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Comment by finstell | Hacker News Reader

Money is nothing if you have it. Money is everything if you don't have it.

People say that and it seems true to some extent, but financially, people rarely fall into the categories of "limitless wealth" and "not a penny to my name." It's almost like a false dichotomy is being implied by this statement, claiming that if you don't prioritize money, you will be left penniless and ruined. That simply isn't true. There are a wide range of conditions between wealth and poverty and studies like this show that you do not need to be closer to rich than poor to be happy.

I think it's more the opposite: that the richer you are the more you can afford to prioritize time. This study doesn't even try to control for that; they measure materiality and a measure of subjective feelings of wealth, but they never measure e.g. parental income.

I think studies have shown that past a relatively low (by SV standards) level of income ($75kish I think) the relationship between money and happiness breaks down.

The argument can definitely be made that the happiness difference between "comfortable and independent" and "Zuckerberg" is not all that great.

> I think studies have shown that past a relatively low (by SV standards) level of income ($75kish I think) the relationship between money and happiness breaks down.

This is true. But while that is low by SV standards, the $75k threshold from the study is targeted to "median america" cost of living.

If you adjust for cost of living and for purchasing power over the 6 years since the study was conducted, you end up with quite a bit more for areas like San Francisco. In fact, you'd probably be looking at more like 175-185k. [1]

1. http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/Happi...

That's not intuitive for me. I personally think my threshold would rather be "comfortable and independent without having to work".

Not that I don't want to work anymore, but being able to leave my programming job and becoming a dog breeder would make a lot of difference. And take month longs vacations to travel whenever I wanted.

The statement plots two points. You can interpolate.

Isn't that too cut and dry? I think what research like this is trying to determine is at what point additional money does not equate to an equal increase in happiness. If you're homeless, then yes, money becomes a huge factor in your life, because it becomes about survival. But what about the middle-class, the people who have the choice to either worry about gaining extra money for material purposes, or choose to be satisfied with a less audacious lifestyle but live more in the moment.

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