REAL LIFE NEWS: MONEY CAN BUY HAPPINESS
by Hazed
It’s a cliché that we hear all the time: money can’t buy you happiness. Poor people say it in order to make themselves feel better about not having any money; rich people say it to stop poor people being so jealous of their riches.
An economist called Richard Easterlin carried out studies back in the 1970s and found that having a high income doesn’t necessarily equate to being happier, so the statement became known as the Easterlin Paradox. The studies claimed that once a certain level of income is reached, happiness stops rising. Various studies have confirmed this, although exactly what that level is varies depending on the study.
I’ve always said that even if it’s true that money can’t buy you happiness, it sure does make being miserable a lot easier!
Now two US economists have conducted a study and discovered that money, in fact, CAN buy you happiness. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are economists at the University of Michigan. They have done a thorough economic study and have come to this conclusion:
“We find no evidence of a satiation point. The income-well-being link that one finds when examining only the poor, is similar to that found when examining only the rich. We show that this finding is robust across a variety of datasets, for various measures of subjective well-being, at various thresholds, and that it holds in roughly equal measure when making cross-national comparisons between rich and poor countries as when making comparisons between rich and poor people within a country.”
So it seems every dollar, pound, euro or imperial groat you make does bring a “greater increment to measured happiness” for both rich people and poor people, and that there is “no satiation point”. This probably explains why the rich just keep on getting richer.
