Here are notes from some of my readings on conspicuous consumption to help with the issue framing:
Call of the Mall
Paco Underhill
Simon & Schuster: New York
2004
[He also wrote Why we Buy: The Science of Shopping, which I’m reading now]
This book is superior in explaining how we are manipulated as shoppers. I will use most of the quotes or the ideas of the quotes below for Approach One: Go Shopping.
Prologue – pages 1-2
Why are we here?
We’re here to buy stuff.
We’re here because we are bored.
We’re here become tomorrow’s Mother’s Day.
We’re here for the new Avril Lavigne CD.
We’re here for emancipation.
We’re here for lip gloss.
We’re here because our mom made us come.
We’re looking for sheets and towels.
We’re looking for sex and love.
We’re looking for self-esteem.
We’re looking for jeans that fit.
We’re here for our first business suit.
We’re here because our daughter made us come.
We’re here for a nice afternoon with the grandkids.
We’re here for the food court.
We’re here for the video arcade.
We’re here for the movies.
We’re here because it’s pouring.
We’re here to buy sneakers.
We’re here because tomorrow’s our anniversary.
We’re here because he needs underwear.
We’re here because she needs underwear.
We’re here because everybody needs underwear.
We’re here because there’s nothing on TV.
We’re here because it’s fun!
We’re here because our wife made us come.
We’re here for no reason whatsoever.
We’re looking for boys.
We’re looking for girls.
We’re looking for work.
We’re looking to shoplift.
We’re here because we love the mall!
We’re here because everybody else is.
We’re here because Christmas is coming.
We’re here because Hanukkah is coming.
We’re here because Kwanza is coming.
We don’t know why we’re here.
We’re here to find . . . something.
We’re here because we’re here.
p. 3
“. . . the saga of humankind can be told at least in part through the history of shoppin.”
p. 4
“. . . by studying the mall and what goes on there, we can learn quite a lot about ourselves – about the state of the nation and its inhabitants – from a variety of perspectives: economic, aesthetic, geographic, spiritual, emotional, psychological, sartorial.”
pp. 4-5
“It’s no surprise that the all is such an easy target for American self-loathing in particular. It’s a lot like television in that way: another totally fake environment that attempts to pass itself off as a true reflection of who we are and what we want. We disdain it, and yet we can’t stop watching. Or shopping. Once in a while, TV fulfills its highest calling – when a man first lands on the moon, say, or during the Watergate hearings. But most of the time it contents itself with reruns of Three’s Company and infomercials for the home rotisserie. It’s the same with the mall. It could be much better—more vivid, intelligent, adventurous, entertaining, imaginative, alive with the human quest for art and beauty and truth. But it’s not. It’s the mall.”
p. 14
“In the early 1970s, U.S. News and World Report conducted a poll and found that adult Americans spent more time at malls than anywhere else except for home and work.”
p.15
“There’s a food court, a vast high-ceilinged arena offering no fewer than forty different outlets, mostly fast food.”
“There a Cinnabon stand, four cookie stands, three pretzel stands, three ice-cream stands, and no place whatsoever to buy an apple.”
“Today, malls account for around 14 percent of all U.S. retailing (not counting cars or gasoline), about $308 billion in annual sales.”
p.22
“Today, when most American malls are over twenty years old, the question of what to do about aging cents will soon be upon us. If the buildings themselves had any intrinsic value, we’d be more likely to restore or salvage ones that need it. We restore and repurpose many public structures, such as former post offices, hotels, libraries, even churches. But most malls are too ugly and banal to warrant such effort. They’ve been designed to be serviceable, nothing more, and once they no longer can serve they’ll have to be razed, and replaced with . .. I don’t know. Maybe something even worse.”
p. 69
“The only females who truly love the nonshopping aspects of the mall are teenage girls. They love shopping, of course, but they also love the food courts and video arcades and all that stuff, too. And that’s probably because the mall is the only nonhome, nonschool environment they have. But they outgrow that by the time they’re in college. From then on, they’re at malls to shop”
p. 170
“And for all their [teenage girls] inefficiency; they (along with their male cohorts)still manage to constitute a $200 billion annual marketplace. If you do the math, every American teenager is the source of roughly $200 a week in retail purchases. It is true that many American teenagers work – from babysitting to taking after-school shifts at the local fast-food restaurants. But most are living off the largess of their families. Their money is spent almost entirely on discretionary purchases. They are, to the economy, pure gravy – they manage, even with limited productivity to represent a lot of buying power, making them tycoonlike in their contribution to the cosmic bottom line. They are trendy, impressionable, and emotional in their spending habits, too, easy to reach through the dependable medium of TV. They also possess something their predecessors couldn’t imagine: consumer credit. The typical college freshman carries somewhere around $2,000 in ongoing credit card balances, the result of having been importuned on countless occasions since high school. They have time, boundless desires, and money. Is it any wonder that retailers crave their attention?”
p. 176
“When we enter a store for the first time, our senses are fully alert and our eyes are moving all over the place. We’re sniffing the air, and our ears are scanning for clues about what kind of place this is. That’s part of what makes shopping a fun thing to do. It’s what distinguishes one store from another.”
pp. 205-206
“We baby boomers are in a postshopping mode, psychically speaking. We’re not as thrilled as we used to be at the mere prospect of buying, of being in the presence of multitudes of objects, talismans, fetishes, beautifiers, intensifiers, glorifiers, junk. If we needed it, we bought it, more than once. Now we’re feeling bought out. We’re bored. People in their twenties and thirties have looked slightly askance at our consumption binge. They’re not quite sold on the idea of salvation through shopping. An awful lot of today’s middle-class disposable income goes for adventure and vacation, intangibles that nourish something more than Calvin Klein’s bottom line. The fat that malls didn’t find a way to keep up with the zeitgeists every twist and turn also explains their overall failure of imagination. Teenagers and children are still excited by the mall, but it’s all still new to them, isn’t it? Give them time – when you consider all the blandishments and temptations they’ll be exposed to, they should become jaded a lot faster than the rest of us. And face it. What’s the alternative to shopping for those adolescents? Almost anything that smacks of the outside world and independence looks good when you’re twelve.”
The Value of Nothing: How to reshape market society and define democracy, Picador, NY, (2009). Heather sent me an
email about this one July 27, 2010
From Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2009
“The Dalai Lama said, ‘Shopping is the museum of the twentieth century,’ Paco Underhill explains why. Brilliantly.” Faith Popcorn, author and Future Forecaster
pp. 24-25
“If we went into stores only when we needed to buy something, and if once there we bought only what we needed, the economy would collapse-boom. Fortunately, the economic party that started the second half of the twentieth century has fostered more shopping than anyone would have predicted, more shopping than has ever taken place anywhere at any time. You almost have to make an effort to avoid shopping today. Stay out of stores and museums and theme restaurants and you still are face-to-face with Internet shopping twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, along with its low-rent cousin, home shopping on TV. You have to steer clear of your own mailbox, too, if you’re going to duck all those catalogs. As a result, every expert agrees, we are now dangerously over-retailed—too much is for sale, through too many outlets. The economy even at its strongest can’t keep up with retailing’s growth. Judging from birthrates, we’re generating stores a lot faster than we’re producing new shoppers. In 2008, across most of the first world, we are building stores and malls no longer to serve new customers but to steal someone else’s. There is no irony that the cutting edge of retail today is no longer found in North America or Western Europe. Moscow, Dubai, Shanghai and Mumbai are the newest retail hot spots –places where money is young, economies are booming and you have a whole lot of pent-up demand. . . . The level of impulse purchasing is going through the roof – in supermarkets and everywhere else, too.”
p. 47
“Remember that more than 60 percent of what we buy wasn’t on our list.”
pp. 99-100
“Certainly we’re all aware of how shopping means different things to different people at different times. We use shopping as therapy, reward, bribery, pastime, an excuse to get out of the house, a way to troll for potential loved ones, entertainment, a form of education or even worship, a way to kill time. There are compulsive shoppers doing serious damage to their bank accounts and credit ratings who use shopping as a cry for help. (Then they shop around for twelve-step programs.). . . . In the 80s, Eastern European émigrés who came to America were awestruck by the abundance on display in a typical suburban supermarket. The stores symbolized how free-market democracy comes down to simple freedom of choice – lots and lots of choices.”
p. 147
“At the same time, if you’re a guy like me, I’ll bet you don’t need any more stuff. The fifty-and-over crowd is generally downsizing, adjusting for empty nests and aging parents. Right now I own every shirt, tie, pair of shoes and piece of jewelry I foresee needing for the rest of my life. The only things I require are fruit, vegetables, pasta, wine, olive oil, meat and fish weekly, and annual doses of fresh socks and underwear. Everything else is discretionary (although my longtime live-in—who I call Dreamboat, because she is one –did surprise me two Christmases ago with a new gadget called a Slingbox, which hooks up to my cable TV and home Internet service, so now when I’m stranded in a hotel room in Singapore at two A.M., I can watch Yankees games on my laptop from my TV at home—pure heaven). Like most fifty-somethings, and with the notable exception of that Slingbox, which you’re not taking away from me, I’ll pick experiences over things any day. Plus a few pair of socks.”
p. 152
“The older we get, the more we recognize that the ownership of any product, no matter what it is, isn’t transformative. That dress, that lipstick, that iPod nano is not going to change you or anyone’s opinion of you. The aging consumer is also better at ignoring pop-up ads online and TiVo-ing their favorite programs so they don’t have to watch five annoying commercials in a row. Thus, the twenty-first century marketer is focused on kids and teens. It’s not surprise to note that the average four-year-old American child can identity more than one hundred brands. There is also the fact that our children consume even more mass media that we adults do, much of it vying to sell them things. The marketplace wants kids, needs kids, and kids are flattered by the invitation and happy to oblige. They idolize licensed TV characters the way their junior forbears once were taught to worship patron saints, and they manage to suss out the connection between brand name and status at a very early age. It’s just one more example of how capitalism brings about democratization – you no longer need to stay clear of the global marketplace just because you’re three and half feet tall, have no income to speak of, and are not permitted to cross the street without Mom. You’re an economic force, now and in the future, and that’s what counts.
p. 214
“Retailers must accept the fact that there are no new customers—the population isn’t booming, and we already have more stores than we need. The usual figure is that 80 percent of a store’s sales will come from 20 percent of its clientele. So if stores are to grow, it will be by figuring out how to get more out of existing customers—more visits, more time in the store, more and bigger purchases.”
p. 230
“Part of the problem these days, as most consumers are aware, is that there’s too much choice in the world. Too much product. Too many different kinds of ink cartridges. Too many shaving razors. Way too much stuff.”
p. 268
“As I said before, if you’re looking for the cutting edge of retail today, you’ve got to go to places where money is young. . . . In cities like Dublin, Moscow and Sao Paulo, among others, the retail world belongs to people under the age of forty who have just come into their money, and they’re spending it on stuff left and right. By 2010, the vast majority of growth in the retail marketplace will take place in emerging markets, where well-trained merchants are serving emerging customers.”
p. 281
“ . . . shopping is practically in our species’ DNA.”
p. 283
“In the twenty-first century the consumer is king.”
p.284
“In his lectures, esteemed social critic, researcher and futurists, Watts Wacker makes the point that, based on the current evidence, men are on their way to becoming exotic household pets. Retail must pay attention to how women wish to live, what they want and need, or it will be left behind. Even the enormous changes in the lives of men and children are merely in response to the lead taken by women.”
p. 289
“Shopping is a form of entertainment, just like movies or the zoo.”
p. 290
“It is not too far-fetched to say even that stores have become places of worship—sites for the exaltation of man-made things, temples where we can express and reaffirm and share our belief in self-improvement, beauty, knowledge or fun. It’s no coincidence that of the two main holidays on the Christian calendar, Christmas and Easter, it is the former—the one with the greatest shopping potential---that every year becomes less exclusively religious and more secular, not to mention commercial. For most retailers, Christmas is make-or-break—the annual arrival of a savior, if you will.”
The New Frugality: How to Consume Less, Save More, and Live Better
Chris Farrell
Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010
For me this book represents a transition between approach two and three in my framing.
Book Flap:
“ . . . the New Frugality . . . means spending your money on quality instead of quantity –buying the best you can afford but the least you need.”
p. 1
“A dollar is not value, but representative of value, and at last of moral values . . . Wealth is mental; wealth is moral.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
p. 4
“We are clearly talking about the end of the consuming generation of reckless spenders,” says Henry ‘Bud’ Hebeler, formerly president of Boeing’s aerospace unit and now a passionate proselytizer for sensible financial planning.
p.6
Paul Newman: “We are spendthrifts with our lives. The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood, I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
p. 7
Green is frugal and frugal is green.
Turn down the thermostat in winter, wear a sweater.
Downsize, don’t buy more house than you need.
Renovate rather than build.
Don’t purchase prepared foods.
Go for quality, not quantity.
Use energy-efficient appliances.
Recycle clothing, furniture, and other goods within your community.
Engage in socially responsible investing.
Use public transportation.
p. 14
Taking on debt was a moral failing. “The second Vice is Lying; the first is Running into Debt,” said Benjamin Franklin.
p.21
A majority of American households have at least one credit card, and government statisticians calculate that some 1.5 billion credit cards are in use in the United States.
p.26
The borrowing binge went beyond housing. People bought everything from aged balsamic vinegar to Sub-Zero refrigerators on credit. The average cost of a wedding soared to nearly $30,000. Students and their families borrowed record sums to pay for college. Car loans reached an average of nearly $31,000 up almost 40 percent over the past decade. Almost half of all car loans were six years or longer, a sure way to owe more than the car is worth. The flush times couldn’t last, and didn’t.
p. 34
Saul Griffith is an inventor, entrepreneur, writer, and MacArthur Fellow. At a talk on the science of climate change and sustainability, he addressed what we can do.
Spend money on services – everything from repairs to education—and not on things
Eat less and more healthy food
Exercise more
Don’t just drive less, get rid of the car
Spend more time with family
Spend less time commuting: Live closer to family and friends, work and school
Reduce business travel
Get higher quality, better-designed products you don’t replace, the “Montblanc pen” approach to life
p.41
Be like Aristotle
“ . . . why not emulate Aristotle, the Greek philosopher. He’s my favorite personal financial planner. Intellectual historians often credit him with developing the idea of the good life, an examined life of meaning and purpose in contrast to merely getting by and gratifying immediate desires. Aristotle lived in the fourth century B.C., and his thoughts were gathered together in the Nichomachean Ethics. In his lectures he expounds on his most famous idea: the golden mean. It’s that desirable although middle between two extremes. The mean ‘lies between excess and deficiency,’ says Aristotle.”
pp.96-97
“A popular distinction was drawn between ‘consumptive debt’ and ‘productive credit.’ It’s really a variation on the distinction between needs and wants. The ominous sounding ‘consumptive’ debt included borrowing for everything from clothes to entertainment. Historian Lendol Calder notes, ‘Consumption signified the wasting disease of tuberculosis. This loathsome association accounts for the stock portrayals of consumptive debtors in the money ethic literature: shivering youths who pawned overcoats to pay gambling debt; sallow New York dandies with showing chains on their vest . .. Borrowing money for ‘gratifications of the moment’ was the only kind of debt strictly forbidden by the money ethic.” In sharp contrast, productive credit was borrowing money to make money.”
p. 218
“Let’s give the last word to Johnny Cash:
Money can’t buy back
Your youth when you’re old
Or a friend when your lonely
Or a love that’s grown cold.”
From discussion with Stell in Greece:
Dictionary definition of conspicuous consumption: lavish or wasteful spending thought to enhance social prestige
Stell asks what are tangible signs of conspicuous consumption:?
Closets stuffed full of clothes
Rental places for storing things you’ve grown out of room for in your home
Vehicles in your driveway that far outnumber the people living in your home
Stuffed and Starved
Raj Patel
Melville House Publishing, Brooklyn 2009
p. 19
“. . . . there are ways to reclaim our sovereignty, to become more than just consumers, by reconfiguring the food system and rewriting the relation of power that exploit people both in growing, and in eating.”
p. 77
“Luxury foods were being brought to Britain so effectively that by 1733, George Cheyne – an eighteenth century advocate of vegetarianism – was able to lament the rise of the systematic disease of affluence, which he termed ‘the English Malady’:
Since our Wealth has increas’d, we have ransack’d all the
Parts of the Globe to bring together its whole Stock of
Materials for Riot, Luxury and to provoke Excess … Is it any
Wonder, then, that the Diseases which proceed from
Idleness and Fulness of Bread, should increase in
Proportion, and keep equal Pace with those Improvements
of the Matter and Cause of Disease?5
pp. 89-90
“In his 1949 inaugural address, US President Harry Truman announced that:
‘we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the government and growth of under-developed areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people. 52
This speech is generally considered the charter document for what today is called ‘development’.53 Less noted, however is the extent to which development isn’t an innocent process. It rested as a fourth point to a speech that began with an excursus on the evils of Communism, and then asserted:
“We must carry out our plans for reducing the barriers to world trade and increasing its volume. Economic recovery and peace itself depend on increased world trade . . . we will strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression. I hope soon to send to the Senate a treaty respecting the North Atlantic security plan. In addition, we will provide military advice and equipment to free nations which will cooperate with us in the maintenance of peace and security.”
Development was, in other words, part of a policy mindset that linked international trade, military power and a programme of redistribution. What was to be redistributed was, it turned out, food. The Marshall Plan – the US aid programme to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – had instigated, among other initiatives, the transfer of food to the hungry and possibly querulous European population in response to the post-war food shortages. When European farmers were able once again to feed the continent, and even to turn a surplus, by the early 1950s, they wanted the aid to stop. Cheap US imports were, after all, preventing them from selling their crops to their own people.54 From July 1954, US food aid was pointed at a new target, one where farmers were politically much less able to make the same demands of the United States – the Global South.
pp. 190-191
“In a recent statement, a spokesperson for Brazil’s Mehinaku indigenous people, living on soy’s frontier, gave voice to the notion that only a few have benefited from the soy industry:
‘The governor of Mato Grasso state, where we live, grows soya. He wants to grab half of our reserve, only to plant soya. I am beginning to understand things about the whites. What I see is that we, the Indians, respect them but they don’t respect us. If you go to my land, all you will see is forest. It’s unbroken. Now we have set up vigilance posts to protect it and the rivers. People come down the rivers in boats throwing out the rubbish and taking the fish. But I don’t take things that belong to the whites. Funai (Foundation for the Protection of Indians) is responsible for our land. A long time ago, this was our land. Now everything is finished. All the trees are gone. There are not bees’ nests full of honey and no eagles. There are no tapirs, no monkeys – they have all died or fled. There are no animals here at all. The Preto river is totally spoiled. There are no fish, and the river is all polluted. The ranchers are finishing everything, and this land has become ugly. We never knew that so many ranchers would arrive in our land. We didn’t know that tractors existed and we didn’t know about chain saws that cut down trees. Nor did we know about cattle. Then we saw that as the city people came on to our land, they brought diseases, they polluted the rivers and finished off the birds and animals. Five years ago, there was nobody here. Now many, many people keep arriving. It’s one ranch after another. We are not interested in cows because we don’t eat meat. So these cattle ranches are of no use to us, we want nothing to do with them.’59
pp. 219-220
The first grocery stores (around 1916)
“The new store combined the idea of getting consumers to shop for themselves (and so reducing staffing costs) with the means for making sure that they were exposed to everything for sale (thus maximizing potential revenue).5 The plan view from Saunders patent shows how the internal geography of the store balanced stock-control with the communicative architecture of what was ultimately, the first consumption factory. You begin at the entrance, you walk through a turnstile, pick up your basket, follow the maze of products back and forth until you arrive at the till, at which point you pay. There’s only one path to follow, there’s no one to talk to, and the store is designed first and foremost to get you to put as much as you can into your trolley in as little time and with as low cost to the store as possible. In it, shoppers resembled nothing so much as rats in a maze.
That said, some consumers didn’t quite understand the system. In Australia, supermarket promoters hired instructors, who taught adults and children, men and women, how to push carts down the aisles. And in US stores today, one can find child-sized carts with long poles attached. While intended to help parents better find their children in the aisles, the mini-carts serve an educational purpose. The flag proclaims it quite clearly: ‘Customer in training.’6
p.223
“. . . consumerism today has constructed us, built consuming people at the same time as building consumer goods. . . “
p. 232
“But convenience, low prices and a paradise of choice in supermarkets go hand in hand with price gouging, discrimination, exploitive labour practices, local community destruction, environmental degradation and shiftless profiteering.”
p.236
“Yet as Stacy Mitchell of the New Rules Project points out, ‘Wal-Mart is as much a product of public policy as it is of consumer choice. Local and state governments have provided billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to fund big-box development. Tax policies in many states allow national retailers to escape paying much of their income tax, while local businesses must should their full-share.’40 At a minimum, over US$1 billion in US federal public subsidy has gone directly to support Wal-Mart – the figure increases when state-level and foreign subsidies are included.41 This at the same time as evidence mounts that the arrival of a Wal-Mart store signals the demise of the local economy and community.42 And without an income, fewer and fewer can afford to be consumers anywhere else but Wal-Mart.”
p. 300
“Current research suggests that, at current rates of industrial overfishing and consumption, there won’t be any fish left by 2048.20”
pp. 316-317
“The call for food sovereignty pushes for political action to fight the poverty caused by the food system at both ends, rural and urban, in poor neighbourhoods across the planet. For what happens in the fields and in the cities is intimately connected and is, at the end of the day, part of the same problem. One that requires a political solution. Quite what these politics will look like depends entirely on local conditions and forces, and that because it depends on everyone having a say. Food sovereignty implies a diversity of solutions, not a monoculture, not an approach owned and patented by a single corporation. It does not involve a single size fitting all. It is a set of ideas, policies and ways of eating that are sensitive to history, ecology and culture, and the respect human rights.”
p. 319
“The way we become singular is plural.”61
A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle
Harper, San Francisco, 1972
p. 16
. . . I am honestly unhappy about Madison Avenue. The advertiser is in business to sell his product to as many people as possible. We forget that most successful high-pressure advertising campaigns deal subtly with our weaknesses, our insecure longing for status (I've never quite overcome my yearing to earn a Merit Badge as a housewife), so that we are being manipulated. A pitch to make us buy a new car or a new stove when our old one is perfectly good, so that we'll have a better 'image' of ourselves, doesn't make sense, but it's what the advertiser's in business for. And the powers of darkness know exactly were to infiltrate. Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to be or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality."
pp. 149-150
"Madison Avenue, my old bugaboo, is one of the greatest of all limiters. The more vocabulary is limited, the less people will be able to think for themselves, the more they can be manipulated, and the more of the product they will buy: selling the product is Madison Avenue's end; limiting the public's capacity to think for itself is its means. 'What Madison Avenue wants to do,' I said to the students at O.S.U., deliberately using a violent word for shock value, 'is screw the public.'"
Other resources:
The New Frugality: How to Consume Less, Save More, and Live Better by Chris Farrell (Bloomsbury Press, 2009).
The Complete Tightwad Gazette: Promoting Thrift as a Valuable Alternative Lifestyle by amy Dacyczyn (Random House, 1998)
In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue by Lauren Weber (Little, Brown, 2009)
Thrift: Rebirth of a Forgotten Virtue by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch (Encounter Books, 2009)
Money and happiness
Issue No. 13406
A PERSON
’S wealth may not always prescribe how he or she will rank on the happiness scale. Many of us know wealthy and successful people who are living in fabulously wealthy houses, driving luxury cars and buying what they desire at a drop of a hat. Yet, they are not happy. Why is that, when we all know that money always makes life easier? Well, the last round of research shows that money up to a certain point indeed makes people happier, because it lets them meet basic needs. However, acquiring things beyond your basic needs is what contributes to your ranking lower on the longterm happiness scale.
One major finding is that spending money to acquire experiences produces longer-lasting satisfaction than spending money on objects. In other words, it’s better to go on a vacation than to buy a new dining-room set.
Consumption doesn’t buy happiness, research has discovered. The only type of consumption positively related to happiness is leisure, such as vacations, entertainment, sports and equipment for it, like golf clubs and fishing rods. Drawing some comparisons with studies linking marriage with happiness, social science researcher Thomas DeLeine notes: “A $20,000 increase in spending on leisure was roughly equivalent to the happiness boost one gets from marriage”.
Moreover, spending on leisure activities appears to make people feel less lonely because it increases the number of their interactions with people, and studies have shown there is a strong correlation between the quality of people’s relationships and their happiness.
Another reason that paying for experience gives us longlasting happiness is that we can reminisce about it. This most likely will also be true even for the numerous tourists at the port of Piraeus this summer when they were inconvenienced by striking mariners from boarding ferries for their much-anticipated island escapades. After some time passes, it is very likely that this event will be airbrushed by them with a rosy recollection of their holidays overseas, in spite of the inconveniences.
Another reason experiences provide more happiness than the acquisition of things is that experience cannot be absorbed in one gulp it needs gradual processing. On the contrary, the buzz from a new purchase is pushed towards the emotional norm, which means it doesn’t last too long.
For instance, we buy a new house, but soon get accustomed to it and the buzz that we initially got from it gets pushed towards the emotional norm, so we stop getting pleasure from it. Consequently, we want to get a new buzz and we buy more and more things, yet happiness evades us.
Further, in purchases, anticipation increases happiness. You might want to consider buying something as long as possible before actually buying it. Remember the days before credit cards? Credit cards allowed us to buy compulsively and impulsively. When one waits for something and works hard to get it, this makes it feel more valuable.
Nowadays, with the economic climate as it is, it forces us to buy less and plan our purchases more carefully. Paradoxically, this may make us happier. The truism “less is more” fits here perfectly.
* Loula Koteas is a Greek American clinical psychologist who specialises in the treatment of depression, anxiety, phobias and interpersonal difficulties and in counselling for couples.
ATHENS NEWS 06/09/2010, page: 22
Study: Money can buy happiness
Researchers find mood rises with income — to a point.
By Randolph E. Schmid Associated Press
WASHINGTON — They say money can’t buy happiness. They’re wrong. At least up to a point. People’s emotional well-being — happiness — increases along with their income up to about $75,000, researchers report in today’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For folks making less than that, said Angus Deaton, an economist at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University, “Stuff is so in your face it’s hard to be happy. It interferes with your enjoyment.” Deaton and Daniel Kahneman reviewed surveys of 450,000 Americans conducted in 2008 and 2009 for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index that included questions on people’s day-today happiness and their overall life satisfaction. Happiness got better as income rose but the effect leveled out at $75,000, Deaton said. On the other hand, their overall sense of success or well-being continued to rise as their earnings grew beyond that point. “Giving people more income beyond 75K is not going to do much for their daily mood, ... but it is going to make them feel they have a better life,” Deaton said. Not surprisingly, someone who moves from a $100,000-a-year job to one paying $200,000 realizes an improved sense of success. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are happier day to day, Deaton said. The results were similar for other measures, Deaton said. For example, people were really happier on weekends, but their deeper sense of well-being didn’t change. Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning psychologist, and Deaton undertook the study to learn more about economic growth and policy. Some have questioned the value of growth to individuals, and Deaton said they were far from resolving that question. But he added, “Working on this paper has brought me a lot of emotional well-being. As an economist I tend to think money is good for you, and am pleased to find some evidence for that.”Overall, the researchers said, “as in other studies of well-being, we found that most people were quite happy and satisfied with their lives.” Comparing their life-satisfaction results with those of other countries, the researchers said the United States ranked ninth after the Scandinavian countries, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and New Zealand.
The research was supported by the Gallup Organization and the National Institute on Aging. Atlanta Journal Constitution, September 7, 2010
