What money can’t buy

“We’re more prosperous than ever but our melancholy has been rising with our riches.”

Gregg Easterbrook, leading US commentator.

If your great-great-grandparents materialized in the present day, they would be dazzled. We travel where we wish quickly and relatively cheaply; talk to anyone in the world; know everything there is to know; think and say what we please; marry for love, and enjoy goods and services in almost unlimited supply.

If you sat down with a pencil and graph paper to chart the trends of American and European life since the end of the Second World War, you'd draw a lot of lines that pointed upwards. Per capita income, "real" income, longevity, home size, car ownership, phone calls made annually, trips taken annually, highest degree earned, IQ scores, personal freedom, just about every indicator has moved upward for two generations.

Yet how many of us believe that life is getting better? We live in a favoured age but do not feel favoured. Happiness has not increased in Western Europe in the past half-century, though daily life has grown fantastically better. But the constantly growing living standards, the increasing amount of money often not earned but received as a social allowance can’t bring happiness, that intangible meaning ultimately. People from the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan and Western Europe consider that it's better to be prosperous, free and unhappy than worn out by toil and disease. But are we doomed to eternal discontent?

So, what do the Americans actually do with their money?

Today in the United States thousands of private aircraft are owned for personal use by people who are not rich, just as millions of not-rich Americans own two homes or four cars plus a boat.

Fly-in restaurants, second homes, pleasure boats, huge sports utility vehicles (SUVs) with built-in video: these big-ticket items are now marketed not to the top but to the middle of American society, and increasingly to the middle of European society, too. They illustrate one of the most fundamental trends in the post-war western world: the grand increase in living standards for people who aren't rich.

Almost everything about American and European life is getting better for almost everyone, ranging from public health and life expectancy to reductions in teen pregnancies, armed conflicts and nuclear warheads.

Research shows that tens of millions of Americans and Europeans live too much for the future and ignore the moment. Parents and schools teach delayed gratification, and many people learn this lesson so well that they can only look ahead, growing excessively concerned about the future. They are obsessed with whether the years to come will be better or worse, to the point of overlooking that things are nice right now.

Most Americans and Europeans already have what they need, in addition to considerable piles of stuff they don't need. It's hard to imagine that the decades to come will be better still, yet we have to learn to appreciate how good the present is. Deep-seated in the minds of Americans and Europeans is a fear that the West cannot sustain its current elevated living standards and liberal personal freedom. We fear that the economy will cease functioning; that natural resources will run out; that anarchy, terrorism or environmental calamity will overwhelm societies based on freedom and plenty.

Another reason for not believing that things are getting better is the paradox that for every problem solved a new one seems to crop up.

It’s hard to believe but research in Holland suggests that the magic number past which money does not buy happiness is only £6,000 a year per capita per annum.

Yet people are greatly influenced by the very rich. Television obsessively documents the lavish lives of the wealthy and glamorous; glossy magazines let you into their homes; catalogues for the most expensive things imaginable are readily available to anyone. For example, if you can’t enjoy the Patek Philippe Calibre 89 wristwatch, which costs $2.7m. you may be put down into a waiting list for Patek Philippe models costing only $45,000.

The desire to possess such money-burning products has trickled down from the very rich to the merely well-off to practically everyone. People can see all the things they can never possess. Unable to afford them, they buy more of what they already have.

The distinction between needs and wants is lost. Stuff becomes desired for the brief pleasurable moment of acquisition. We buy storage today to put the stuff in; and hire someone later to enter our home and sort the stuff out. In sum, we have too much of everything except happiness.

It's impossible to be certain, of course, precisely what happiness is; but nearly all "wellbeing research" supports the basic conclusion that money and material things are only weakly associated with leading a good life.

Edward Diener, a psychologist at Illinois University, has spent his career studying happiness. As income begins to rise, his research shows, the sense of wellbeing rises with it – but only up to a point. Once the middle-class level is reached, money decouples from happiness. And immediately the problems of isolation, sorrow, bitterness, anxiety, loneliness and despair appear.

The point is, of course, that needs can be satisfied but wants never can. A person needs food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education and transport; once attained, these needs are fulfilled. The more you want, by contrast, the more likely you are to feel disgruntled. The more you acquire, the more likely you are to feel controlled by your own possessions.

Furthermore, most of what people really want in life – love, friendship, respect, family, standing, fun – have no price. Most people would say that the most important commodity that cannot be bought is love.

The Sunday Times

COMPREHENSION CHECK

Exercise 1. Match the definitions with the words from the text.

1. longevity	a. an expected number of years of life based on statistical probability
2. income	b. satisfaction or pleasure promised in distant future
3. IQ	c. an extraordinary grave event marked by great loss and lasting distress
4. intangible	d. something which is bought by extremely expensive price
5. big-ticket item	e. rich, highly favoured
6. life expectancy	f. items not needed by a person by their possession is the index of definite standard of individual living
7. well-off	g. length of life
8. possession	h. intelligence quotient
9. money burning products	i. something owned or occupied
10. delayed gratification	j. impalpable, something you can’t touch
11. calamity	k. value expressed in money or goods & services accruing to a government firm or individual over a specified time period

Exercise 2. Read the text and complete the following chart.

IT’S NECESSARY
because it’s prestigious	but can’t be bought for money
Two homes	love

Exercise 3.Insert the proper word.

western, prosperity, blue, shortages,

survey, satisfaction, enjoy, feel, clinically, rationing, prevalent, equal with, eerie depression

Ruut Veenhoven, a Dutch professor of happiness studies, did ¹ … in 68 countries in the 1990s, asking people how much they ² … life. Britain came 19^{th 3} … Guatemala. British life ⁴ … was marginally lower than in 1948 (after a bitter post war winter of fuel ⁵ … and food ⁶ … . The United States came 11^th among ⁷ … nations. Adjusting for population growth, “unipolar” ⁸ … , the condition in which a person, simply always feel ⁹ … , is today 10 times as ¹⁰ … as it was half a century ago.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 100m people – most in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and the European Union – are ¹¹ … depressed. Ultimately, we should be glad that society is creating the leisure and ¹² … that enable people by millions to ¹³ … depressed.

TRAIN AND CHECK YOURSELF

I. Make up sentences.

1. The, define, and, of, supply, system, market, demand, work, free.

2. Unlimited, because, it’s, to, satisfy, impossible, it, demand, is.

3. Constrain, demand, only, limited, can, supply, unlimited.

4. Spiritual, people, busy, about, have, with, being, their, values, wants, material, satisfying, forgotten.

5. Or, to, goods, people, are, a, where, arrangements, of, in, services, is, contact, exchange, set, market.

6. Interdependent, product, factor, are, and, markets, markets.

7. Approach, be, can, on, of, market, psychographic, made, segmentation, behaviouristic, demographic, basis, geographic, the.

8. Economists, customers, basis, knowledge, attitude, product, on, to, the, their, classify, the, of, of, and.

9. Brand, study, preferences, psychographically, in, etc., segmenting, individuals’, habits, market, a, values, specialists.

10. Are, a, life, and, money, weakly, material, with, good, leading, things, only, associated.