Can’t Buy Me Love (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

My husband takes a backseat to no one when it comes to nostalgia and sentimentality, but even he is baffled by car commercials featuring an animated Six Million Dollar Man and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Who is the target market for these Honda ads? Trailing-edge baby boomers like us who watched Lee Majors benefit from the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $32.5 million worth of state-of-the-art 1970s biotechnology? Or 30-somethings who grew up with the Heroes in a Half Shell?

Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I can’t imagine a car being a Christmas present anyway — much less two vehicles, as GMC’s current “his and hers” commercial suggests. But I guess I must be weird because every carmaker and dealer pours money into giant-red-bow commercials at this time of year.

My preference for a low-key, modest holiday is a product of my upbringing in the disappearing Church of Christ tradition that treated Christmas as a strictly secular holiday. I love lights and decorations — within reason, you freaks — and parties, food, family gatherings and carols at the spinet, especially since my mother-in-law is still playing after more than 80 years.

But the seasonal shopping tradition so vital to retailers appeals to me less and less as I get older, probably because our kids are grown and we already have too much stuff. (Entirely too much stuff, and yet we keep going to estate sales. Explain that.)

Into the middle of my annual struggle with gift-buying came an article in The Atlantic titled “The Reason Many Ultrarich People Aren’t Satisfied With Their Wealth.” In it, staff writer Joe Pinsker explores the motivations of people “who possess more money than they could ever reasonably spend on even the lushest goods.”

It reminded me of an article I did for this publication in 2004. It was about the difficulty affluent parents — not even the ultrarich — have in teaching children to appreciate what they have while preparing them to be financially responsible adults.

H. Wallace Goddard, who was then a family life specialist for the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service, dropped some timeless truth on me: “The more we have, the more we want. The assumption that ‘once our basic needs are met then we’ll be peaceful’ doesn’t match our experience.”

For his article, Pinsker interviewed other academics who have studied the connection between wealth and happiness. Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton, Pinsker wrote, “says that research regularly points to two central questions that people ask themselves when determining whether they’re satisfied with something in their life: Am I doing better than I was before? and Am I doing better than other people?”

And since it’s hard to measure universal goals like being a better parent, humans tend to fixate on things that we can measure — weight, height, the size of our houses and, of course, net worth.

Jeffrey Winters, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, described to Pinsker a phenomenon that I have struggled for most of two decades to explain to young business reporters who are invariably unacquainted with wealth.

“For those of us who make wages and have expenditures that we are trying to meet — a mortgage, pay our health insurance, food, whatever happens to be our kid’s tuition — we link the making of money to our expenses,” Winters said. But the wealthy have ceased worrying about having enough money for needs, if they ever did, so money becomes a tool for creating more wealth and then a scorecard for measuring how well that tool has been used.

“Every billionaire I’ve spoken to, and I’ve spoken to quite a number of them,” Winters told Pinsker, “is extremely excited by each additional increment of money they make.”

That’s a positive answer to the “am I doing better?” question. But even that can be a letdown when the question is “am I doing better than other people?” That’s because people who amass significant wealth tend to start living and socializing around other wealthy people — including some who are even richer.

And research Norton did of 2,000 people worth $1 million or more — some of them much, much more — found that “all the way up the income-wealth spectrum, basically everyone says [they’d need] two or three times as much” in order to be perfectly happy. Bummer.

It’s almost like more money doesn’t guarantee more happiness the way a shiny new car, or two, for Christmas does in the TV commercials.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.