When Money DOES Buy Happiness

From the Situationist

Money can’t buy hap­pi­ness. Or can it? The Tier­ney­Lab blog from The New York Times recently con­ducted an infor­mal sur­vey. Based on Spent: Sex, Evo­lu­tion, and Con­sumer Behav­ior, a new book from Dr. Geof­frey Miller, read­ers were invited to “List the ten most expen­sive things (prod­ucts, ser­vices or expe­ri­ences) that you have ever paid for (includ­ing houses, cars, uni­ver­sity degrees, mar­riage cer­e­monies, divorce set­tle­ments and taxes). Then, list the ten items that you have ever bought that gave you the most happiness.”

You are then sup­posed to count how many items appear on both lists.

Tier­ney­Lab exam­ined the responses. And the results are fas­ci­nat­ing. Things appear­ing much more often on ‘expen­sive’ lists than ‘happy’ lists include:

• chil­dren
• mar­riage ceremonies
• divorces
• taxes
• most cars
• boats

Items that were on more ‘happy’ lists than ‘expen­sive’ lists included:

• meals with friends
• alco­hol
• bicy­cles
• pets
• hob­bies
• adult edu­ca­tion
• church and charity
• books, music, artwork
• qual­ity beds

And, finally, there was some over­lap where things were both expen­sive and happy/fulfilling. These include:

• houses
• higher edu­ca­tion
• travel
• elec­tron­ics
• cer­tain vehicles

The results are by no means sci­en­tifc, but it does make us think. Are the intan­gi­ble things (things like love, char­ity, ful­fill­ment, world peace, etc.) over rated? Have peo­ple changed so much over the years (i.e. become more “shal­low”, etc.) that mate­r­ial things are now able to bring us fulfillment?

Well, we have cen­tered our lives over money and finances (guilty as charged!) that it does seem the two are cor­re­lated. The more money you have, the more happy you “can” become. But even as we point that out, we see a lot of excep­tions to the rule. We see peo­ple who do not have sav­ings in the bank give off the most gen­uine smiles to us. We see peo­ple who are filthy rich wal­low in self-pity and die of lone­li­ness. To say though that money and hap­pi­ness are NOT con­nected to each other is an irre­spon­si­ble sweep­ing state­ment. It sounds a lot like what wealthy gov­ern­ment or church peo­ple would say to poor peo­ple under their care.

Per­haps this quote by Laura Row­ley of MONEY AND HAPPINESS expresses this cor­re­la­tion: “Money is a tool that ulti­mately expresses our core val­ues. Beyond basic needs, money helps us achieve our life’s pur­pose and sup­port the things we care about most deeply – fam­ily, edu­ca­tion, health care, char­ity, adven­ture and fun. It helps us get some of life’s intan­gi­bles – free­dom or inde­pen­dence, the oppor­tu­nity to make the most of our skills and tal­ents, the abil­ity to choose our own course in life, finan­cial secu­rity. I have found that the peo­ple who invest the time to fig­ure out what they truly value and then align their money with those val­ues have the strongest sense of finan­cial and per­sonal well-being.”

Psy­chol­o­gists have spent decades study­ing the rela­tion between wealth and hap­pi­ness,” writes Har­vard Uni­ver­sity psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Gilbert in his best-selling “Stum­bling on Hap­pi­ness,” “and they have gen­er­ally con­cluded that wealth increases human hap­pi­ness when it lifts peo­ple out of abject poverty and into the mid­dle class but that it does lit­tle to increase hap­pi­ness thereafter.”

Since World War II the gross domes­tic prod­uct per capita has tripled in the United States. But people’s sense of well-being, as mea­sured by sur­veys ask­ing some vari­a­tion of “Over­all, how sat­is­fied are you with your life?,” has barely budged. Japan has had an even more mete­oric rise in GDP per capita since its post­war mis­ery, but mea­sures of national hap­pi­ness have been flat, as they have also been in West­ern Europe dur­ing its long post­war boom, accord­ing to social psy­chol­o­gist Ruut Veen­hoven of Eras­mus Uni­ver­sity in Rot­ter­dam. [From the Newsweek arti­cle: Why Money Doesn’t Buy Hap­pi­ness by Sharon Begley]

But in the end, I would like to think that the most impor­tant com­mod­ity you can buy with addi­tional wealth is not any mate­r­ial thing; it is choice. If you have P1000 in your pocket, you can decide between going to an expen­sive restau­rant or buy­ing take-out fast­food for lunch. But if you have only P100, 7/11 is your best­friend. Or if I have a car (which I do not cur­rently have), I could go buy gro­ceries in the gro­ceries offer­ing the best prices, instead of mak­ing do with the near­est gro­cery store to my house. Poverty, then, is not just the absence of money, or cars, or houses, it is the absence of choices and the oppor­tu­ni­ties that you could have had, if you had the money (or the con­nec­tion, or the friends) with you in the first place.

What about you, what do you think?