CONCEPT
The Wellbeing Gap
The systematic divergence between measured economic performance and experienced human flourishing — documented by the Easterlin paradox and widened to breaking point by AI-augmented work that produces exhilaration and depletion simultaneously.
Richard Easterlin published a paper in 1974 containing a finding so counterintuitive that economists have been arguing about it for fifty years: countries that grow richer over time do not, on average, become happier. Within any given country, people with higher incomes report higher life satisfaction than people with lower incomes. But when an entire society grew richer together, the average reported happiness did not rise proportionally. The Easterlin paradox has been debated, refined, challenged, and partially complicated by subsequent research. The broad conclusion — that GDP growth is a poor proxy for wellbeing improvement beyond a moderate income threshold — has survived fifty years of empirical scrutiny. The metric that dominates economic policy captures one input to human flourishing and misses most of the others. The AI transition threatens to drive the largest wedge yet between production and flourishing.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Coyle's engagement with wellbeing measurement has been characteristically pragmatic. She has not argued that