Why the rich seem happier
In a surprising finding in 2010, a study revealed that money could make you happier, but there was actually an “enough” point — a level after which happiness tended to plateau even with rising income. Now it turns out the “enough” point may be a myth.
In a new study published on January 26, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School reports that, after tracking the lives of over 33,000 volunteers in the US for seven years, he is yet to see the happiness plateau.
Technology helped Killingsworth capture real-time data on his volunteers (a total of over 1.7 million data points by the end of the study), allowing him a deeper look into their lives, he says. At least thrice a day, the volunteers were asked multiple-choice questions that called on them to rate: “How do you feel right now?” and “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?” From time to time they were also asked about their sense of financial security, their sense of control over their lives, among other factors.
Killingsworth states in his report that “Larger incomes were robustly associated with both greater experienced well-being (real-time) and greater evaluative well-being (when a person reflects on their life)”.
Where the 2010 study, published in the same journal — by researchers Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, both Nobel laureates — suggested that a household income of $75,000 (about Rs 54 lakh) a year was sort of a threshold of emotional well-being for people in the US, Killingsworth says in his findings that happiness continued to grow even as annual household incomes crossed $480,000 (about Rs 3.4 crore).
Killingsworth explained the difference in the results thus: “It has been possible to look into people’s lives in real time through the use of smartphones recently, while earlier it was through surveys that looked into how people felt in the last week or month. That was remembered feeling, which is subject to change and, hence, possible bias.”
Killingsworth does sound a warning about his findings too. “Some people might think I’m saying money is much more important than we previously thought. That’s not what I’m saying,” he said via email . “Instead, I find that income matters across a broader range of incomes than we thought, and that it doesn’t plateau at a modest income level. But the magnitude of the effect, I find, is comparable to past research, and only moderate in size. So, people should not conclude that money is extremely important for happiness or that they should focus on making a lot of money in order to be happy. My findings show both views are wrong.”
“Earning more money by working very long hours or doing a job you hate is almost certainly going to make you less happy,” Killingsworth adds.