After World War II, the Japanese economy went through one of the supreme booms the world has ever recognized. From 1950 to 1970, the economy’s output per person grew more than sevenfold. Japan, in just a few decades, remade itself from a war-torn country into one of the richest nations on earth.
Yet, bizarrely, Japanese citizens didn’t seem to have become more satisfied with their lives. According to a poll, the percentage of people who gave the most positive possible answer about their life satisfaction actually fell from the late 1950s to the early ’70s. They were richer but apparently no happier.
This contrast became the most eminent example of a theory known as the Easterlin paradox. In 1974, Richard Easterlin, then an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, published a study in which he argued that economic growth didn’t necessarily lead to more satisfaction.
To put it in today’s terms, owning an iPod doesn’t make you happier, because you then want an iPod Touch. Relative income — how much you make compared with others around you — mattered far more than absolute income.
What is our religion preaching us?
“The man who has two tunics is to share with him who has none; and he who has food is to do likewise.” - Luke 3:11
"If a man or woman is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?" James 2:15-16
If this is what god wanted us to do? What are we doing? Science and Religion is agreeing a same factor that we are not ready to agree.
Let’s go to the roots, what is money? It is a medium of exchange. What does it do? It ensures the success of exchange by being the one item on offer that is ALWAYS acceptable. How important was the discovery of the idea of money? Look around you!!
I can guess what a reader may think right now, you are right to a point. Yes everyone needs a certain amount of money to achieve certain things. The problem is when you become obsessed with getting rich. Do you really think rich people need all that money?
Don’t you think they could be just as happy with a fraction of that? But they insist on spending 14 hours a day making just one more dollar. They take time away from their families to make just one more dollar. I know people like this too. I tell them that they will be the richest person in the graveyard.
There is only one thing that keeps popping in my head is this:
Human beings have lived together for more than two million years. Money in its modern form - coin of fixed weight and denomination - came into use less than three thousand years ago.
Then how money got this much power, why aren’t we unable to control it, why money is related to a person’s happiness, if is it so weren’t people who lived before the money was discovered were not happy?
