The Happiness Sale

A. J. Maxwell’s was an archetypal New York steakhouse on the corner of 48th and 6th in the heart of midtown Manhattan. There, a few weeks after my middle school graduation, my family splurged on a celebration of our first road trip to America. I distinctly remember the forty-dollar entrées that dotted the menu (the opulence of it all!), and sinking my teeth into a steak that the Old Spaghetti Factories I was used to could only dream of serving.

Today, A. J. Maxwell’s is closed after years of poor reviews, with references to overpriced food and jerky-like steaks dating back to far before my visit. Though I can’t say for certain, I suspect the steak I had eight years ago was not, in any particular way, noteworthy in the grand scheme of beef. But somehow that steak remains in my mind, more vividly than any steak I’ve had since, as close to perfection as a slab of meat can be.

Diminishing marginal utility is one way to understand this seeming contradiction. Loosely, this is the idea that the marginal (read: additional) utility (read: benefit) of extra stuff diminishes as we have more stuff to begin with: We would love an extra dollar if we only had ten dollars to our names, but could probably care less about the same dollar as millionaires. For similar reasons, my very first fancy steak—though not incredible per se—was far more memorable than my tenth. The first let me peek into a whole new world of fine dining, while the tenth probably wasn’t all that special next to the nine other fancy steaks before it.

As thoroughly broke college students who in the median will earn between $50,000 and $69,999 upon graduation and likely even more later in life, our marginal utility is high now relative to our expected marginal utility 20 years down the road. In other words, as we become older and richer, things and experiences that amaze us now will probably lose their luster. We might understand this as a sale on happiness: Today, it would almost certainly take more than forty dollars to buy a steak as incredible to me as the one my 13-year-old self savored so dearly at A. J. Maxwell’s.

In more concrete terms, imagine we knew that, like the average American, we would be spending $55,000 every year by the middle of our lives (note, for the record, that the argument here works even if we’re not planning on being a big future spender). If we had the power to move a thousand dollars of that spending to today, we almost certainly would. Imagine if we had an extra grand today! Instead of a trip into Boston, we could take a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Paris; instead of celebrating semester-end with instant noodles, we could treat our best friends to dinner at the city’s finest restaurant. On a smaller scale, instead of brain break, we could satiate a late-night Kong craving as soon as it materialized without guilt (at least of the monetary kind). Cheap Chinese food hits the spot in a way only college students can truly appreciate: There is a reason—diminishing marginal utility—our parents don’t like the Kong as much as we do. And we could do all of this in exchange for the negligible sacrifice of consuming $54,000 instead of $55,000 worth of stuff over one year, many years from now. Even Macklemore couldn’t find a better deal.

It turns out that financial markets have created a way for us to move money through time in exactly this way: debt. We can borrow money from the bank today and pay it back with our higher incomes in the future, effectively taking out a loan from our richer, future self. The logic of introductory economics would say that we should squeeze every last penny out of the happiness sale in this way, borrowing large amounts of money to finance increased spending today until we could expect to consume roughly the same amount at every point in our lifetimes.

But perfectly spreading out our consumption like this is impossible in practice and probably undesirable to boot. Few banks would be willing to issue the large loans we would need, and we might be worried about the risk of being saddled with debt if we ended up earning less than we expected to. Furthermore, consumption is often positional, in the sense that what matters isn’t necessarily how much we consume, but how much we consume relative to those around us. In other words, your 20-year class reunion might not be a lot of fun if you’re paying down debt while your classmates are busy buying nice houses.

On the other hand, it is easy to veer too far in the opposite direction. We’ve been taught since childhood to spend when we know we’ll have more and save precisely when we have little. Though this seems fairly reasonable, it certainly doesn’t sound right to teach farmers to gorge themselves during good harvests and only attempt to store grain in bad harvests. Rather, they should be saving excess grain in good years so that they have more to eat in bad years. While a perfectly smoothed consumption profile is non-optimal, there is no reason to believe that the extremely jagged consumption pattern that we naturally fall into is any better. The sweet spot is likely somewhere in between; hence, spending a little more today than we otherwise unreflectively might and buying marginal utility on clearance should move us closer to where we optimally ought to be.

This is not an argument for financial profligacy. Taking out a loan for $10,000 against our future income to buy a new Hermès purse today is probably a bad idea. Spending for the sake of spending isn’t likely to make us substantially more content with our lives. But there will likely never be another time in our lives when happiness today can be found for so cheap relative to happiness tomorrow. From the crab rangoons that we’ve been craving all night to the unforgettable college adventure abroad we’ve always wanted to take, life’s sale on happiness awaits.

Marshall M. Zhang ’16 is a statistics and math joint-concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.