23 ms·

A while ago I read about a study that surveyed people with inherited wealth. IIRC they ranged from having inherited tens to hundreds of millions. No matter how

• deepstack 6y ago
  It is never about how much money you have, rather what situation you are in, what you are expecting and what others around you have.
  • ajsnigrutin 6y ago
    Yep! As someone from a former socialist country, I can confirm. Situation has got a lot better in the last ~30 years, people have alot more, but since a few people got even more than that, some complain a lot. Average worker family has gone from bicicyles and maybe one yugo (or a "fico" - even smaller/cheaper) to two, maybe three european-mid-range cars + all the modern extras, but are not happy, because their neighbor has as 100k€ mercedes.
    • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      Comparison is the thief of joy. Theodore Roosevelt
      • deepstack 6y ago
        Indeed. Comparison is not bad as that is what current academia is based on. However also be aware comparison is NOT the ONLY way to experience life. One of the effect of comparison is that it diminishes one thing over another. I often find new the thing when I just experience one thing for itself without comparing against a pre-existing experience and thing.
    • chii 6y ago
      it makes some evolutionary sense tho - because objective wellbeing is only part of the competition. Relative wellbeing is what "counts" for real, esp. when competing for scarce resources.
      • ajsnigrutin 6y ago
        Well, this is ok when you work more, to get more for yourself... ...out here, people want their neighbours to have less.
    • fogihujy 6y ago
      There's a local saying that in Finland, people would prefer paying €100 to the neighbour getting paid €50. I take it that's true elsewhere too? :)
      • ajsnigrutin 6y ago
        Here it's "let my cow die, just if two of neighbours' die" But yeah... we earn relatively little (compared to you), and have better cars than most of the northern europe... most of them on long year loans... It's not rare to see an (eg.) BMW X7 owner at a gas station pump 9.85eur of gas, than slowly fondle the pump handle, because he only has 10eur for gas. The neighbors see the car, not the amount of gas inside :) Also a lot of "not in my back yard" behaviour.
        • fogihujy 6y ago
          It sounds like the basic idea is the same; perceived relative status is more important than actual status, though the details obviously differ.
  • em500 6y ago
    Yes, according to one of my old economics teachers, above the subsistence level, happiness is approximately how much better off you are than your neighbors.
    • skohan 6y ago
      If you choose to play that game. In my experience focusing on what you need to be happy and ignoring your neighbors is a better recipe for happiness and a whole lot cheaper.
      • boston_clone 6y ago
        A quote about personal happiness that has lived with me for some time: "comparison is the thief of joy"
    • sethammons 6y ago
      Growing up poor and now being more well off than most of our community is actually a source of stress for my wife and I.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    I wonder how much of that is innate rather than being driven by consumerist propaganda though. Do I really want a new car because the Jones's next door have one, or because advertising makes me feel somehow inadequate because I don't have one?
    • acdha 6y ago
      I think advertising has a role but it’s amplifying an existing cultural value rather than creating one. A culture which conceives of itself as capitalist naturally encourages thinking of wealth as your score and at least in the U.S. we lack much counter pressure pushing other values as equally important. Even things like religions which discourage this have been distorted to fit, as anyone who’s ever seen a prosperity gospel believer try to talk their way around the clear meaning of the needle’s eye parable can attest. I think this comes back to basic primate social dynamics. We evolved tracking our social standing relative to others and wealth is pretty easy to compare. Advertising exacerbates that tendency but I don’t think there’s any way to get rid of it with standard issue humans.
• brianmcc 6y ago
  There's this in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/rich-people-happy-money/577231/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/rich-peop... “All the way up the income-wealth spectrum,” Norton told me, “basically everyone says [they’d need] two or three times as much” to be perfectly happy. It references this study: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=53540 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=53540
  • simonh 6y ago
    Thanks, that's the one. I suspected I was under-shooting the multiple.
    • brianmcc 6y ago
      I remember reading it initially some time ago - and visiting it anew I'm surprised how high the multiple is. In my head it was "10% - 25% higher". My personal hunch is too many of us "shoot just too high" in terms of what we can afford, be it housing, cars, whatever. Granted there are plenty of disciplined individuals and families out there and it's certainly not impossible to live within one's means. But human nature is what it is - why "settle" for a $400,000 home when the bank will give you a mortgage for $500,000? Why settle for a Ford, VW or Toyota when the car finance payment for a BMW or Merc are just a little bit higher each month? There's definitely a status thing goes on too...
  • skohan 6y ago
    Maybe it’s because I grew up in a frugal household, but I have basically never felt like I needed more money since properly starting my career. I mean it helps that I have tended to live in lower COL cities, but I have always saved a sufficient portion of my income, and I have never had the feeling that I want to buy something or travel somewhere and I can’t because I can’t afford it. I don’t fly first class, and I rarely stay in luxury accommodation, but those things just don’t matter to me, especially compared to the freedom of always having extra money. I feel like this is such a relaxing way to live, and I have never understood the lifestyle treadmill or conspicuous consumption.
• globular-toast 6y ago
  The thing is, humans can't sense a constant velocity, we can only sense change. People always want more. Some people get addicted to the feeling of more and then a constant velocity actually feels like they are losing something. It's even possible to get addicted to the second derivative, ie. your upgrades getting bigger and more frequent. It's impossible to talk to people objectively about how good their life is because you just don't know what they are used to. In all cases people struggle because they've absorbed things into their life that they now consider essential. The things you own end up owning you.
• golergka 6y ago
  > I suppose expectations scale up with means. Isn't that social pressure? No matter how much you start with, if you end up with less than that, people see you as a failure. A person who inherits 10 million dollars and is afraid of going down to 1 million isn't as much afraid of selling his yacht as he's afraid of what his peers would think of him.
  • rrdharan 6y ago
    I know it doesn’t matter much but just to ground these numbers a bit - anyone owning or trying to own a yacht with “only” $10M is indeed heading towards $1M very quick.
    • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      Upper middle class know-it-alls sneer at the bad financial decisions of the guy living in the double wide with a brand new corvette in the driveway while the lower middle class looks up to his efficiency and prioritization. A yacht is the same thing with the decimal moved a couple places. If your income is fat enough to give you 10m in the bank then you can definitely own a yacht so long as you don't mind living in the kind of neighborhood where your neighbors are plumbers instead of surgeons.
      • leetcrew 6y ago
        yes, but only in a rough sense. the ratio of maintenance cost to purchase price is much higher for a yacht (or really any boat) than for a mass produced car like a corvette. if you can afford to buy/finance a corvette, you can usually afford to drive it too. the same is not true for any boat larger than a canoe. there is a reason for the old joke about a boat being merely "a hole in the water that you throw money into".
      • rrdharan 6y ago
        There is a distinction between a yacht (generally > 35 feet, needs a full crew) and just a boat: https://www.tessllc.us/whats-the-difference-between-a-yacht-and-a-boat/ https://www.tessllc.us/whats-the-difference-between-a-yacht-...
• cafard 6y ago
  One thing I learned as a parent is that kids always compare up the wealth scale, never down. I'm sure my parents noticed that, too. I've never heard about the negative effect on levels of empathy. I suspect that it is unusual for people to have friends far poorer or richer, and it is easy to be dismissive of the problems of those one does not know.
• commandlinefan 6y ago
  > they would need to have inherited to feel financially secure It seems ridiculous to most of us, but I can see how it happens. I grew up pretty poor - my father was a police officer and my mother didn't work because she had to watch the four of us. But I graduated with a degree in CS in '95 (if you're thinking about graduating with a degree in CS, try to do it in '95 because that may be the best possible year to do it) and am much better off financially now than my family was when I was growing up. Still, I keep worrying about my kids: I can pay to send them to college, but I can't afford, say Harvard or MIT. I have to keep reminding myself that they're far better off than I was at that age and I managed to turn out OK - I think part of it is that I end up comparing my situation with the people around me, many of whom are far better off than I am.
  • tangjurine 6y ago
    The average software engineer makes around 100k. If you have been working for 20+ years, has it been difficult for you to save up enough money for college?
    • hcho 6y ago
      Not during at least three quarters of the mentioned period and not for every location even today.
    • commandlinefan 6y ago
      > save up enough money for college Depends on the college. MIT says to expect to spend ~ $70K/year. $100K * 20 years = 2 million. Two kids * 4 years = $560K. That's a little over 1/4 (before taxes). So yes, it would have been difficult to save up that much money. I have enough to send them both to a public in-state school debt-free, but not an elite private school.
      • Aeolun 6y ago
        What in gods name could they be spending $70k a year on?! They hire a private teacher for every student?
• genedan 6y ago
  As I become more wealthy, I have started to tackle problems that I never really thought about when I wasn't as well off, things that cropped up when I thought I'd finally have peace of mind. In retrospect, the insecurity was always there, but I had the luxury of ignoring it when I was poorer. Once I started making enough not to worry about rent, the problem was then saving enough for things like retirement, setting up tuition funds for the family, etc. Now the problem is managing my mix of investments and having a big enough pad to insulate myself from the occasional recession. But, I think even if my net worth were to triple there isn't really anything I can do to avoid a great depression-level economic catastrophe. Beyond that, I know not what money problems people with eight or nine figure net worths are scared of but I would assume if I ever made it that far the anxiety won't go away.
  • spaetzleesser 6y ago
    Just remember that your anxieties are child's play compared to the anxieties of people worrying every day about paying for their place to live, food or health care. These worries are tally different.
    • paxys 6y ago
      People out there having bigger problems does not diminish your own. To me, getting my children into a good public school is a current problem which is giving me anxiety. Someone saying "that's not really a problem, at least you can afford to feed your kids" doesn't come off as helpful or ease my concerns. Similarly, billions of poor people in developing countries would kill to swap places with the poorest American, but that doesn't mean the latter has a good life.
      • Nemi 6y ago
        I once read something that resonated with me (though I can't remember where), in essence that everyone has a default level of stress and anxiety that they feel (a "stress bubble" if you will), and it does not matter so much what your particular life situation is, you tend to fill up the "bubble" with whatever is going on in your life at the time. The idea is that you feel the same amount of stress as a teenager with your social issues as you do as a successful adult with more than enough money to live comfortably. This really impacted me because I definitely came from a poor-ish background where I lived month to month and only thought about paying rent and whatnot. I then went to community college at 29 to give myself a chance at something else and then ended up making well into 6 figures having worked up to a director of a software company (unheard of in my social circle growing up). At the time that I read this I remember feeling just as stressed about work things and family issues as I was when I didn't have health care and could barely pay my rent. Looking back, I remembered that I would feel just the same way about friend issues as a teenager when that was my whole world - something I would now scoff at as unimportant and incidental. It helped me realize that a lot of my stress levels were "baked in" to me - but that also meant I could affect my stress levels by being aware of my bubble. Now when I am feeling stress about my financial portfolio or my kids getting proper education during the pandemic, I make a conscious effort to compare it to the helpless feeling I had when I made no money and felt powerless and that allows me to shrink my stress bubble. I also empathize much more with my kids and when they are stressing about something that my adult self realizes is not consequential. I remember that this is just them "filling their bubble" and to them it is just as important as the things I am dealing with. It also makes me appreciate those people who have a naturally small bubble and realize that that is also often a factor in their success (e.g., though I don't know Elon Musk, I can imagine that he has a naturally small stress bubble that allows him to drive so hard for success). This is not to criticize you in any way, on the contrary, I agree with you 100%. But it is an empowering way of looking at your life.
• spaetzleesser 6y ago
  This study maybe true. But there are levels of poverty where people don't just have a subjective desire to have more money but have real hard worries about paying for food, health care or a place to live. That's totally different from people wanting a nicer car or nicer house and way more psychologically stressful. The lack of empathy for the wealthy goes both ways. The wealthy traditionally haven't had much empathy for people with less money so it's not too surprising that people with less money don't have much empathy for them. It makes me really angry when I see multimillionaires in the news warning about the risks raising the minimum wage. It's actually pretty sad.