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Canongate Books - Claudia Hammond

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174 pages

English

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Why is it good to be grumpy if you want to avoid getting ripped off?Why do we think coins are bigger than they really are?Why is it a mistake to choose the same lottery numbers every week?Join award-winning psychologist and BBC Radio 4 presenter Claudia Hammond as she delves into big and small questions around the surprising psychology of money. Funny, insightful and eye-opening, Mind Over Money will change the way you think about the cash in your pocket and the figures in your bank account forever.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

Popular science

Popular psychology

Psychology

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	19 mai 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781782112075
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Also by Claudia Hammond
Time Warped Emotional Rollercoaster
MIND OVER MONEY
The Psychology of Money and How to Use It Better
CLAUDIA HAMMOND
Published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Claudia Hammond, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 205 1 e ISBN 978 1 78211 207 5
Typeset in Plantin Light by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
For my sister Antonia and my nieces Florence and Matilda
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 From Cradle to Grave
Where our relationship with money starts, why money is both a drug and a tool, why we hate to see money destroyed and how it wards off our fear of death
2 Holding Folding
Why we’re so attached to familiar forms of money, why we think coins are bigger than they are, why it’s good to be grumpy if you don’t want to get ripped off and why paying with cash might be better than credit
3 Mental Accounts
Why the more an item costs, the more careless with money we are, why we should all use psychological moneybags and how certain budget airlines could have saved themselves a lot of grief
4 To Have and to Hold
How we hate losing money more than we like making it, how Puerto Rican monkeys helped a researcher understand the financial crisis and why it’s a mistake to choose the same lottery numbers every week
5 The Price Is Right
Why a high price is not always a sign of quality, why your brain is a wine snob, why sometimes we’d rather pay more than we need to, why you shouldn’t be fooled by the ‘mid-priced’ option and why you should never open a café called the Zero Dollar Diner
5½ Loose Change
Tips for waiters, why a light touch is best and the problem of the shared bill
6 Money the Motivator?
How money makes you run to catch that train, why paying children to do better in exams has mixed results, why it’s only worth introducing financial incentives if you can keep paying them long term, and why small payments can help people quit drugs and cigarettes
7 Just Rewards
Why if you pay someone they might be more likely to turn to Playboy in their break, why praise is often a better motivator than money (but don’t overdo it), why you should never pay friends for favours and why the England football team always loses in the penalty shoot-out
8 Money Tips for Bankers
Why it’s best not to empty your wallet in front of friends, why a free gift of thousands of pounds can be insulting and why large bonuses might be counterproductive
9 Money, Money, Money
Why some people have lots, why most of us want more, why enough is never enough and how having more can make you happier (sometimes)
10 Poverty of Thinking
Why being poor can reduce your IQ and lead you to make bad financial decisions, and how you won’t get a lot of sympathy from everyone else
11 Bad Money
Why rich people would be the first to jump in the lifeboats on the Titanic, why envy is bad sometimes but not always, why we’ll tell lies for money (as long as it’s a substantial sum) and why some people can’t resist throwing money away
12 Good Money
Why giving money away (and even paying tax) increases our happiness, why we don’t always like generous millionaires and why charity campaigns might do better with less pretty children
13 For a Rainy Day
Why speaking German could help youto save more, what Odysseus can teach us about saving and how piggy banks are helping in the fight against malaria
14 The Joy of Spending
Why, if you want the good life, you should spend your money on experiences not things (while allowing yourself a bit of retail therapy), why buying high-quality prosciutto that you don’t need might not be extravagant and why it’s better not to know your hourly rate
15 Money Tips
Notes
Recommendations for AdditionalReading
Index
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
ON THE EVENING of 23 August 1994, in a small abandoned barn on the island of Jura in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, a fire was burning. Had you stepped inside you might have thought that a newspaper archive was being destroyed. Great bundles of printed paper were alight, sending smoke and ash billowing up into the air.
You’d also have noticed that there was something a little odd about the way the paper ignited. It took a while to catch and then burned sluggishly. Eventually you’d have realised that the paper was denser than the fine stock used for newsprint – and the sheets were much smaller than newspaper pages. Then a torn corner dancing past in a hot air current might have caught your eye. Wasn’t that a picture of the Queen’s tiara? Indeed, weren’t those £50 notes on the fire? And not just a few, but hundreds?
In fact, what you’d have witnessed on that August night more than twenty years ago was the destruction by fire of £1 million. A million pounds in £50 notes. It took just over an hour – 67 minutes, to be precise – to complete the task. A fat hour to burn the stuff of every lottery player’s dreams.
The two men behind the fire were from the band KLF. They had made the money with dance tracks from the early 1990s such as ‘Justified and Ancient’ and ‘3 a.m. Eternal’. Tired of the music scene, they’d moved on to making art. For them, the burning of the million pounds was a work of conceptual art. Their first idea was to make a sculpture from bundles of notes nailed to a wooden frame. But as a sign of the taboo they were dealing with, they couldn’t find a gallery willing to exhibit such a sculpture. So they had another idea.
Just burn the money.
The whole process was videoed. You can watch it on YouTube today. The two members of KLF are dressed, rather predictably, in black. At first, they peel £50 notes from a wad one at a time, feeding them casually to the fire, almost as if they’re throwing bread to ducks. Jimmy Cauty screws up every note before consigning it to the flames; Bill Drummond frisbees them into the blaze. The notes burn slowly. Some drift out of the fire and have to be gathered up and thrown back in again. After a while the K Foundation, as they called themselves by then, realise that at the rate they are going, the process will take hours. So they speed things up: chucking in armfuls of notes at a time.
Despite the video evidence, there were suspicions afterwards that the whole thing was a stunt. Would anyone really burn so much real money? To prove the doubters wrong the K Foundation had the remains of the fire tested in a laboratory. There it was confirmed that the ashes were the genuine remains of a very large quantity of banknotes.
The performance went to plan, but nothing prepared the band members for the hostility the act would induce. People hated them for it, saying if they didn’t want the money why not give it to charity? People called them selfish and stupid.
After a few minutes of seeing the money burn on the video we all want to know why Cauty and Drummond did it. Okay, it was some sort of art work, but signifying what?
Surprisingly, in the many interviews they’ve given over the years (you can watch these on YouTube too) the two men struggle to answer this question – seeming incoherent, inconsistent, and not even convincing to their own ears.
In the official documentary Jimmy Cauty admits that what they did was possibly meaningless, that its status as a work of art is highly disputable. ‘You can get into this whole area where it’s pretty black.’ You hear him fumbling for an explanation, falling into despair.
In one TV interview, Bill Drummond says: ‘We could have done with the money.’ Cauty and he had six children between them. Only to add: ‘but we wanted to burn it more.’ Then when asked what it was like to throw the notes onto the fire he says he felt numb, that the only way to do it was to operate on autopilot. ‘If you’re thinking about every fifty quid or every bundle . . . ’ and his voice fades almost as though he can’t bear to think about it. 1
Yet Drummond also insists they hadn’t really destroyed anything. ‘The only thing that’s less is a pile of paper. There’s no less bread or apples in the world.’ 2
It is this apparently unarguable statement that gets to the heart of the matter – and explains why so many people were so angry and upset by what Cauty and Drummond did. For although it’s true that no actual bread or apples were destroyed in the fire, something was destroyed. The possibility of bread and apples. A million pounds worth. Food that could have fed people.
What was also destroyed was the possibility of planting trees to grow apples or building a bakery to make bread – or employing others to do so. Which might have resulted in many millions of pounds worth of produce over the years.
And it doesn’t stop there either. Everyone who watches the film of the burning cash thinks about what they could have done with the money. A new house. A new car. Freedom from debt. The option to set up a new business. The opportunity to help family and friends. The chance to travel the world. Aid for thousands of children in a poor country. Help for a project to save the rainforest.
It would have been a different situation if Cauty and Drummond had set fire to an object worth a million pounds. In that case only that particular object – a painting, a yacht, a precious jewel – would have been destroyed. And not everybody would even have valued what was lost.
Had they frittered the money away in traditional rock star fashion – trashing a hotel or snorting it up their noses – people would doubtless have deplored the waste and excess, but there wouldn’t have been such an outcry. And if they had just hoarded the money or put it in a high interest account or invested (and perhaps lost it) on the stock market, few people would have cared. While