One-liners — the modern proverbs — can tell you a lot about a society. For example, the put-down, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is comprehensible only in a society where it's assumed that the chief function of intelligence is to help its possessor accumulate money.
The come-back to it — "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" — tells us that there also exists in the society a certain healthy scepticism about the prevailing assumptions.
But despite such scepticism, most people in Australia today, if they ever think about phrases like "Money can't buy happiness" or "Money isn't everything", probably put them in the category of slogans that are somehow useful in improving the morals of children, but which don't have any application after the age of 12.
For every time we hear such a phrase, we are told a hundred or a thousand times that the chief purpose and satisfaction of life are "getting ahead", which means increasing the amount of money we have.
But now comes a paper from the Australia Institute ("Why Australians Will Never Be Prosperous", by Clive Hamilton and Claire Barbato) which reveals that many of Australia's rich have indeed discovered that their money doesn't make them happy, or even satisfied.
The paper updates 2002 and 2003 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) surveys with a more recent Newspoll survey conducted for the institute. It recently received a brief flurry of coverage under headlines like "Poor little millionaires" (Sydney Morning Herald) and "Millionaires prove money equals misery" (Australian).
Such headlines exaggerate: Australian millionaires don't live in misery. But the figures from the Hamilton-Barbato paper are very interesting.
For example, when respondents were asked about their satisfaction with life, only 12.7% of those with household incomes over $100,000 reported they were "totally satisfied". This was the second lowest figure of all income groups, only slightly higher than those on incomes of $75,000-100,000 (12.3%).
The lowest income group, under $25,000, had the highest number (21.2%) who were totally satisfied with their lives.
When economic status was measured by net worth rather than income, the results were different but still unexpected, the numbers reporting "totally satisfying" lives among the four wealth bands varying only by very small margins.
The above figures refer to satisfaction with life in general. Even more striking was that many of the wealthy are dissatisfied with their financial situation. For example, only 9.2% of households on incomes over $100,000 were satisfied with their financial situation and household income. This was barely more than the 8.8% of those on incomes of less than $25,000.
Only one-seventh of those in the top bracket of household wealth were satisfied with their financial situation. Seven per cent of households with a net worth over $3 million say they are poor or just getting along.
There are several reasons not to regard these figures as a precise picture of reality. Nevertheless, it is clear that a lot of people who have "made it" haven't made themselves all that content. The advice to "get ahead" is a lie, because capitalism never lets them get far enough ahead.
In capitalism, all that matters is money. And because every pile of money, no matter how large, is smaller than someone else's pile, no amount of money ever seems enough.
There are people with $3 million who really do feel that they are just scraping by, and they will feel the same way when they have $30 million or $300 million. That's why they keep trying to drive down our wages and social benefits no matter how large their profits are already.
They don't really need it, but they think they do, so they pursue it even though that means further impoverishing people who really are poor.
If you think that sounds insane, you're right. And we hope you'll join us in trying to end the insanity by doing away with capitalism.
Allen Myers
From Green Left Weekly, July 20, 2005.
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