Chris,
I appreciate your zeal and the argument you’ve formed given the information you have. You have correctly pointed out a fundamental logic flaw with the “get a job you love” mentality, and your alternative is certainly worthy of consideration.
As rational agents, we should be inclined to pick a model which is more robust to empirical data (given the same degrees of freedom). From your post I infer that you are not an economist, so you might be unfamiliar with the “Easterlin Paradox,” which shows that indeed wealthier people within a country are generally happier than poorer people of that same country, however, that relationship does not hold when we compare poorer countries with wealthier countries. In the context of your argument, this data implies that a person could just move to a country in which the job-they-love earns a higher income than the average of that country, thus maximizing both relative and total utility. This alternative requires less assumptions than your monetary targeting, and it is not bound by path dependent uncertainty. It is therefore more optimal.
But the interesting thought of “relative utility” only begins at that example. In the classical economic framework of absolute utility, it is deduced that riskier assets must be priced higher than less risky assets. Empirically it turns out that this is often not the case! The enlightening cognitive bias research of kahneman, tversky, and ariely (among others) in behavioral economics has put a spotlight on the exceptions to the classical view. And we now generally accept that people are “irrational” with respect to the mathematical definitions of the Hicksian synthesis — we try to explain the why.
Back to the original dilemma: should we optimize for money, or should we optimize for the job-we-love. The answer is inextricably dependent upon who we are going to compare ourselves to, whether consciously or not. I think this makes the problem much much harder than you imagined.
Chris, I appreciate your zeal and the argument you’ve formed given the information you have. You have correctly pointed out a fundamental logic flaw with the “get a job you love” mentality, and your alternative is certainly worthy of consideration.
As rational agents, we should be inclined to pick a model which is more robust to empirical data (given the same degrees of freedom). From your post I infer that you are not an economist, so you might be unfamiliar with the “Easterlin Paradox,” which shows that indeed wealthier people within a country are generally happier than poorer people of that same country, however, that relationship does not hold when we compare poorer countries with wealthier countries. In the context of your argument, this data implies that a person could just move to a country in which the job-they-love earns a higher income than the average of that country, thus maximizing both relative and total utility. This alternative requires less assumptions than your monetary targeting, and it is not bound by path dependent uncertainty. It is therefore more optimal.
But the interesting thought of “relative utility” only begins at that example. In the classical economic framework of absolute utility, it is deduced that riskier assets must be priced higher than less risky assets. Empirically it turns out that this is often not the case! The enlightening cognitive bias research of kahneman, tversky, and ariely (among others) in behavioral economics has put a spotlight on the exceptions to the classical view. And we now generally accept that people are “irrational” with respect to the mathematical definitions of the Hicksian synthesis — we try to explain the why.
Back to the original dilemma: should we optimize for money, or should we optimize for the job-we-love. The answer is inextricably dependent upon who we are going to compare ourselves to, whether consciously or not. I think this makes the problem much much harder than you imagined.