You’ve heard the saying, “money can’t buy happiness,” but what if a certain amount of money actually does make you happier? And don’t people feel unhappy when they learn a colleague is earning more money for doing the same amount of work?

At the very least, money, or lack of it, can bring some level of joy or despair.

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The art of the Swiss deal

Several LinkedIn Influencers weighed in this week on why salaries shouldn’t be secret and just how much money brings happiness. Here’s what two of them had to say.

Felix Salmon, senior editor at Fusion

“Very few people like to talk about how much money they make — especially not people who earn a lot of money,” wrote Salmon in his post Why Salaries Shouldn’t Be Secret, in the wake of news that recently-departed New York Times editor Jill Abramson had started asking questions about the pay discrepancy between her and her predecessor.  “Since companies tend to be run by people who earn a lot of money, the result is a culture of silence and secrecy when it comes to pay.”

There are several surprising reasons “secrecy surrounding pay is generally a bad idea for any organisation,” Salmon wrote.

 “For one thing, secrecy about pay is bad for women, who are worse at asking for raises than men are. If men secretly ask for raises and secretly get them, while women don’t, then that helps to explain, at least in part, why men end up earning more than women,” Salmon wrote. “Secrecy around pay is also a great way to allow managers to — consciously or unconsciously — play favorites with their staff.”

“We’ve all worked in companies, I’m sure, where the only way to get a substantial raise is to confront management with a job offer from somewhere else,” he added. “That’s clearly a dreadful way to run a company, since it gives all employees a huge incentive to spend a lot of time looking for work elsewhere, even if they’re very happy where they are.”

“If you work for a company where everybody knows what everybody else is earning, then it’s going to be very easy to see what’s going on. You’ll see who the stars are, you’ll see what kind of skills and talent the company rewards,” he wrote. “You’ll also see whether men get paid more than women, whether managers are generally overpaid, and whether behaviour like threatening to quit is rewarded with big raises. What’s more, because management knows that everybody else will see such things, they’ll be much less likely to do the kind of secret deals which are all too common in most companies today.”