Obsession with money won't make nation happy
- Source: Global Times
- [22:09 March 08 2010]
- Comments
By Patrick Mattimore
When I taught a world history class to students in California, we would discuss the economics of traditional communism. I asked the students to consider if they would want me to distribute class grades using a Marxist model, equal grades for everyone. At first, they thought it was a good idea since they could all get As.
I explained to them however, that I would only be able to give out grades based upon their total work product. I couldn't award more than I had received. Some students produced superlative efforts and some students contributed inferior work, so I only had enough product to award everyone a C, the average.
The students who didn't work very hard liked the idea of "Cs" for everyone but the harder workers didn't. There was a further complication. I asked the students what would likely happen after the first time I assigned grades of "C" to everyone.
The students said that the workers who had been rewarded for doing less work would continue doing little work, but that the students who normally worked hard and had formerly gotten As and Bs, would also work less. So the overall work product would decrease and for the next grades I would only have enough product to award "Ds."
That was an obvious simplification of Marxist theory but the model explains well why traditional communist economics failed in the Soviet Union and has been exchanged for a capitalist model in China. Without incentives, people work less. What is less appreciated is that unrestrained capitalism is hardly a global panacea.
China has embraced a capitalist model. In fact, a February Reuters-Ipsos poll of people in 23 countries and regions found that over two-thirds of Chinese surveyed believed that "money is the best sign of a person's success."
Along with South Korea, China's percentage of people equating success with money was higher than any of the other countries, and over twice as high as the US.
It's fairly easy to see the results of the "success equals money" paradigm. Materialis-tic hedonism grips Beijingers as new malls spring up weekly and consumers flock to buy more goods.
The problem is not money itself, but rather living a life where money is the predomi-nant focus of our lives. We need not live in a society in which everyone has exactly the same amount in order to understand that we can all nevertheless benefit from living in a society in which everyone has enough.
Money may buy us a bit of happiness, but according to psychologists, apparently not much.
Psychologist David Myers points out the surprising fact that in countries where nearly everyone can afford life's necessities, increasing affluence matters surprisingly little in terms of personal satisfaction. The correlation between income and happiness is "surprisingly weak," as University of Michigan researcher Ronald Inglehart observed in one study of 170,000 people in 16 nations. Once we have attained life's necessities, more money provides diminishing returns.
According to University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener, even lottery winners and the Forbes' 100 wealthiest Americans have expressed only slightly greater happiness than the average American. Maybe that's why only a third of Americans equate money with success.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao suggested to netizens in his February 27 online chat with Web users that the government must insure an equitable distribution of social wealth.
Wen said "distributing the cake of social wealth is a matter of being just and fair to everybody."
It is also the responsibility of people to straighten out their priorities. We can work to ex-pand our personal wealth without gobbling up too much cake.
Overindulgence leaves some people without anything and it also makes the gluttons sick. Money has a rightful place in our lives, not as a marker of our value or success, but as a tool to help enrich all our lives.
The author is a fellow at the institute for Analytic Journalism. patrickmattimore1@yahoo.com
