My buddy Curt steered me to a new book called The Progress Paradox : How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse whose author, Gregg Easterbrook, was recently on MPR’s Midmorning. He also has a weblog on the New Republic site called EasterBlog.
He was on the PBS show ThinkTank last year and that link has a transcript of his interview. Here’s a quote:
Ben Wattenberg: So ten thousand per year, per capita income would mean a husband and wife, two children is a income of forty thousand dollars a year.
Gregg Easterbrook: Yeah. That’s the point at which additional income in research decouples from happiness and getting more money has nothing to do with how happy you feel in life. In a sense this is the proof that money cannot buy happiness. But researchers who have studied people, higher income people are no happier than lower income people. Members of the Forbes Four Hundred, the list of the richest men and women in the world, are not any happier as a group than people who earn the median income. Money doesn’t buy happiness. The proof is now in. If anybody doubted it, that’s true.
I think the modern era creates a materialism jealousy effect that didn’t exist before that you might call catalog induced anxiety. In previous centuries there’ve always been people of spectacular wealth and most people knew that they existed but they didn’t know the details of the lives of the Rockefellers or the Astors. All they knew was that they had lives that people could only dream of. Now we see every possible detail of the life of rich people, uh, on television, in Vanity Fair, in People magazine. The way the rich live is covered in extraordinary detail. And I think it makes people feel, even people who are themselves relatively well off, not wealthy but live in a nice house, don’t worry about where their next meal will come from, because they see the details of the lives of wealthy and the celebrities, it makes them feel that they themselves haven’t gotten what they wanted.
A telling statistic on this is that if you—no matter how much an American earns, he or she tells pollsters that twice as much is required to live well. So a person who earns twenty-five thousand dollars says you gotta have fifty thousand. A person who earns fifty says you gotta have a hundred. A person who earns a hundred says you gotta have two hundred. We’re programmed to think that we can’t live well unless we get much more. You can find individuals who have realized that money doesn’t buy happiness and that endlessly chasing the last dollar of maximized income is a formula for unhappiness. But as a society as a whole I don’t think we’ve realized this yet.
I think you might call this the revenge of the credit card. Your American Express card absolutely cannot buy you happiness. It can buy you unhappiness. If you use it too much, get into debt, you have debt problems, you have to work around the clock to pay your bills, the credit card will buy you unhappiness very reliably. But it can’t buy you happiness.