
'Billionaires' Book Review: Money Can't Buy Happiness - tacon
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120092/billionaires-book-review-money-cant-buy-happiness
======
danieltillett
I love the subtlety of this defence of the wealthy. Peons don't worry about
all that money the 0.01% have extorted from you by rigging the rules, they are
not happy. Don't worry about their corrupting influence on democracy and
society because some of them sometimes lose (like Meg and Mitt). Move along
and leave your betters alone - isn't it time for you to phone in your vote for
American Idol?

~~~
pedalpete
Did you miss this statement "The single biggest donor to political campaigns
just now is Tom Steyer, a Democrat with a passion for climate change."?

If all the wealthy people had the same goals and views, then you'd be in
trouble, but as they having competing ideals, what it seems America ends up
with is the wealthy trying to outspend each other to gain political favour,
which, according to the article, they have been unsuccessful at doing.

The 99.09% may not have the money, but they've got the vote, they've got
brains, creativity, and the persuasive effect of numbers.

The question, what should those capabilities be pointed at resolving?

Blame the rich may be popular right now, and I'm all for a more equal society,
particularly bringing up the income of the lowest 50%, but I doubt a heaping
tablespoon of sarcasm is going to get us there.

~~~
marcusgarvey
>If all the wealthy people had the same goals and views, then you'd be in
trouble

One must of course speak in generalities but it seems obvious they have at
least one goal in common: to remain wealthy & empowered, come what may. Which
of course has implications for which public policies succeed and which fail

As for your statement that the wealthy have not gained political favor -- not
true: "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised
groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on
US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups
have little or no independent influence." [http://m.bbc.com/news/blogs-
echochambers-27074746](http://m.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746)

~~~
enoch_r
> One must of course speak in generalities but it seems obvious they have at
> least one goal in common: to remain wealthy & empowered, come what may.
> Which of course has implications for which public policies succeed and which
> fail.

The self-interested voter hypothesis has been examined empirically quite a bit
and the lack of evidence for it is pretty surprising. To avoid the risk of
cherry-picking, let's look at a few papers that support your assertion, and
look at how _they_ describe the literature.

In the first paper, "Caught in the Draft: Vietnam Draft Lottery Status and
Political Attitudes,"[1] the authors found that eligibility for the Vietnam
draft had a significant and quite strong effect on political opinions. Here's
how the authors describe previous research on self-interest and public
opinion:

> Self-interest effects have been notoriously elusive in public opinion
> research. [...] "Longino (1973) found more negative attitudes toward the war
> among those with low lottery numbers, but not to a statistically significant
> extent (reaffirmed by Bergen’s (2009) reanalysis), while Aspler (1972) found
> more disapproval of the draft. Yet,civilian attitudes toward (or related to)
> the war in Vietnam have been shown to be at best weakly related to self-
> interest indicators whether one has a family member or friend serving in
> Vietnam (Lau, Brown,and Sears 1978, Mueller 1973). Indeed, Lau, Brown, and
> Sears (1978) find “no evidence that the self-interested had distinctly self-
> serving attitudes toward the war” (p.479).

Here's another paper, titled "A Reconsideration of Self-Interest in American
Public Opinion,"[2] let's quote their introduction:

> A fairly extensive body of research has investigated the weight that self-
> interested concerns carry in defining the opinions that citizens come to
> adopt (e.g. Bobo and Kluegel 1993; Feldman 1982; Green and Gerkin 1989;
> Kinder and Kiewiet 1981; Lau, Brown, and Sears 1978; Sears, Hensler, and
> Speer 1979; Sears, Lau, Tyler, and Allen 1980; Sears and Citrin 1982; Sears,
> Huddy, and Shaffer 1986; Tyler 1990). Over and over in these studies the
> same conclusion emerges: the evidence for self-interest effects is, in most
> cases, weak at best. In an early review of this literature Lau and his
> colleagues concluded that "[i]n all these cases, self-interest, defined in
> terms of real or potential impact of a policy issue upon the individual's
> personal life, had only minor effects on policy attitudes and upon behavior
> connected with them" (Lau, Brown, and Sears 1978, 479). More recent reviews
> have reached similar judgments (e.g. Citrin and Green 1990; Kinder and Sears
> 1983; Sears and Funk 1990).

They buck the trend of looking at _material self-interest_ to look instead at
subjective self-interest--"asking respondents to indicate whether the policy
would have (national health care, school funding) or has had (affirmative
action) either positive or negative consequences for themselves personally,"
and find a strong effect on opinion. (Given what we know about the human
tendency to deny _all_ costs of a favored policy, or deny _all_ benefits of an
unfavored policy, I fear that this is a pretty thorny definition of self-
interest.)

A third paper, "Self-Interest and Public Opinion Towards Smoking Restrictions
and Cigarette Taxes,"[3] finds that nonsmokers are "far more enthusiastic
about tightening smoking restrictions and increasing cigarette taxes than
smokers, particularly heavy smokers." Unfortunately I can't find an ungated
version, but here's their abstract:

> A burgeoning literature suggests that self-interest has little influence on
> policy preferences. In sharp contrast are the findings discussed in this
> paper. [...] We conclude by discussing several explanations for the apparent
> discrepancy between these results and the pattern of null findings
> characteristic of the self-interest literature.

So, three papers, all of which support your claim that political opinions are
self-interested. To describe the existing evidence, they use words like
"notoriously elusive," "weak at best," and "pattern of null findings." You can
look through the literature yourself but what "seems obvious" has been studied
quite a bit, and the evidence that our intuition is correct has been
surprisingly sparse.

[1]
[http://www.columbia.edu/~rse14/vietnam_rev_Feb2010.pdf](http://www.columbia.edu/~rse14/vietnam_rev_Feb2010.pdf)

[2]
[http://www.electionstudies.org/resources/papers/documents/ne...](http://www.electionstudies.org/resources/papers/documents/nes010876.pdf)

[3]
[http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/53/1/1.short](http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/53/1/1.short)

------
marincounty
"A team of researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed
43,000 Americans and found that, by some wide margin, the rich were more
likely to shoplift than the poor." In college I worked as a security guard,
and was astonished to see to amount of seemingly wealthy people shop lifting.
It didn't make any sense, other than the thrill? Minorities, and seemingly low
income people were watched the minute they walked on the door. If they did
steal they were always arrested. The wealthy shop lifters were allowed to
steal if they were good customers(spent a lot). Not one was ever arrested.
While I was there a doctor's wife would steal weekly--she was given a stern
warning. I'm tempted to name the store. On another note; employee theft was
usually higher than customer theft. I though that store was an anomaly, but
that's not the case; security professionals try to keep the real truth a
secret.

~~~
brandonmenc
My anecdotal experience is the exact opposite of yours.

As a teen, I worked shipping and receiving at a Macy's in the mid-to-late
nineties, and frequently hung out in the security camera room. I watched them
follow thieves on the cameras while we waited for them fill their bags with a
felony-level amount of merchandise before giving chase - chases I was at times
enlisted to participate in.

Not a single thief was "seemingly wealthy," and we never, ever, let anyone
walk out with merchandise. If anything, the opportunity to catch a rich person
in the act would've been immediately seized, if only for the novelty.

~~~
ScottBurson
Interesting. I guess the well-off thieves figure out pretty quickly which
stores will let them get away with it. Since it sounds like they also buy
things from the stores they steal from, it might even be profitable to let
them do it.

------
curiouslurker
Hmmh, I remember reading a study (or studies) that showed wealthy people are
generally more honest, the larger point being that you are unlikely to thrive
if you are not virtuous or lack high character.

That said, I'll quote from "As a man thinketh" by James Allen where he says
some thing along the line of: When people look at successful people who are
cheats and unsuccessful ones who are honest, they forget to analyze all their
other traits. The successful cheat may have serious talents, work ethic etc
that make him successful despite his dishonesty and the unsuccessful saint may
be lazy, unambitious or have other faults that make him unsuccessful.

~~~
cafard
The wealthy might have less incentive to lie in the small everyday
transactions that make an impression. The English of the 19th Century regarded
the Irish as inveterate liars, perhaps not considering the disproportion in
power between the official classes (English and Anglo-Irish dominated) and the
rest of the population.

As for the unsuccessful saint, presumably he regards sanctity rather than
wealth as success.

------
ctchocula
The part about money not being able to influence politics does not ring true
to me. Sure, perhaps isolated cases like Mitt Romney and Meg Whitman may not
have succeeded in winning some election, but then you have Koch brothers using
newspapers and television networks to push their brand of politics.

"Another study, by a coalition of nonprofits called the Independent Sector,
revealed that people with incomes below twenty-five grand give away, on
average, 4.2 percent of their income, while those earning more than 150 grand
a year give away only 2.7 percent."

This study is also unconvincing. You could say by percent the people making
less than $25k are more generous, but the use of percents as a metric here is
misleading. 2.7% of $150k+ is a minimum of $4050 while 4.2% of <$25k is at
most $1050. Is it fair to say the wealthy are less generous when they are
donating more money by one metric but not another?

~~~
byuu
> The part about money not being able to influence politics does not ring true
> to me.

Yeah, it's true that you can't outright buy an election wholesale. But rich
people are rich for a reason: they don't just throw their money away on things
that have zero results. They spend so much on elections because it has real
results. Maybe it sways a race by 4%. But if the race is decided by 2%, then
that's enough to win instead of lose. Plus, some of that money goes to
campaigning, some goes to decide which candidates are able to afford to run in
the first place, some goes to lobbyists, some of it goes directly to
congressmen in return for favors, etc.

~~~
wpietri
You may be interested in this: "In almost every instance, senators appear to
be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than
to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of
constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent
statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes. Disparities in
representation are especially pronounced for Republican senators, who were
more than twice as responsive as Democratic senators to the ideological views
of affluent constituents."

"Economic Inequality and Political Representation", Dr. Larry Bartels,
Princeton
[https://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/economic.pdf](https://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/economic.pdf)

------
EdwardCoffin
This is an excerpt from a longer article in The New Republic, Extreme Wealth
Is Bad for Everyone—Especially the Wealthy [1], which is a review of the book
Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust by Darrell M. West (Brookings).
The articles are by Michael Lewis (the author of Moneyball and The Big Short,
among others)

[1] [http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120092/billionaires-
book-...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120092/billionaires-book-review-
money-cant-buy-happiness)

~~~
dang
Yes. Url changed from [http://theweek.com/article/index/274046/what-wealth-
does-to-...](http://theweek.com/article/index/274046/what-wealth-does-to-your-
soul).

------
amelius
“While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form
of misery.”

― Groucho Marx

------
j_lev
Some thoughts:

1) "Enough" by John Bogle is a decent read if you want more of the same:

> Two famous authors, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are talking at a party
> hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Kurt says to Joseph, “You know,
> this billionaire makes more money in one day than you made in your whole
> lifetime from your novel Catch-22“. Joe responds, “Yes, but I have something
> he will never have… enough.”

2) There's a big difference between people wanting to give back and Picketty's
proposal to tax the tits off the rich. I believe the difference is due to
people's faith in government and the "buffer" they perceive they require.
There is no shortage of people with an 8-figure net worth who just want to
increase their wealth a little more, "just in case."

3) The "rich cancel each other out" argument may hold more for the US than for
other countries. Not a criticism, just pointing it out.

------
wtbob
I don't think that it's terribly surprising that rich folks should be more
likely to shoplift or steal candy than poor folks, for precisely the reason
that Lewis identifies: the sums involved seem so much less important. I think
it might imply that we are all constantly geting away with what we think we
can get away with. That sounds right to me.

~~~
jberryman
I think "the sum seems unimportant" is something a wealthy _sociopath_ might
think. I'm around lots of things I could steal that feel relatively cheap, but
I don't, nor do I litter, etc., not because I couldn't get away with it, but
because it feels wrong and icky, and I would be ashamed of myself.

~~~
nemo
I grew up in a neighborhood in CA that gentrified fast since it was on the
coast so I wound up with a lot of millionaire neighbors (doctors, lawyers,
actors, pro sports people, a remarkable number of people who scammed
government contracts). One thing about it was that the richer the people were,
the more you'd find among them those who had a sense of really being better
than people who weren't as rich - even if they basically stole their money it
made them feel like they were special and successful and better than others
because of it, and different rules applied to them. Certainly not all, but
some, and they stood out. Their kids who I was in school with inherited that
attitude, and did things that made my skin crawl, like doing school
fundraisers and spending the money on a cocaine party, or getting a Corvette
for their 16th birthday and crashing it since they'd wanted a Porsche (my god
I hated that kid), shoplifting for kicks, or wasting expensive things in front
of less wealthy people for entertainment. Having a lot of money can seriously
mess with some people's heads.

~~~
judk
I suspect you saw about 5 people being conspicuous out of hundreds of less
exciting folks. I am sure some poor folks committed some crimes as well.

~~~
nemo
It was certainly more than 5, esp. in school where it was more like 5-10%.
There were more than 15 kids at the coke party, and they were just one clique
among many. I did try to emphasize that those people stood out.

There weren't anything that could be described as poor people in the area that
I interacted with, certainly nowhere near my neighborhood, and the poorest
people in the school district were middle-class.

------
jamariusThomas
I think one of the interesting things about this article is the principle of
relatively and how people will tend to do things within their means. You're
more likely to violate traffic rules if you have a more expensive car because
it's faster than the other cars and you want to be able to utilize the car's
features or you know if you do something wrong and get caught, you're able to
pay off the fines because you have so much money. I'm sure there's a ton of
rich people who are very happy, and I'm guessing the proportion of happy rich
people would be about the same as the proportion of happy average people. I
think one of the things these studies do is that they use the relatively small
and highly selected sample size of rich people and compare them to a group of
normal people and then come to a generalized conclusion of rich people being
more miserable than average people. But I would beg to differ if you were to
take rich people in other industries besides the banking industry, such as
tech, healthcare, or natural resources you'd probably find a lot of people who
love their loves.

------
dbarlett
Counterpoint: _If money doesn 't make you happy, then you probably aren't
spending it right_
[http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20%26%20WILSO...](http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20%26%20WILSON%20%282011%29.pdf)
(PDF)

------
gbog
This states the obvious: the very rich or very successful ones are not happy.
Bill Gates doesn't have a better life than the first rickshaw you'll find in
Kolkata. The main reason will probably because of the kids, which are not
likely to be spoiled in the case of the rickshaw.

And this is where I find some demonstrations of pg fall short: the reason to
start start-ups is to make huge money, but huge money is dangerous for the
mind. In this case it is better to make normal and steady amounts of money,
which normal corporate jobs provide.

I guess starting start-ups is only for those with very solid psychology, or
for those already crazy.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
Even though most people have convex utility WRT money this is not true for
everyone. Some people need large amounts of money for big ambitious projects,
others might have linear utility WRT money. For example, say you were donating
a significant fraction of your wealth to effective charities. It is not clear
you should have diminishing marginal utility towards these donations the way
you would with personal consumption.

------
pcl
This was published in November, weeks before the big shake-up at the New
Republic [1]. It will be interesting to see whether or not the new New
Republic will publish articles that go into an issue with this much depth and
consideration.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/business/shake-up-at-
the-n...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/business/shake-up-at-the-new-
republic-franklin-foer-and-leon-wieseltier-are-out.html)

------
a8da6b0c91d
Why should we care about happiness? Poor people in dirt poor Indian towns
where they all shit on the street are statistically happy. This is something
to aspire to?

This whole genre of "happiness" pop-psychology seems essentially effete. Why
don't we ask people how bad-ass they feel? Can money buy you bad-assery?

