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How much money do people need to be happy?
41–50 of 273 posts
Re: How much money do people need to be happy?
#42> 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.”
Sounds like satiation point is where the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy have been satisfied.
This article [0] makes the point that mastery, belonging, and autonomy contribute to happiness, as well as the worldview of abundance vs one of scarcity.
[0] Why so many smart people aren't happy https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/why-so-...
Re: How much money do people need to be happy?
#43I've seen it suggested elsewhere that there is no saturation point, it's just that the relationship is logarithmic, and truncated logarithmic datasets look asymptotic.
https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/
This is another great link on debunking popsci like 75K is where people are happy sort of headlines that points to your point.
Re: How much money do people need to be happy?
#44tl;dr - A new study finds that $105,000 is the income level at which people no longer feel happier earning more money. This updates the previous number, $75,000, from a 2010 study.
Personally, I’m deeply skeptical of any psychology or sociology research that relies on magic numbers like “105,000”. As far as I can tell, the study doesn’t even account for cost of living.
Re: How much money do people need to be happy?
#45Is this net income (after taxes, and possibly after 401k [or equivalent] savings)? I would say that having no debt, or at least having manageable debt, along with knowing you are saving enough for retirement, and making enough that you don't have to second-guess if you can afford every purchase you make, is the real cutoff. For example, if you don't have mortgage debt then you are probably renting. So I consider mort…
>Is this net income (after taxes, and possibly after 401k [or equivalent] savings)? No, it's before tax income. Income Variables. Participants were asked to report monthly household income rather than yearly income to facilitate responding. Respondents were asked the question, “What is your total monthly household income in [local currency], before taxes? Please include income from wages and salaries, remittances fro…
It's also worth noting that it's normalized to household size -- income divided by sqrt(household size). So for a married couple with two children -- a number close to my own heart -- the 105k satiation point would be real dollars of 210k/year.
Dollars are also represented as International Dollars, which are adjusted for the local purchasing power, expressed in units equivalent to one USD in the US.
Re: How much money do people need to be happy?
#46tl;dr - A new study finds that $105,000 is the income level at which people no longer feel happier earning more money. This updates the previous number, $75,000, from a 2010 study. Personally, I’m deeply skeptical of any psychology or sociology research that relies on magic numbers like “105,000”. As far as I can tell, the study doesn’t even account for cost of living.
It does, but only at a country scale, not within a country.
Re: How much money do people need to be happy?
#47How does ones partner affect this? Does both need to earn the maximum, or earn the double combined?
The numbers are reported as total income / sqrt(household size) (from the supplementary material -- i.e., from the actual paper, since the main paper is a relatively short letter).
Re: How much money do people need to be happy?
#48I've never understood the absolute premise of: money can't buy happiness.
It very obviously can. I'm happy when I'm not living in a ditch. When I'm warm in Winter. When I have food and I'm not afraid of starving to death. When I can afford to pay my rent or mortgage. And those are the primitives. I'm extremely happy when I can spend a month at the beach (say I live in the mountains or midwest), or hop on a plane and enjoy the glorious creations of cultures from Paris to Rome to Tokyo to Buenos Aires.
Up to a point? I call bullshit on that too. That's a lack of creativity. Assuming we're not talking "point" = the scale of the universe or something beyond reasonable human potential. I'd be very happy spending my life trying to figure out how to benefit humanity with the $127 billion Bezos is sitting on. It'd be an immense joy, it'd be challenging, it'd be rewarding, it would fundamentally further my happiness.
There are various types of personal happiness, some are more core than others. Articles that discuss the up to a point benefits of money always collapse due to that.
Re: How much money do people need to be happy?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
There might be a fine line there; humans need a sense of purpose, and for many people, purpose is tied up in our job. If you no longer have to work, and you choose not to work because your current job isn't ideal, it can be hard to get the motivation to search for a new job. At the same time, without work, it can be hard to find purpose. So you might be stuck in a situation where you aren't working and struggling to…
That seems like a cultural thing, though - many Western cultures wrap up personal identity in job description, but there's nothing biological to stop people from just laying out a purpose for themselves and pursuing it. There are plenty of financial reasons, but isn't that what we're talking about? If you have enough money that you don't have to work for the rest of your life, you probably have enough money that you…
> many Western cultures wrap up personal identity in job description, but there's nothing biological to stop people from just laying out a purpose for themselves and pursuing it.
That's just as common in many other non-Western cultures, such as Japan, South Korea, China. All three are materialistic and work-centric. Japan has extreme work identity, South Korea is barely a notch lower than Japan on that. Both put the US - and the entire West - to shame on work-centric life (for better or worse depending on your views on such things). China today is one of the greatest materialistic work cultures that has ever existed. You see it in all of China's markets and businesses today, and the move from rural to urban to seek greater materialism and elevated work identity. It's an intense fever there, eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/china-plans-bu...
Re: How much money do people need to be happy?
#50Let's ask all the employment wage slaves how happy they are and then conclude that they do not become happier above 105k based on self report. What a joke. A person making 500k or more or someone with high net worth is going to have a more full life (not needing to work, help community, help family)
You say this, but you offer no evidence to contradict the study, which is based on ... evidence that you're wrong.
But think about it: A single person making $105k is just touching the top 10% of income earners in the US: https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
Having spent some time in about that bracket in an average cost-of-living area (earned slightly more, but I'd spent the previous few years being a broke grad student), I can attest that it felt amazingly rich - there were few things I would have done with more money. My life satisfaction came from my job, my relationships, and my hobbies.
There's a lot of evidence supporting the general conclusion that happiness is either logarithmic in income, or asymptotic after a point. Just blowing it off as "a joke" doesn't hold water. There's also considerable evidence that things like friendships, family, good relationships with neighbors, etc., are much more important contributors to happiness than income.