Quote:
Originally Posted by MiddleAgedAl
Once you amass a certain amount of wealth, the social circles you keep change, and thus your expectations do too. That's the problem.
For me, $150 million would be an absurd amount of money. For Lewis, the folks that he associates with now are often quite above that level, so the boats and planes and homes they own make the lifestyle that he can enjoy with 150 million seem less extravagant. You get recalibrated when hanging out with the new crowd, and the problem is, there's always a bigger fish.
Even at the multi-billionaire level; supposedly Paul Allen and Larry Ellison got into a pissing match with their boats, which led to Pauls "Octopus", which is clearly more boat than anyone needs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_%28yacht%29
It stopped being about the boat itself, and became about beating the other guy's boat.
I've seen many happiness studies which prove time and time again that absolute wealth is not the key to happiness; relative wealth is. Human nature is what it is, and will not be denied. If you are the wealthiest person in your social circle, you probably will be happier than if you are in the bottom half of wealth in your social circle, even if example 1 is 100K per year, and example 2 is 1 million per year. |
You know it may sound silly at face value but what you said about relative wealth is absolutely true. There's a famous set of studies done in the late 20th century called the Whitehall studies (feel free to google it) that looked at health outcomes along the social class gradient within the British civil service.
Here's the upshot: health outcomes (e.g. life expectancy, risk for developing cardiovascular disease, etc) follow a
gradient along the socioeconomic spectrum within the civil service.
Someone who makes $45,000/year has better health outcomes than someone making $40,000/year. The person who makes the most money had better outcomes than rank 2, who had better outcomes than rank 3, and so forth.
If you told the average person that a CEO (in the U.S., for example) had better health outcomes than a homeless person no one would be surprised. The CEO likely has some 'Cadillac' health insurance plan, and worst case scenario he or she could likely afford to pay out of pocket for major health care expenses if needed. In other words, most people might be tempted to think that money buys access to better care and thus this observation is not surprising.
People in the British civil service all have access to the exact same healthcare (which is why the authors chose them as a test group to begin with) and they're all at least middle class or above. No one is severely economically disadvantaged in that group. The differences in health outcomes were largely a function of their relative position within the British civil service hierarchy, and these results have been generalized since then.
If you make $25,000/year and you live in a neighborhood where the median income is $10,000/year and $25,000/year puts you in the "local" top 1% or .1%, you're going to have better health outcomes (
all else being equal) than someone making $25,000/year who lives among rich plutocrats making $35,000 or $40,000/year.