Hacker News Reader

Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

The disgruntled nurses I know don't want more money anywhere near as much as they want things like lunch and bathroom breaks.

Money can't buy happiness, but not being able to take care of your basic bodily needs can absolutely buy unhappiness.

View on HN

My spouse is just starting her first RN job. As part of the onboarding, an administrator/HR person called and strongly suggested that she sign a paper waiving one of her 30 minute lunch periods. Even though the paper says "I am not being coerced", it's pretty clear that signing it is necessary for getting the job.

How can a document like that even be legal? What reason would a worker have to willingly sign away their rights?

> Money can't buy happiness

No but not having enough will make you unhappy, and keep you trapped there.

> Money can't buy happiness

Usually when someone says this to me, I respond with "then you're spending your money poorly". What I mean to say is that more money buys more flexibility and options, which should lead to more opportunities to leave unhappy situations or at least add more happy situations. Note that this is a generalization so there are plenty of edge cases to counter this.

There's also this distressing hump in the money/happiness curve. More money leads to a greater sense of well being up to a point where you meet your basic sufficiency needs, and then, beyond that, the correlation goes inverse.

My guess is that there is a very strong diminishing returns effect to the utility of money, and that, at some point, other effects start to dominate. Perhaps what's happening with health care workers is a case study for what's going on there.

Can you cite a source on that? The studies I've seen have shown that happiness increases more slowly after a certain income but the slope never goes negative.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom...

My intuition is on the money vs happiness curve, the first derivative is always positive unless “your spending it wrong”. The second derivative might be positive for lower values of money but probably has negative values that might highlight a diminishing returns effect.

I should have qualified in my parent post that it assumes all else being equal.

Having money buys flexibility and options. Merely making slightly more money doesn't.

What’s the difference between having a little bit more money and making a little bit more money? My guess is it’s how it is spent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com