Receiving a basic monthly income can mean an increase in happiness, especially for people from low-income countries.
If you have always had doubts in the order of health, money or love, perhaps you should put in the first place the moneybecause a recent study states that if you are looking for happiness you only have to have a lot of money, although there is a limit to the perception of happiness according to your annual income.
An experiment collected in the PNAS magazine gave 200 people a lump sum of $10,000 from two anonymous donors and asked them to rate their happiness monthly after receiving that amount.
The problem with this study, is that they had to spend this $10,000 in just three monthssome taking advantage of them better than others.
On the other hand, there was a control group of 100 members who received absolutely no sum, but who still had to report their level of happiness for three consecutive months.
As a result, something obvious, those participants who received the money rated their happiness higher than the control group who received nothing.
The least obvious thing is that after spending these three months and spending all the money, continued to report greater happiness than those who did not receive any previous amount.
Greater happiness in those with low incomes
In addition they clarify, that the lower the participants’ annual income, the higher their happiness. In this way, those people from low-income countries reported greater monthly happiness than those who received the money, but were from countries with rents tall. Namely, those who really needed the money were happier.
Thus, those participants with annual incomes greater than $123,000 did not show much happiness in the months after receiving the $10,000 donation.
Research supports the need to include a basic income since this could not only help to survive, but also increase happiness.
The experiment was originally organized by Chris Anderson from TED in December 2020, and participants had to be over 21 years old and fluent in English.
There were participants from low-income countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Kenya, and others from high-income countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
the netherlands income reported a significant increase in happiness up to three times greater than those participants from high-income countries.
“Our data provide the clearest evidence to date that private citizens can improve happiness globally through voluntary redistribution to those who have less.”, the researchers wrote.
