Money and Happiness: Extended Evidence Against Satiation

Is there a point beyond which more money is no longer associated with greater happiness? In recent research, I found that happiness rose steadily at least up through incomes of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. But what happens beyond that – does happiness plateau, decline, or continue rising? To find out, I compare happiness from a large U.S. sample with diverse incomes (N = 33,269) to the happiness of two high net-worth samples (N = 49, N = 2,129) using a nearly identical happiness measure. The results show a sizable upward trend, with wealthy individuals being substantially and statistically significantly happier than people earning over $500,000/y. Moreover, the difference between wealthy and middle-income participants was nearly three times larger than the difference between the middle- and low-income participants, contrary to the idea that middle-income people are close to the peak of the money-happiness curve. Finally, the absolute size of the difference in happiness between the richest and poorest people was large. Differences in income and wealth closed more than half (approximately 58%) of the gap between the not-very-happy low-income participants and the scale maximum. The results suggest that the positive association between money and happiness continues far up the economic ladder, and that the magnitude of the differences can be substantial.