Posted on 03/05/2006 8:08:06 PM PST by crushelits
Money doesn't really make us very happy. Not only do we want what we don't have, we really don't know what we want, and we think the things that we want will make us happy, which they tend not to do.
That's the conclusion of an ever-gushing hydrant of research from academics, psychologists, economists and social scientists from places like the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois, the University of Southern California, Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Virginia.
To researchers, the pursuit of happiness--the decision to buy a Jeep Cherokee over a Chevy station wagon, a Cape Cod house versus a ranch, to chain ourselves to our desks and grind ourselves into wafers--emanates from the most important question human beings can ask themselves: What really makes us happy?
Some academics have spent years pursuing the link between happiness and money. To some, the link is the keystone to why we spend. And spend. And spend some more.
We're not much different from Americans a century ago. In the early part of the 20th century, when people began to move off the farm and into town, they wanted to listen to Bessie Smith on their new Victrola, and they wanted to go out for a Saturday night dinner and a movie.
They wanted to buy new convertibles, washing machines and telephones. And they did so with ease, because companies were suddenly producing faster than consumers could shop. The turn of the 20th century was the dawn of a new, greased-lightening manufacturing age, the era of Ford Motor's (nyse: F - news - people ) assembly line. With factories revolutionized, with shelves groaning under the weight of a surfeit of goods, stores for the first time let Americans buy on credit.
Today, as cable shopping networks bloom like kudzu, we stuff our closets with Grip-N-Flip kitchen utensils, mixers with dough hooks, tanzanite bracelets and vanilla candles so rank they knock out power lines.
We've got more shopping malls than churches, we spend more time staring at Internet coupon sites than reading Shakespeare, we stomp on each other at 5 A.M. on Christmas Eve to snag that discounted laptop at Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ), a store that now sells buckets of popcorn, suggesting that shopping for Glade plug-in air fresheners is the entertainment equivalent of going to the movies.
All rather unseemly. And yet, how does spending connect to happiness?
Of course there's always Thorstein Veblen's explanation: "conspicuous consumption," propounded in his 1899 classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class. A rather pinched, neurotic notion (after all, Veblen did write during the airless twilight years of the Victorian era), it held that the rich don't accumulate wealth in order to consume it. Rather they accumulate wealth in order to display it, and their happiness is fueled by their neighbors' envy.
Which is somewhat along the lines of what another wonk suggests, that the country is in the grips of "luxury fever." That is, families with annual incomes of $50,000 try to emulate the consumption of those with $70,000, who in turn try to emulate those with $140,000, ad infinitum.
Which is somewhat akin to this finely tuned story pitch a writer once turned in at my old job at Money magazine: "The hottest trend today is the two-BMW or two-Mercedes-Benz family. I think this will make a great feature story." To which the editor dryly wrote back: "This is an eloquent case for capital punishment."
While it's heartening to see taxpayer-funded grants shot down a rat hole of sententious research that overly complicates simple, self-evident truths, what's gone ignored is a simple fact known for eons to anyone who's studied the mimicry abilities of primates and infants.
Simply put, when we see something we like that someone else has, we want it, too.
"It's just plain common sense to the average American. Anybody with half a brain can figure this out," says Catherine Enright, an executive vice president at the Coastal Group, a marketing and advertising company in New York City and a longtime advertising executive. "It's physically impossible for a piece of paper like money to make you happy. Instead, what makes people happy is the feeling of security or power money brings."
Perhaps these simple realities are behind consumer spending, which drives two-thirds of the U.S. economy. Irrepressible consumer spending has helped the U.S. economy glide through two wars, recessions and the bursting of the Internet bubble--financial mayhem that should have brought the economy to its knees a long time ago.
That spending has been driven by astounding upward-income mobility. According to analysis of census data by economics writer Stephen Moore and Lincoln Anderson, former chief economist at LPL Financial Services, back in 1967, one in 25 families earned an income of $100,000 or more. Today, adjusted for inflation, one in six do. In 1967, the income range for the middle class was between $28,000 and $39,500 a year. Adjusted for inflation, today that income range is $11,000 higher: between $38,000 and $59,000 a year.
And yet, does all of this spending make us happy?
Researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania proclaim with totemic authority that, in a 1985 survey, respondents from the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans and the Maasai of East Africa were almost equally satisfied and ranked relatively high in well-being. The Maasai are a traditional herding people who have no electricity or running water and live in huts made of dung.
"It follows that economic development and personal income must not account for the happiness that they are so often linked to," the academics note.
Or maybe it's simply that the Maasai don't yet have DirecTV.
I am a avery happy man. However, if I had to live in a house of dung....well....I think some of that happiness would go right down the toilet...so to speak.
Thank you.
Envy is for socialists.
This is only true if the X-Box 360s have already sold out, or if your girlfriend is richer than you.
I’ve come to the conclusion that things don’t make you happy. Money, on the other hand, when saved and not spent, gives you freedom. Freedom makes you happy. Or at least, it makes you less unhappy than you would be in it’s absence.
There was a study out of England a few years ago that said that people felt a lot happier and secure when they reached the $2million mark in wealth. It's like a cut off line. Below it and you are still struggling with getting more and keeping up. Above and you feel safe, and then you are freer to live life the way you want to.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.