Society could dispense E at an increasing rate if we aimed for people to always be happy, albeit not at a high level (in graph 3 happiness doesn’t even make it as high as 0.1). However, if society gives a lot of E to people while they are children, they are actually more likely to end up capable of generating additional E for themselves and for the rest of society.

I can’t remember the statistic exactly, but it’s *something* like: For the average person, 80% of the total NHS lifetime spend is spent during the final two weeks of their life. (Source: some doctor friends of mine, who I may have misquoted!)

Back to the model. I like that it explains why we go camping. The main flaw is that there’s no way of increasing the total happiness over a lifetime. What I’d be most interested in, is answering the question ‘How much/ how often should I go camping?’. This is just a restatement of Tom’s question which we were keeping one eye on: “How can experience be best manipulated to produce the maximum total happiness?”

I think the development that should be made to the model is to also adjust to the rate experience is changing. In fact, thinking back to the supermarket in Vauxhall, this is exactly what Nicol suggested originally. (That it should be a first order differential equation.) The solution (max happiness over lifetime) to which was to sinusoidally vary the experience. Does this work?

Peoples lifetimes are finite, say length N. Society and technology can only afford to provide a certain maximum amout of experience E over that time. How should one partition the experience E over a persons lifetime N?

It will depend on the duration the comparitor integrates experience over. If we assume that it is less than N then the third graph suggests to me that the allotment of E that one receives should slowly increase throughout life. However, I haven’t bothered yet to do the maths, so I may be wrong.

Assuming that I am not wrong, then this model suggests that for a happy life we should give people a sparten childhood with many struggles, a difficult youth, a fair middle age, and shower the old with blessings. An curious hypothesis, and counter to many current beliefs, which is a sign to me of an interesting model.

The small dent in parsimony would make a large explanatory difference (which is what information criteria are about, i think..?)