happy society is disintegrating before our eyes. Depression rates rise, birth rates fall, people imagine their lives worse than their parents despite the countless miracles of digital technology (near unlimited access to knowledge, art, culture, and other minds that might make life beautiful), animosity is rising.
This is not what good society looks like, and in what seems to me an ironic joke, we fail to organize a better society, pointing toward the need to maintain "productivity", as if happiness would remove the human need for productive achievement.
There has been a failure in civic thinking: good civics encompasses both happiness AND productivity, and it should be obvious to any reader that these two things not be mutually exclusive, considering the long history of our species.
Wealth is so ineffectively distributed that in an era with the technology to eliminate material scarcity we have an increasing share of people who feel they don't have enough to provide for their happiness.