by SAM PIZZIGATI
We can’t buy happiness, but greater equality could make it more likely.
Old adages can often come across as trite. But a trite old adage, we always need to remember, can also speak truth. Consider, for instance, the time-worn maxim that immediately comes to mind whenever we see the awesomely affluent stumble in their personal lives. Just another reminder, we tell ourselves, that “money can’t buy happiness.”
Earlier this week, Billionaire America’s most celebrated couple, Bill and Melinda Gates, stumbled. The pair announced Monday they’re divorcing after 27 years together. Money, apparently, still can’t buy everything that really matters.
Even money by the billions upon billions. The three richest individuals in the world — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk — have now all turned out to be divorced men. Musk leads that parade. He’s already divorced a life-partner three times.
What’s going on here? Does this week’s latest billionaire break-up have something profound to tell us? Let’s dig a bit. And where might we start? How about here: No one — at least no one who claims to be leading a rational life — pursues wealth simply to become wealthier.
Reasonable people and societies treat wealth as simply a means to an end. Greater wealth, we believe, can improve our lot in life, help us become, in a word, happier. But ever more wealth, we also understand, doesn’t ensure us ever more happiness.
“Many very rich men are unhappy,” as the ancient Greek historian Herodotus intoned, “and many in moderate circumstances are fortunate.”
“It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness,” quipped Frank McKinney Hubbard, the early 20th-century Indiana humorist, over two millennia later, “poverty and wealth have both failed.”
Few of us today would quibble with either Herodotus or Hubbard. We generally look askance at people who turn their lives into single-minded races after riches. So do most social scientists who’ve done research into what makes us happy. Their work suggests a possible social formula for happiness: If most people in a society can sit back, think about their personal situation and conclude they’re doing better than they used to be doing and about as well as most everyone else, you have the makings of a generally happy society.
The world’s wealthiest nation, the United States, doesn’t come close to fitting this profile. Average Americans today are not contentedly contemplating how nicely their personal fortunes have improved. They’re struggling to get by, to catch up to where they expected to be, and watching while other people — incredibly wealthy people — seem to be leading ever more luxurious and comfortable lives.
And what about those incredibly wealthy people? Most of us have learned not to take their luxury and comfort at face value. Every week, we thumb through the magazines at supermarket checkout counters and read about how wretchedly unhappy the personal lives of rich people can sometimes be. Even storybook couples — like Bill and Melinda Gates — can split. Their wealth cannot fix what ails them.
“Money brings some happiness,” as the playwright Neil Simon once put it. “But after a certain point it just brings more money.”
Inequality for more