Does money buy happiness?

Public Interest, Fall, 1993 by Robert E. Lane

Consider the biological fixity of moods: We are born with happy or unhappy dispositions. As the physiological psychologist Jan Fawcett said of "joylessness," "We seem to be measuring a biological characteristics, like blue eyes, that doesn't change." Of course, since there are many reports of measured changes in long-term moods, this biological fixity must be seen as only a limiting condition.

Daily pleasures are different from overall satisfaction with one's life, but they too lack any significant relation to income. When Gallup asked Americans in 1981, "What gives you the most personal satisfaction or enjoyment day in and day out?" family activities again ranked first, but then, in order of preference came: television, friends, music, books and newspaper, house or apartment, work, meals, car, sports, and clothes. Few of these require expenditure that those below the poverty line cannot afford, even cars. The pleasures yielded by many of the others are purely comparative. Possessions may be important (in anothe study, a sample of primary grade school girls beleived that their own identities were better defined by "the clothes that you wear" than by who their fathers were!), but at least enjoyment of these activities is not entirely income-dependent. As a society we have focused so much on possessions that we forget that it is not so much what one owns as what one does that gives pleasure.

And what about work? Don't higher paid jobs afford more power, discretion, challenge, and therefore pleasure? In 1985 Thomas Juster (reporting on several surveys in the 1970s and early 1980s) found that family and freindship were enjoyed most. But most striking was the high rank given "the actual work that you do," which was ranked right after family and social activities and well ahead of television, sports, movies gardening, reading, and shopping. Strangely, Juster found little correlation between job status and job enjoyment. Other studies dispute this, but we may assume at least that the relationship is much looser than many middle-class intellectuals imagine. (I once interviewed a wallpaper-hanger who found his skill in handling corners a source of great delight.)

Well-being has a much to do with releif from pain as it has to do with pleasure; indeed, more so, because losses hurt more than gains please--and pain is remembered longer than is pleasure. Take the question of worries, which is one would think to be more frequent among the poor than the rich, Not so. Andrews and Withey's surveys in the early 1970s found that when it comes to the amount of worrying "there are virtually no differences associated with socioecomonic status." But, as another study revealed, the worries are different: Whereas the poor and less educated worry about health and income and things they cannot easily control, the richer and better educated worry more about their relations with their spouses and children and the more controllable features of their lives. Money does not reduce worrying; it simply changes the subject.