Money, happiness
Can money buy happiness? Exploring this question is a chapter in ‘Dance with Chance: Making luck work for you’ by Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth, and Anil Gaba (Landmark). Acknowledging that the question is something that has intrigued philosophers, poets, and pop stars over the years, the authors go on to narrate a study by two psychologists, Ed Diener and Martin Seligman. “They carried out a survey of various groups of people, ranging from the tycoons and heiresses on Forbes magazine’s billionaires list to Calcutta’s pavement dwellers. The respondents were asked to indicate their agreement with the statement, ‘You are satisfied with your life,’ using a scale from 1 (complete disagreement) to 7 (complete agreement), with 4 suggesting a neutral attitude.” If the answer is above 5.8, you are happier than a billionaire, the respondents were informed.
What were the findings? No huge differences in happiness between the different groups, apart from the homeless respondents. The semi-nomadic Massai of Africa may be fractionally less content than the billionaires, but they score higher than a random selection of Swedish people; and the satisfaction rates of Indian slum dwellers are not much worse than an international sample of college students, one learns.
Life satisfaction does not increase once people reach a certain minimum level of income, the authors note. They also cite another study that plotted per capita GDP on the x-axis, and life satisfaction on y-axis. The mapping of international happiness revealed that the average level of satisfaction is higher in richer countries, with some exceptions, such as Indians being more satisfied than Russians despite lower GDP per capita, and communist Cuba seeming to be happier than capitalist Japan.
About Japan, again, it can be interesting to know that the self-reported satisfaction levels have remained constant across three decades (1958-1987), though real income increased fivefold. Likewise, “the London School of Economics professor Richard Layard reports that the percentage of people in Britain and the USA describing themselves as ‘very happy,’ ‘quite happy,’ or ‘not happy at all’ has remained the same for five decades, despite the fact that they were getting steadily richer all this time.”
The chapter wraps up by stating that happiness – like health and longevity, wealth and professional success – is complex to the point of unpredictability. One thing, however, is simple, the authors observe: “As the old Scottish proverb goes, be happy while you’re alive for you will be dead for a long time.”
Thought-provoking read.