We're sorry but we're going to have to call a halt to all this social mobility malarkey

One standard demand in modern society and politics is that we shouldn't be running society in pursuit of this wealth, all this stuff and GDP. Instead, we should be concentrating upon the happiness of the people. Another insistence from the same sort of source is that we should be having lots of social mobility. Something which even Polly has managed to note means downward social mobility for just the same number as those who enjoy upward such.

Something has to give here:

Men spend their lives subconsciously striving to do better than their parents and are materially less happy if they fail, while women have no such hang-ups, research has found.

Men already have lower self-reported happiness than women - something that's been true all along in fact.

So, downward social mobility increases unhappiness in society, happiness is the goal, we'll have to stop the mobility, won't we? Good, that's settled then.

Leaving us with the correct structure, the one we should be having anyway. Have a society as free and liberal - liberal in that correct sense of relating to liberty - as it's possible to have without us all bursting from the joy of it. Including that economic freedom which is what leads to there being more GDP, more stuff. And the happiness of the resulting society will be something emergent from our interactions - just like everything in that economy is.