[brabel]

You're ignoring the proportions. Your happiness is maybe 80% related to your job and salary (at least up to a point where you can be considered wealthy, after that there's decreasing returns), and each product you consume from each different company affects your wellbeing by a minuscule amount. Even adding them all up won't give more than, say, 15% as most of your expenses are not on products, but things like housing and transport.

Given that, if you could make everyone's jobs more fullfilling and increase people's salaries at the cost of things costing a bit more, you would definitely increase overall wellbeing. People would afford a small amount less, but that would not impact them significantly, or maybe at all.

The problem I see is that in global competition, you may be put out of business by countries that give much less shit about worker's wellbeing because people will still spend almost all their money on the cheapest available option (even more so if they can afford less!), and that IMHO explains why American companies have taken over so many markets overseas (and now, China seems to be doing it even more). When that happens, everyone in the country loses. So there needs to be a balance, which I think Europe is doing more or less well: people still have great working conditions but can afford less than in the USA, where people have very near the worst possible working conditions (nearly no vacation mandated by law, no parental leave, no healthcare except for the best jobs), but can buy more useless stuff.

[mantas]

EU is on the same path. Actually even worse with over-the-top ecological requirements. Making it harded for local businesses, while making trade deals with iffy countries left and right. For now it's rolling on selling assets to China or US. But obviously that's not sustainable long term. Either we need to protect our internal market and tax the crap out of imports, or the party will be over.

[Qwertious]

>Actually even worse with over-the-top ecological requirements.

That seems hard to judge in the short term - if in 50 years some economically-critical ecosystem collapses like the north atlantic fisheries did, they will have been absolutely necessary in retrospect.

[mantas]

No matter what ecological requirements would EU impose on local businesses, the rest of the world would happily pollute to cover its part. And eu itself would by that stuff. Point in case - fertilizers. EU regulations for fertilizer plants are getting stricter and stricter. Local produce prices are sky-high, especially after cheap gas was cut off. Yet imports from Russia (!!!) are massive.