Helpful ways to think about improving quality of life as it relates to finances.
How to “wring the most happiness out of every $5”—by structuring experiences to create the largest impact on happiness and satisfaction.
Dunn (Psychology/Univ. of British Columbia) and Norton (Marketing/Harvard Business School) write that bringing in more money doesn't necessarily increase happiness. This is certainly not a new assertion, but their infectious enthusiasm for their subject is admirable. They organize their thinking around five principles for money—1) Buy Experiences; 2) Make It a Treat; 3) Buy Time; 4) Pay Now, Consume Later; 5) Invest in Others—and they offer a way to break out of the consumer cycle of ever-bigger, expensive purchases of goods like cars and houses. They argue that the happiness associated with such a pathway is evanescent at best. A bigger bang for the buck can be achieved by organizing small purchases using their principles. The more of them that can be combined into one purchase, the greater the happiness. Buying coupons for friends to enjoy coffee at Starbucks sometime later in the week is better than doing the same for oneself, or buying the coffee today. They organize the evidence to back this up, discussing how “what we call the ‘drool factor’ ”—anticipation—works on us at a physiological level, and how “delay can enhance the pleasure of consumption.” Dunn and Norton argue against going into debt to pay for either experiences or things, insisting that debt is detrimental to marriages and other relationships, nor do they favor buying now and paying later. They provide an interesting exploration of increasing happiness by buying time, as well as ways to address budgeting.
Helpful ways to think about improving quality of life as it relates to finances.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451665062
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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