Because ‘how the question is interpreted’ makes comparing subjective happiness survey results hard to compare, one other way to approach the question of ‘are hunter-gatherer societies happier’ is to look at the people who move between hunter-gatherer and modern societies and study their happiness and outcomes. On the one hand, lots of hunter-gatherer peoples who switched into living in modern societies (e.g. Inuit in Greenland) have fairly bad outcomes ( to my limited knowledge, further study obviously needed here), on the other hand, few seem to opt to return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, potentially suggesting modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gather lifestyles.
Is there a significant cohort of people who’ve gone from living in modern societies and moved to live in hunter-gatherer societies? If yes, they’d be a useful group to survey. If not, is this evidence that modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gatherer ones, because no one ‘votes with their feet’ and moves from modern societies into hunter-gatherer ones?
I agree that “voting with one’s feet” is an interesting angle. Some discussion of this angle is here (search for “Certainly, the part closest to my area of expertise raises questions”).
Because ‘how the question is interpreted’ makes comparing subjective happiness survey results hard to compare, one other way to approach the question of ‘are hunter-gatherer societies happier’ is to look at the people who move between hunter-gatherer and modern societies and study their happiness and outcomes. On the one hand, lots of hunter-gatherer peoples who switched into living in modern societies (e.g. Inuit in Greenland) have fairly bad outcomes ( to my limited knowledge, further study obviously needed here), on the other hand, few seem to opt to return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, potentially suggesting modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gather lifestyles.
Is there a significant cohort of people who’ve gone from living in modern societies and moved to live in hunter-gatherer societies? If yes, they’d be a useful group to survey. If not, is this evidence that modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gatherer ones, because no one ‘votes with their feet’ and moves from modern societies into hunter-gatherer ones?
I agree that “voting with one’s feet” is an interesting angle. Some discussion of this angle is here (search for “Certainly, the part closest to my area of expertise raises questions”).