According to a recently released study (paywall) in the burgeoning field of happiness research, the two higher-earning women are likely to report more satisfaction with their lives than the one who makes $40,000. But, perhaps surprisingly, the psychologists who conducted the study find that the one making $200,000 is probably no happier than the one making $120,000. This is because both the $120,000 and $200,000 women have incomes above $105,000, which according to their research is the point at which greater household income in the US is not associated with greater happiness. The technical term for this cutoff is the income “satiation point.” [...]
The researchers analyzed the relationship between this score and household income. They find that in every region of the world, after accounting for a person’s age, gender, and marital status, people with higher incomes are happier. But they also find that there is a level of income at which happiness no longer increases with more money. This varies by region, with Australia and New Zealand the highest and Latin America and the Caribbean the lowest. They even find some evidence that in certain places, when incomes rise above the cutoff level, life satisfaction gets lower. [...]
These psychologists, from Purdue University and the University of Virginia, are not the first to study how income relates to life satisfaction. In 2010, the Nobel prize-winning duo of economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, famously found that the satiation point for US households was about $75,000 (about $84,000 in 2016 dollars). This new research improves on Deaton and Kahneman’s work, because the data is able to account for the number of people in a household, has more detailed income numbers, and includes responses from many more countries. [...]
Not at all. Research suggests that the average person who makes $150,000 is no happier than the average person who makes $120,000. But it could be that the sort of person who makes $120,000 is different in some fundamental way from the sort of person who makes $150,000. Perhaps, the people who make $150,000 would be less happy if they made $120,000, so their satiation point is higher than the sort of person who is happy with $120,000 and doesn’t want for anything more.
No comments:
Post a Comment