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Happiness increases depending on income and even accelerates when the salary exceeds $100,000 per year, says a group of scientists who analyzed more than 33,000 people in the United States.
Money does bring happiness. Thus concludes a new study carried out on 33,391 people residing in the United States and published on March 1 in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’.
The scientists, including a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who introduced the idea of an economic cap on happiness a decade ago, measured the effect in people with incomes from $75,000 to $500,000 a year.
Money really does buy happiness, and the correlation goes well beyond the $85,000-a-year salary threshold that had been considered the upper limit for having an impact, according to the scientists.
Happiness increases steadily with income and even accelerates when salary exceeds $100,000 a year, yes, scientists warn, as long as the person enjoys a certain basic level of happiness.
The new study contradicts famous 2010 work by psychologist Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton, which argued that happiness increases with income until the relationship begins to “flatten out” between $60,000 and $90,000 a year.
Kahneman himself reanalyzed his work in collaboration with Matthew Killingsworth, a Harvard University psychology doctoral student and former head of software products, and found no happiness plateau in the 2021 study on the same topic.
Their new job, described as a “contradictory collaboration,” did find a price ceiling, but only among the most unhappy 20% of people, and only when they start making more than $100,000, but even this unhappy group became happier. as his income rose to six figures.
Only at this point is where the happiness effect of more money stops working and “the miseries that remain are not alleviated by high income.”
“For very poor people, money clearly goes a long way,” Killingsworth told New Scientist. “But if you have a decent income and you’re still miserable, the source of your misery probably isn’t something money can fix,” she added.
For everyone else outside of this group, more money means more happiness, at least to some degree. For the happiest 30% of the population, the rate at which happiness increases even accelerates as income exceeds $100,000.
Nothing buys free time
The researchers found that the overall emotional effect of more money on a person dwarfed when compared to circumstances as humane as two days off on the weekend.
“A roughly four-fold difference in income roughly equates to a weekend effect,” say the scientists.
Although the survey included people with incomes above $500,000, the researchers said it was impossible to say that the happiness effect held for people with higher incomes.
Respondents were employed adults ages 18 to 65, with a median age of 33 and a median household income of $85,000 per year. Participants were surveyed about their happiness multiple times a day using an app developed by Killingsworth.
With Bloomberg
