Money vs. Happiness, Round 3: Higher Income Correlates to Higher Happiness (Unless You’re Just an Unhappy Person)

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Mo’ money, mo’ problems? Or more money, more happiness? Over the years, the media has picked up on academic studies trying to establish the relationship between the two, and it seems we have a new result from two initially conflicting researchers. First, a bit of backstory.

Round 1: The $75k plateau? In 2010, Kahneman and Deaton found that happiness rose as annual income increased initially at lower incomes, but eventually it leveled off and happiness plateaued at between $60,000 and $90,000 annual income ($75,000 midpoint). From my post Happiness Is Earning $60,000 A Year?

Below 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I’ve rarely seen lines so flat.

Here is a reproduction of the chart in that paper.

Round 2: No plateau. More money, more happiness. In 2021, Killingsworth found that happiness rose steadily with income well beyond $75,000 with no plateau effect. I wrote the post Happiness Keeps Increasing Past $75,000 a Year. Here is a reproduction of the chart in that paper.

Round 3: Adversarial collaboration leads to a bit more nuance. Kahneman and Killingsworth decided to collect more data (especially at higher incomes), and analyze it together. Here’s the chart of their findings from their paper Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved:

Looking at the chart, you can see the two major conclusions:

  • For the happiest 80% of people (most people), happiness continues to rise with income, even with very high incomes.
  • For the unhappiest 20% of people, happiness rises up to about $100,000 in annual income and then plateaus.

“In the simplest terms, this suggests that for most people larger incomes are associated with greater happiness,” says Killingsworth, a senior fellow at Penn’s Wharton School and lead paper author. “The exception is people who are financially well-off but unhappy. For instance, if you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help. For everyone else, more money was associated with higher happiness to somewhat varying degrees.”

The paper also explores why Kahneman and Deaton may have previously overstated the flattening pattern and why Killingsworth failed to find it. I doubt this will be the last round of this debate.

I would simply point out (again) that they are saying happiness tends to correlate with log(income), not income. To illustrate what this means, in order to match the amount of linear happiness increase from $20,000/yr to $60,000/yr income, you would have to go from $60,000 to $180,000 year, or then $180,000 to $540,000 a year, and so on. That would look more like the sketch below.

My take. Getting a $25k annual raise will make a person currently earning $50k a much larger happiness boost than a person currently earning $150k. But, that $150k earner will still become slightly more happy (unless they simply tend to be miserable no matter what). Sounds about right to me.

Additional sources: WaPo, Penn Today,

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Stuck on a Hard 50/50 Decision? Pick the Change, Avoid the Status Quo

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The recently-republished Quartz article An economist’s rule for making tough life decisions draws from research by Steven Levitt, perhaps best-known for being co-author of the book Freakonomics.

The study asked people who were having a hard time making a decision to participate in a randomized digital coin toss on the website FreakonomicsExperiments.com. People asked questions ranging from “Should I quit my job?” to “Should I break up with my significant other?” and “Should I go back to school?” Heads meant they should take action. Tails, they stuck with the status quo.

Ultimately, 20,000 coins were flipped—and people who got heads and made a big change reported being significantly happier than they were before, both two months and six months later.

Here’s the takeaway, direct from Steven Levitt:

A good rule of thumb in decision making is, whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change, rather than continuing the status quo.

Here’s another version of the takeaway, per the article author Sarah Todd:

If the choice is between action and inaction, and you’re genuinely unsure about what to do, choose action.

Again, this should be the tie-breaker. Obviously, if you are completely happy with the status quo, then there is no reason for change.

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Quiet Confessions of Options Trading, Rental Real Estate, Crypto

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People are usually quite eager to share their stories of amazing wealth and riches. If you bought Apple in the early years or Bitcoin at $40, why not mention that at a party? Folks are usually much more quiet about their failures. But you can find such admissions thanks to the anonymous nature of social media. Reading these confessions can hopefully provide a clearer perspective of potential dangers.

Options trading. Meme stock mania was born as people learned the power of leveraged positions, but others ended up being the joke instead.

How do you get $100,000? You start with $700,000 and make a bunch of aggressive options trades: My losses, your gains. My unfortunate journey thus far.

That’s not even the worst part. The user admits in the comments (verified by their previous post history) that they ended up borrowing $200,000 at 10% interest:

Unfortunately I lost in options. I borrowed money and now I am paying 10% on 200k.

Assuming that is the full picture, they are negative $100,000 and the juice is still running.

Rental real estate. Many people do build wealth over time with rental real estate, but things can still go wrong. No landlord rents to a squatter that they have to evict on purpose: Lessons from a former accidental landlord…

While I’ve seen plenty of threads on having rentals at part of a FIRE strategy, I’ve rarely seen comments from experienced landlords that outline the challenges or negative outcomes that can come along with being a landlord.

I sold my rental property a couple of months ago, ending my 11-year stint as an accidental landlord. I thought this would be a good time to provide my experience. And before all the “rental moguls” show up to shit on this post, let me qualify that I am not claiming to be an expert. In hindsight there were a lot of things I would have done differently/better. However, I feel I can provide real world examples of what a new landlord can experience.

If done correctly, there can be a lot of financial upside. However, being a landlord is not as hassle/risk free as most people think it is – and there is no guarantee you will make money.

Crypto. The Twitter account @coinfessions shares “anonymous crypto confessions”. These days, there are many people afraid to tell even their spouses how much they lost betting on crypto.

I thought about these stories when reading about the growing popularity of DraftKings and FanDuel: DraftKings Is Coming for Your Dumb Money at Wrigley Field. This is not a net positive development for our society. The Chicago Cubs (and soon your favorite team as well) just can’t say no to the easy money, but also prefer to ignore where it will come from. My children will be told that gambling addiction runs in their family history (there’s my little confession) and that the best path is to never bet at all, even casually (and to never marry someone who gambles). Don’t be the dumb money.

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Improving Your Everyday Negotiating Skills (Never Split The Difference Book Notes)

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Initially, I viewed Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss as a tactical financial book for specific situations: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, renegotiating rent, or any number of business transactions. After all, the author is the “FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator”!

Instead of a win/lose mentality, this book helps you find out what the other person really wants overall, what they will accept specifically within your own acceptable range, and to do it in a way that everyone feels respected. I found myself using the advice every day for all the little negotiations in life: getting the kids out the door in the morning, finding out why someone was mad at me, and so on. Admittedly, I had (and still have) a lot of room for improvement, but this book helped improve my communication and listening skills. I highly recommend reading the entire book, but here are a few selected highlights and excerpts.

What are the goals after learning these skills?

What were needed were simple psychological tactics and strategies that worked in the field to calm people down, establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the verbalization of needs, and persuade the other guy of our empathy. We needed something easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to execute.

It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.

Mirroring. Here’s a very simple tactic that you can try today (really! try it on your very next conversation) to help get more information, called “mirroring”:

It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective.

It’s just four simple steps:  

1. Use the late-night FM DJ voice.
2. Start with “I’m sorry . . .”
3. Mirror.
4. Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror work its magic on your counterpart.

Here’s a short YouTube video with examples.

Labeling. We want to get on the same page. People want to be heard and understood. We can try to confirm a perception gently, show that we are listening, and validate their emotions with “It seems like…” phrases.

There are fill-in-the-blank labels that can be used in nearly every situation to extract information from your counterpart, or defuse an accusation: It seems like _________ is valuable to you. It seems like you don’t like _________. It seems like you value __________. It seems like _________ makes it easier. It seems like you’re reluctant to _________. As an example, if you’re trying to renegotiate an apartment lease to allow subletters and you know the landlord is opposed to them, your prepared labels would be on the lines of “It seems as though you’re not a fan of subletters” or “It seems like you want stability with your tenants.”

Here is an example from a grouchy relative at Thanksgiving:

“We don’t see each other all that often,” you could say. “It seems like you feel like we don’t pay any attention to you and you only see us once a year, so why should you make time for us?” Notice how that acknowledges the situation and labels his sadness? Here you can pause briefly, letting him recognize and appreciate your attempts to understand what he’s feeling, and then turn the situation around by offering a positive solution. “For us this is a real treat. We want to hear what you have to talk about. We want to value this time with you because we feel left out of your life.”

“How” and “What” questions are much more gentle and respectful ways to guide the conversation along. It frames it is as a collaborative effort and asking for help, not being accusatory or demanding was “Why”.

Here are some other great standbys that I use in almost every negotiation, depending on the situation:  

What about this is important to you?
How can I help to make this better for us?
How would you like me to proceed?
What is it that brought us into this situation?  
How can we solve this problem?  
How am I supposed to do that?

Instead of “No”:

The first step in the “No” series is the old standby: “How am I supposed to do that?” You have to deliver it in a deferential way, so it becomes a request for help. Properly delivered, it invites the other side to participate in your dilemma and solve it with a better offer. After that, some version of “Your offer is very generous, I’m sorry, that just doesn’t work for me” is an elegant second way to say “No.”

Used properly, these little things can really improve your everyday life. Learning about “negotiating” doesn’t mean you like fighting or painful conflict, it can actually mean less painful conflict:

If this book accomplishes only one thing, I hope it gets you over that fear of conflict and encourages you to navigate it with empathy. If you’re going to be great at anything—a great negotiator, a great manager, a great husband, a great wife—you’re going to have to do that. You’re going to have to ignore that little genie who’s telling you to give up, to just get along—as well as that other genie who’s telling you to lash out and yell.

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The Power of the Default: 401(k) Auto-Enrollment, Auto-Increase, and Default Investment Options

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Vanguard has an interesting whitepaper called Automatic Enrollment: The power of the default [pdf]. It takes effort to make a choice beyond the default setting. Doing nothing is always easier. Behavioral economics is still gaining popularity and I knew that auto-enrollment was a powerful way to increase participation in retirement plans, but I didn’t know it was this powerful. Here are a few examples.

Much higher participation: After 3+ years, 90% of auto-enrolled employees kept participating in the retirement plans.

You might think, is that really better than normal? Yes! Here is what participation looked like without auto-enrollment.

Higher contribution rates: After 3 years, 90% of employees auto-enrolled with automatic annual increases indeed kept increasing their contribution percentages. Most stayed with the gradual auto-increase even though they could opt-out at any time, but some also increased more on their own (for example to reach the max).

More appropriate investments: After 3+ years, 94% stayed with a mix of the default and other investments and 74% stayed with solely the default investment option. This is usually a diversified Target Date Fund, whereas in the past a significant amount of participants just stuck with a money market or similar cash account.

My takeaway is that I keep underestimating the power of the default. We see the effects all around us. Why do people keep using Google as their search engine? Default. Switch to DuckDuckGo? Hassle. Why do I simply buy the newest iPhone again after a few years? Default. Switch to Android? Hassle. Buying from Amazon? Easy. Input your name, address, payment info and buy from 100 different online stores? Hassle. Why does Netflix auto-renew with zero effort instead of sending you a bill to pay each month? Behavioral tendencies are big component of business success.

The power of the default is also why you can get $300 to open a new bank account and $500 to try out a new credit card. It takes a big fat incentive for people to move beyond their default. Car insurance companies like GEICO, Progressive, and Liberty mutual spend billions just to get you to even compare premium quotes, let alone switch. Getting over this behavioral tendency is a big component of improving your personal finances.

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Behavioral Activation: Mood Follows Action

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On top of everything else, December and January are busy times for finance as well. There are “year-end moves” like tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio, making sure you contributed to your 401k/IRA/HSA/FSAs, and charitable giving. Then comes “New Year’s resolution” season with new goals to reduce debt, set up a savings schedule towards a house downpayment, increasing retirement contributions, and so on. Unfortunately, none of those things are as fun as checking your phone.

If you’re like me and looking for some additional motivation at times, consider the concept of behavioral activation. While behavioral activation is used as a serious treatment for depression, but it can also be applied to general wellness. From the Outside magazine article Why You’re Tired All the Time:

Your brain is doing everything it can to trick you into staying in bed all day, when the best thing to break out of the cycle would be to get up and go, or what psychologists call “behavioral activation,” which is a gold-standard treatment for depression. This isn’t to say the sensations of lethargy, dullness, and torpor are not real—they are, and they can be quite paralyzing. But those sensations, as far as we know, are not organic, not caused by a lack of sleep, an expenditure of physiological resources, or something wrong in the body, for example. If they were, taking action would make the situation worse. But, as research shows, with depression, taking action—particularly when supported by therapy—tends to make the situation better.

From 7 Wellness Strategies to Build Resilience:

On days when you’re down or anxious and want nothing but to sit in bed, nudge yourself into doing something—whether it’s calling a friend, accomplishing some creative work, exercising, or cleaning. Even if you have to force yourself, just get started. Research shows that behavioral activation—a strategy that involves doing something even if you don’t feel like it—is one of the most effective ways to change your mood. Intrusive thoughts and feelings are stubborn. This is why nonsense advice like “think positive” usually fails. Mood follows action. If you know your core values and act in alignment with them regardless of how you’re feeling, you give yourself the best chance at turning your mood around.

You are trying to break any negative cycles, and jump-start a positive cycle. From @christophburch:

Take action first, don’t wait for mood. Positive-reinforcement cycles are why methods like the “debt snowball” work so well. Any time you hear “Couple goes from zero savings to $20,000 in the bank”, that’s didn’t happen overnight; it was a positive reinforcement cycle. A little progress feels good, which makes it easier to keep going, and so on.

As a micro-example, when faced with something that I want to be done but don’t want to actually *do* it, I start by doing something positive, enjoyable, specific, and small that I know I can start and finish in less than 30 minutes. Once I am actually doing something positive, I can feel my energy levels improve and it makes it much more likely that I will want to do the next thing. Then I just tell myself to “start” the hard thing. In such a moment, I am more likely to run comparison quotes for auto insurance or make adjustments to my 401k.

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Mind The Gap: How Investor Timing Affects “Real-World” Returns

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Morningstar has released the 2021 update to their annual Mind The Gap study, which measures the gap between reported investment returns (buy and hold throughout the entire period) and investor returns (actual returns experienced due the real-world timing of buy and sell transactions). How well does the average investor time their purchase and sell transactions?

For the 10-year period from 12/31/2010 to 12/31/2020, the average return gap was negative 1.7% annually, with negative gaps across the board:

Investors in US stock funds had a 10-year return gap of negative 1.2% annually. This gap has varied over past rolling 10-year periods, but has been consistently slightly negative:

Now, this is not completely due to performance chasing. Here’s a quick example of how steady dollar-cost averaging may also result in a return gap:

To use a simple example, let’s say an investor puts $1,000 into a fund at the beginning of each year. That fund earns a 10% return the first year, a 10% return the second year, and then suffers a 10% loss in the third year, for a 2.9% annual return over the full three-year period. But the investor’s dollar-weighted return is negative 0.4%, because there was less money in the fund during the first two years of positive returns and more money exposed to the loss during the third year. In this case, there was a 3.3-percentage-point per year gap between the investor’s return (negative 0.4%) and the fund’s (2.9%).

Morningstar ran some extra simulations and DCA does possibly account for some of the gap, but a perfectly-steady DCA investor still outperformed the real-world investor in 6 out of 7 fund categories. DCA can’t be helped if you are simply investing what you can, when you can, but there is still extra trading in and out that appears to only make things worse.

The most boring fund category that includes Target-Date funds has the smallest return gap. Target-date funds are included in the “Allocation” fund category as they include a managed mix of stocks, bonds, and other classes. These funds have the calmest trading activity, and we see that the return gap has been consistently smaller over time:

The fund categories with the most volatile cashflows in and out have the greatest return gaps. Alternative funds and sector equity funds did the worst.

Investing in a low-cost target-date fund (TDF) is easy to dismiss as “too simple” or for the “inexperienced newbies only”, but often the inaction of TDF investors work in their favor. Maybe we should give credit to the humble investors that knows they could do a lot worse by thinking they have skills that they don’t actually have. (Meanwhile, I’m also guilty of thinking that I can do better than a TDF.) From a Bloomberg article using Mind the Gap data from 2015:

But target-date funds have one big advantage over other kinds of mutual funds, the data show. The average mutual fund has a flaw, which is that the average investor hardly ever does as well as his or her funds. Investors tend to jump in and out of funds at the wrong time. They buy high, choosing funds only after they’ve done well. And they sell low, dumping underperforming funds just as they’re about to take off.

targetdategap

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Happiness Exercises: Take Action To Improve Your Well-Being

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As I reach the end of the 10-week free Yale Happiness Course, I definitely recommend this course if you are ready to commit time and effort into making yourself feel better mentally. One of the key points is the G.I. Joe fallacy, which is the false notion that knowing about a mental bias is enough to overcome it. Knowing isn’t enough! Taking repeated action is required to achieve lasting change.

As such, much of the course is based on “rewirements”, but I think of them as “happiness exercises” because they only work temporarily for me. When I do them, I feel better immediately and for a little while afterward, but the effect wears off. This is similar to my experience with diets, in that diets don’t work.

Once you go back to your original eating habits, you’ll go back to your original weight. Therefore, any changes you make should be something you can maintain for the rest of your life.

Can you really change your life to include these habits? Well, here are the happiness exercises, along with a short description from the Yale course. Try each one for a week and discover which ones work best for your personal situation. I found the prompts to commit acts of kindness and initiate social connections were the most helpful, and a really do hope to keep them up forever. (I’ve already been working on the sleep and exercise bits for a while.)

Savoring

Savoring is the act of stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it. Often we fail to stay in the moment and really enjoy what we’re experiencing. Savoring intensifies and lengthens the positive emotions that come with doing something you love. For the next seven days, you will practice the art of savoring by picking one experience to truly savor each day. It could be a nice shower, a delicious meal, a great walk outside, or any experience that you really enjoy. When you take part in this savored experience, be sure to practice some common techniques that enhance savoring. These techniques include: sharing the experience with another person, thinking about how lucky you are to enjoy such an amazing moment, keeping a souvenir or photo of that activity, and making sure you stay in the present moment the entire time.

Gratitude

Gratitude is a positive emotional state in which one recognizes and appreciates what one has received in life. Research shows that taking time to experience gratitude can make you happier and even healthier. For the next seven days, you will take 5-10 minutes each night to write down five things for which you are grateful. They can be little things or big things. But you really have to focus on them and actually write them down.

Random Acts of Kindness

Research shows that happy people are motivated to do kind things for others. Over the next seven days, you will perform seven acts of kindness beyond what you normally do. You can do one extra act of kindness per day, or you can do a few acts of kindness in a single day. These do not have to be over-the-top or time-intensive acts, but they should be something that really helps or impacts another person. For example, help your colleague with something, give a few dollars or some time to a cause you believe in, say something kind to a stranger, write a thank you note, give blood, and so on.

Social Connection

Our social connections matter. Research shows that happy people spend more time with others and have a richer set of social connections than unhappy people. Studies even show that the simple act of talking to a stranger on the street can boost our mood more than we expect. Over the next seven days, you will try to focus on making one new social connection per day. It can be a small 5-minute act like sparking a conversation with someone on public transportation, asking a coworker about his/her day, or even chatting to the barista at a coffee shop. But you should also seek out more meaningful social connections, too. At least once this week, take a whole hour to connect with someone you care about— a friend who’s far away or a family member you haven’t talked to in a while. The key is that you must take the time needed to genuinely connect with another person.

Exercise

Research suggests that ~30 minutes a day of exercise can boost your mood in addition to making your body healthier. For the next week, you will spend each day getting your body moving with at least 30 minutes of exercise. Set aside a location and time (write it in your calendar!). Then hit the treadmill at the gym, do an online yoga class, or throw on some headphones and dance around your room to cheesy pop songs. This isn’t supposed to be a marathon-level of activity; it’s just to get your body moving a bit more than usual.

Sleep

One of the reasons we’re so unhappy in our modern lives is that we’re consistently sleep deprived. Research shows that sleep can improve your mood more than we often expect. For the next week, you must get at least seven hours of sleep for at least four nights of the next week. I know, I know. You’re super busy this week. There are deadlines to meet, friends to see, errands to run, etc. But sleep is going to make you feel better— both physically and mentally. So pick four nights this week, note them in your calendar, and get ready to get some much needed sleep. Also be sure to practice good sleep hygiene too— no devices before bed and try to avoid caffeine and alcohol on the days you’re getting your sleep on.

Meditate

Meditation is a practice of intentionally turning your attention away from distracting thoughts toward a single point of reference (e.g., the breath, bodily sensations, compassion, a specific thought, etc.). Research shows that meditation can have a number of positive benefits, including more positive moods, increased concentration, and more feelings of social connection. For the next week, you will spend each (at least) 10 minutes per day meditating. Find a quiet spot where you won’t be disturbed while you’re meditating. If you are new to meditation, you can try one of three guided meditations available on SoundCloud. And remember— meditation isn’t about the meditation itself; it’s about building a skill that we can use later. Lots of people find it hard at first, but stick with it and see if it allows you to feel a bit calmer over the course of the week.

For all of these exercises, you should find a way to track them – physical notebook, Notes smartphone app, daily planner, or the unpolished-but-free ReWi app (iOS, Android). By keeping track, you make it much more likely that you’ll maintain a streak and eventually make it a life-changing habit like eating healthier foods or regular exercise.

Also see:

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Influence: How Salespeople Use Your Mental Shortcuts Against You

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Although not technically a “personal finance” book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini should be required reading if they ever create a standardized curriculum for personal finance. In addition to being a professor of psychology, the author was hired into several jobs where sales professionals have carefully honed the ability to use your own psychological tendencies for their benefit:

For nearly three years, then, I combined my experimental studies with a decidedly more entertaining program of systematic immersion into the world of compliance professionals—sales operators, fund-raisers, recruiters, advertisers, and others.

While a NYT Bestseller and on Warren Buffet’s reading list, I put it off as it seemed a little bit stuffy and dry, and besides I’d probably read about all the things discussed already, right? I was wrong! This book contained enough new and valuable information that I plan on making my kids read it as soon as they can. The amount of carefully-targeted marketing being thrown at them is only increasing.

These six psychological principles (mental shortcuts) have been used recently to influence your purchases, donations, and votes. I’ll still do my own brief summary below to help me remember the highlights, and there are many other summaries of the book online, but I recommend reading the entire thing in the original form. The book is older, so there are lots of copies at my library.

1. Reciprocation. If I do a favor for you, then you will feel the urge to repay me by doing me a favor in return. This tendency helps us work together in positive ways, but it can also be exploited.

  • Free in-home trials with “no obligation”.
  • Free samples at Costco.
  • Free custom mailing labels or even a nickel/dime in charity mailer.
  • “Free rewards” if you leave an Amazon product review.
  • “Free” steak dinners when selling expensive insurance products.
  • Upfront sign-up bonuses for trying out a credit card. (Ahem)

As a marketing technique, the free sample has a long and effective history. In most instances, a small amount of the relevant product is provided to potential customers for the stated purpose of allowing them to try it to see if they like it. And certainly this is a legitimate desire of the manufacturer—to expose the public to the qualities of the product. The beauty of the free sample, however, is that it is also a gift and, as such, can engage the reciprocity rule.

The confidential Amway Career Manual then instructs the salesperson to leave the BUG with the customer “for 24, 48, or 72 hours, at no cost or obligation to her. Just tell her you would like her to try the products…. That’s an offer no one can refuse.” At the end of the trial period, the Amway representative returns and picks up orders for those of the products the customer wishes to purchase.

For instance, the Disabled American Veterans organization reports that its simple mail appeal for donations produces a response rate of about 18 percent. But when the mailing also includes an unsolicited gift (gummed, individualized address labels), the success rate nearly doubles to 35 percent.

Defense? Mentally, you must redefine any “trial” or “gift” as a sales device. It is not a gift, and thus you owe them nothing in return. Choose to use a product or service on its own merits only.

2. Consistency. We are strongly wired to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done.

If you must leave your laptop in a library or valuables on the beach temporarily, your best bet would be to ask a single person directly “Will you please watch my things?”. Once that person has committed to that responsibility, your stuff becomes pretty safe, as indicated by experiment:

In these incidents, before taking his stroll, the accomplice would simply ask the subject to please “watch my things,” which each of them agreed to do. Now, propelled by the rule for consistency, nineteen of the twenty subjects became virtual vigilantes, running after and stopping the thief, demanding an explanation, and often restraining the thief physically or snatching the radio away.

Once you state something publicly, it becomes very hard for you to back down from it, even if later you realize your statement is wrong and refuted by nearly all evidence. Even worse, small wrong commitments can also open the door to larger wrong commitments. Answering “yes” to something as innocuous as “Are you a spontaneous person?” can get you do later do some stupid and dangerous things. “Why not do [dangerous thing]? You said you were spontaneous!”

What the Freedman and Fraser findings tell us, then, is to be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests. Such an agreement can not only increase our compliance with very similar, much larger requests, it can also make us more willing to perform a variety of larger favors that are only remotely connected to the little one we did earlier. It’s this second, general kind of influence concealed within small commitments that scares me.

Defense? Be very careful before agreeing to anything (even if it is small), especially publicly (like on social media). Don’t let a small commitment automatically lead you to more extreme commitments.

3. Social Proof. We tend to look to and follow the behavior of others, especially if we are unsure and/or they seem similar to us.

  • Infomercials will always have someone else come up and show an enthusiastic response.
  • During a sales presentation, there will usually be “plants” in an audience with a rehearsed response.
  • Immediately after a high-profile suicide, overall suicide rates will rise.

Bartenders often “salt” their tip jars with a few dollar bills at the beginning of the evening to simulate tips left by prior customers and thereby to give the impression that tipping with folding money is proper barroom behavior.

Defense? This shortcut can makes sense at times (Yelp/TripAdvisor/Amazon reviews), but be aware that sometimes it may be artificially generated. Also, be aware of how this tendency will affect others around you:

I have been sufficiently affected by these statistics to begin to take note of front-page suicide stories and to change my behavior in the period after their appearance. I try to be especially cautious behind the wheel of my car. I am reluctant to take extended trips requiring a lot of air travel.

4. Liking. We tend to say “yes” to people we like. We tend to like physically attractive people, as well as people that appear similar and familiar to ourselves, even though those factors may have nothing to do with why you should vote for them or buy a car from them.

The clearest illustration I know of the professional exploitation of the liking rule is the Tupperware party, which I consider the quintessential American compliance setting. Anybody familiar with the workings of a Tupperware party will recognize the use of the various weapons of influence we have examined so far: reciprocity (to start, games are played and prizes won by the partygoers; anyone who doesn’t win a prize gets to reach into a grab bag for hers so that everyone has received a gift before the buying begins), commitment (each participant is urged to describe publicly the uses and benefits she has found in the Tupperware she already owns), and social proof (once the buying begins, each purchase builds the idea that other, similar people want the product; therefore, it must be good).

Defense? Acknowledge this tendency, and try to focus solely on the merits of the situation.

5. Authority. We tend to follow symbols of authority as a mental shortcut, for example titles, uniforms, business suits, and celebrities. The problem is we do this even in situations where it shouldn’t be applicable. Why should an athlete tell me what life insurance to buy? Think of the many instances of abuse and harassment performed by people in positions of authority.

Planes have crashed because the junior pilot didn’t want to question the senior pilot. In one study, nurses were convinced to administer a lethal dose of a drug by an unknown stranger that simply firmly and urgently claimed to be a doctor over the phone.

There were four excellent reasons for a nurse’s caution in response to this order: (1) The prescription was transmitted by phone, in direct violation of hospital policy. (2) The medication itself was unauthorized; Astrogen had not been cleared for use nor placed on the ward stock list. (3) The prescribed dosage was obviously and dangerously excessive. The medication containers clearly stated that the “maximum daily dose” was only ten milligrams, half of what had been ordered. (4) The directive was given by a man the nurse had never met, seen, or even talked with before on the phone. Yet, in 95 percent of the instances, the nurses went straightaway to the ward medicine cabinet, where they secured the ordered dosage of Astrogen and started for the patient’s room to administer it. It was at this point that they were stopped by a secret observer, who revealed the nature of the experiment.

Defense? Don’t shortcut your own thinking and power by allowing the authority figure to take over. Question authority. Sometimes, it is your duty to be a safety check and protect others.

6. Scarcity. Simply being scarce makes something more desirable. This may also be linked to loss aversion – we hate losing something more than we like gaining something. “While supplies last.” “Limited-time offer.” No matter what time you land on the website, the sale will always be “ending in only 23:54 hours!”

For similar reasons, department stores holding a bargain sale toss out a few especially good deals on prominently advertised items called loss leaders. If the bait, of either form, has done its job, a large and eager crowd forms to snap it up. Soon, in the rush to score, the group becomes agitated, nearly blinded, by the adversarial nature of the situation. Humans and fish alike lose perspective on what they want and begin striking at whatever is being contested.

Defense? Question the actual amount of scarcity, especially in high-pressure environments like a live auction, Black Friday, or car sales department. Buy now or lose it forever? In reality, another train may arrive shortly.

Final thoughts. An important point in the book is that these tactics won’t always work, but they will alter the odds of success. The tactics will often be used in combination with each other for added strength. Finally, we are more likely to fall back on these mental shortcuts without thinking when we are stressed, rushed, tired, or hungry. Hopefully, the ability to identify these tactics in action will help us avoid making poor decisions, including financial ones.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Happiness Test Questions? The Components of Happiness and Well-Being

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As part of the first week of The Science of Well Being (AKA the “Yale happiness” class), I was assigned two psychological surveys meant to measure my baseline happiness:

  • PERMA Profiler (Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment), “Measures Flourishing”
  • Authentic Happiness Inventory, “Measures Overall Happiness”

How happy am I? The types of questions asked were interesting, as it revealed what the creators believed were the components and characteristics of happiness and high levels of well-being. I have a hard time believing that anyone never feels lonely or that they always for excited and positive about life, but…

Here’s how the world’s happiest person might answer these questions:

  • I consistently feel that I am making progress towards accomplishing my goals. I have direction in my life.
  • I consistently become absorbed in what I am doing. Time seems to pass quickly when I am working.
  • I rarely feel anxious.
  • I consistently achieve the important goals that I set for myself. I am successful at what I do.
  • I am in excellent health and am satisfied with my level of health.
  • I consistently lead a purposeful and meaningful life. I spend my time on things that are important.
  • I consistently receive help and support from others when I need it.
  • I consistently feel that my life is valuable and worthwhile.
  • I am consistently excited and interested in things.
  • I rarely feel lonely.
  • I consistently feel positive and rarely sad nor angry.
  • I consistently feel loved.

If aren’t part of the online class, you can sign up for a free account at the UPenn Authentic Happiness website to take them yourself. They list many other happiness assessment options as well.

My own measured happiness levels ended up somewhere a bit above the middle of their scales. I hope you didn’t think I was deliriously happy, I definitely could do better – why else would I sign up for this course?

Topics not addressed. Neither survey asked about any of the following items. Perhaps they don’t correlate with happiness and well-being? Perhaps they do but just not as much as the topics they did ask about? Perhaps something else altogether.

  • Salary/income
  • Net worth
  • Marital/relationship status
  • Number of children
  • Prestige of job title
  • Quality of stuff (size of home, brand of car, model of smartphone)
  • Physical beauty or attractiveness.
My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Money and Happiness: Happiness Keeps Increasing Past $75,000 a Year

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Did you know there was an iPhone app called Track Your Happiness? The app basically does what the name suggests:

A few times a day, you’ll get a notification and be asked some questions about your experience at that moment. The idea is that by measuring your experience at many individual moments, you’ll get an accurate picture of your life and the determinants of your happiness.

After collecting over 1.7 million data points from 30,000+ app users, here is the research paper Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year by Matt Killingsworth, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Thanks to reader Al for the tip. Taken from the “Significance” section:

Past research has found that experienced well-being does not increase above incomes of $75,000/y. This finding has been the focus of substantial attention from researchers and the general public, yet is based on a dataset with a measure of experienced well-being that may or may not be indicative of actual emotional experience (retrospective, dichotomous reports). Here, over one million real-time reports of experienced well-being from a large US sample show evidence that experienced well-being rises linearly with log income, with an equally steep slope above $80,000 as below it. This suggests that higher incomes may still have potential to improve people’s day-to-day well-being, rather than having already reached a plateau for many people in wealthy countries.

Here is a chart from the paper that illustrates how “experienced well-being” keeps increasing with log(income).

Why do I keep making log in bold? Because even though it was a long time ago, I still remember something about logarithms! The only two charts in the paper emphasize the nice line before and after the $75,000 income marker. This might confuse a quick reader to think that happiness keeps increasing linearly with income. In reality, here is a graphic (source) that shows the difference between rising linearly with n vs log(n). The relationship between happiness as income increases looks like the red line below.

If you read the entire paper, this is addressed (emphasis mine):

When interpreting these results, it bears repeating that well-being rose approximately linearly with log(income), not raw income. This means that two households earning $20,000 and $60,000, respectively, would be expected to exhibit the same difference in well-being as two households earning $60,000 and $180,000, respectively. The logarithmic relationship implies that marginal dollars do matter less the more one earns, while proportional differences in income have a constant association with well-being regardless of income.

In order to match the amount of happiness increase from $20,000/yr to $60,000/yr income, you would have to go from $60,000 to $180,000 year, or then $180,000 to $540,000 a year, and so on. Here a quick sketch that I made of this (gives me a reason to use my new $34 knockoff Apple pencil).

That… sounds pretty reasonable, doesn’t it? Happiness increases with money quickly at lower incomes, and as your income grows the incremental increases are smaller (but still goes up a bit). If you make $150,000 a year now, getting a $25,000 annual raise will still make you little happier, but nearly as much as someone earning $50,000 a year now.

If the past research said that you got zero additional happiness past $75,000 year, that would have been the surprising thing. If happiness forever increased directly in proportion with income, that also would have been surprising.

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Skin in the Game: How Much Do You Have To Lose? (Book Notes)

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The central idea behind the book Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is simple. Never trust anyone without skin in the game. In the real world, behavior changes for the better when you have to pay a price for your mistakes. This is a very handy heuristic to apply in everyday life and applies in many areas. A good example of why we shouldn’t allow people to not have skin in the game is Bob Rubin:

The Bob Rubin trade? Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check—he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. Heads he wins, tails he shouts “Black Swan.”

If someone is giving you financial advice, don’t worry about what s/he “thinks”, ask them what they actually hold in their own portfolio. Sure, what is optimal for them may be different than what it optimal for your own situation, but at least put it out there and let the consumer decide. Predictions are cheap without real risk of loss/pain.

In case you are giving economic views: Don’t tell me what you “think,” just tell me what’s in your portfolio.

How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.

Conflicts of interest can be good, if it means skin in the game. Taleb argues that while many people think it is better for CNBC “experts” and/or journalists to not own the stocks or companies they talk about, it’s actually better that they do.

There are two types of “talking one’s book.” One consists of buying a stock because you like it, then commenting on it (and disclosing such ownership)—the most reliable advocate for a product is its user. Another is buying a stock so you can advertise the qualities of the company, then selling it, benefiting from the trumpeting—this is called market manipulation, and it is certainly a conflict of interest.

We removed the skin in the game of journalists in order to prevent market manipulation, thinking that it would be a net gain to society. The arguments in this book are that the former (market manipulation) and conflicts of interest are more benign than impunity for bad advice. The main reason, we will see, is that in the absence of skin in the game, journalists will imitate, to be safe, the opinion of other journalists, thus creating monoculture and collective mirages.

In general, skin in the game comes with conflict of interest. What I hope this book will do is show that the former is more important than the latter. There is no problem if people have a conflict of interest if it is congruous with downside risk for themselves.

Bureaucracy too often means NO skin in the game. We allow people elected for only a few years be allowed to bind all of us into agreements that last for decades. We should also look more closely at the former “civil servants” that conveniently land high-paying jobs soon after their terms are over.

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

More critically, people with good lawyers can game regulations (or, as we will see, make it known that they hire former regulators, and overpay for them, which signals a prospective bribe to those currently in office). And of course regulations, once in, stay in, and even when they are proven absurd, politicians are afraid of repealing them, under pressure from those benefiting from them. Given that regulations are additive, we soon end up tangled in complicated rules that choke enterprise. They also choke life.

Employees have skin in the game, but perhaps not in a good way.

A company man is someone who feels that he has something huge to lose if he doesn’t behave as a company man—that is, he has skin in the game.

What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing. […] The more you have to lose, the more fragile you are.

It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.

People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions.

How can you achieve true freedom?

Financial independence is another way to solve ethical dilemmas, but such independence is hard to ascertain: many seemingly independent people aren’t particularly so. While, in Aristotle’s days, a person of independent means was free to follow his conscience, this is no longer as common in modern days.

Intellectual and ethical freedom requires the absence of the skin of others in one’s game, which is why the free are so rare. I cannot possibly imagine the activist Ralph Nader, when he was the target of large motor companies, raising a family with 2.2 kids and a dog.

I have held for most of my (sort of) academic career no more than a quarter position. A quarter is enough to have somewhere to go, particularly when it rains in New York, without being emotionally socialized and losing intellectual independence for fear of missing a party or having to eat alone. But one (now “resigned”) department head one day came to me and emitted the warning: “Just as, when a businessman and author you are judged by other businessmen and authors, here as an academic you are judged by other academics. Life is about peer assessment.”

You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.

Embrace taking some risk (those that don’t endanger your survival). Starting a business is one way.

Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move the descendants of Homo sapiens away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, away from the kind of social engineering that brings tail risks to society.

Doing business will always help (because it brings about economic activity without large-scale risky changes in the economy); institutions (like the aid industry) may help, but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming). Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.

By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.

A final summarizing quote:

Recall that skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and to how much of their necks they are putting on the line. Let survival work its wonders.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.