The Case for Consumption Now

This is from Slate, on research that suggests that the young enjoy their consumption more than the old. Here is an excerpt:

Recent research by economists Amy Finkelstein, Erzo Luttmer, and Matthew Notowidigdo suggests that you'll get a bigger bang for your consumer buck by spending while you're healthy, before old age starts to take the fun out of life's indulgences. Their research is part of a larger academic enterprise attempting to understand what makes us happy. Economics is a field more associated with rational calculation than emotion, but there's an ever-growing subculture of "happiness economists." Just as mainstream economists spend their time figuring out things like gross national product—how much a country produces in dollar terms—these happiness scholars churn out numbers like gross national happiness (how much happiness a country produces).

So is it better to have a higher MPC during your younger years? Maybe. Happiness research--which is the actual focus of this article--is sort of an economic fad, but I think it reflects something of a logical direction for economics when large swaths of the world have dealt with the problem of scarcity well, compared to the state of the world 100 years ago.