Do you know these sayings? “It’s better to be poor and healthy than rich and sick” or “Money alone doesn’t make you happy”? Guest author Rainer Zitelmann, wealth researcher and sociologist, explains why he doesn’t think much of it.
For more than a month it was unclear which Potsdamer had won the 23.2 million euros from the lottery jackpot. According to the Land Brandenburg Lotto GmbH, the winner reported that he had been in shock for some time. He delayed picking up the profit to first get a clear idea of what so much money would mean for him. “In fact, I briefly considered whether I should pick up this large sum and really want to change my life,” said the winner from Potsdam. Eventually he decided to collect the prize.
A few days ago, Franz Josef Wagner wrote a letter to the winner in the Bild newspaper: “You have decided, being rich is better. I disagree. Being rich doesn’t mean happiness. The rich get cancer like the poor. Rich people get divorced, fight marital wars, rich people get stomach ulcers because they fear for their money. The rich are afraid of the eyes of the envious.”
If being rich is so terrible – why do 22 million Germans play the lottery (seven million regularly)? Why so many books, youtube videos, seminars etc on how to get rich?
Of course, rich people can get sick too. But the saying “better poor and healthy than rich and sick” is misleading. A study from the USA shows: The difference in life expectancy between the poorest and the richest percent of the income distribution was almost 15 years for men and 10 years for women. While the rich men lived an average of 87.3 years, the poor lived 72.7 years.
The scientists Johannes Siegrist and Ursula M. Staudinger have examined the topic for Germany. Here, too, there are these differences, albeit not quite as starkly: “The difference in average life expectancy between the lowest and the highest social class is more than eight years for men and more than four years for women.”
Rainer Zitelmann has a doctorate in history, sociology and has been a member of the FDP for 25 years. He is also the author of the book “Psychology of the Super-Rich”.
A little more money leads to better health. In her dissertation on “Wealth in Germany”, the scientist Dorothee Spannagel looked into the question of what people are worried about. The total population was compared with people who earn at least twice and three times the average citizen. Result: 22.8 percent of the total population was “very worried” about their own health, but only 10.2 percent of higher earners. The scientist came to the clear conclusion: “The comparison with the state of health in the general population can be summarized succinctly: With increasing wealth, the proportion of people in good health increases. This result applies equally to western, eastern and Germany as a whole.” The results of the surveys clearly showed that the rich “not only (have) better health than the general population, but they are also more satisfied with it.”
The poor state of health is by no means a direct consequence of the lack of money, as the journalist and author Walter Wüllenweber writes, who has compared the life of the upper and lower classes: Members of the lower class are sick much more often than other people, but that is not the case The result of economic hardship, but of a certain way of life: “So the reason is less to be found in the external conditions of life, but in people’s behavior: smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, unhealthy eating, lack of exercise… None of this has anything to do with money: one Smoking for a month is more expensive than the monthly fee even in an exclusive gym. Fast food is more expensive than cooking it yourself. Alcohol is more expensive than orange juice you squeezed yourself. Overall, unhealthy behavior is more expensive than healthy behavior.”
“The rich get divorced, they fight marital wars,” says Josef Wagner as an argument. But the question is: does money make you unhappy, or does a lack of money make you unhappy? The fight over money is central to any divorce, but scientists have found that money is also a major bone of contention in relationships.
Lauren Papp from the University of Wisconsin had 100 couples with children keep a diary over a period of two weeks. In it, men and women were supposed to write down separately which issues came up over the course of the day, how long the respective argument lasted and what sparked it. The result: the couples argued about no other topic as persistently and persistently as they did about money. The majority of the couples felt that the dispute over money was a threat to their future together, and there was no other conflict issue where the spouses found it so difficult to find a solution.
The business psychologist Erich Kirchler from the University of Vienna investigated what married couples talk about and what they argue about. He had 40 couples keep a diary for a year. Economic issues were the most contentious of all. The couples kept arguing about how much money should be spent on which things.
Do an experiment yourself: write down what worries you for a month. This can be any area: work, health, raising children, finances, partnership, body weight, etc. After a month, evaluate: How many of these problems would not have occurred if you had plenty of money? You will see that there were quite a few worries that you would not have had if you had enough money. But you will also see that there are many worries that you would have had even if you had enough money. For these worries, please write down whether they would have been easier to bear or whether the difficulties involved could have been solved better if you had significantly more money.
The already quoted scientist Dorothee Spannagel also examined what people worry about. The total population was compared with people who earn at least twice or three times as much as the average citizen: 24.5 percent of the total population, but only 6.4 percent of the higher earners were “greatly worried” about their own economic situation. And 54.3 percent of higher earners were not worried at all, but only 26.7 percent of the general population stated that they were not worried about their own economic situation. In the general population, 22.7 percent were very concerned about their job security, but only 4.8 percent of higher earners. In contrast, 59.7 percent of higher earners (but only 39.4 percent of the general population) said they were not concerned about job security.
The saying “Money alone doesn’t buy happiness” is nonsensical. I don’t know anyone who has ever said that money alone makes you happy. That would make just as much sense as the statement: “Health alone does not make you happy” or “Sex alone does not make you happy”. That’s true too. But are these really arguments against wealth, health and a celibate life?
Poets, singers and philosophers have repeatedly coined aphorisms that relativize the value of money and condemn the pursuit of wealth. “Having enough is lucky, having more than enough is ominous. This is true of all things, but especially of money,” said the Chinese philosopher Lao-tse. Pop singer Bob Dylan asked “What is money? A person is successful when they do what pleases them between getting up and going to bed.”
On the other hand, there have always been poets and philosophers who saw things very differently. “A healthy person without money is half ill” – this sentence comes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The German philosopher Gertrude Stein said: “I was rich and I was poor. It’s better to be rich.” And the writer Oscar Wilde, who always loved to provoke contradiction through exaggeration and to bring truth to light, wrote: “When I was little I believed that money was the most important thing in life . Now that I’m old, I know: It’s true.”
What could be more important than the question of what makes us happy in life? This is the focus of an entire scientific research field, the so-called “happiness research”. Again and again one could read the thesis that scientific research on happiness comes to the conclusion that money does not make you happy.
As early as 1974, the economist Richard Easterlin took the view that there was no positive correlation between higher income and more happiness, at least above a certain annual income. The two Nobel laureates in economics, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, restricted this finding somewhat and related it only to certain manifestations of the feeling of happiness. But they also came to the conclusion that the connection between higher income and greater happiness only applies up to a certain limit, namely up to an annual income of $75,000. Anything beyond that no longer has a measurable impact on a person’s satisfaction, since they have already become accustomed to a comfortable financial situation and only make minimal adjustments to their lifestyle with each salary increase.
New research has disproved this thesis. The most recent analysis comes from the American psychologist Matthew A. Killingsworth. He found that both experienced well-being and evaluative well-being increased with income. The “experienced well-being” was measured by evaluating 1.73 million reports from 33,391 Americans. They were contacted at different times on their smartphone and asked the question: “How do you feel right now?” The “evaluative well-being” was measured with the question: “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?”
The result: The limit of $75,000 claimed in the study by Kahneman and Deaton did not exist. The connection between more money and greater happiness in life was clearly demonstrated for incomes up to and above 80,000 dollars. The study had some methodological advantages over older studies. For example, respondents in older studies could only answer the question about their happiness with “yes” or “no”, while in the current study a scale with different gradations was used. Another big advantage was that by making contact with the mobile phone, the current emotional state was actually measured. In previous studies, people were simply asked to remember how they felt. However, such memories are often distorted and heavily colored by the current emotional state.
Nevertheless, the lottery winner from Potsdam should be careful. There are too many examples of lottery winners losing everything they won. I list many of these examples in the introduction to my book, Getting Rich and Staying Rich, which I titled Millionaire to Rags. People who become rich as entrepreneurs or investors have a certain personality structure, as I showed in my dissertation “Psychology of the super-rich”. But whoever wins the lottery is just lucky and unlikely to have the knowledge and mental abilities to manage money. We also know this from many pop stars and top athletes who quickly made too much money – and then lost everything. The last prominent example is Boris Becker, but there are many others. I have five tips for people who – like the winner from Potsdam – quickly made too much money, and you can find them here. If you follow these tips, you have a good chance that winning the lottery won’t make you unlucky.
