News just in: money does buy you happiness. Duh, you might say. Anyone could have told you that; it’s hardly a Nobel-prize winning insight. Well, actually, it kinda is: in 2010, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel prize-winning economist and psychologist, came out with the theory that there was a monetary “happiness plateau”. Once you hit an annual household income of $75,000 (£62,000), earning more money didn’t make you any happier. In 2021, the happiness researcher Matthew Killingsworth released a dissenting study, showing that happiness increased with income and there wasn’t evidence of a plateau. Now the pair have teamed up in a process known as “adversarial collaboration” and released a new study finding that they were both sort of right, but Killingsworth was more right: for most people, earning more money makes you happier.
There is some nuance to this. If you are extremely unhappy, happiness apparently increases with household income up to $100,000 (£82,000), then it “abruptly” levels off: there are some problems money can’t fix. For people who are in the “middle range of emotional wellbeing”, happiness increases linearly with income. And for very happy people, happiness accelerates above $100,000. The study didn’t look at incomes above $500,000, so we don’t have any insight into whether joyriding around space is making Jeff Bezos feel truly fulfilled. Or whether Rishi Sunak’s newly heated swimming pool is warming the cockles of his heart.
