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| Lee Jin-Man/AP |
Apparently, the Wharton tools were right all along: money does buy happiness.
At least That’s what a growing body of scholarship on the relationship between money and happiness might suggest.
A recent AP article focused on the trend and presented a few of the area’s seminal works. The research that has recently garnered the most attention comes from Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England. Oswald studied a group of Britons who won between $20,000 and $250,000 in the lottery and determined that their happiness levels on a 36-point scale rose a full point from two years before the win until two years after.
Daniel Kaheneman, a Princeton economist and Nobel Prize winner, has also completed similar work with more mixed results. People in the high-income bracket were found to be almost twice as likely to call themselves “very happy” as people from the lowest. However, the difference between people who made $90,000 and those who made between $50,000 and $89,000 was only 1 percentage point.
Rush Limbaugh, who apparently subscribes to the same RSS-feed as I and reported on the same article on his radio show, remains a Big, Fat Idiot. He takes this evidence as proof that money does buy happiness, a conclusion he has come to on his own based on two damning pieces of evidence: that people want money and that people who have money would not be willing to forfeit it.
Aspiring toward a Cribs lifestyle does not mean that people would be any happier if they had money, but only that they think they would. Perhaps if they were watching VH1’s Behind the Music instead of Cribs they would realize that many of the celebrities on the screen are struggling with drug problems, mental illnesses or unhealthy relationships.
As the stories of MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice and other classic Behind the Music subjects show, many of the people whose fortunes we covet often squander it all and be worse of than before. Maybe if Oswald checks in with his lottery winners another two years from now, they will be telling a different story.
As for rich-but-miserable people who still wouldn’t be willing to let go of their money, this proves nothing except that many rich people are stubborn and afraid of giving up what they thought they wanted.
The one valid point on the money-buys-happiness side of the debate comes from Kaheneman’s comparison between the highest and lowest income brackets. As one of the callers to Limbaugh’s show stated, “Money itself doesn’t bring happiness, but the lack of money brings misery.”
The intense difficulty of living paycheck to paycheck causes a host of problems that make people less satisfied with their lives. To conclude from this that the more money one has the happier he will be is completely false.
Money does not buy happiness. And if Rush Limbaugh is any indication, it also can’t buy you a clue.
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November 29th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Rush Limbaugh’s logic:
Opiates equal happiness; money buys opiates; money equals happiness
November 29th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Money does buy you a certain level of happiness, for if you didn’t have to worry about food on the table, you would be a lot happier. But yes, it does not buy complete happiness.
November 30th, 2006 at 1:41 am
Um, you do realize that half the things Rush says are tongue-in-cheek. He’s an entertainer first, and a social commentator second. His show lives off of sarcasm, jokes, and humorous songs about Democrats. Really — why do people take him so seriously, as if he’s going to ruin the world with what he says?
November 30th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Here’s a little experiment for you: take $20 out of an ATM and put it in your wallet. Over the course of the next 30 days spend only that $20 and nothing more. Come back at day 15 and tell us all how happy (and hungry) you are.