Motive journal has an article entitled:
Extra Cash Does Purchase Extra Happiness
However the article itself is extra nuanced:
A brand new research within the journal Emotion presents a problem to the Easterlin discovering. Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State College, and A. Bell Cooper, a knowledge scientist at Lynn College, examined knowledge collected from 44,000 grownup respondents to the Common Social Survey (GSS) between 1972 and 2016 and located that more cash does, actually, correlate with extra happiness.
I do know that “correlation doesn’t indicate causation” has turn into a cliché, nevertheless it stays an necessary idea. I really see two issues with the “cash buys happiness” declare:
1. I’d count on pleased folks to be richer than sad folks, even when wealth had no causal influence on happiness. Depressed folks usually lack ambition, feeling fatalistic about life.
2. Happiness is troublesome to outline. One definition pertains to temper—pleased persons are folks in a cheerful temper. One other definition pertains to basic life satisfaction.
I do know some grouchy people who find themselves happy with what they’ve achieved in life. Are they “pleased”? I suppose it relies upon how one defines happiness:
Nonetheless, Easterlin and different students proceed to argue that the “Easterlin Paradox” is actual. Some cite 2010 analysis within the Proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences by Princeton economist and Nobelist Angus Deaton and his colleagues that supposedly discovered happiness doesn’t enhance as soon as a person’s revenue reaches about $75,000 per yr. What the research really discovered is that more cash doesn’t have an effect on the extent of day-to-day pleasure, stress, and unhappiness however does correlate strongly with rising measures of general life satisfaction.
If I had been to all of a sudden lose 98% of my wealth, I would inform pollsters than my “life satisfaction” had gone down. However again once I really had 98% much less wealth than right this moment, my temper was about the identical is it’s now.
I stay agnostic on the query of whether or not wealth will increase happiness. I’m extra sympathetic to the declare that freedom will increase happiness, and I additionally consider that freedom results in increased wealth. So I’m in no way stunned by the truth that worldwide comparisons present a constructive correlation between wealth and happiness.
