Money

I just finished Week 2 of Dan Ariely's free course "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior." This week was all about money. It was all about how we aren't really strategic when using a resource that we work so hard for. And even when we have all the money we need, we're still not happy.

The above clip from "Glengarry Glen Ross" gives an inkling about how cutthroat working can be. The stakes are really high, and people can be inspired to take advantage no matter how unethical the situation becomes. The salesmen have it rough especially since we generally don't want to part with our money; it's this tendency called pain of paying. Things would be easier if the payments were using credit cards though, as the more a mode of payment becomes removed from actual physical currency the more willing people are to part with their funds. 

In the movie, a character protests that their leads are weak, which I took to mean that their prospective marks weren't big-shots. To invest in real estate when the costs of doing so are so huge compared to  one's income and savings means you have to be suffering some pretty strong delusions to go through with it. 

The sales tricks of offering something for free and offering bulk purchases serve to screw with our decisions - when something is free we don't focus as much on the quality and usefulness of the product, or even if we want such a thing at all. We'd pick the free option over what we truly want, if the latter has a price attached to it. Offering bulk purchases makes it so that the costs of what we're purchasing jump less at awareness. And if that isn't enough, we tend to forget that we have a pool of money to draw from. We instead operate under a tacit  understanding that this much money needs to be consumed only for this category of goods. In essence, it's hard to provide an accurate accounting for what we are giving up when we choose to buy something, so we don't - we just focus on the cost on the price tag.

And when we have money, we get primed to be less helpful and less likely to seek out others. The irony is that from studies the behavioral economists do, it's clear that we derive more pleasure from using our money and other resources to help others. The social considerations trump the financial ones in a happy life.