what's the truth?
The truth is that there isn't a single notion of what makes something the "best." To explore how great (or not) America is, we'll start by looking at the question from mu...
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You can’t buy back time once you’ve spent it
There's a deep and surprising sense in which money can't be "wasted" from a bird's eye perspective - only resources and people's time can be wasted.
If someone "wastes" $100, someone else now has $100 extra to spend. Even burning bills deflates the currency, making other bills more valuable.
But people's time genuinely can be wasted. The tragedy of someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a yacht is not the dollars spent but the enormous quantity of people's time and all ...
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Hypothesis about America: people are coming to realize society is messed up
I've been coming to think that the following hypothesis may be true about America:
Increasingly, people in the U.S. are concluding that society is really F'd up. But the reasons are subtle, hidden, and complex, so each group picks their favorite simple enemy to blame. Problems go unfixed.
Points in favor of the claim that people are increasingly coming to this realization:
1. This helps explain Trump's election in 2016. Many rural Republicans and disaffected independents believed s...
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