Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton at Princeton University published a study in 2010 showing that money buys happiness only up to about $75k per year (in 2010 dollars, for Americans), at which point happiness plateaus and more money doesn’t meaningfully buy more happiness.
Years later, Matthew Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania published a study showing that happiness didn’t really plateau with money, but kept increasing at $75k and beyond.
They got together to see if they could reconcile their different findings from pretty similar methodologies.
As it turns out, Killingsworth’s data did show the same plateau, at pretty much the same place, if you focus only on the least happy 20%. In a sense, the Kahneman data was focused on only measuring unhappiness, and didn’t properly distinguish between people who were kinda happy, people who were moderately happy, and people who were really happy.
So now the most widely accepted analysis is that there are people who are deeply unhappy, for whom giving them more money might not make them emotionally better off, at least past $75k in 2010 dollars. But for the rest of us, the majority of people will continue getting happier with more money, well up to the $500k income.
Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton at Princeton University published a study in 2010 showing that money buys happiness only up to about $75k per year (in 2010 dollars, for Americans), at which point happiness plateaus and more money doesn’t meaningfully buy more happiness.
Years later, Matthew Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania published a study showing that happiness didn’t really plateau with money, but kept increasing at $75k and beyond.
They got together to see if they could reconcile their different findings from pretty similar methodologies.
As it turns out, Killingsworth’s data did show the same plateau, at pretty much the same place, if you focus only on the least happy 20%. In a sense, the Kahneman data was focused on only measuring unhappiness, and didn’t properly distinguish between people who were kinda happy, people who were moderately happy, and people who were really happy.
So now the most widely accepted analysis is that there are people who are deeply unhappy, for whom giving them more money might not make them emotionally better off, at least past $75k in 2010 dollars. But for the rest of us, the majority of people will continue getting happier with more money, well up to the $500k income.
Here’s a write up of the collaboration