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Weekend reading: Money and the meaning of life

Some musings, then the weekly reading links.

I am a sucker for academic papers on happiness and money, and whether watching The Apprentice every Wednesday can do much for either.

True, I’m not sure they’re of much practical use. I’ve got a hangover this morning, making me question exactly where I’m going with my life [1], and making me feel rotten. It’s severely skewing my personal data set.

On a society-wide level, however, they do provide an interesting challenge to the direction that markets and mainstream capitalism is taking us – which let’s face it is determined more by the invisible hand [2] making come hither gestures than by any 20th Century-style grand plan.

Don’t worry, be a believer in an expensive dress

In their recent paper Happiness, Meaning of Life, and Income [3], Lois Duff and Artjoms Ivlevs of the University of the West of England pitted these three variables against each other in a cockfight:

The paper explores the non-material determinants of happiness. We go beyond the well-established result that individual ‘religiousness’ is positively correlated with happiness and look at a broader spiritual activity – time spent thinking about the meaning and purpose of life (MPL).

We […] find that the educated, the religious, females and the middle aged are more likely to spend time thinking about the MPL.

The correlation between happiness and thinking about the MPL depends on a country’s income: it is negative in high income countries and positive in low income countries.

You can download the whole paper via the link above, but here’s my summary: If you want to be happy, then be a well-off female in a poor country and believe in God, or if not spend a lot of time wondering whether you should.

Alas, that’s a lifestyle change that few of us can make. And anyway, if you’re a middle-aged man in the UK who believes in evolution (I do) and has decided to bow down before Richard Dawkin [4] instead (I definitely don’t) then a sex-change and a relocation to Burkina Faso [5] isn’t going to cut it.

You can’t forget where you came from because you can’t forget what it taught you.

Nothing else for it but to keep recklessly living below our means, irresponsibly saving and investing the resultant spare cash, and having faith in the stock market over the long-term, I guess.

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