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Ignores Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, where he makes the instructive comparision between the rich man who has throws parties and the rich man who builds a stone fence around his property.

Twenty years later, the man with the stone fence is still enjoying the utility of the fence where the man who threw the parties has nothing. Our psychologist introduces the idea of fond memories as having utility, a concept which didn’t seem to occur to Adam Smith.

It is instructive to note the expected lifetime of most material goods. When Adam Smith talked about building a stone wall around your house, the presumption was that the wall would last well into several generations. Few material goods made today last that long.

Ignores Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, where he makes the instructive comparision between the rich man who has throws parties and the rich man who builds a stone fence around his property.

Twenty years later, the man with the stone fence is still enjoying the utility of the fence where the man who threw the parties has nothing. Our psychologist introduces the idea of fond memories as having utility, a concept which didn’t seem to occur to Adam Smith.

It is instructive to note the expected lifetime of most material goods. When Adam Smith talked about building a stone wall around your house, the presumption was that the wall would last well into several generations. Few material goods made today last that long.

Related to the idea that people _and_ things are being valued more for the experience they create is NYT columnist Virginia Postrel’s book “The Substance of Style”. It is a good read.

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I think the experiment paper discusses many of the issues raised in previous comments; the researchers were wary of the various ambiguities… and tried to design questions and assumptions that in the end make it relatively worthwhile.

The key seems the subjective approach to the spending, and that is hard to ellicit.
Does it make sense to talk about subjective approaches that can be qualified as “materialistic” and “experiential”. I think it’s useful to a point… which?

Other issues I see: money was part of the experiments, but many experiential activities are free! Walking, playing with pets, shopping for someone else, staying in bed. Obtaining material stuff often involves negative experiences: crowded malls, scarce parking, highways, strange or pushy clerks, mentally balancing accounts, complex product comparison, etc… These may leave more traces (fatigue, stress, etc) in the long run than the goods we get used to in the end.

A converse ambiguity to the experience one derives from material goods, is treating en experience as a material good: european vacation: check!, ecoadventure: check!, kiss exotic girl/boy: check!… ‘been there, done that, got the Tshirt… what’s next… what are the Joneses up to?

I’d agree that exploring the material/experiential distinction is quite tricky; it opens to issues with the feasability of psychology as science. Is psychology a way to study happiness at all?

The good thing about the study is to (even shakily) continue the discussion about these very ideas: happiness, how one know it, materialsm, experience… we’re too afraid of these “heavy” words and discussions.

Very bad article.
You can buy materials things to have an experience, like a digital camera, a car, even a home theather. I know people who like to decorate and fix their houses. This is totally materialist but involves an experience. Other people spend a lot of money in an specific thing like photographic equipment. Maybe the author of the article doesn

A couple of comments on the study: It only accounts for two means by which people dispose of discretionary income – spending on “stuff” or spending on “experience.” However, I know several people who give away most of their discretionary income. I don’t know how this activity would be classified, but my friends are all happy people. Second, the results show that an annual income increases, the value attached to experiential spending increases. I wonder how much of this is an indicator of how much happiness experience brings vs. how much happiness financial freedom brings. In other words, everything is more “fun” when you don’t have the mortgage, etc. on the back of your mind all the time.

Here’s another thought-provoking article about happiness.  I think I posted this reference once already in the comments section of this blog, but here it is again:

The Futile Pursuit of Happiness
If Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong.  That is to say, if Daniel
Gilbert is right, then you are wrong to believe that a new car will make you
as happy as you imagine.  You are wrong to believe that a new kitchen will
make you happy for as long as you imagine.  [...]
… How we forecast our feelings, and whether those predictions match our future emotional states, had never been the stuff of laboratory research.  But in scores of experiments, [researchers] Gilbert, Wilson, Kahneman and Loewenstein have made a slew of
observations and conclusions that undermine a number of fundamental
assumptions:  namely, that we humans understand what we want and are adept at
improving our well-being — that we are good at maximizing our utility, in
the jargon of traditional economics.  Further, their work on prediction
raises some unsettling and somewhat more personal questions.  To understand
affective forecasting, as Gilbert has termed these studies, is to wonder if
everything you have ever thought about life choices, and about happiness,
has been at the least somewhat naive and, at worst, greatly mistaken.

The article originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine on Sept. 7, 2003.  It’s reprinted here: http://healthandenergy.com/pursuit_of_happiness.htm

driving my BMW is an experience that i enjoy every day.