Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?

Articles published recently in Science, one of the best science journal in any science field. Since I am not rich, I need to read this type of articles more often:)


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Science 30 June 2006:
Vol. 312. no. 5782, pp. 1908 - 1910

Perspective

Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion
Daniel Kahneman,1 Alan B. Krueger,1,2* David Schkade,3 Norbert Schwarz,4 Arthur A. Stone5

The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. Moreover, the effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient. We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their life or the lives of others.

1 Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
2 National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
3 Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA 92093, USA.
4 Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, USA.
5 Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA.


* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: akrueger@princeton.edu


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Science 26 August 2005:
Vol. 309. no. 5739, p. 1322

Random Samples

"Men do not desire merely to be rich, but to be richer than other men." So said philosopher John Stuart Mill about 150 years ago. Now sociologists are chiming in with a study showing that money buys happiness--as long as it puts people ahead of their peers.

Many surveys have shown that more money doesn't necessarily translate into more happiness. Glenn Firebaugh, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and Harvard grad student Laura Tach devised a method to try to zero in on the relationship. Mining 30 years of survey data on well-being, they sorted some 20,000 working-age Americans by income and then by whether they thought of themselves as "very," "pretty," or "not too" happy. The data also covered age, health, marital status, education, race, work status, and gender, so the researchers were able to compare individuals with otherwise similar profiles.

Firebaugh and Tach concluded that money makes people happiest when they have more of it than those in their bracket. But it's not as important as health or marriage, they reported last week at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Philadelphia. Economist Richard Easterlin, who studies income and happiness at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, calls the study a "thorough, painstaking analysis."