The Hindu Business Line : Miserable with money

SOCIOLOGICAL research is one area which cannot be stopped from taking up redundant posers and turning up familiar answers after elaborate theorising with an uncanny grasp of the obvious. The latest mystery that researchers have taken enormous pains to penetrate and solve is on whether the affluent live in greater happiness than the indigent.What do you think, dear reader? That man (or woman) does not live by money alone? That those rolling in the stuff may as well be rolling, not in pleasure, but in pain? Well, read on! Even age-old questions are not that simple, once the sociologists are seized of the matter.

First, you have to distinguish between "absolute income effect" and "relative income effect", the former measured by the quantum of goods and services you can buy with the money you have, and the latter denoting the psychological impact of comparing your income with that of the Joneses in the community.

Based on this, the wholly predictable finding is that you may be sitting on a pyramid of quadrillions in your currency, but if you see yourself dwarfed by those in the same age group possessing zillions, you are bound to wallow in misery, no matter that there is very little value added to money once it crosses a level and one is satiated with it. This relative income effect forces you to get on to a "hedonic treadmill". You strive to make a greater pile to overtake the Joneses, and then the Joneses are pushed to overtake you, and then, in turn, you ... well, you've got the gist.

Instead of chasing happiness, you begin chasing the will-of-the-wisp of being ahead of the Joneses. Inevitably, your consumption has to become more and more conspicuous to purchase the same degree of contentment.

The other unsurprising discovery is that if you are stuck in a predetermined salary scale, with little hope of hop-step-and-jumping on to higher trajectories, your happiness takes a nosedive. So, you restlessly cast about for a breakthrough, the strain telling on your resources, your output and your health. The problem with such studies mapping already charted terrain is that they contain no suggested way out to the targeted audience which is left high and dry holding the conclusions which do nothing to assuage its sense of helplessness.

B. S. Raghavan

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