Silver Foxes Dig the Green
I’ve got a new piece at The American on how money saves us from unhappiness in old age. A slice:
Easterlin, a pioneer of the study of happiness in the field of economics, set out to chart the trajectory of happiness over an ordinary person’s life-span. He discovered that, on average, happiness rises slowly from our early twenties, peaks at about forty-five, and then declines as slowly as it rose. But the smooth arc of happiness over the life-cycle obscures dramatic action in average satisfaction within the main domains of life—family, work, health, and finances—that together compose the overall trend.
Easterlin, drawing on the massive General Social Survey, reports that health satisfaction heads steadily south from eighteen on, while family satisfaction peaks at about fifty then tails off determinedly. Job satisfaction hits a crescendo at about sixty and slopes off with retirement. Only financial satisfaction, like Matlock reruns, gets better with old age. Financial satisfaction, Easterlin finds, dips until the mid-thirties, levels off, then heads skyward, soaring ever higher each remaining year of life. If not for sharply rising financial satisfaction, the mild downward slide from midlife would be a sharp drop into a well of gray-haired despair. Money does make us happy in at least this one way: as a firewall against an otherwise soul-sapping senescence.
But Easterlin—a vocal critic of the money-happiness link—does not interpret his findings quite this way. Why not?
Why not find out?
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Or, money is no guarantee of happiness, but not having enough of it is damn near a guarantee that you won’t be happy (especially if “enough” means “enough to stave off abject poverty).
P.S. I ran into Easterlin’s (2004) paper in Daedalus thanks to a reference you made in your Policy Analysis paper to some other paper from that issue (Annas, I think). I thought it was really interesting, and I should probably look for more of his work. Thanks.
I like this article and your site very much.
I only have one complaint: I’d love to send this article to all the “silver foxes” in my life but I know they won’t be able to read the text. Is there a way to make your layout more “senior-friendly?” Thanks for putting up with my whinge.
I finally get to visit your site. I just linked to you.
Life is a Slice, it’s all what you make of it, whether you have money or not. It’s our state of mind that is more important.
Yes, money helps us more..but why should it? Most of us are rich beyond what most other people have. So let’s just give thanks and appreciate what we have now!
You might be interest in this article in tomorrow’s FT: “Don’t ask the state for happiness”. Its by the authors of “Happiness, Economics and Public Policy.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/cc1e7b00-33ab-11dc-9887-0000779fd2ac.html
Of course this is an indictment of the social economy which determines that only by wealth can we be happy in old age. In other words, a society that makes people pay for everything that is valuable is harmful to the well-being of its citizens. This is the primary symptom of the disease which plagues the US. The disease is of course, the idea that money matters more than humanity. I fear it is contagious.
I have just been thinking..
there seems to be a tautology in the position of your whole blog. It runs as follows: if we create a socity in which money is the most important thing in life, then having more money makes a person happier.
Of course it does, by definition.
A more interesting question might be - how can we order society so as to maximise people’s freedom to flourish as human beings and therefore be happy without the artificial and self-defeating goal of wealth maximisation through competetive aquisition?
What do you think?