Salary envy can make you happy, says study
07 Apr, Deily Telegraph
You would be forgiven for thinking that office gossip about senior
colleagues’ salaries and bonuses is a shortcut to seething envy.But for
young workers, seeing others around them do well can actually make them
happy by providing them with aspirations, according to a new report.
Economists believe that workers under the age of 45 get high levels of
satisfaction from seeing their peers earn more than them, because they
think they have similar chances of success.
But the effect has a time limit: for those over the age of 45,
comparisons with high-fliers can lead to misery, because there is less
time to “catch up” .The study, entitled So Far So Good: Age, Sex,
Happiness and Relative Income, was based on surveys carried out in
Germany.It divided participants into peer groups using characteristics
such as age, education, and location, and hypothesised that people may
be categorised as hares: people who are promoted early, or tortoises:
those who develop more slowly.
The researchers found any negative impact of comparing salaries was
limited to older workers.Prof Feliz FitzRoy, one of the co-authors of
the report, which was recently presented to the Royal Economic Society
Conference in Cambridge, said: “People are generally made less happy by
comparisons."In other words, the higher their peer group income, the
worse they feel. With young people, it’s the opposite.” Prof FitzRoy, an
expert in happiness and public economics at the University of St Andrews
School of Economics and Finance, said those under the age of 45 were
given a “positive boost” by knowing their peers earned more than them.
He added that the researchers planned to conduct a detailed study of
British workers after finding initial differences between Germany and
the UK, which suggested that older people in Britain were less affected
by income comparisons.But he said the findings had worrying implications
for those currently at the beginning of their careers at a time of
austerity and public spending cuts.“What it does emphasise is how
important aspirations are for young people,” he said.“In a situation
like the current austerity, these aspirations are being systematically
destroyed because young graduates are lucky to get jobs and if they do,
they are usually below their qualifications.
"We can conclude that this is particularly damaging to their
self-esteem and of course, we find in virtually all studies that
unemployment has very damaging effects.” |