The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [73]
All else being equal, people will generally guess that they are doing well. A 1996 study showed that two-thirds of people think they have above-average earnings.4 Economist Robert Lane explains it like this: “[I]t seems to me that the market ideology is a kind of codification of many of the common beliefs of humankind, especially a preference for the justice of deserts compared to the justice of need and equality.”5 People think well of themselves, so they create for themselves a comfortable delusion that they are, in market terms, well valued. This reminds us that money cannot be directly proportional to happiness, since people are capable of believing all sorts of wrong things about who has what. Consider also a much-cited study of “positional” happiness, published in an article entitled “Is More Always Better?” of 1998.6 A survey of 257 students, faculty, and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health asked whether they would prefer to earn fifty thousand dollars a year in a world where the average salary was twenty-five thousand dollars, or one hundred thousand dollars a year where the average was two hundred thousand dollars. Half the subjects chose to be less prosperous but better off than most. This is often the only part of the study cited in the popular press, but the questions were not only about money. For example: Do you want to be the sexiest person in town, but not actually that hot, or instead would you prefer to be beautiful in a land full of absolute knockouts?
Along with income and physical attractiveness, the questionnaire asked people whether they wanted more education, or whether they wanted less but more than others; about whether they would prefer that their child was very smart among very, very smart people, or just smart but among a crowd of fools. There were also questions about vacation time, approval and disapproval from a supervisor, and how many papers you would be assigned to write. When it came to physical attractiveness and a supervisor’s praise, people wanted to be ahead of other people more than they cared about the absolute amounts. When it came to vacation time, absolute quantity was more important than relative position. For money, as noted, 50 percent chose less real money if that meant they would have more than average. Praise, we may imagine, is more valuable if it sets you apart, whereas vacation time appears to have more intrinsic satisfaction. Money falls in between: it is associated with real, intrinsic goods, but it is also dependent upon relative position.
We think of money as allowing us to buy lifestyles that would be permanently conducive to happiness, but we don’t appear to be all that good at guessing which lifestyles those would be. For instance, many people believe that nice weather and access to the beach can make you optimistic, relaxed, more socially open, and unburdened by coats and head colds. This, however, seems to be an illusion. Sure, we feel good when, after three days of sleet and gray, we walk out the door to find the sun shining in a warm blue sky. On the other hand, a hot town can feel grungy—sticky and peeling on one block, precious and smug on another. Warm weather is lovely, especially when you haven’t had much lately, but a lot of other things can make a big difference in quality of life. In an article titled “Does Living in California Make People Happy?,” research data is shown to confirm that Californians are no happier than Midwesterners.7 If you are convinced that sun and surf are objective pleasures, remember that many island-dwelling people do not think of the beach as a place of joy and relaxation. As anyone having a bad day in Southern California knows, the symbology of bliss does