If money doesn’t buy you happiness, you don’t have enough money.
For example, what would you do if you had ten billion dollars ? Some people would answer, “I’d buy my own zoo !” or whatever, but the real answer is, “I would never work again; instead, I’d pursue whatever projects I found interesting“. That kind of freedom could enable you to be quite happy.
I’m not sure if this kind of experience scales to lower amounts of money; there’s probably a minimum threshold above which wealth becomes entirely self-sustaining, and below which you’d still have to work for a living. Still, even below the threshold, you can still spend your money on automating and outsourcing smaller chunks of your daily drudgery, thus indirectly purchasing happiness.
That kind of money would certainly enable happiness, but I doubt it’d reliably cause happiness. Suddenly removing the need to ever work again, without developing the mental habits needed to exploit that freedom, sounds like a recipe for boredom and listlessness.
I get the impression that money is important to happiness mainly insofar as it affects people’s locus of control. That explains the data pretty well: lower-income individuals are on average likely to feel less control over their lives and thus to be less happy, but where we find exceptions to that rule (i.e. broke college kids) we find happier populations. More money implies more options and also a cultural presumption of agency (which hasn’t been researched much but probably should be). Above a certain point, though, we hit diminishing returns: an upper-middle-class income gives you more options than a middle-class income, but the diffs are smaller. Eventually they’re drowned out by uncorrelated noise: happiness set points, habits, accidents, non-financial life choices.
This predicts that uncorking a $10^10 financial genie wouldn’t much affect most people’s happiness. As far as I know, windfalls of that magnitude are so rare that there’s no data to speak of, but there is a pretty good record of happiness research on lottery winners that seems to back this up on a smaller scale.
That kind of money would certainly enable happiness, but I doubt it’d reliably cause happiness.
I’m not sure what the difference is, practically speaking. You say:
Suddenly removing the need to ever work again, without developing the mental habits needed to exploit that freedom, sounds like a recipe for boredom and listlessness.
I agree with you there, but all that money could also buy you the freedom (plus any external help you may need) to acquire those habits.
Above a certain point, though, we hit diminishing returns: an upper-middle-class income gives you more options than a middle-class income, but the diffs are smaller.
Agreed, but then, a million-dollar income would enable many more options, with many more differences. The price/performance curve is not linear, but IMO it does increase monotonically.
but there is a pretty good record of happiness research on lottery winners that seems to back this up on a smaller scale.
I haven’t read the article yet, but what it says about contrast effects sounds reasonable. That said, I don’t know what they mean by “happiness from mundane events”. How mundane are we talking about ? For example, I was relatively happy after managing to unclog my toilet, but I’d be even happier if I never had to worry about clogged toilets ever again.
I’m not sure what the difference is, practically speaking.
The difference is necessary vs. sufficient. Money and most purchasable goods aren’t a significant source of happiness as best I can tell, and neither is freedom as such. Lower incomes constrain your happiness by increasing your sensitivity to negative externalities and probably also by way of status effects, but removing those constraints doesn’t lead reliably to a happy life; granted, I’d expect the miserable millionaire trope to be at least partly sour grapes, but I’m sure there are plenty of independently wealthy people out there that never developed the skills to be happy. Particularly if we’re talking old money, since I’d expect people who grew up with that level of privilege to respond poorly to any minor disruption. A billion dollars would give you all the freedom you need to be happy—but going from that to “a billionaire must be unusually happy”, or even “most billionaires are unusually happy”, seems to depend on a lot more self-awareness and agency than I think most people of any income actually have.
I also doubt there’s much of a discontinuity in the income-to-happiness curve when income reaches what Neal Stephenson called “fuck-you money”; if there was, we’d expect the lottery winner results to look different.
A billion dollars would give you all the freedom you need to be happy—but going from that to “a billionaire must be unusually happy”, or even “most billionaires are unusually happy”, seems to depend on a lot more self-awareness and agency than I think most people of any income actually have.
One thing I muse over sometimes in the context of billionaires is that, by and large, we should expect them to be strange and often unhappy people—simply because anyone more normal and well-adjusted would have stopped at, say, $10 million and $10 million typically doesn’t accidentally turn into billions. Continuing past the point where all one’s real needs are met indicates a bizarrely low estimate of the utility of switching to consumption and away from earning additional money (or perhaps the inability to stop working).
Having worked for / talked to some people who became decamillionaires or higher through startups, a common theme seems to be just being really competitive. They don’t care too much about money for money’s sake—that’s just what we currently use to send the signal “your startup is doing something we really like” in our society.
Or they just enjoy working… I’ve read quite a few accounts of work being a fairly meaningful part of life, and when you’re worth billions, you probably run the company, set your own dress code, can casually fire anyone that annoys you, etc..
I’d also suggest that being a billionaire and enjoying your work probably go hand in hand—it would explain why so many of them work 80+ hours a week...
Agreed that being a billionaire and enjoying work go hand in hand–obviously they enjoyed it enough to put in the work required to earn billions. It’s not impossible that someone could say “well, I sort of got dragged into working 80-hour weeks running my company and making billions, but I wish I’d just worked 9-5 for $100,000 a year and spent my leisure time doing x, y, z.” But I doubt you hear it often–if they were the kind of person who enjoyed leisure activities more than working, earning, and promotions, they probably would have ended up in the 9-5 job by default–it’s hard to accidentally get to be a billionaire.
One thing I muse over sometimes in the context of billionaires is that, by and large, we should expect them to be strange and often unhappy people—simply because anyone more normal and well-adjusted would have stopped at, say, $10 million and $10 million typically doesn’t accidentally turn into billions.
I think this is unlikely to be the case (that “well-adjusted” people would stop at $10 million), because the processes that lead you to earn $10 million, i.e. being the CEO of a major corporation, aren’t things you just quit doing because you felt like “switching to consumption.” Also, the type of person who is ambitious and self-driven enough to earn $10 million is likely to be someone who enjoys the process of their work more than consumption anyway.
I don’t expect I’ll ever earn $10 million, so that is a moot point, but if it happened you could earn millions of dollars working as a nurse, I wouldn’t quit nursing just because all my “needs” were met. A lot of my needs (emotional, self-worth, social life) are met at work. Maybe an “inability to stop working” is an adequate description–but how is that unhealthy compared to, say, an inability to stop watching sci-fi movies? If your job provides a significant part of the meaning in your life, it wouldn’t make sense to quit it and live a life of luxury. And high earning jobs (like being a CEO), although stressful, are probably much more “meaningful” than sitting in an office all day, at least to the type of people who are likely to succeed in those jobs.
Lottery winners have different problems. Mostly that sharp changes in money are socially disruptive, and that lottery players are not the most fiscally responsible people on Earth. It’s a recipe for failure.
If money doesn’t buy you happiness, you don’t have enough money.
It’s trivially true that multiplying the amount of money you have by 10,000 will probably make you much happier, but the interesting question is whether this is the easiest or most efficient route to increasing happiness. Since most people have no practical path to acquiring ten billion dollars, and most people could learn to enjoy their possessions more, Alicorn’s piece is quite useful.
“I would never work again; instead, I’d pursue whatever projects I found interesting“. That kind of freedom could enable you to be quite happy.
Why is there this cultural assumption that everyone dislikes their job and would do something else if they had the option? I honestly think that if I had ten billion dollars, I would continue to do a lot of the things I currently get paid to do, only for fun. This has a lot to do with the way my brain’s motivational system works–if I’m not in a structured environment, my default is to mess around doing random stuff that doesn’t output much of value, which I don’t endorse myself doing and which I don’t actually find all that pleasurable (although it is a good way to recharge when I’m exhausted.) Work provides a structured environment, and it’s not all that hard to modify the environment a little bit and yourself a little bit to enjoy work more.
Maybe this isn’t attainable for everyone–there are some jobs I wouldn’t want to do–but given that most people do have to work, shouldn’t enjoying it be more of a goal?
Why is there this cultural assumption that everyone dislikes their job and would do something else if they had the option?
While not everyone dislikes their job, many if not most people do. Although “dislike” is not the same as “burning hatred”; many people are content with doing their jobs, but would still prefer to do something else if given freedom to do so.
I honestly think that if I had ten billion dollars, I would continue to do a lot of the things I currently get paid to do, only for fun.
I have no idea what you do, so I can’t comment on your exact situation. My guess is that, if you were freed from life-support tasks such as earning money to buy food and shelter, and spending time to prepare and maintain said food and shelter—then you would, at the very least, have more hours in the day to spend on doing those things you enjoy. This is only a guess, though.
I should add that another interesting effect of having an extremely large supply of money (one that I didn’t cover in my original comment) is that you can now perform activities that are categorically different from the activities that a middle-class person can engage in. An ordinary middle-class citizen can study astronomy in his spare time—or, if he’s lucky, during the course of his main job. A multi-billionaire can launch his own space program.
but given that most people do have to work, shouldn’t enjoying it be more of a goal?
I don’t know whether it should be or not, morally speaking, but I do acknowledge that it’s a reasonable goal. If you find yourself spending a lot of time on doing things you don’t enjoy, and you cannot change the things you do due to the lack of money, then changing yourself to enjoy those things is a practical solution.
I have no idea what you do, so I can’t comment on your exact situation. My guess is that, if you were freed from life-support tasks such as earning money to buy food and shelter, and spending time to prepare and maintain said food and shelter—then you would, at the very least, have more hours in the day to spend on doing those things you enjoy.
I’m currently a student in my last year of nursing school. The best job I’ve ever had was this summer, as part of a program where Ontario hospitals hire 3rd year nursing students to work as non-reglemented health care providers and follow a nurse around on a unit of their choice. I got my first choice, which was the intensive care unit, and I was excited to go to work for every shift–including night shifts. I was sad when my every other weekend off came around, because that meant 2 whole days of not being up to date on what was happening on the unit.
I think the reason I liked that job so much, and expect to love nursing as a career, is that it involves all five senses in a way that your standard office job doesn’t. I rarely got to sit down at work. I saw some of the most interesting things I’ve ever seen in my life. Being someone who is basically immune to disgust–I don’t know if I really know what being “grossed out” feels like–and who has quite a poor sense of smell, was likely helpful. I acquired a reputation of being extremely curious and wanting to help everyone, and the nursing staff happily answered all my questions and would come find me to show me anything interesting. The staff was also awesome–I was surrounded by motivated people who liked being busy and hated being bored. I also had tons of awesome anecdotes to relate to my (usually grossed-out) friends and family. I found it personally meaningful, being there to make a difference in people’s lives. And I learned a lot–working there for the summer gave me a huge advantage going into my fourth year of nursing school.
So some of it is likely the fact that nursing in general, and ICU nursing in particular, is hardly ever boring–if I worked in an office doing spreadsheets and answering emails, I probably wouldn’t like going to work as much. But it’s also the fact that little things make me disproportionately happy. I’ve really liked working as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a community pool, too, and I still like it after doing it for 5 years–it’s something I’m good at, I get to play in the water, I get to teach adorable children and see direct results when I teach them to swim, the parents usually love me, and I’m on good terms with the staff and get my daily socialization in while working there. I’ve had incredibly fascinating conversations with fellow lifeguards while “buddy-guarding” during boring 6 am shifts, and I’ve made friends with all the regulars. I wouldn’t volunteer to lifeguard, but I probably would teach swimming lessons for free, if only a few hours of the week–why waste a skill I’ve spent years acquiring, not to mention one that’s fun to apply?
An ordinary middle-class citizen can study astronomy in his spare time—or, if he’s lucky, during the course of his main job. A multi-billionaire can launch his own space program.
100% agreed. Money gives you a lot of leverage and influence in the world. Being a billionaire would be useful for making the changes you want to see happen.
I think what you intended to say is “There are a lot of things which would make people happy, except that they are not financially feasible.”
Also, when discussing amounts of money which approach the GNP of a small country, you can’t just ‘get’ the wealth without there also coming into existence a small country whose GNP you get. For small amounts of wealth, rounding errors in inflation will mask the effect.
Well, the world’s current GDP is about 70 trillion dollars. $10 billion is about 0.014% of that, which seems like it’d be within the error bars of at least a consumer-level presentation of its inflation.
$10 billion dollars a year is then roughly 80 minutes of every single person’s time, assuming all people are productive 24⁄365 and all productive time is included in the world GDP; or about 15 minutes of working time for everyone who is included in the world GDP, assuming they average a 2000 work-hour year.
If money doesn’t buy you happiness, you don’t have enough money.
For example, what would you do if you had ten billion dollars ? Some people would answer, “I’d buy my own zoo !” or whatever, but the real answer is, “I would never work again; instead, I’d pursue whatever projects I found interesting“. That kind of freedom could enable you to be quite happy.
I’m not sure if this kind of experience scales to lower amounts of money; there’s probably a minimum threshold above which wealth becomes entirely self-sustaining, and below which you’d still have to work for a living. Still, even below the threshold, you can still spend your money on automating and outsourcing smaller chunks of your daily drudgery, thus indirectly purchasing happiness.
That kind of money would certainly enable happiness, but I doubt it’d reliably cause happiness. Suddenly removing the need to ever work again, without developing the mental habits needed to exploit that freedom, sounds like a recipe for boredom and listlessness.
I get the impression that money is important to happiness mainly insofar as it affects people’s locus of control. That explains the data pretty well: lower-income individuals are on average likely to feel less control over their lives and thus to be less happy, but where we find exceptions to that rule (i.e. broke college kids) we find happier populations. More money implies more options and also a cultural presumption of agency (which hasn’t been researched much but probably should be). Above a certain point, though, we hit diminishing returns: an upper-middle-class income gives you more options than a middle-class income, but the diffs are smaller. Eventually they’re drowned out by uncorrelated noise: happiness set points, habits, accidents, non-financial life choices.
This predicts that uncorking a $10^10 financial genie wouldn’t much affect most people’s happiness. As far as I know, windfalls of that magnitude are so rare that there’s no data to speak of, but there is a pretty good record of happiness research on lottery winners that seems to back this up on a smaller scale.
I’m not sure what the difference is, practically speaking. You say:
I agree with you there, but all that money could also buy you the freedom (plus any external help you may need) to acquire those habits.
Agreed, but then, a million-dollar income would enable many more options, with many more differences. The price/performance curve is not linear, but IMO it does increase monotonically.
I haven’t read the article yet, but what it says about contrast effects sounds reasonable. That said, I don’t know what they mean by “happiness from mundane events”. How mundane are we talking about ? For example, I was relatively happy after managing to unclog my toilet, but I’d be even happier if I never had to worry about clogged toilets ever again.
The difference is necessary vs. sufficient. Money and most purchasable goods aren’t a significant source of happiness as best I can tell, and neither is freedom as such. Lower incomes constrain your happiness by increasing your sensitivity to negative externalities and probably also by way of status effects, but removing those constraints doesn’t lead reliably to a happy life; granted, I’d expect the miserable millionaire trope to be at least partly sour grapes, but I’m sure there are plenty of independently wealthy people out there that never developed the skills to be happy. Particularly if we’re talking old money, since I’d expect people who grew up with that level of privilege to respond poorly to any minor disruption. A billion dollars would give you all the freedom you need to be happy—but going from that to “a billionaire must be unusually happy”, or even “most billionaires are unusually happy”, seems to depend on a lot more self-awareness and agency than I think most people of any income actually have.
I also doubt there’s much of a discontinuity in the income-to-happiness curve when income reaches what Neal Stephenson called “fuck-you money”; if there was, we’d expect the lottery winner results to look different.
One thing I muse over sometimes in the context of billionaires is that, by and large, we should expect them to be strange and often unhappy people—simply because anyone more normal and well-adjusted would have stopped at, say, $10 million and $10 million typically doesn’t accidentally turn into billions. Continuing past the point where all one’s real needs are met indicates a bizarrely low estimate of the utility of switching to consumption and away from earning additional money (or perhaps the inability to stop working).
Having worked for / talked to some people who became decamillionaires or higher through startups, a common theme seems to be just being really competitive. They don’t care too much about money for money’s sake—that’s just what we currently use to send the signal “your startup is doing something we really like” in our society.
Or they just enjoy working… I’ve read quite a few accounts of work being a fairly meaningful part of life, and when you’re worth billions, you probably run the company, set your own dress code, can casually fire anyone that annoys you, etc..
I’d also suggest that being a billionaire and enjoying your work probably go hand in hand—it would explain why so many of them work 80+ hours a week...
Agreed that being a billionaire and enjoying work go hand in hand–obviously they enjoyed it enough to put in the work required to earn billions. It’s not impossible that someone could say “well, I sort of got dragged into working 80-hour weeks running my company and making billions, but I wish I’d just worked 9-5 for $100,000 a year and spent my leisure time doing x, y, z.” But I doubt you hear it often–if they were the kind of person who enjoyed leisure activities more than working, earning, and promotions, they probably would have ended up in the 9-5 job by default–it’s hard to accidentally get to be a billionaire.
I think this is unlikely to be the case (that “well-adjusted” people would stop at $10 million), because the processes that lead you to earn $10 million, i.e. being the CEO of a major corporation, aren’t things you just quit doing because you felt like “switching to consumption.” Also, the type of person who is ambitious and self-driven enough to earn $10 million is likely to be someone who enjoys the process of their work more than consumption anyway.
I don’t expect I’ll ever earn $10 million, so that is a moot point, but if it happened you could earn millions of dollars working as a nurse, I wouldn’t quit nursing just because all my “needs” were met. A lot of my needs (emotional, self-worth, social life) are met at work. Maybe an “inability to stop working” is an adequate description–but how is that unhealthy compared to, say, an inability to stop watching sci-fi movies? If your job provides a significant part of the meaning in your life, it wouldn’t make sense to quit it and live a life of luxury. And high earning jobs (like being a CEO), although stressful, are probably much more “meaningful” than sitting in an office all day, at least to the type of people who are likely to succeed in those jobs.
Well, yes, I wouldn’t expect billionaires to be normal, but I don’t see why that implies unhappiness.
Lottery winners have different problems. Mostly that sharp changes in money are socially disruptive, and that lottery players are not the most fiscally responsible people on Earth. It’s a recipe for failure.
It’s trivially true that multiplying the amount of money you have by 10,000 will probably make you much happier, but the interesting question is whether this is the easiest or most efficient route to increasing happiness. Since most people have no practical path to acquiring ten billion dollars, and most people could learn to enjoy their possessions more, Alicorn’s piece is quite useful.
Why is there this cultural assumption that everyone dislikes their job and would do something else if they had the option? I honestly think that if I had ten billion dollars, I would continue to do a lot of the things I currently get paid to do, only for fun. This has a lot to do with the way my brain’s motivational system works–if I’m not in a structured environment, my default is to mess around doing random stuff that doesn’t output much of value, which I don’t endorse myself doing and which I don’t actually find all that pleasurable (although it is a good way to recharge when I’m exhausted.) Work provides a structured environment, and it’s not all that hard to modify the environment a little bit and yourself a little bit to enjoy work more.
Maybe this isn’t attainable for everyone–there are some jobs I wouldn’t want to do–but given that most people do have to work, shouldn’t enjoying it be more of a goal?
While not everyone dislikes their job, many if not most people do. Although “dislike” is not the same as “burning hatred”; many people are content with doing their jobs, but would still prefer to do something else if given freedom to do so.
I have no idea what you do, so I can’t comment on your exact situation. My guess is that, if you were freed from life-support tasks such as earning money to buy food and shelter, and spending time to prepare and maintain said food and shelter—then you would, at the very least, have more hours in the day to spend on doing those things you enjoy. This is only a guess, though.
I should add that another interesting effect of having an extremely large supply of money (one that I didn’t cover in my original comment) is that you can now perform activities that are categorically different from the activities that a middle-class person can engage in. An ordinary middle-class citizen can study astronomy in his spare time—or, if he’s lucky, during the course of his main job. A multi-billionaire can launch his own space program.
I don’t know whether it should be or not, morally speaking, but I do acknowledge that it’s a reasonable goal. If you find yourself spending a lot of time on doing things you don’t enjoy, and you cannot change the things you do due to the lack of money, then changing yourself to enjoy those things is a practical solution.
I’m currently a student in my last year of nursing school. The best job I’ve ever had was this summer, as part of a program where Ontario hospitals hire 3rd year nursing students to work as non-reglemented health care providers and follow a nurse around on a unit of their choice. I got my first choice, which was the intensive care unit, and I was excited to go to work for every shift–including night shifts. I was sad when my every other weekend off came around, because that meant 2 whole days of not being up to date on what was happening on the unit.
I think the reason I liked that job so much, and expect to love nursing as a career, is that it involves all five senses in a way that your standard office job doesn’t. I rarely got to sit down at work. I saw some of the most interesting things I’ve ever seen in my life. Being someone who is basically immune to disgust–I don’t know if I really know what being “grossed out” feels like–and who has quite a poor sense of smell, was likely helpful. I acquired a reputation of being extremely curious and wanting to help everyone, and the nursing staff happily answered all my questions and would come find me to show me anything interesting. The staff was also awesome–I was surrounded by motivated people who liked being busy and hated being bored. I also had tons of awesome anecdotes to relate to my (usually grossed-out) friends and family. I found it personally meaningful, being there to make a difference in people’s lives. And I learned a lot–working there for the summer gave me a huge advantage going into my fourth year of nursing school.
So some of it is likely the fact that nursing in general, and ICU nursing in particular, is hardly ever boring–if I worked in an office doing spreadsheets and answering emails, I probably wouldn’t like going to work as much. But it’s also the fact that little things make me disproportionately happy. I’ve really liked working as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a community pool, too, and I still like it after doing it for 5 years–it’s something I’m good at, I get to play in the water, I get to teach adorable children and see direct results when I teach them to swim, the parents usually love me, and I’m on good terms with the staff and get my daily socialization in while working there. I’ve had incredibly fascinating conversations with fellow lifeguards while “buddy-guarding” during boring 6 am shifts, and I’ve made friends with all the regulars. I wouldn’t volunteer to lifeguard, but I probably would teach swimming lessons for free, if only a few hours of the week–why waste a skill I’ve spent years acquiring, not to mention one that’s fun to apply?
100% agreed. Money gives you a lot of leverage and influence in the world. Being a billionaire would be useful for making the changes you want to see happen.
I think what you intended to say is “There are a lot of things which would make people happy, except that they are not financially feasible.”
Also, when discussing amounts of money which approach the GNP of a small country, you can’t just ‘get’ the wealth without there also coming into existence a small country whose GNP you get. For small amounts of wealth, rounding errors in inflation will mask the effect.
Well, the world’s current GDP is about 70 trillion dollars. $10 billion is about 0.014% of that, which seems like it’d be within the error bars of at least a consumer-level presentation of its inflation.
$10 billion dollars a year is then roughly 80 minutes of every single person’s time, assuming all people are productive 24⁄365 and all productive time is included in the world GDP; or about 15 minutes of working time for everyone who is included in the world GDP, assuming they average a 2000 work-hour year.