Humans are social animals. One of the primary drives of most social animals is to get as high up in the status/dominance hierarchy as possible, since this improves an organism's access to mates. Status and dominance are relative to other members of the species and, thus, unrelated to the absolute level of an organism's access to food and other resources.
Except that pretty much no social animal with dominance hierarchy has a ranking function as simple as "status=mates". Most animals track the cost(e.g. more stress, higher metabolic rate) of high status vs the rewards. Which means that in an environment of abundance, the cost often exceeds the rewards.
There's also the phenomenon of reverse hierarchies (essentially, lower ranking members band together to keep anybody from dominating them). Which has at the very least been proposed as an explanation for altruistic behavior in humans, too.
And then there's the point that happiness is not related to status, or access to mates, or even access to resources beyond a certain point.
The world's a bit more complicated than ev. psych suggests.
Of course, the relation is not perfect because there are probably more than half a dozen other major things that can go wrong; most prominently disease, relationship and work situation.
I could imagine that dissatisfaction due to disease also largely comes from comparison with others. If everybody is healthier, then more minor diseases have a stronger negative effect on life satisfaction; so not much is gained.
Work satisfaction might have improved, but the hedonic treadmill probably also diminishes the returns in that case.
I could imagine that relationship satisfaction has decreased with the loss of the classical gender roles and culture regulating all of that. E.g. it is known that premarital promiscuity results in decreased marriage satisfaction:
> Which means that in an environment of abundance, the cost often exceeds the rewards.
The problem is that environments of abundance basically do not exist, because the population of a species quickly grows to consume any excess. The situation that humans in the developed world face is novel. We are not evolved to deal with abundance because abundance has only ever occurred during the brief gap between when we invented a new technology and when the population has expanded to fill the new, larger ecological niche which that technology enabled.
Uh, yes, they do exist. The example of human cultures that comes to mind are Melanesians which IIRC had relative abundance of natural resources. In the animal kingdom, Bonobos are probably the prime example.
And IIRC, in both cases the reaction to abundance wasn't overpopulation, but the development of a sharing trait. (Because it reduces the cost incurred by unnecessary competition)
In the case of Melanesians, they were at some point taken over by relatively resource-poor Polynesians. (Inequality will cause trouble). Bonobos escaped that problem since they have no competitors in their natural habitat, and they evolved a somewhat interesting mechanism to cope with any of the smaller conflicts that might pop up. (E.g. access to favorite food instead of just normal food). If you're not familiar with it, I recommend reading up on it :)
I would love to read a link about the Melanesians if you have one.
The only way a population doesn't expand to consume available resources is if there is something else which is controlling population growth. For many species, that would be predation. But humans are an apex species, so that's not a factor.
Disease is another possibility. The bubonic plague kept European populations below the malthusian limit for a long time in Europe. But not long enough to really have an effect on our evolved traits. Generally speaking, it's difficult for disease to be a significant problem without agriculture and the population density that it allows. But the consensus is that people who lived in agricultural societies pretty much universally had poor diets (ie, they were living at the Malthusian limit).
The other major factor that would prevent human populations from reaching the Malthusian limit is violence. But violence is usually committed for the purpose of increasing or maintaining status. Either by killing competitors within the tribe or by stealing women and resources from other tribes.
"get as high up in the status/dominance hierarchy as possible,"
I don't think that's true. A lot of people are OK with getting high enough to have a life they view as decent. Only very few want to get as high as possible.
This argument I see to often really ignores the strength of the power law that exists in the US and other countries. In the Nordic states for example, there is still a power law but people are much happier than here because the power law is much weaker. People in the US have a severe lack of access to basic needs and in fact their access to basic needs has eroded in the last few decades comparatively.
Humans are also security focused rational animals, and if we can believe that there really is enough for us and no one will take it away, then happiness might be for all. Perhaps UBI will make us all happy
> if we can believe that there really is enough for us
What I am saying is that humans are not wired for the concept of "enough".
We have already had something similar to UBI in the form of fossil fuels and the abundant energy they provide, which have tremendously lowered the cost of the bare essentials in the developed world in the last 100 years. You can go into any super market in the US and buy a days worth of calories for about $3. And then you can go into a Walmart and buy a complete wardrobe for about $200. If you want to get crazy and provide yourself with the utter luxury of gasoline powered personal transportation (not a thing available to any human being until about 100 years ago), you can buy a pretty good car on Craigslist for about $1000.
But rather than use the excess provided by cheap and abundant energy to just chill and enjoy the good times, all I see is people (myself included :P) tripping over themselves to buy nicer clothes, and nicer car, or a house in a nicer neighborhood. So I'm having a hard time seeing how people will act differently with UBI. That said, I think something like UBI will be necessary to keep the masses from revolting against the rich. I just don't see it bringing universal happiness.
Star Trek is interesting to consider. Most see it as a sort of utopia, one that people could only dream of. And it's certainly portrayed as such. Yet "poor" is not really a measure of what you have, but a measure of what you don't have. In our Star Trek society imagine the state of mind and affairs for the hoards of Star Fleet officers unable to find promotion and instead left to meaningless toil while somebody else calls all the shots.
Well actually that's hardly even touching on the issue. Consider those that can't even get into Star Fleet! There'd be entire movements from these "poor" individuals indignant at the inequities in society. Star Trek rarely tackled this issue as it was always intended to be an optimistic, not necessarily realistic, view of the future. However, it did indirectly delve into these issues in one episode - Tapestry. A brief clip of it. [1] A longer cut of the ending scene there. [2]
UBI will make us a huge proportion of people serfs unless it is accompanied by wealth transfer. It is at best a temporary (on the order of 100-200 years) solution.
I agree, I just don’t think it’s as much of a silver bullet as people want it to be. It’s only a first step in moving towards post-scarcity, not the final one
