Who wants to be a millionaire? The answer is practically everybody. Who wouldn’t want a life of financial ease in which every need was affordable? But since the vast majority of us will never achieve this blessed state, we try to persuade ourselves that it is not such a happy one. When people believed in God, they could take comfort in the prospect of a happy afterlife. But now they must convince themselves that here on this earth they are no less content than the very rich.
Unfortunately, this is not easy. We know that great wealth doesn’t necessarily bring contentment — the tragic case of Eva Rausing is a recent example — but most of us feel that we would know how to handle it, that we would spend our money wisely and generously, and that we would stay the same decent, level-headed people that we have always been. So try as we may to pity the rich, we usually find ourselves envying them. And despite the encouraging examples of lottery winners ending up bankrupt or committing suicide, it is apparently the case that most of them are much more cheerful after their enrichment.
This was the conclusion reached, after extensive research, by Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick University, who said last year: ‘Although many people don’t want to hear the evidence, it is overwhelmingly that winning the lottery makes you happier and improves your mental health.’ So my purpose this week is to generate cheer among those who are not as rich as they would like to be and to persuade them that they are perfectly all right as they are.
There is nothing to be said for poverty, of course, but if you are comfortably off — have a decent house, can afford to educate your children, take holidays abroad, go to the cinema, own an iPhone, and so on — what have the very rich got over you? It was set out in Cole Porter’s song — the ‘country estate’, the ‘supersonic plane’, the ‘gigantic yacht’, the ‘fancy foreign car’ — but, as the song said, who needs them? For apart from such wholly dispensable ‘extras’, the comforts and pleasures enjoyed by a Russian oligarch are little different from those available to, say, an NHS doctor (unless he yearns for the devotion of a young supermodel). The ‘millionaire lifestyle’ is not so much something to be enjoyed for its own sake as a status symbol, because it is something that only millionaires can afford. And perhaps not even millionaires, for its cost has risen so much faster than the rate of inflation that if you want a house in Knightsbridge, let alone a yacht in the Mediterranean, you had better be very rich indeed.
In any case, it’s only about status. A study carried out in the United States a few years ago found that envy and resentment of the very rich was greatest by far among those in the wealth bracket immediately below them (by those earning an average of half a million pounds a year of those earning an average of more than two million pounds). For while the gap between rich and poor in America has been widening for years, the gap between the rich and the super-rich has widened at a much faster rate, generating bitterness quite unrelated to anybody’s actual needs or desires.
Make a lot of money, and wealth becomes an end in itself. It defines you; it’s the source of your self-confidence and self-esteem. So hanging on to it becomes the most important thing in life. That’s why France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault (said to be worth £32 billion), is assumed to be seeking Belgian nationality in order to escape the new tax regime proposed by President François Hollande, who wants to increase the top rate of income tax to 75 per cent. Why else would a Frenchman want to become a Belgian? Even if Arnault did pay income tax at a very high rate, he would still have far more money than he could possibly want to spend; and this is also true of most of the wealthy people everywhere who are ‘forced’ to leave their native countries and live abroad so as to avoid paying taxes.
Those of us who are neither poor nor rich but adequately well-off are much freer. We can live where we want, provided it’s not in Knightsbridge. And we don’t have to agonise pointlessly about our status. The only thing we might be forced to do is work; but Britain’s first survey of national wellbeing, published in the summer, found that all work, and especially hard work, is the thing that makes everyone most happy.
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