There're also some perverse incentives around happiness calculations too. When I was in college, I had a netfriend who lived in a poor rust-belt town, and her family never had enough to eat. One time she was talking about her brand new DVD player and home entertainment system, a couple days after talking about how there was no food in the house. I asked her why she'd just bought a brand new DVD player (something that, to my middle-class college existence, was an incredible luxury) when she was going hungry.

She replied that if she'd spent that money on food, she'd eat well this month but would just go hungry again next month. This way, she'd go hungry all the time, but at least she could lose herself in a movie and forget about it. There's a peculiar kind of logic to that which I can't really argue with, despite the common Internet refrain about how poor people are poor because of their own stupidity.