Money
I believe it was retired Supreme Court Justice Stevens who said during an interview that he had never heard a dollar bill say a word. Yet the Court has decided that money is equivalent to speech. Many people think that money is equivalent to anything that can be bought with it such as labor, goods, and entertainment. A dollar bill cannot talk so it is not speech, it cannot open a can of beans so it is not a can opener, it cannot keep you warm in winter so it is not a sweater, and it cannot feel so it is not love, although the reverse seems to be true, that people love money. I would like to argue money is not equivalent to anything except need.
If you believe the studies, a few years old now but I'll use their numbers, individual incomes correlates with increased happiness up to an annual income of $75,000 then, as income rises above that, happiness seems to fall. According to Wikipedia, American income for a home with two earners of $150,000 is the 88 percentile of family incomes. This means that 87% of American home would be 'happier' with more money. That is most of us.
Why would higher incomes mean less happiness? Many reasons but the obvious ones are that making more money means they work harder, longer hours and their work is more life disrupting. Lots of money also gives you more to worry about. The bigger your house the bigger the headaches. You become a tool of your tools, as someone said. Sometimes there is happiness in simplicity. And there is some research from the psychology literature that says the more choices a person has, the more likely they are to be depressed.
Unless you are Scrooge McDuck, and play in your pile of money, money is not very interesting or satisfying, in itself. It's great to have savings in case of a disaster so that your entire lifestyle is not lost. But most people don't really enjoy just having a large savings account. What they do enjoy is work that is meaningful and pleasant to do. They enjoy a stable family. They enjoy having enough free time to recreate. And they enjoy having enough money to be able to offer their children access to a bright future through a college education. And they enjoy having some help at home.
The satisfaction that comes from playing a Beethoven piano sonata, building a coffee table for your living room, scoring a goal in a soccer game, having an article published in a magazine, is satisfaction unobtainable by holding money in your hand. This is because all the listed activities require the achieving of a goal through hard work and thought. Even if no money comes with the accomplishment, the satisfaction is beyond having a monetary value. Lots of people think that if they could make a living building furniture or playing Beethoven they would be happy, and this is true for many, but for most they would need to get by on less than $75,000 a year. The questions is whether the satisfaction of building furniture is enough to offset the distress of not having enough money to fund your retirement plan or send your child to college.
Since the great recession on 2008, and even before, more and more of American are making a family income of less than $150,000 a year, the number that I am suggesting yield maximum happiness. If one member of a married couple was to work a standard work week and have two weeks of vacation per year, they would need to earn $75 per hour. Not many folks earn that much. Two working adults in a household would need to earn $37.50 per hour: also rare. This gives you an idea of how far the $15 per hour proposed minimum wage is from producing a happy household. In 2016 the average average personal income of all Americans was $31,100 or about $15, 000 per working adult which works out to an hourly wage for a full time worker of $7.50 per hours. So, half of working Americans are making a minimum wage. This sounds more and more like serfdom. As I've said in an earlier essay my father supported our family of 4 from 1955 thought the end of his life in 1980 working as an electrician and later as a union executive, without my mother working. He wasn't a serf and you should not be either. He added value to his product and got paid a fair share of it. He didn't get rich.
I don't really want to give numbers for wealthy. The income of the very rich are far higher than they need to be. Over the last 30 years the goal of business has been to keep more and more of the profits of enterprise in the hands of the owners and executives and less in the hands of the people who are actually doing the work of the business. This is just pure greed. Executive and managers add little to the value of a product. But this should be the topic of another essay.
Most Americans need a larger share of the profits of business. Until that happens they will be unhappy and susceptible to the idea that a conspiracy is occurring that keeps them poor. And they would be partly right. That susceptibility is one of the things that led to the election of the con-man-populist we have for president now. We are paying for the greed of the executive/owner class in America.
If you believe the studies, a few years old now but I'll use their numbers, individual incomes correlates with increased happiness up to an annual income of $75,000 then, as income rises above that, happiness seems to fall. According to Wikipedia, American income for a home with two earners of $150,000 is the 88 percentile of family incomes. This means that 87% of American home would be 'happier' with more money. That is most of us.
Why would higher incomes mean less happiness? Many reasons but the obvious ones are that making more money means they work harder, longer hours and their work is more life disrupting. Lots of money also gives you more to worry about. The bigger your house the bigger the headaches. You become a tool of your tools, as someone said. Sometimes there is happiness in simplicity. And there is some research from the psychology literature that says the more choices a person has, the more likely they are to be depressed.
Unless you are Scrooge McDuck, and play in your pile of money, money is not very interesting or satisfying, in itself. It's great to have savings in case of a disaster so that your entire lifestyle is not lost. But most people don't really enjoy just having a large savings account. What they do enjoy is work that is meaningful and pleasant to do. They enjoy a stable family. They enjoy having enough free time to recreate. And they enjoy having enough money to be able to offer their children access to a bright future through a college education. And they enjoy having some help at home.
The satisfaction that comes from playing a Beethoven piano sonata, building a coffee table for your living room, scoring a goal in a soccer game, having an article published in a magazine, is satisfaction unobtainable by holding money in your hand. This is because all the listed activities require the achieving of a goal through hard work and thought. Even if no money comes with the accomplishment, the satisfaction is beyond having a monetary value. Lots of people think that if they could make a living building furniture or playing Beethoven they would be happy, and this is true for many, but for most they would need to get by on less than $75,000 a year. The questions is whether the satisfaction of building furniture is enough to offset the distress of not having enough money to fund your retirement plan or send your child to college.
Since the great recession on 2008, and even before, more and more of American are making a family income of less than $150,000 a year, the number that I am suggesting yield maximum happiness. If one member of a married couple was to work a standard work week and have two weeks of vacation per year, they would need to earn $75 per hour. Not many folks earn that much. Two working adults in a household would need to earn $37.50 per hour: also rare. This gives you an idea of how far the $15 per hour proposed minimum wage is from producing a happy household. In 2016 the average average personal income of all Americans was $31,100 or about $15, 000 per working adult which works out to an hourly wage for a full time worker of $7.50 per hours. So, half of working Americans are making a minimum wage. This sounds more and more like serfdom. As I've said in an earlier essay my father supported our family of 4 from 1955 thought the end of his life in 1980 working as an electrician and later as a union executive, without my mother working. He wasn't a serf and you should not be either. He added value to his product and got paid a fair share of it. He didn't get rich.
I don't really want to give numbers for wealthy. The income of the very rich are far higher than they need to be. Over the last 30 years the goal of business has been to keep more and more of the profits of enterprise in the hands of the owners and executives and less in the hands of the people who are actually doing the work of the business. This is just pure greed. Executive and managers add little to the value of a product. But this should be the topic of another essay.
Most Americans need a larger share of the profits of business. Until that happens they will be unhappy and susceptible to the idea that a conspiracy is occurring that keeps them poor. And they would be partly right. That susceptibility is one of the things that led to the election of the con-man-populist we have for president now. We are paying for the greed of the executive/owner class in America.
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