TED Talks are great. Everybody always sounds extremely intelligent and enlightened, and they all use cool microphones attached to their heads. However, one in particular speaks to the notion that money cannot buy happiness very aptly. The TED Talk, which was given by Michael Norton, an economist I assume, talks about happiness levels in relation to the way people spend their money. Essentially what he found was that when people spend money on themselves, their happiness levels don’t go up. However, when people spend money on others, their happiness levels do go up. It makes sense that spending money on others would make you happier because helping others feels good, but what was surprising was the fact that people who spent money on themselves weren’t even a little happier. This contrasts sharply with the values I think a lot of us were raised with which essentially say that more money affords us more goods and more peace and comfort, and thus we are happier. An article from the New York Times also speaks to this idea. In “Don’t Indulge. Be Happy,” we are told that as people make more money, they tend to be happier, but only to a certain point. Once people make more than about $70,000 a year, which is considered a comfortable salary, more money doesn’t necessarily mean more happiness. Although we live in a capitalist society where money speaks louder than anything, it seems that money is simply not everything. According to Michael Norton, helping others does your happiness more good than helping yourself. What I think we as a society need to consider is whether we value happiness over senseless wealth. Though wealth can buy you things, what is the point of buying things when they won’t make you happy?
Another reason why I feel money should not play a large role in society today is the effect it has had on education in this country, particularly at the collegiate level. Crippling student debt has become an increasingly serious issue in this country as college tuitions have gone up at an alarming rate in the past twenty years. More and more students are taking on enormous sums of loans just so that they can graduate from college, but for what? Our society has placed such a large value on becoming financially successful that people think that it is okay to invest tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in money to something that may earn them more money in the future. Because of this stress to make a lot of money we as a general society focus less on humanitarian work that is less lucrative, and more on professions meant to make us more money. It’s always about money! The reason why most kids going to college next year aren’t going to take up humanitarian jobs for careers is because they will be too busy worrying about making a paycheck that will allow them to repay their loans. The Planet Money podcast titled “What’s your Major?” speaks about what majors earn students the most money upon graduation. The top ten were, if I remember correctly, all in STEM fields. Public service majors were all in the bottom ten earning majors. This list is indicative of what our country values.. Rather than promoting majors that help other people by paying them decent salaries, we push our brightest to careers in engineering that in the long run may help people, but are not public service jobs. This all may seem like a criticism of the college system in this country, but the point is that the flawed college system is only a side effect of the larger, more underlying problem we have with money. We make money define everything and everybody. In a conversation I had with Fiona Wu, we talked about how people like Bill Gates and other multi-billionaires sort of ruin society. Though Bill Gates is a big philanthropist, that all just seems like a front. Nobody needs $80 billion. In my current mindset, if I were suddenly given that money I would only think it right to give it all to people who need it more. This is not because I am an extremely kind or caring person, though I try to act it sometimes. It is because there is no way to spend that all. People like Bill Gates and the rest of the richest one percent in this country hoard a disproportionate amount of the wealth, and leave the remaining 99% with next to nothing. The quality of people’s lives are at stake here. Money is not some obscure commodity; money is what people spend their lives trying to possess. And so when asked what the role of money in this country should be, I can only answer with something very small. Having money be something we value greatly only leads to greed, and I think that we as a general society would live more happily if we simply did away with this idiotic obsession with money. There is no simple way to change the paradigm that is short of a revolution, but it is nice to imagine at some point maybe my life won’t be defined by the amount of money I can accumulate. Oh well. Money.