Keeping up appearances

Keeping Up with the Joneses Can Put You Behind is an article from Yahoo! Finance about the social psychology of money (via Lifehacker). The primary reference is a book, Green with Envy: Why Keeping Up with the Joneses is Keeping Us in Debt, and the article states:

For instance, Andrew Oswald of England’s Warwick University and David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College found that even if our incomes are rising, we tend to become less happy if the incomes of others are increasing more.

…

Meanwhile, books like “The Millionaire Next Door” by Thomas Stanley and William Danko have documented the fact that many wealthy people got that way by living below their means and saving heaps of money. But, as Boss points out, no one looks at someone with a used car and modest home and says, “Wow, they must be putting a lot of money aside for their future!”

Sounds like a book many people I know could use.

What happens to the people who are trying to be the Joneses so that others will want to keep up with them?

• 30 Aug 2006

• Thinking