Www Loveofmoneyisrootofallprosperity Da Letra S Happiness Finding Happiness Life Happiness Happiness Quotes Happiness Richard Layard Money Make You Happy Happiness Layard Can Buy Happiness Money Makes You Happy Money Happy Money Buy can't buy me love....

I had a co-worker who won $500 from a scratch-off lottery card.

He acted as if, all of a sudden, the universe (I think he used "God") had decided to smile on him, and that, from there on in, his life was going to take a different, more uplifting tack. He started spending more, and quickly exceeded the $500, because, it seemed to me, more was coming. And, due to the math, it wasn't.

I think that would be the case for people, no matter how much they won. There was a This American Life episode about this also. Lottery winners very rarely end up happy.
posted by Danf at 8:45 AM on March 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

"On an individual level, it’s possible to stop buying lottery tickets, move back to Minnesota,"

Ouch.

The other problem with associating income and happiness is that the scales don't match up. It's possibly for Bill Gates to be a million times richer than I am, but even if it's possible to for him to be a million times happier than I am, the test only allows him to rate his happiness on a (say) 1-10 scale.

And x10000 on enn's median/mean discussion above. Nothing pisses me off more than making this "mistake" (which I'm not convinced is innocent at all). I'm looking at *you*, people who make ludicrous claims about world poverty reduction based on Chinese per cap GDP growth.
posted by bonecrusher at 8:55 AM on March 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

I find this subject pretty interesting. The books Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard and The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt are worth reading.

The linked article concentrates on public policy, which I'm a bit skeptical about: I think it's more useful for individuals.

The big thing is "hedonic adaptation". We expect that changes in our life will make big differences to our levels of happiness, but in fact we rapidly adapt to many changes.

As one example, Haidt points out that if we buy a bigger house, we rapidly adjust to it and find it makes us no happier. However we don't adjust easily to a longer commute: that keeps on making us miserable each time we do it. So moving to a large house further away from work is likely to make us less happy.

This VoxEU article has some interesting graphs taken from a very large set of data, showing how various life events (unemployment, marriage, divorce, widowhood, birth of child) affect happiness.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:01 AM on March 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

it would be stressful seeing a friend get promoted and get rich for no apparent reason

This one suspects is probably due to capitalism's pitting of workers against each other, so that the default mode in the U.S. (and maybe other Western countries) is to resent others' economic good fortune rather than to be happy for it. It's possible that children raised without this artificial indoctrinated sense of competition with the other worker bees might be able to cope with communal living, or at least this aspect of it. It's maybe worth noting that the examples you cite replace other ideologies -- the peace and love of the hippies, the national identity and shared religion on the kibbutz -- for the default capitalist mindset of U.S. citizens.
posted by aught at 9:12 AM on March 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

What sallybrown said. "Hapiness" as an indicator, at least as human use it in self-assessment, seems to be the problem.

Ask yourself this: If you had a million, or ten million dollars, could you change things such that you enjoy how you spend your time more than you do now?

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- when a term appears on either side of an equation, you remove it. These sorts of studies, even when they're not misused by people looking to suggest that money actually results in unhappiness, suggest that money and happiness is unrelated. Ok, thanks for that. I'll take the long vacations to exotic places, nice meals, a work or hobby schedule according to desire rather than need, please. If none of that translates to "happiness", so be it.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 9:13 AM on March 19, 2010 [5 favorites]

See also: culture jamming, and "exposing questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture so that people can momentarily consider the branded environment in which they live." In the (IMO) flawed Rebel Sell book talk, Joseph Heath talks about the "happiness plateau":

While economic development has been shown to generate a steady increase in average happiness levels, after a certain level of development has been reached, the effect disappears completely. The rule of thumb developed amongst economists, considering the subject, is that once GDP reaches about US 10,000 per capita, further economic growth generates no gains in average happiness. In North America, we hit that level long ago, so despite spectacular economic growth since the Second World War, there's been no overall increase in happiness. Some studies have even shown a decrease, in the United States in particular.

Once you sufficiently fulfill the needs and basic wants of your life, your next goal is the unattainable "more." Winning the lottery can be a curse, because suddenly you can fulfill all your dreams, except the summation of your dreams costs a lot more than you ever realized. Plus you get contacted by more family and friends that you never knew you had.

I've learned the method to being happy with massive lottery winnings from family friends who did just that. They were the one in a million who won a big cash-out, but they didn't tell anyone right away. They talked to financial experts first, then thought about their options. That weekend, they went on a snow trip with the boy scouts, helped my parents put chains on their car in the dark, and enjoyed their weekend. Over a few days or maybe a week, they figured out how to maximize their winnings in a conservative way, and finally claimed their winnings. They went for getting a couple hundred thousand dollars each year for 20 or 30 years instead of the lump sum, because you'd get more in the long run. They changed their phone number and got it unlisted, and bought land with a nice house and an orchard but didn't turn a profit on it, so they had a tax write-off of some sort. They had a small woodworking shop with a few employees, and they kept that but were able to get decent insurance for their employees and buy the building they were previously leasing for the shop. And they were able to pay for their son's college education with ease. The never got lavish, and they paced themselves. They figured out how much they needed in savings to live off of the interest earned and the additional annual pay-out from the lottery. I don't think they ever called it "a gift from god," and made their life (which was already pretty good by most standards) more comfortable.

Now all I need is a trick to win the lottery.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:25 AM on March 19, 2010 [9 favorites]

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