Money has some effect on how happy you are, but not very much. The latest attempt to quantify the relationship comes from Justin Wolpers, who finds that to raise your happiness by one standard deviation you would have to raise your income by 1,640%.
And remember that this is not a flat curve, and most of the impact comes at the bottom; once you're in the upper middle class the impact of more money on happiness is hard to measure and you are not likely to notice.
Two things that are worth more than all the money in the world: a good marriage and a group of friends you see on a regular basis.
Once all your basic needs are met and you are comfortable and secure, more money isn't going to make you happy - you need to make yourself happy at that point.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, our society is strongly oriented around the acquisition of ever more personal wealth, far and away beyond meeting a person's basic needs.
Instead of a system that works to ensure that all members of society are well off, we prefer a system where a few privileged or lucky individuals are free to amass absurdly large amounts of personal wealth at the expense of everyone else. This doesn't make those privileged or lucky few any happier, but it does make everyone else more miserable.
It's just all so stupid and senseless.