Does Money Buy Happiness? – Econlib

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, an information scientist at Lynn College, examined knowledge collected from 44,000 grownup respondents to the Normal Social Survey (GSS) between 1972 and 2016 and located that more cash does, the truth is, correlate with extra happiness.

I do know that “correlation doesn’t suggest causation” has grow to be a cliché, but it surely stays an vital idea.  I truly see two issues with the “cash buys happiness” declare:

1. I might anticipate pleased individuals to be richer than sad individuals, even when wealth had no causal influence on happiness.  Depressed individuals typically lack ambition, feeling fatalistic about life.

2. Happiness is troublesome to outline.  One definition pertains to temper—pleased persons are individuals in a cheerful temper.  One other definition pertains to normal life satisfaction.

I do know some grouchy people who find themselves glad 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 earnings reaches about $75,000 per 12 months. What the research truly 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 total life satisfaction.

If I had been to abruptly lose 98% of my wealth, I would inform pollsters than my “life satisfaction” had gone down.  However again after I truly had 98% much less wealth than at the 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 imagine that freedom results in greater wealth.  So I’m under no circumstances stunned by the truth that worldwide comparisons present a constructive correlation between wealth and happiness.