especially the parts where they explain > exactly the question about why people would make that transition when it > actually reduced how happy they were. > > Perhaps because happiness is intangible and hard to measure. I am hugely skeptical of the self-reported model of measuring happiness, which is what most current tests use.
As far as transitioning to new ways, that is an ongoing debate, isn’t it. The problem is that the effects of such transition are visible in retrospect. I doubt that the agrarian transition happened with any sense of self-examination. Today, it is what social media is doing to our minds. Sherry Turkle paints a bleak picture. But the larger debate, at least in India, is the capitalist/market model (should we let walmart enter and destroy the kirana stores; economies of scale versus….well, everything else). While I am a reluctant convert to the capitalist model (data about poverty and corruption reducing as GDP increases make it hard not to become one), I find that a lot of areas fall through the cracks with the market-model (education and environment being two). Yesterday, at ulsoor market, I found a shuttered shop with the sign, “Closed for 15 days. Gone to native place.” Wish I had taken a photo of it. It was in that bright “Ramar blue” that Indians so love (again the choice of that paint color is inexplicable to me— is it because it is cheap or an aesthetic choice). My two cents: Markets improve efficiency but reduce humanity. Or insert your choice of transition— agrarian model, industrial revolution, tech, whatever. Since we are not going back, the question then becomes what to preserve from the ‘old ways,’ and how to recognize and preserve them.
