Money can buy happiness! Here's the science
But is there any real evidence for this? Or is it just a story we tell ourselves out of either resentment of the rich or a sense of social justice? We can all produce examples of rich people whose lives were ruined by horrible divorces or poor people who spend their lives doing what they love. But anecdotes are not data — and vague sentiments about just desserts are not arguments.
Over recent decades both economists and psychologists have embarked on a rigorous study of happiness (or “well-being,” as they tend to put it). Their work not only explodes the myth of happy peasants and miserable millionaires. It also suggests, more tantalizingly, that there may be no upper limit to the happiness that wealth can bring.
There is overwhelming evidence that up to a certain point greater average wealth produces greater average wellbeing. In 2007 the Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton analyzed the data on life satisfaction supplied by a Gallup Organization poll of well-being in 132 countries and discovered that average life satisfaction is strongly related to per capita national income. Each doubling of income was associated with a nearly one-point increase in life satisfaction on a scale of one to ten.
Skeptics about the wealth-happiness equation have now retreated to a different argument: that there is a plateau in the relationship between wealth and happiness. People in rich countries may well be happier than people in poorer ones because their basic needs are more likely to be met, the argument goes, but a
