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A new US study suggests more money actually does contribute to greater happiness
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“Money can’t buy you happiness”, said the actor and comedian Spike Milligan, “but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery”.
And now even the first part of that claim is very much in dispute, after a new study out of the USA cast doubt on previous assertions that happiness barely increases past a certain income threshold.
In 2010, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman asserted that earning more money brought no corresponding increase in happiness once a person reaches an annual income of about $120,000.
But after he was challenged to a nerd-off by happiness researcher Matthew Killingsworth (the researchers describe it as an “adversarial collaboration”, but we like “nerd-off better), Kahneman has revised his opinion, saying their study shows happiness continues to rise with income, even when you’re already very well-off.
It’s not all one-way traffic though: for about 20% of participants, happiness increased until a threshold of about $140,000, after which further increases in income had little to no effect.
Clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland told Newsable that while the research is interesting, it’s not as simple as: “money makes you happier”.
“It’s not a strong relationship, though it is a relationship,” he says.
“You’d be mistaken to put all your eggs in the money basket … but there’s definitely a trend that shows that the more income, generally you report feeling happier.
“It’s particularly strong for people at the bottom of the income heap – so, if you’ve been pretty poor, getting more money does have a bigger impact than if you’re already well-off.”
Sutherland says “happiness” is actually a difficult metric to reliably measure – the study used an app to ask people how they were feeling at random points in the day, and makes a point not to refer to “happiness” directly – instead measuring “emotional wellbeing”.
“I’m not sure I’d call that happiness,” says Sutherland.
“It’s a good title, it’s good clickbait. Is that happiness? We could have a debate on that, and I’m sure there would be some strong points of contention around whether that’s actually happiness or not.”
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