Pursuit of money: Does it make you richer or poorer?

Abstract

In today’s Indian work environment, it has become very common for people to work long hours, usually more than 12-13 hours a day. With the cost of living going up, the major reason for this is usually money. People often end up in jobs with long working hours since they pay more. The companies also use smart mechanisms to add fuel to the fire. Instead of hiring 2 people for a post, they pay 1.5 times the salary to a person who ends up working as much as 2 people would! This seems like a win-win all the way along. But is the individual really winning in this? Through this research paper, we want to study whether these people would be willing to trade their existing work and life for a completely different one which pays either more or less money than their current one. While determining this, we plan to look at what are the parameters based on which people make this decision. Moreover, we want to see what is it that people are looking for in exchange of giving up money; it could be happiness, leisure, time for a hobby, sleep, time with family, weight loss or a lot of other things that we otherwise might not have imagined but might be extremely intriguing to understand from the people we study. Lastly, we are also trying to understand the willingness of these individuals to give up money for other people or activities in their lives which drives their satisfaction. Limitations of the study: We are conducting this study over a span of three months and trying to understand the human mindset about money and happiness. For the purpose of this study, our subjects are limited to students who are currently a part of this management institution but who are, in a few months, going to be working in the corporate world, not only in India but across the world. Even though some of these students have prior work experience, we expect a certain bias in the answers of the respondents considering they are just about to begin working and may have a high sense of ambition and responsibilities. Moreover the answers of certain students who don’t have prior work experience will be affected by anchoring bias. Their answers will be impacted by the lifestyle their parents or other influencers might have had and they might be unaware of the problems they might face once they venture into the corporate world. Lastly, due to limitation of time, we have conducted a detailed study on 11 respondents who are a part of this institution. Hence, people who have lower qualifications or who come from economically weaker sections of the society might have different responses, something which can be discovered as we go on expanding the sample size.