The Downturn’s Upside
Your retirement savings are swirling through the drain of the market meltdown, your home isn’t worth what a Chihuahua’s doghouse was a year ago, and the United States may be facing the most severe recession since the Great Depression.
But cheer up, for this is a happy column! The economic misery is numbingly real, but it’s also true that a downturn isn’t uniformly bad and might even be good for you in several ways:
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Income doesn’t have much to do with happiness. Americans haven’t become any happier as they have prospered in the last half-century. And winning the lottery doesn’t make people happier in the long term.
This is called the Easterlin Paradox: Once they have met their basic needs, people don’t become happier as they become richer. In recent years, new research has undermined the Easterlin Paradox, yet it’s still true that happiness has less to do with money than with friendships and finding meaning in a cause larger than oneself.
“There’s pretty good evidence that money doesn’t matter much for how you feel moment to moment,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist who is conducting extensive research on happiness. “What seems to matter much more is having good friends and family, and time to spend on social activities.”
The big exception to all this is people who lose their jobs or homes, and the new president should act immediately to help them. Professor Krueger argues that for these people, the losses are greater than we have generally realized, for their losses are not only monetary but also the erosion of self-esteem and friendships as they are wrenched out of social networks that enrich their lives (and help them find new jobs). And for those who lose health insurance, a medical or dental problem is enormously stressful, even life-threatening.
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1 comment:
I just finished a Master of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, and the program emphasized that the “most robust” finding in the literature today, after the association of smoking with cancer, is the association between social connectivity and literally every kind of health outcome, from resistance to the flu to depression to mortality. This is definitely real, even though there is great controversy over how it works.
I’ll have to track down the cite, but I believe that for a 65 year old, making one friend has more positive effect than the combination of taking up exercise, stopping smoking, lowering cholesterol, etc.
And with two thirds of our health care costs due to “behaviors”, it becomes very relevant that the strongest way to surmount a difficult behavioral change is with a lot of help from your friends. Going at it solo doesn’t work.
There is risk now of a global depression, not just of the economy, but of the spirit. In a depressed state, no amount of resources being “available” helps. It latches and becomes self-sustaining gloom and incapacity to cope.
So the question becomes what kind of people are we? In times of trouble, do we turn to help our friends and neighbors, or turn on them?
One way to counter depression is to look around and realized that there are people way worse off than you.
So I’d suggest considering what the obstacles are to the following “bailout plan”: everyone look around and find one, just one, other person less fortunate, and, moved by compassion help that person a little from the little you have. That focuses the debate on what our values are.
Here’s two posts from my blog “Perspectives in Public Health” on this subject:
The importance of social relationships
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2006/12/importance-of-social-relationships.html
and Psychosocial factors and Depression
http://cscwteam.blogspot.com/2006/11/psychosocial-factors-and-depression.html
Regards,
R. Wade Schuette, MBA, MPH
Ann Arbor, MI
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