Does the conflict between cardinal utility and ordinal preferences just keep on getting worse?

This argument is not necessarily a critique of capitalism, but it could be.  At the very least, it is an observation about advanced capitalism.

As you will know from philosophy, there is a difference between what makes you happy, in the felicific sense, and what you want.  Some of this difference may be due to addictions, but most of it is not.  You may want to be a person of a particular kind, whether or not that makes you happier.  You may wish to do things to help the world, without believing you will be personally happier as a result.  You might have mixed feelings as to whether having children will make you happier (stress!), but still you might have a deep preference for raising a family.  And so on.  These distinctions are part of the mainsprings of human life, they are not minor exceptions standing in the corner.

The more capitalism develops, the more the gap between cardinal utility and preference satisfaction is likely to grow.  Consider the polar case of a very primitive economy where the only commodity is rice.  Eating rice is what makes you happy, and eating rice is also how you wish to spend your money.  After all, what else is there?  Given the feasible set, cardinal utility and preference satisfaction will coincide perfectly.

But as product choice grows and incomes rise, you will have more and more chances to deviate from maxing out on cardinal utility.  Furthermore, your immediate “needs” likely are taken care of, so most of your income spending is discretionary rather than “I need to buy this food to avoid the miseries of starvation.”

More and more, you will be led away from cardinal utility maximization.  But additional preferences will be satisfied.

Is this good or bad?

It is not quite right to say that people are becoming less happy, as they are getting what they want.  That could be a central component of the good life, and of individual well-being, broadly construed.  That said, some of your ordinal preferences might be harmful addictions, or you might prefer things that stress you out, either proximately or in the longer run.

Let’s say you keep on checking your phone for texts.  Do you do this because you think it will make you happier?  Maybe not.  You simply might have a preference for wanting to know the information in those texts as soon as possible.  Should we think that preference is bad?  Maybe it is a mother wanting to know that her daughter got home safely, and so she checks her texts every three minutes.  That might not make her happier, but I am reluctant to conclude that is a worse state of affairs.  And it does not have to be an addiction, a much overused concept by intelligent people who do not define it very carefully.

I too have plenty of preferences that do not make me happier, though I consider them quite legitimate.  I am keen to see as much of the world as I can, yet I am not convinced this makes me happier than say simply going back to Mexico again and again and eating the street food.  I just want to know what else is out there.

If you side solely with cardinal utility, yes you condemn capitalism.  Or if you think all of these ordinal preferences are addictions, again you can condemn the status quo.  Your meta-preferences in that case presumably would wish to have different preferences.  In any case, many books will be written about how capitalism makes us miserable.  Most of them will have the incorrect framing, though most of them will have ” a point,” one way or another.  Furthermore, while some of these books may be correct, in the aggregate they will push us away from viewing individual human beings as agentic.  That is a negative social consequence.

I do not think those critical perspectives are, by and large, the primary correct views.  Instead, I think of capitalism and markets as an unparalleled engine for making us…weirder?  And for moving us into different worlds (NYT)?

YMMV.