Comments

Characterizing the observed behavior as "lying" ascribes a motive and moral base that are simply absent. A more accurate (but admittedly less colorful) description would be that the robots discovered that a better strategy to maximize their individual success was to not aid others in achieving their success. Deception is a common tactic in most games, but is not considered lying. Now, a more interesting experiment would be to evaluate success more as average gain for the robot's identity group to see if cooperative genomic patterns emerged.

My personal opinion is that for the people who were genuinely unhappy in the '70s things have really gotten better (higher standard of living, less discrimination, etc.) but that many of those sorts who previosly considered themselves happy (e.g. educated) have been conditioned to look at the US through dark colored glasses (worst economy/president/government/crisis ever) while simultaneously having their consumerism tendencies reenforced. No wonder their not happy.