The Easie Thing to Do

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We're constantly spending money, and we almost never think about it. A quick audit of your expenses can tell you a lot. The easiest thing to do is take a credit card statement from last month and go through it. It tells you what you did as a person for a month. And then, by the way, next month you can print it out again and see if you did any better.

Can money really buy happiness? Michael Norton is a social science researcher who studies how we feel about our spending decisions. His work explores questions like: What’s the best way to spend your cash? How much should you donate to charity? Do credit cards make us unhappy? In this episode, Michael shares the sometimes-surprising findings that can help you use our money to improve your life. Michael is a professor of business administration in the marketing unit at the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining HBS, Michael was a Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His work has been published in a number of leading academic journals and has been covered in media outlets such as the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman