Impact of capitalism on worthwhile lives and on happiness

Nowadays there are many people who discuss that under capitalism, there is disproportionate
distribution of income or wealth under capitalism system, firms can gain monopoly power and
exploit consumers, or high prices, so it leads to worthless lives. However, they are reluctant to
see other side of capitalism. With the assistance of the capitalism, people can increase standards
of living by innovation, free market opportunities, competition, lack of government intervention,
however, higher standards of living especially have negative impacts on the happiness of society.
Capitalism encourages competition and innovation and they make people’s life easier. Under
other systems, there might be entrepreneurs in which government’s prevention restricts them to
start a technology, to earn money, or to increase the living standard for the whole society. But
businesspeople do not need to get permission to produce valuable products under capitalism.
They only need money and passion for development to start their work and if they do not have
enough money, it can be borrowed from the government, because government supports them.
Limited government intervention permits to have competition among the owners of the firms and
competition has special effect for citizens to have worthwhile lives. Younkins (2002) puts
forward that successful competitors compete with one another in order to associate more
effectively with the buyers who demand products and services and this competition encourages
innovation and the development of new and better products and services. For example, if one
restaurant does not serve to people well, people will go to another restaurant, so second
restaurant will gain much because it cooperates with customers very well. Under capitalism, the
individual introduces technology and improves productivity for his or her own profit or for the
benefit of society, at least it increases standards of living rapidly. According to economist
Baumol (2002, p. 6) “the spread of new technology, which in other economies has proceeded at
stately pace, often requiring decades or even centuries, under capitalism is speeded up
remarkably”. So, with the help of innovation, it can be observed that capitalist regimes develop
faster than any other regimes and development in every nation leads to worthwhile lives.
Higher standards of living in overall have negative effect on people’s happiness. Higher
standards of living obviously means higher incomes for citizens. Within a country, satisfaction of
individuals with their lives varies with their level of income. Generally, rich people are happier
than poorer ones and riches take advantage of improvements or innovations easily. However, this
happiness ends because of people’s expectations. Harari (2014) explains that people’s happiness
is based on their expectations, not on their real conditions. When they get more, their
expectations rise too and after some time, even striking improvements do not have positive
impact on people’s happiness. Also, standard of living refers to the material basis of well-being,
which is reflected in a person's consumption level. Thus, higher standard of living of society is
determined by their access to goods or services. This means people’s power of getting food,
water, housing, education, health care, transportation, clothing, or these kinds of necessary
needs. Because of high standards of living, people have many choices to buy new goods or
services and, in most situations, many choices do not bring happiness to the people. “Thus, it
seems that as society grows wealthier and people become freer to do whatever they want, they
get less happy” (Schwartz, 2004, para. 1). For instance, after buying any kind of goods or
services, because of abundance of them, many people start thinking about whether they bought
the best one among the choices or not, although what they bought is convenient enough. These
thoughts make people to suffer, regret, or blame themselves. There are millions of choices for
customers to buy and often it is impossible to find to best one.
All in all, capitalism has great potential to increase the standards of living by innovation,
competition among the companies or the firms in any society. If we look at societies under
capitalist systems, such as The United States of America, Canada, Germany, The United
Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, or these kinds of countries, every individual can observe that the
standards of living in these countries are very high. However, higher standards of living do not
totally mean that people in the country are happy. People’s higher expectations about the future
and not evaluating their objective conditions, also increased number of choices of goods or
services might prevent them to be happy. Higher living standards are important, but people’s
happiness is more necessary, and therefore, new ways to satisfy citizens in every aspect of life
should be established.