Scott Adams does it again. This time he’s prosing (with tongue in cheek) that, in exchange for higher taxes, the super-rich get extra privileges that don’t really have a significant impact on the rest of us.

For example, let’s say the super rich are granted the right to use the carpool lane even if no one else is in the car. They’d need special stickers on their cars so they didn’t get pulled over. It wouldn’t clog the car pool lane because there are so few super rich people, and half of them have chauffeurs, so they use the carpool lane already. Society wouldn’t notice the difference.

While I’m not expecting any of this to actually happen, it did make me think. Consider that:

1. The super-rich already get special privileges. They’re just not official ones.
2. They’re paying for them with money that they’d otherwise keep.

The idea of special rules for special people is an obvious affront to egalitarianism. However, that same egalitarianism should, in theory, be affronted by the difference in wealth. Adams’ idea is about trading one inequality for another; they should really balance each other out.

So why does the special rules suggestion offend me (and I suspect everyone else as well) so much? That is what makes me wonder.

From the blog of Scott Adams, the guy who made it rich poking fun at the repression of free will.

Before the whining begins, allow me to answer the question so many of you have on your mind: Why do I continue to blog on this same worn-out topic of free will?

The real answer is that I have no choice.

Marco replied to my previous blog post:

There are a lot of questions as to *why* these numbers are the way they are.

The article has a few statements on this:

Further analysis showed that a nation’s level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels (correlation of .62), followed by wealth (.52), and then provision of education (.51).
…
There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people. However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher GDP per captia, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.
…
We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being.
…
The frustrations of modern life, and the anxieties of the age, seem to be much less significant compared to the health, financial and educational needs in other parts of the World.

So the answers are perhaps not so mysterious: people who are materially comfortable, healthy, and well-educated are happier, but individualism also plays an important role (or else Japan would be way up on the scale).

A psychologist at the University of Leicester has published the results of a study showing the happiest countries in the world.

Canada comes in at #10. Costa Rica (my wife’s home country) is #13 (which makes the two of us average at about Ireland). The US places a respectable #23 (out of 178). 6 of the top 9 are all Scandinavian/Germanic countries (which are the usual suspects in studies like this one). The other 3 in the top 9 are the Bahamas, and (perhaps surprisingly) Bhutan and Brunei. Also surprising is that the really big names in Europe and Asia all do quite poorly, from Germany at 35 to Russia at 167. Considering the amount of wealth and/or power these countries have, I think it’s telling that they’re not performing better.

I should make one thing clear: in my opinion at least, these are really the only results that matter. Everything else we talk about (economics, politics, health, etc) is a means to the end of personal happiness.

(Via Guy Kawasaki).