How much money do people want to achieve their ideal life?

ECONOMISTS often treat people as having unlimited economic wants but limited resources to satisfy them. It’s a foundational economic concept known as scarcity, often presented as a basic fact about human nature. Our recently published research found that only a minority of people actually have unlimited wants, and that most would be happy with a limited, if still significant, sum of money.

To assess economic wants, we asked people in 33 countries to consider how much money they wanted in their “absolutely ideal life.”

But money rarely comes for free, and we thought their responses could be influenced by what they imagine it would take to obtain large amounts of money—working long hours, high-risk investments, or even criminality. So we made it about chance, by asking them to choose a prize in a hypothetical lottery. The lottery prizes started at $10,000 with options increasing by a multiple of 10. At the time we ran the study, the top prize of $100 billion would have made them the richest person in the world.

Who wants to be a billionaire?

OUR prediction was straightforward: if people truly have unlimited wants, they should always choose the maximum $100 billion. But in all 33 countries, only a minority chose the top prize (8 percent to 39 percent in each country). In most countries, the majority of people chose a lottery equivalent to $10 million or less, and in some countries (India, Russia) the majority even chose $1 million or less.

We also wanted to understand differences between people with limited and unlimited wants. Our analyses ruled out many personal factors—responses didn’t vary meaningfully by gender, education, or socioeconomic status. However, more younger people reported unlimited wants than older people, although this varied across countries. In less economically developed countries, the influence of age was weaker.

We asked people as well about the most important change they would make if they won the prize. Here there was some inconsistency. People with unlimited wants were more likely to tell us they would use the money to help others, but in terms of values they were no more concerned with helping others than those with limited wants.

The consequences of (un) limited wants

THE results of this research give us hope that human nature is not fundamentally at odds with sustainable living. Many are paying more attention to how to improve and even reorient society to live fulfilling lives without exhausting our planet’s resources. understanding the lives and motivations of people with limited economic wants may teach us something about how to achieve this.