Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending by Elizabeth Dunn

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Buy Experiences

“After two or three fabulous days of preparing with your crew, you’re suited up
and you’re raring to go. The climb to 50,000 feet is marked with quiet
contemplation but there’s an air of confidence and eager anticipation. Then
the countdown to release, a brief moment of quiet before a wave of
unimaginable but controlled power surges through the craft. . . . As you
hurtle through the edges of the atmosphere, the large windows show the
cobalt blue sky turning to mauve and indigo and finally to black.”
This description greets visitors to Virgin Galactic’s website. The
company now makes it possible for you to pre-book a ticket for a six-

minute spaceflight. But at $200,000 each, these tickets don’t come cheap.
Announcing a trip into orbit is likely to prompt some concerned looks
from friends and family, looks that could be avoided by spending that
$200,000 on a more traditional purchase—say, upgrading to a Tudor-style
home on a leafy street in the suburbs. Even in the wake of the recent
housing meltdown, most people would advocate the purchase of the
upgraded homestead over the ticket to outer space. But research on
happiness points in the opposite direction.
It may be hard to see how a trip to space could be a reasonable
expenditure, so let’s start with the fact that buying a big, beautiful house
may not be a wise use of money. Remarkably, there is almost no evidence
that buying a home—or a newer, nicer home—increases happiness.
Between 1991 and 2007, researchers tracked thousands of people in
Germany who moved to a new house because there was something about
their old house that they didn’t like.1 Immediately after settling in to their
new abodes, these movers reported being much more satisfied with their
new homes than they’d been with their old ones. Humans are adaptable
creatures, however, and research shows that people often get used to
whatever they’ve got. So we might expect that this initial spike in housing
satisfaction would wear off, leaving people no happier with their home
than they were before moving. But that’s not what happened. Satisfaction
with the new home only wore off a little bit, and in the subsequent five

Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending by Elizabeth Dunn