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Money can buy happiness

economist.com

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Re: Money can buy happiness

#111

Post by marquis »

beachstartup wrote: post #96
marquis wrote: post #4

In regards to subjective happiness and income, I like to pose the question: Would you rather earn $80,000 and live in a neighbourhood of those earning $100,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 and live in a neighbourhood of those earning $80,000. Money and happiness is entirely subjective according to your environment.

this is a highly personal answer. it depends on a person's specific mechanisms of motivation and satisfaction. i realize this is a hypothetical "thought experiment", but you can see how this actually plays out in reality. i've done both. i've lived in areas where i made significantly more than my neighbors (regular apartment complex in the middle of LA/hollywood), and now i live in a place where i make significantly…

It's really just an thought experiment in understanding why events rise such as extreme materialistic consumerism and social envy: if all factors are irrelevant the experiment makes sense in explaining otherwise inexplicable consumerist behaviour such as that we might generalize from the lower socioeconomic classes watching reality tv.

Re: Money can buy happiness

#112

Post by nazgulnarsil »

oscargrouch wrote: post #99
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, the noble savages are very serene....until you notice the infectious disease and children and mothers constantly dying in childbirth.

just to make it clear: im not saying they live the perfect life.. but both types of civilizations have things to teach one another.. we have things to teach, but we also have things to learn.. things that we lost in the way.. What we constantly see, is the "white man" notion of superiority, and therefore that he has nothing to learn, from "primitives".. But the irony is that they have a lot to teach us.. Our societie…

I agree, work/life balance has gone to shit since the agricultural revolution.

Re: Money can buy happiness

#113

Post by adwf »

Dewie wrote: post #87
adwf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynic in me is actually thinking it's interesting that the Scandanavian countries are left off the charts. They are usually touted as being amongst the happiest countries in the world, despite rather aggressive tax regimes to pay for it. Perhaps there is some cherry picking going on here? Either as propaganda to show that the US is the happiest, or to show that money equals happiness - which might not be true in…

The Nordic countries were featured in an article a year ago. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571136-politicians-b... If there is an agenda somewhere, it's probably not on the part of The Economist (I don't know enough about The Economist to comment on more than their apparent public face overall).

Yeah I doubt there's an agenda, I was being cynical just because there was a potential point to make.

It's almost impossible to find an article about countries overall happiness without discussing the Scandinavians at the top, so their absence was conspicuous. Add in the fact that the article is pro-capitalism / money making, and the US are at the top of their happiness scale... It's contrary to the usual message, so I thought it worth pointing out.

Re: Money can buy happiness

#114

Post by eropple »

ig1 wrote: post #45
rtpg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people are actually pretty bad at defining where they are on the wealth scale. For example, loads of very rich Americans seem to think they're middle class (the WSJ once portrayed a middle-class family as earning $100000 a year, which actually places them in the top quintile). This article describes how it is a relatively universal factor though (everyone thinks they're kinda in the middle)( http://economix.blogs.nyt…

You seem to under the misapprehension that middle-class refers to a median income grouping when that's not actually the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class

What you call a misapprehension I would instead call "identifying a delusion." The faux-classlessness of American society is one of the weirder and to my mind deleterious aspects of the American character, in part because I think it feeds into Steinbeck's temporarily-embarrassed-millionaires phenomenon (the rush of actual middle-class people to defend the people who will profit from their defense).

And I don't think it holds true, anyway. I don't have the same problems as someone making $25,000 a year (approximately the 48th percentile as per Wikipedia), though they are recognizable to me in the abstract. I also don't have the same problems as someone making $200K a year and they are utterly foreign.

Re: Money can buy happiness

#115

Post by tszyn »

It's really impossible to rate your life numerically in relation to a "best possible life", so in order to give some kind of answer to this vague question, respondents fall back on some quantifiable measure like money.

A separate issue is that the question "How satisfied are you WITH your life?" is not the same as "How satisfied are you IN your life?". It's possible to have high moment-to-moment happiness, but have a negative view of one's life; or vice versa. Daniel Kahnemann explains this in this TED talk (13:30):

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...

He even mentions the Gallup World Poll.

Re: Money can buy happiness

#116

Post by _xhok »

The survey measures people's self-perceived satisfaction. I have no difficulty believing that richer people think they're happier, but the survey tells little about whether they actually are.

Re: Money can buy happiness

#117

Post by deskglass »

deskglass wrote: post #103
leoedin wrote: post #3

The income scale is logarithmic, so the apparently linear lines that you see are actually curved. The returns in happiness per $ earned fall off significantly towards the top of the scale (which incidentally is capped at a fairly low $128,000). I don't really see how this new data contradicts the generally accepted view (mentioned in the article) that money increases happiness up to a point.

According to the paper (page 13), they only look at incomes between the 10th and 90th percentiles. That's why they cut off at $128,000 for US residents. With that said, I do think it'd be interesting to see a graph that continues past the 90th percentile. The paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18992?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_mediu...

That link has started charging since I posted it. You can get the paper for free (legitimately) here: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/...

Re: Money can buy happiness

#118

Post by [deleted] »

deskglass wrote: post #103
leoedin wrote: post #3

The income scale is logarithmic, so the apparently linear lines that you see are actually curved. The returns in happiness per $ earned fall off significantly towards the top of the scale (which incidentally is capped at a fairly low $128,000). I don't really see how this new data contradicts the generally accepted view (mentioned in the article) that money increases happiness up to a point.

According to the paper (page 13), they only look at incomes between the 10th and 90th percentiles. That's why they cut off at $128,000 for US residents. With that said, I do think it'd be interesting to see a graph that continues past the 90th percentile. The paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18992?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_mediu...

[deleted]

Re: Money can buy happiness

#119

Post by king_phil »

quadrangle wrote: post #83

Correlation ≠ causation. If you live in a society where the propaganda tells you that wealth = success & value & esteem, then of course there's some connection. Maybe if we really lived in a culture where hoarding wealth was considered shameful, it would make people less happy to do so.

I always wonder how easily scientists (and journalists) fall for the correlation vs. causality trap. It looks like that scientific community lost the critical thinking. I always think the other way around when I read a "scientific" study and ask (in this case): "Do people with higher life satisfaction earn more money?" (=the cause of the better earnings is the satisfaction, not the other way around). Without reading the study it's impossible to tell that the researchers ruled this out, but it is imaginable that this is the case, too.

And it could be that there is a factor that is invisible to the study (maybe... IQ, height of the person, shoe size, ...?) that influences BOTH.

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