Advertisement

By the hour, money can buy happiness

 
Associated Press
Associated Press
Published July 28, 2017

If you were given $40 on the condition that you had to spend it on something that would make you really happy, what would you do with the money? Some people might go shopping, others would treat themselves to dinner or a movie, a few might even donate to a cause. But what about using that $40 to "buy" yourself more free time?

According to a study published in the journal PNAS, people who buy time by paying someone to complete household tasks are more satisfied with life. And it's not just wealthy people. Across a range of incomes, careers and countries, time-saving purchases were correlated with less time-related stress and more positive feelings.

In sum, life satisfaction was typically higher for people who regularly spend money to save time. This was true regardless of household income, hours worked per week, marital status and number of children living at home. Yet the researchers' surveys showed that very few individuals think to spend money in this way.

Jenna Gallegos, Washington Post

These college students lost access to legal pot — and started getting better grades

The most rigorous study yet of the effects of marijuana legalization has identified a disturbing result: College students with access to recreational cannabis on average earn worse grades and fail classes at a higher rate.

Economists took advantage of a decision by Maastricht, a city in the Netherlands, to change the rules for "cannabis cafes," which legally sell recreational marijuana. Because Maastricht is very close to the border of multiple European countries (Belgium, France and Germany), drug tourism was posing difficulties for the city. So the city barred non-citizens of the Netherlands from buying from the cafes. This policy change created an intriguing natural experiment at Maastricht University, because students there from neighboring countries suddenly were unable to access legal pot, while students from the Netherlands continued.

The research on more than 4,000 students, published in the Review of Economic Studies, found that those who lost access to legal marijuana showed substantial improvement in their grades. Specifically, those banned from cannabis cafes had a more than 5 percent increase in their odds of passing their courses. Low-performing students benefited even more, which the researchers noted is particularly important because these students are at a high risk of dropping out. The researchers attribute their results to the students who were denied legal access to marijuana being less likely to use it and to suffer cognitive impairments (e.g., in concentration and memory) as a result.

No research can ultimately tell us whether legalization is a good or bad decision: That's a political question, not a scientific one. But what the Maastricht study can do is provide highly credible evidence that marijuana legalization will lead to decreased academic success — perhaps particularly so for struggling students — and that is a concern that both proponents and opponents of legalization should keep in mind.

Keith Humphreys, Washington Post

Our truly unfounded medical optimism

Critical decisions about the final months of people's lives are often based on biased judgments of reality. Patients seem to overvalue innovation, as a rule, and assume that newer drugs have a better chance of working than any other treatment, just because they're new. Not only does this sanguine view of scientific progress fail to fit the facts; it also leads patients to the converse, false impression that "non-conventional" treatments aren't likely to be harmful in themselves. A more sober view suggests that the hope that often moves people to seek out these types of treatments — and the ever-present pressure to fight until the end — is not as useful as we think.

Spend your days with Hayes

Subscribe to our free Stephinitely newsletter

Columnist Stephanie Hayes will share thoughts, feelings and funny business with you every Monday.

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Explore all your options

Unfounded optimism tends to be the rule in medicine. A 2015 review of several dozen studies of people's expectations from treatment, comprising data from more than 27,000 subjects, found systematic evidence of a Pollyanna Patient problem: We overestimate the value of the care that we receive and underestimate its harm. That work is cited in an excellent article by Liz Szabo of Kaiser Health News, on the surprising ineffectiveness of cancer drugs that have been FDA approved. It's not just that these treatments do little to prolong survival, Szabo says; according to one study, many patients never grasp this fact. In a sample of several thousand adults, 39 percent said they believe the "FDA only approves prescription drugs that are extremely effective"; 1 in 6 asserted that "drugs that have serious side effects cannot be advertised to consumers." Neither statement is even close to being true. According to Vinay Prasad, an oncologist and expert in evidence-based medicine at Oregon Health and Sciences University, we don't have any hard evidence of benefit — in terms of patients' living longer lives — for the majority of cancer drugs approved in recent years.

If FDA-approved drugs often fail to offer substantive benefits, then experimental ones — those that haven't even passed the suspect bar for agency sign-off — are even less likely to be helpful. In fact, about 90 percent of experimental treatments flunk out during clinical trials, either because they aren't shown to be any more effective than the standard treatment or because their side effects are too severe.

Daniel Engber, Slate

Smart kids live longer

Intelligent children tend to live longer than their less gifted peers, a new study suggests.

Scottish researchers began their study with 75,252 men and women born in 1936 — 94 percent of the Scottish population born that year — who had taken standardized intelligence tests in 1947. By 2015, they were able to confirm a cause of death for 25,979 of them; 30,464 were still living in Britain.

After controlling for many health, socioeconomic and behavioral characteristics, they found that lower scores on the childhood intelligence test were associated with death from heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, lung cancer and stomach cancer. All of these diseases are highly associated with smoking, and smoking did partially explain the association with mortality. But even after controlling for smoking, the link to lower scores on the intelligence test did not disappear.

The study, in BMJ, found no association of lower intelligence with cancers not related to smoking or with suicide, but there was a strong association with death by accidental injury. The reasons for the link are far from clear, said the senior author, Ian J. Deary, a professor of differential psychology at the University of Edinburgh: "Lifestyles, education, deprivation and genetics may all play a part."

Nicholas Bakalar, New York Times

I'll get around to reading this later

Part of the challenge of studying procrastination is defining it. Joseph Ferrari, at the recent 10th Procrastination Research Conference, defined procrastination as "the purposive and frequent delay in beginning or completing a task to the point of experiencing subjective discomfort, such as anxiety or regret." At the simplest level, most researchers agree, you know it when you're doing it.

One out of five people, researchers have found, fall into a category they call chronic procrastinators or procs (rhymes with crocs). The proc consistently procrastinates in multiple areas of his or her life — work, personal, financial, social — in ways that attendees describe as wreaking havoc, undermining goals and producing perpetual shame. Researchers have built scales to separate the true proc from the occasional procrastinator. They assess not simply how often, but also the severity of consequences with prompts like:

• I delay making decisions until it's too late.

• I am continually saying, "I'll do it tomorrow."

• Putting things off until the last minute has cost me in the past year.

Heather Murphy, New York Times