People matter

From an Ezra Klein op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. (Also posted at The American Prospect.)

Winning the rat race by quitting it

We're working ourselves silly thanks to the desire to have better stuff than everyone else.

It's always sad to see Thanksgiving finish. I don't attend Renaissance fairs, so it's the only time of year when I tear at giant legs of roast turkey. I'm also not an insane person, so it's the only time of year when I combine marshmallows and yams. And I'll just admit it: I like giving thanks. It offers an organizing structure within which to create a coherent narrative of the past year. And here's what I find, year after year: People matter. No matter how much cool stuff I purchase while waiting for the Earth to rotate around the sun, come November, all I remember, and all I mention, are people.

The emergent field of happiness studies backs me up. Richard Layard, an economist at the London School of Economics and the author of "Happiness: Lessons From a New Science," puts it succinctly. "Family, colleagues, community," he's said. "We are basically social animals, and most of our enjoyment comes from other people."

Each Thanksgiving, our litany of gratitude suggests that, on some level, we know that. But in the time between each Thanksgiving, we prove, rather decisively, that we don't know it all that well. Because so much as "people" happiness tends to rule our memories, "thing" happiness, or at least the promise of it, has a habit of governing our actions. How else to explain the ceaseless march for more hours at work, for larger incomes, for bigger houses (that, as we're rapidly finding out, we couldn't really afford in the first place)? How else to explain the fact that the United States, alone among developed nations, does not guarantee its workers even one day of compensated vacation time (France, by contrast, guarantees 30)?

We are a country obsessed with consumption, which would be fine if we seemed to be fulfilled getting bigger TVs but having less time to watch them. But, in the aggregate, that's not the case. "The things that we get used to most easily and then take for granted are our material possessions -- our car, our house," writes Layard. "But there is lots of evidence that people underestimate the process of habituation." The amount of happiness we think we'll get from a new house, and the amount of happiness we actually get from a new house, are not the same.

continued here.....

Ezra also regularly blogs on political and related matters at www.ezraklein.com (It's one of my daily reads.)