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The right pond paradox
In his Economics manual, widely used in universities for over ten years, Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson has put forward an equation: happiness equals consumption divided by desire. Until now this correlation has been the cornerstone of consumerism.
But, when one begins to study the dynamic effect of it in relatively high-income societies, one notices that a certain level of wealth does not entail a proportionate increase in happiness. On the contrary, the richer you are, the more intense pleasures you seek. Your desires are increasingly more advanced and so you consider yourself less satisfied.
This psychological adapting mechanism means the ephemeral pleasure of a more powerful car or designer jeans cannot keep pace with the longing for the "ideal" car or jeans. A society that multiplies its desires to infinity consequently becomes a society that can never be fulfilled. Having a greater income seems to render a person more unhappy, confirms Luigino Bruni, Italian progenitor of happiness economics.
This phenomenon intrigued the American economist and demographer Richard Easterlin, who took ten years of empirical study to demonstrate that:
a) the richest people are not always the happiest,
b) the poorest countries are not significantly less happy,
c) happiness in peoples’ lives seems to depend very little on levels of income and wealth.
And so adds to the conclusion that a ‘happiness paradox’ actually exists.
Robert H.Frank attempts to offer an explanation with a theory of relative consumption.
Only when our level of consumption increases vastly in comparison to others’ does our happiness increase. Being the owner of a little runabout among a population of pedestrians will generate an enormous sensation of well-being, but being behind the wheel of a saloon when everyone else is driving a top-of-the-range model produces scant satisfaction, if not a feeling of downright resentment.
The title of his first book Choosing the Right Pond is taken from the introductory cartoon where a toad says to a fortune-teller, "It’s better to be a frog-prince stuck in a small pond, rather than the servant of the prince in a big one." Globalisation doesn’t help: the pond has become planet wide.
(16/06/2006)
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