Green with Envy : Part 5

Green with Envy: A Whole New Way to Look at Financial (Un)Happiness
by Shira Boss

(Page 5 of 7)

We were feeding our frustration with assumptions. If we had hunted down statistics and believed that they referred to just some of the people in our own circle, and if we could have heard them describe their own struggles, we wouldn't have felt so isolated.

In fact, we were far from the only ones living paycheck to paycheck. One survey reported that most households are doing so sometimes, most of the time, or always. The American Psychological Association recently reported a survey that showed money to be the number-one stress in our lives. The country as a whole owes $800 billion on its credit cards, making an average balance of more than $7,500 for each household if we divided up the debt among all of us. So some of that must belong to households right next to ours. Every year, the National Opinion Research Center asks people whether they are better or worse off financially than the previous year, and consistently, millions declare themselves worse off. In a recent survey, 78 percent of respondents said their debts were "making their home life unhappy."

We say we know that money doesn't buy happiness, but we don't seem to believe it. We want more, and the more we get the more we want. According to research presented in the book The Overspent American, "Among those making $30,000 or less, 81 percent said they would need less than 20 percent more income to be satisfied, while only 40 percent of those in the $75,000+ category would be satisfied with a 20 percent increase."

We certainly were not the only ones whose relationship was being strained by financial issues. We've all heard that money is the leading cause of problems in marriages. Some research on bankruptcy shows that couples who file for bankruptcy are at least twice as likely to file for divorce as the general population.

As for unemployment, the fallout it causes, ranging from temporary malaise to social and emotional implosion, is a shared experience but one that isn't discussed openly. "People who have lived through downward mobility," explains a book on the subject written by an anthropologist, "are often secretive and cloistered or so bewildered by their fate that they find it hard to explain to themselves, let alone to others, what has befallen them." Therefore most of us don't hear about it, don't understand it, and are never prepared for handling it.

My husband's and my problem, as it often happens, was larger than fretting over the personal side of our finances. We were equally, or perhaps more so, upset by contrasting ourselves to our better-off friends and neighbors. It doesn't make logical sense why we should concern ourselves with the financial situations of those around us. After all, they're not paying our bills and we're not paying theirs. Life is not a zero-sum game, with one person's gain having to be another person's loss. So we have no real reason not to be glad for another's success. Right? If only it worked that way. In fact, it does matter to us. And the more difficulties we are having, the more the success of others, frankly, aggravates us.

In our competitive, comparison-minded culture, relative success is what matters. So another person's gain really can feel like our loss. Economists refer to "positional goods," the things we buy that are meant to set us a notch higher than others who don't have them; and psychologists ponder "status anxiety," our worry that we are not keeping up with others. In measuring where we stand, relativity is everything.

Professors at Harvard and the University of Miami conducted a survey about income. They asked over 250 people whether they would prefer to earn $50,000 per year while those around them earned $25,000, or to earn $100,000 while those around them earned $200,000. More than half chose the first scenario, giving up having twice as much total money in order to have relatively more than others.

A more nuanced experiment showed even more strongly how important relative wealth is to us. Researchers in Britain set up a computer gambling game in which each player got 100 units of currency. The subjects played to increase their wealth, and as they played they could also see how well the other players were doing. Then a new level of the game was introduced: First some random players were given a 500 unit bonus, and then all players were given the ability to pay some of their own currency in order to "burn" other players and reduce the other players' wealth. In what came as a surprise to the researchers, the game became all about burning. The players who hadn't gotten the bonus immediately struck out against the newly rich. Although it hurt their own wealth, two-thirds of the players spent their own currency to bring the wealthier players down.

Another bit of Petri dish proof that we care all too much about how much money our peers have comes from a recent experiment conducted at Princeton. A series of two players were openly explained the terms of a game that would be played only once: One player was given ten dollars and had to make an offer of some amount of that money to the other player. If the other player accepted the offer, both players would get to keep their money. But if the other player refused the offer, then neither would get to keep any money. Rational behavior says that Player B would accept any offer, since doing so meant personal gain, while refusal of any amount meant getting nothing. But that's not what usually happened. When Player A's offer was seen as unfair (a piddling dollar, for instance), it was usually refused by Player B, leaving both players with zero. As one of the study's authors wrote, "Player B often gives up a smaller sum so Player A doesn't get a larger sum."

Copyright © 2006 by Shira J. Boss

About the Author

I grew up in Flint, Michigan, a gritty but wonderful place to grow up. I studied economics and political science undergrad at Columbia University, and went back there for master's degrees in journalism and in international affairs. In between, I've lived and worked in Saint Petersburg, Russia (where I edited the cultural section of the main English-language newspaper), in Paris (the only time in my life I've tried writing fiction - I'd rather wrap a boa constrictor around my neck now than have to make up a story), and in the Middle East (where I got to live the low-paid but high-adventure life of a foreign correspondent).