The Debate over Happiness-Income Chart
The well-known 2010 chart that shows diminishing marginal happiness beyond an annual income of $75000 was related to research by Daniel Kahneman who passed away today. I referenced this chart in my book too.
Other research has shown that life satisfaction may continue to increase with income but the slope of increase depends on our PERCEPTION of Money Buying Happiness. In other words, money has a larger effect on our happiness if we THINK our happiness depends on it! For unsatisfied folks who SEE high incomes as their main path to happiness, their life satisfaction increases with their income even above $75000 a year. Please note the words “life satisfaction” used in recent research and in later years by Kahneman because happiness and joy, in biblical and spiritual sense, are not the same as satisfaction and pleasure. Interestingly, new research also shows on average, the more people equated money and success (life satisfaction), the lower their overall experienced well-being was!
Separately, an international survey of more than 2000 millionaires from seventeen countries found that, at net worths above $1 million, more wealth is minimally predictive of happiness (though millionaires enjoy more work autonomy and time for active leisure). Other reports published in 2018 demonstrate that economic growth has not improved human morale and level of happiness over time although in inflation-adjusted dollars, U.S. adults were three times richer in 2012 than 1957 (with bigger houses, bigger TVs, new technologies, and more phones and cars per household now than any time in history) as seen in the graph.
In my book, I explain how our brain handles pleasure and satisfaction by a different neurotransmitter than it does joy and happiness, and how one leads to addiction and another to contentment. If you depend for your JOY (a contentment feeling) less on numbers (quantity, scale and money) and more on quality of life (other blessings and experiences of life like education, love, health), you will be blessed with as stated in spiritual and holy scriptures:
“He who loves money will not be satisfied with money1, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity... To the person who pleases God, he gives wisdom and joy [in anything they do, without COUNTING the rewards], but to the deviant he gives the toil (labor/agony) of [constantly] SCALING UP [wealth/assets/power].”
Quoted from Ecclesiastes in Bible