Happiness Happiness 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

Www Loveofmoneyisrootofallprosperity Sk Afaceri Comert 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 The real secret to happiness: higher taxes - Ross Gittins - www.theage.com.au

Www Loveofmoneyisrootofallprosperity Sk Afaceri Comert 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

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"When a monkey beats off his rivals, he not only gets more mates and more bananas, he also gets a direct reward: being top makes him feel great. This is a powerful motivator."

We need to keep taxes high to discourage us from working so hard and neglecting leisure.

Social standing has a big effect on physical health. When monkeys are put in different groups so that their rank changes, their coronary arteries clog up more slowly the higher their rank.

Not convinced this has any implications for humans? Well, in a famous study of British civil servants, those of higher rank secreted lower average levels of stress-related cortisol - one reason people in the higher grades lived on average 41/2 years longer than those in lower grades.

Still not convinced we're obsessed by getting ahead of the Joneses? Consider this experiment where students at Harvard were asked to choose between living in two imaginary worlds. In World One, you get $50,000 a year while other people average $25,000. In World Two, you get $100,000 a year, while others average $250,000.

The majority of respondents preferred the first world. They were happy to be poorer in absolute terms, provided their RELATIVE position improved.

All this suggests that a major motivation for people in working so hard is to gain higher status directly from their position in their organisation or from the amount of money they earn and the homes, cars and other status symbols they are able to buy with that money.

Trouble is, what may make sense for the individual doesn't make sense for society. Status-seeking is a zero-sum game. I can advance myself in the pecking order only at the expense of those I pass. My gain is cancelled out by their loss.

Thus all the effort we expend trying to get ahead of the Joneses, or at least keep up with them, is like a perpetual arms race, which is socially wasteful. We'd be better off if we could somehow call a truce.

Layard says our preoccupation with status is heightened by the fact that the modern capitalist economy has "conquered scarcity". Our basic needs for food, clothing and shelter have long ago been more than satisfied.

And yet our incomes keep growing in real terms year after year. What are we to do with the extra money? I believe the richer we get, the more of our income we devote to our pursuit of status, to buying "positional goods" - goods that, as well as doing whatever they are supposed to do, also demonstrate our position in the pecking order: flash homes in good suburbs, late-model European cars, kids attending private schools and everyone dressed in the most fashionable way.

I strongly suspect that, whether we quite realise it or not, our underlying motive in urging governments to cut our taxes is to be left with more disposable income to spend on conspicuous consumption. We would like to strike another blow in the status race - even though, as a group, it would get us nowhere.

Those students at Harvard were offered another pair of alternative worlds: a world where you have two weeks' holiday while others have one week, or a world where you have four weeks' holiday and others have eight.

This time, only 20 per cent of students chose the first world. Most preferred longer holidays to shorter holidays that, even so, were twice what others were getting.

"So most people are not rivalrous about their leisure," Layard says. "But they ARE rivalrous about income, and that rivalry is self-defeating. There is thus a tendency to sacrifice too much leisure in order to increase income."

Taxes are clearly performing some useful function beyond that of raising money to pay for public spending, he concludes. "They are holding us back from an even more fevered way of life."

Ross Gittins is an Age writer.

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