The obvious appeal of the idea is that money can buy happiness in the sense that it can provide for basic necessities and stability, but not much beyond that, meaning that multi billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are much richer but not all that happier than the rest of us. The only problem with this idea is that it's wrong, and that we'd all obviously be much happier if we had millions of dollars. A new study published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that the $75,000 figure is bullshit and that happiness continues to
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.
The study, titled
Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year, doesn’t mince words. “There was … no evidence of an income threshold at which experienced and evaluative well-being diverged, suggesting that higher incomes are associated with both feeling better day-to-day and being more satisfied with life overall.”
The new study is the work of Matt Killingsworth, a senior fellow at Wharton School for Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His study is based on 1,725,994 samples pulled from 33,391 employed adults in the United States. He collected the samples using an app he designed called
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. “The way it works is that people get pinged at random moments as they go about their daily lives,” Killingsworth told Motherboard over Zoom. “And then I ask them some questions about their experience, just before that moment, how they feel, what they’re doing, and a variety of other things.”
