A recent study published in the journal Nature Sustainability, which surveyed about 220 people in each of 33 countries about the amount of wealth they’d require to live their version of an ideal life. Based on this number, participants were asked to choose the prize they’d hope to win in a lottery, with options ranging from $10,000 at the low end to $100 billion at the high end—an amount so large, the study’s author’s say, that it’s tantamount to unlimited wealth.
One might expect the majority of people to choose the $100 billion, unlimited wealth option. After all, the field of economics tends to hold that people are basically insatiable when it comes to their desire to consume goods and services, an assumption that helps to justify the pursuit of perpetual economic growth. Very wealthy people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos certainly seem interested in making more money even when they already have billions of dollars. Plus, the more money you have, the more options you have—so presumably, with unlimited wealth, the possibilities are endless.
But this study suggests that most people don’t think they need unlimited wealth to lead the life of their dreams. Overall, the majority of the study’s participants went for the comparatively moderate (and purely hypothetical) $1 million or $10 million prize options. For a 38-year-old with a life expectancy of age 78, the study points out, $1 million works out to just $25,000 per year.
Psychological researchers Paul Bain and Renata Bongiorno, who co-authored the paper, say this finding has important implications when it comes to how cultures normalize excessive consumerism.
“The ideology of unlimited wants, when portrayed as human nature, can create social pressure for people to buy more than they actually want,” Bain, the study’s lead author and a reader at the University of Bath in the UK, said in a recent press release. “Discovering that most people’s ideal lives are actually quite moderate could make it socially easier for people to behave in ways that are more aligned with what makes them genuinely happy and to support stronger policies to help safeguard the planet.”
