To absolutely no one’s surprise, a study has just shown that money brings happiness. And the more, the better.

Just because the sayings are often spot on and a seemingly inexhaustible source of useful life advice doesn’t mean they’re infallible. They just proved it. Matthew A. Killingswortha researcher at the Wharton School with a PhD in Psychology from Harvard University who this week published A study peculiar, both in form and, above all, in substance. In it, Killingsworth basically states that, whatever the proverbs or the defenders of the philosophy of detachment say, money does he can buy the happiness.

What’s more, the more money, the better.

A scholar of happiness. It may not be the most conventional subject of study, but that is what it is dedicated to. Matt Killingswortha researcher at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania: to investigate the nature and causes of human happiness. And its relationship to money, of course. Over the years, Killingsworth has published many jobs on this subject together with other prominent scientists, including the recently deceased Daniel Kahnemanbut now he has released a new article that addresses a broader and more curious perspective.

Although the study in question (Money and Happiness: Extended Evidence Against Satiation) has not been peer-reviewed and has been self-published by Killingsworth himself, the work is achieving a remarkable echo. It has even reached the pages of The Guardian, Bloomberg either Money. And this is understandable. After all, it leaves two conclusions that are as interesting as they are provocative. First, it confirms that there is a “positive association” between euros and happiness. Second, it confirms that this affair It seems sweeter the more bills there are. Those who have money are happy. But those who have a lot of money are happier.

How do you study something like that? Killingsworth’s work updates and completes others essays which he had already developed on the subject. For his complex work he relies on previous surveys and studies that take into account the income of the participants and their degree of “satisfaction” with life. For example, one of his sources is a sample of 33,269 Americans with a family income of at least $10,000 a year who were given a “Life Satisfaction Scale.”

His study covers an interesting segment, one that Killingsworth himself admits is not easily accessible for research like his: wealthy people. For his analysis, he included data on people with an average net worth of between $3 million and $7.9 million, details The Guardian.

A question of money. That there is a clear relationship between money and happiness is nothing new. Over the years we have been reporting on different studies that, sometimes with nuances, have confirmed this link. Killingsworth himself pointed this out in an article of 2023 signed with more scientists and in which, among other ideas, he stated: “Happiness increases steadily with income among happy people, and even accelerates among the happiest group.”

Now he again points to a “positive association between money and happiness” showing that when we talk about levels of life satisfaction, there are clear differences between people with low, medium, high and very high incomes.

A “broad and complex” issue“Are people with more money happier? The literature on this question is vast and complex, but virtually all research agrees that having more money is associated with greater happiness, at least to some extent,” Killingsworth explains in his article.

“In recent research involving a sizable number of high-income participants, I found that happiness increased steadily across the income range in a broad U.S. sample. From low-income earners to people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, there was a roughly linear association between higher income and greater happiness.”

Is there a threshold of wealth and happiness? That is the million-dollar question, Killingsworth recalls, the one that poses a challenge and that the academic had already tried to answer in previous works: assuming that there is a “direct association” between wealth and happiness, is there a level of income or wealth from which more money stops translating into more happiness? Is there a threshold, a “plateau of happiness”as it has sometimes been called?

“Is it possible that people who earn $400,000 or $500,000 a year, for example, have reached a point beyond which more money is no longer associated with greater happiness?” the author questions. The question is very pertinent because in the past Killingsworth had already largely dismantled the idea that there is an income threshold from which the increase in happiness stabilizes, a concept that in 2010 came to be fixed in the $75,000 per year.

Now Killingsworth wants to go further and clarify whether there are differences even in the most opulent layers of society: Do very rich people show higher levels of happiness than people who are merely rich? “Despite the abundant literature on money and happiness, I am not aware of any study that compares people who earn something like $500,000 a year with those who earn much more, which raises a question about the upper end of the economic distribution,” admits in his latest essay on the subject.

And what did you discover? The more money, the better. It is not just that a person with a good income is more satisfied with life than someone with a modest income; this difference is also seen between millionaires and people with very comfortable finances. So no: the relationship does not stabilize even among people with more money in the bank. “The results suggest that the positive association between money and happiness continues at higher levels of the economic scale and that the magnitude of the differences can be substantial.”

Not everything is reflections. Killingsworth’s study also leaves clear indicators that help to understand the phenomenon, such as Bloomberg recalls. When asked to rate their life satisfaction, the wealthiest people, with a fortune of millions or billions, gave an average of between 5.5 and 6 out of 7The score is substantially higher than the 4.6 given by those earning around $100,000 a year and is well above the four and a bit given by people earning between $15,000 and $30,000 a year.

Getting down to the details. These “notes” not only show notable differences in happiness between the richest and the poorest groups, but they make for an even more revealing reading: the happiness gap appears to widen between the richest groups and those with average earnings. “The difference in life satisfaction between the rich and those with incomes of $70,000 to $80,000 a year was almost three times greater than the difference between the $70,000 to $80,000 a year group and the average of the lowest income groups,” Killingsworth explains.

“The results show a strong upward trend, with wealthy individuals being substantially happier than those earning more than $500,000.”

Important yes, but with nuances. While Killingsworth’s conclusions are clear, the old adage is right about one thing: money isn’t everything. There may be a clear link between money and life satisfaction, but the complicated cocktail of happiness has other important ingredients. He confesses it to her the expert to The Guardian“Money is just one of many things that influence happiness, and small differences in income are often associated with fairly small differences in happiness; but if differences in income and wealth are large, differences in happiness can be large as well.” The reason? Freedom.

“A greater sense of control over life can explain about 75% of the association between money and happiness. So I think a big part of what’s happening is that when people have more money, they have more control over their lives. More freedom to live the life they want to live,” the expert notes“Money alone is a small part of the happiness equation. Part of the reason I study happiness is to broaden our horizons.”

Image | Vitaly Gariev (Unsplash)

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