Happy happy joy joy

Via the wondrous fark.com comes 'How Rich People Spend Their Time' from the Washington Post - it's about an article in Science written by a battery of psychologist/economist types, including Daniel Kahneman. Very relevant to the question of what motivates people; my first instinct was to assume that it might reveal what people with the time to do what they want do with their time, if you see what I mean, and while the actual intention of the article is somewhat different it's still full of fun.

The original article is behind the Science subscriber wall, but via the wonders of institutional access, I can get access to metaphysical nuggets like this:

Schkade and Kahneman noted that, "Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it."

Perhaps some intriguing fact about human nature; perhaps not. The article goes on to talk about some well-known results in the burgeoning 'happiness' literature, like the importance of relative rather than absolute income, and adaption to circumstances. I think a great article about this stuff, for the terminally interested, is Richard Layard's 'Happiness and Public Policy'.

But the thing that hooked me on this particular Science article is the following piece of weird:

"In a representative, nationwide sample, people with greater income tend to devote relatively more of their time to work, compulsory nonwork activities (such as shopping and childcare), and active leisure (such as exercise) and less of their time to passive leisure activities (such as watching TV)."

Let me get this straight: richer people work more and buy more stuff, and poor schmucks watch a lot of TV? Stop those presses. The point of the article is well-made (from the the title, 'would you be happier if you were richer', right on down), and that is to say that people with higher incomes aren't necessarily engaging in relatively more 'fun'; however, there are a bunch of unasked questions. Does 'TV'='fun'? Is this really evidence that the rich are wasting their time, or are there other reasons why they endure work to get money?

The happiness literature is desperate to find an answer to the question of whether money buys happiness; an eerie similarity to the oft-(mis?)perceived economists' equation of money with happiness when modeling people, and surely as deserving of the same retort: we know people care about more than money. The obvious question is, well, obvious. What does motivate people?