Money and Happiness

We all know the classic saying, "Money can't buy happiness," but is there any scientific basis to the old adage? Apparently so: I was scouring PubMed this morning looking for an answer to that very question, and came upon this article from the Center for Health and Well-Being at Princeton University. The study used data from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index to look for correlations between various participant characteristics and their subjective well-being. The poll data is unusual in that it focuses on two concepts that make up subjective well-being: "Emotional well-being (sometimes called hedonic well-being or experienced happiness) refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, fascination, anxiety, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to a person's thoughts about his or her life." (i.e., "How satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?"

The study found that both life evaluation and emotional well-being rose with income, but emotional well-being reached a satiation point at about $75,000/year. Thus, while members of the upper classes (those with more income in this case) were more satisfied with their lives, the correlation between happiness and income reaches a maximum level, and is unchanged by further income above this threshold. The study also found that those with lower incomes were associated with lower measurements for both metrics. Thus, although more money does not necessarily lead to more happiness, less money does lead to more unhappiness. This seems like an emotional parallel to Weberian social theory, which looks at life chances as strictly economic (market position); in this case, the life chances proposed are for emotional, rather than material well-being, but the same principles appear to hold true -- money is related to the amount of time and resources households have available to participate in activities better for their well-being (time with family, leisure, etc.)