Them That's Got Shall Want More
Research: All Money Is Not Created Equal
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Back in 2002, Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella told Fortune that the more he earned, the more he was preoccupied by his earnings, a comment that got researchers Sanford E. DeVoe of the University of Toronto, Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford, and Byron Y. Lee of Renmin University of China wondering about money’s strange properties. In their research, they found that money does indeed take on greater importance as you accumulate more of it, but only if you’ve earned it (as opposed to getting it through some random distribution). “The money in that case is a signal of competence and worth, and that makes it addictive, because the more you have, the more you want,” Pfeffer says.