Re: RE: [Kudlow] In Praise of Economic Freedom.

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From: ThosStew@aol.com
Date: Tue Jan 18 2000 - 06:27:07 PST


In a message dated 1/18/2000 10:02:36 AM, dan@teledesic.com writes:

>2) Understand why rich people (again, in an absolute sense) are not happier.
>

There's an interesting book by Jonathan Friedman, probably out of print,
about happiness--called, I think Happiness, if memory is serving and not
double-daulting as it too often does. Friedman is / was a prof of psych at
Columbia when I worked with him on it circa 1975, and began studying
happiness (unploughed land for most psychologists!). Happinessbeing
subjective, he began by asking people "how happy are you?" (scale of 1-10,
etc), then matching that soi-disant rating up against demographic and
psychographic and other data. Among the interesting findings: money can't buy
happiness, but poverty can buy misery (a maslovian no-duh, seems to me); and
this intriguing one: there was no corellation (positive or negative) between
childhood happiness or unhappiness, and adult happiness or unhappiness.
People overcame miserable childhoods and grew into happy adults; people
who'd had Edenic childhoods grew into miserably whining grownups-- adult
happiness seemed to be the result not of how one started, but of what one
made of one's life: I.e. it's in your hands.
(If anyone has in hands a pile of in-the-money options that are making him
rich but miserable, I'll be glad to relieve you of the burden.)

Tom


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