Editorials

Happiness is a state of mind

In 2004, psychologist and popular New York Times writer Barry Schwartz released a book titled “The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less.”

The crux of his central thesis was that the overwhelming options available to modern consumers — whether it’s within breakfast cereal, automobiles, light bulbs, cell phones or blue jeans — create an unmistakable level of anxiety that simply wasn’t present in earlier generations.

Taking that idea a step further, increased comfort and luxury give people extra time to worry about “big picture” questions without easy answers, leading to more stress than perhaps we’re equipped to handle.

We live in an era with seemingly limitless technological advancements and a mind-boggling number of products designed to make us happier, but there might be more unhappiness now than ever before.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the annual “best and worst jobs in America” list — consistently one of the most intriguing studies released each year.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal detailed the top and bottom 20 jobs on the list, compiled annually by Les Krantz, author of “Jobs Rated Almanac.” According to the WSJ, his study is “based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as studies from trade associations and Mr. Krantz’s own expertise.” His criteria include environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress.

Topping the list this year? Mathematician, thanks to its low-key work environment and typically lucrative job openings.

Most of the list’s top 20 follow a similar formula (statistician, software engineer, systems analyst, accountant, economist, paralegal, computer programmer) with a few wild cards thrown in there for good measure (philosopher, meteorologist, astronomer, actuary, parole officer).

This year’s bottom 20 mainly feature labor-intensive jobs that remain necessary for any industrialized society to thrive (construction worker, garbage collector, welder, painter, auto mechanic, firefighter). Lumberjack came in dead last at No. 200, meaning Krantz believes Paul Bunyan felt unfulfilled in his vocation.

Looking closer at this list, it seems as if Krantz’s criteria for satisfaction may feed into Schwartz’s theory on modern unhappiness. The “better” jobs give people more of an opportunity to enter into Schwartz’s choice paradox, which can often lead to a nagging unfulfilled sense without any clear explanations. Heck, most philosophers (No. 12 on this list) spend every waking hour attempting to answer unanswerable questions.

Meanwhile, many of Krantz’s “worst” jobs come attached with a greater sense of accomplishment and immediacy. Granted, it’s not easy to be a nurse (No. 185) or a child-care worker (No. 183), but the rewards one can gain from those professions can often outweigh any monetary compensation.

That’s not to say all comfortable jobs are necessarily unfulfilling and all laborious jobs are intrinsically heroic, because that’s not true. But perhaps it’s up to the individual to create his or her own happiness within their chosen field in order to escape Schwartz’s choice paradox.

The lesson we can take from Krantz’s annual job list is that it’s not what you do, but how you do it that makes you happy.

The Fed rolls over on credit cards

We now know—thanks to, among other things, the revelations of whistle-blowers whose warnings went unheeded—that the explosion in home mortgage defaults and the ongoing credit crisis might have been avoided if the Federal Reserve had been mildly attentive to companies that abused their regulatory freedom and to the interests of ordinary consumers and investors.

When everything fell apart, former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan proclaimed his “shocked disbelief” at the lending institutions’ suicidal greed.

Yet regulators seem to have learned little from the experience. Greenspan’s successor at the Fed, Ben Bernanke, linked arms with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to prop up failing financial firms quickly, but they have been notably slow to address the concerns of strapped individual mortgage holders or to focus on reforms to rein in consumer abuses.

Last month, the topic was credit cards, another area of consumer finance in which companies create a market—and then exploit it to their financial advantage the confusion of ordinary Americans.

Credit card operations—in some instances, divisions of the same financial institutions needing multi-billion-dollar federal bailouts—have burned consumers and businesses with practices similar to those of their counterparts in the mortgage lending industry. Both enticed borrowers with endless solicitations. Both extended credit with little consideration of the ability to repay. And like the mortgage debt that has become so toxic that it has frozen the credit markets, much of the credit debt has been bundled into securities and resold to investors in packages for which it could prove impossible to assign a marketable value.

What the Fed did in December, however, was issue new rules that attempt to restore some balance and fairness to the credit card business at the user level, where credit card companies have used a wide variety of pretexts to extract extra payments from consumers.

One tactic relies on fine print in some credit card agreements allowing card companies to jack up interest rates on an account balance, even when the customer has never made a late payment and has kept her account current.

That fine print includes “trigger” language permitting the imposition of higher rates if a consumer goes over the credit limit on a different credit card account issued by an entirely different company.

Credit card companies also can get more money out of consumers by the way they apportion payments on an account that has balances for both credit purchases and cash advances. Invariably, the companies apply payments so that they generate the highest possible fees and interest charges.

In announcing its new rules, the Fed said that consumers are being cheated. Card companies now will be required to allocate fairly payments on accounts and will be allowed to raise interest rates on existing balances only in limited circumstances. These rules, the Fed declared, “represent a significant step forward in consumer protection ... ensuring fairness and making credit terms easier to understand.”

The rules, which were more than 18 months in the making, will be an improvement, but not for another 18 months. The Fed delayed implementation of the new rules after the credit card industry complained about the administrative problems the new rules create.

Consumers must hope that the incoming regulators designated by the Obama transition team will be more attuned to the problems of ordinary Americans than to the problems of the credit card industry.

Reprinted from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by Creators Syndicate Inc.