Salary

At a recent coffee time, with my colleagues, the conversation turned to the salary within our department.

Any time the word salary is part of a dialogue, it's a taboo. After all, asking our friends about their salary is virtually the same as (and probably more impolite than) asking their age. That being said, we all want to know others' age and salary, as what Tom Sawyer's great law of human action had predicted, "In order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain."

But guess what the link between the amount of our salary and happiness is like. Uh-oh, rather weak. Studies had shown that countries with the "happiest" people are not among those with the highest personal income. One of the true human obsessions is with our friends' salary, but not our own personal income. H. L. Mencken put it so well when he noted a man's satisfaction with his salary depends on whether he makes more than his wife's sister's husband. Why the wife's sister's husband? Because (I was told by Dan Ariely) this is a comparison that is salient and readily available.