How much money do people need to be happy?
qz.com
qz.com
You still need to work 40 hours a week or whatever, and only get X weeks of vacation. Having a 180K salary instead of 150K doesn't change any of these obligations, or change your life in any significant way, you just put away more money into the bank.
Of course, stepping from 40K to 100K in salary is practically life altering. Unless you absolutely suck at budgets you can easily get out of debt and start having real vacations. You can afford hobbies, etc.
That's one thing I've always wondered. Unless you can reach super high incomes, the "buy/rent a jet" incomes, your life isn't that different from "all the rest." You still commute to work daily, have a house, etc. I mean sure, the house and car may have higher price points, but the lifestyle is still the same. Maybe I'm wrong and all those luxury brand commercials are right, spending 30 minutes (or however long) per day in a 80K car is so much more rewarding than spending those 30 minutes in a 40K car.
For example:
- Housekeepers who come often
- Paying someone to manage the yard
- Private school and college funds for kids
- International vacations for the whole family
- Paying for family to visit you if you are working adults
The idea being that a couple making $200k jointly per year spending $800/mo on a maid gives them far, far less happiness than a homeless person getting their first warm meal and shower this month.
Just one thing: you don't need a "buy/rent a jet" income to not have to commute to work daily. Retiring early appears to be surprisingly easy with decent income and good spending habits. Taking a year or two off even more so. Eg with the 80k (the more expensive car you mentioned), you can live handsomely for 4+ years in South-East Asia or Eastern Europe.
$3mil let's you live on $50k/year for 60 years. And realistically, more than that due to interest - 2% of 3mil is 60k, so if you have it well-invested you could live off it with $50k/yr indefinitely.
The truth is, most people can barely afford to save due to aforementioned high costs.
Stocks for example have averaged, inflation adjusted, about 6% in the past 50 years. 6.6% in the past 60 years and 8.2% in the past 40 years, for comparison. So let's say 6%. This is inflation adjusted, and dividends reinvested.
At that point you're earning $180k a year. Even if you spend $100k, you'll be accruing money over time while maintaining purchasing power. In 50 years, you'd add another $4m of inflation-adjusted wealth for example, but that's wildly underestimating reality as that doesn't figure in the compound effects of adding $80 to your wealth each year.
I live in the Netherlands where 40K is quite a reasonable income. I really dont get why you would need 100k to do the things you need. Perhaps people need to become a bit more frugal?
People here in general don't have any debt (except for mortgages) and a vacation to an Asian country is 1-2k/month'(yes people sometimes do take 2 months vacations here). Even a month of Australia is only 3-4k. Hobbies? I don't know what kind of exotic hobbies people have in the bay area but even flying drones (relative expensive) is relative affordable if you get started with a cheap Chinese drone before you buy an Expensive one.
Rent, family size, location, etc probably makes a huge difference but I really don't think 100k is the magical number that you need to become happy.
Another point that makes a difference is that if you ever want to get a mortgage and buy a house, the maximum the banks will give you is a constant multiplier times your annual salary. In Ireland it’s 3.5x — good luck trying to buy a house on a €140k budget in Dublin.
In my case, my total effective comp increased about 8x in the last 5 years after being corrected for taxes and CPIs of the countries I lived in, and I kind of concur with the OP in that it’s more of a log curve than linear. Things get progressively ‘easier’ but less lifestyle-changing over time.
The multiplier isn't constant or fixed but dependent on interest rates. So there are certainly multipliers that work in certain periods, like about 4x now in the Netherlands. But that'll go down once rates rise, it's only a constant insofar as the long-term interest rates appear somewhat constant (or rather, sticky) in a given period of time. At the end of the day they look at ability-to-pay, and interest rates factor in to that, which are variable.
At 30k salary, I was able to save $400-$500/month in Boston. It would have been near zero if I had student debt (6%+ interest). Frightening thinking back, but I was always one major repair on my car or mid level health issue away from spending an entire years worth of savings.
The entire cost for my graduation is probably come in under 1000€ total, 800€ will be tuition and the rest directly university related spending. (There is an additional 2k€ spending on stuff like a new laptop, software, etc. that wasn't necessarily required but made things easier).
Another obvious fix would be to spread good jobs around the country so we don’t have such concentrated HCOL cities. That’s as easily done as the suggestion of lowering cost of graduation to your sugessted price point. We have an entire political party against free or near free education, which means more taxes to pay for it. I don’t fully disagree with some of their stances. Many degrees don’t provide financial value, and can be learned online or have meet ups to discuss topics. A college degree for a college degree sake is what’s happening to much of the populous.
And at every step, people jumped straight into employment from school.
US High School should focus on that. If a student graduates they should already have a job offer signed, that should be their primary target. If they don't they should be moving into higher education. College and other Institutions should have the same goal.
What I have found is that the majority of "happiness from money" comes from the financial security, not actually spending the money. The reduction in stress going from a chronically broke PhD student to having 5 years of living expenses in savings is huge.
It's the knowledge that you can immediately solve almost every problem that pops up with a bit of money, and figure out the details later. Missed your flight? Book another one. Car trouble? Call assistance and take an uber. Lost your job? Take a short vacation and then hit up your network on LinkedIn.
And in most countries in Europe, you can feel secure with a lot less in income/savings than in the US. You don't need to worry about what your health insurance does not cover, probably don't have any student loan debt - and probably don't need to worry about a college fund for kids, can commute by public transport in cities, have better unemployment protections, and so on.
And then your expectations shift, you require more expensive things to acquire that base level of prosperity and satisfaction, and you have a whole new set of problems which feel just as stressful, relatively speaking.
Just an edit: I think it goes back to our shortening attention spans and modern conveniences quite a lot. Being bored and comfortable with it at some level is an important life skill.
There's that idea that giving poor people money will have them just spend it gambling or buying drugs, doesn't seem to be true, either.
A lot of these just sound like justifications to pay people less, or an odd way to shame people for wanting something material. Money is power, and power is always valuable.
Basically, if I usually buy a certain Ikea table if I need a table, I still buy that Ikea table, and it still feels too expensive to me, regardless of the fact that I earn a lot more now. If I get an apartment that I like, I don't have any desire to get a more expensive one. I only want a more expensive one if the current one is really bothering me for some reason. I'm still uncomfortable with purchases of certain amounts, or buying things for myself in general (particularly, clothes and furniture). It's physically painful to spend certain amounts of money.
There's a set point in my brain for how things are supposed to cost, and that point is very hard to move. I.e., it takes actual effort to explain to my brain that I can spend more now. There's nothing automatic like the general wisdom suggests.
It really leads to a persistent feeling of danger, so yes, making 100k instead of 40k could literally save your life, or at least keep you from being an indebted loan shark victim for the rest of your life.
Right, that problem just doesn't exist in the Netherlands.
Basically everyone pays, I would guess, around $150 a month median for insurance, with a standard deviation of probably around $25. That covers anything life threatening and quite a bit more.
There's a bit of co-pay on things like dental and there's a mandatory own-risk of about $500 a year on certain procedures.
If you're about 10% below the median income in the Netherlands you get an insurance subsidy which tops out slightly above $100 a month.
The point I'm trying to make here though, which I lightly implied, is that regressive tax systems and distributive justice lead to overal higher happiness.
i.e., if there are diminishing marginal returns of happiness from money, it makes sense that Total Happiness in a country is optimised through a substantially regressive system. That's one of the interesting things about it.
I suspect by "regressive tax" you mean "a tax rate that increases as the amount subject to taxation increases" . Wikipedia defines "regressive tax" to be the opposite one- where the tax rate decreases as the amount subject to taxation increases.
Or you're making a fairly non-obvious and interesting claim!
They're definitely not?
> I'm curious what the justification for this claim is as well.
My claim makes no sense cause I used the wrong (opposite) word! Apologies, please read it the other way around.
the EU as a whole actually has a more regressive tax system than the united states (although they spend the proceeds very differently), but in the netherlands, the regressive and progressive taxes essentially cancel out so that overall taxes are flat.
here are some sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/19/other... https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/12/i... https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/12/05/...
I looked into the Dutch case. It indeed appears that there's no progressive effective tax, but rather a flat tax. Each group pays about an equal share of the tax burden as their share of the income.
The study published in EBS is a great start, but it is omitting some important elements. Taxation of cars is left out, despite them being a luxury good whose costs are carried by the more affluent class. Transaction tax on real estate, same thing, omitted and mostly a rich-people thing. Real estate taxes, same thing. Nor are capital gains taxes or company's income taxes included, thereby omitting income effects from entrepreneurship and ownership in companies, these capital effects and its taxes of course scale with affluence.
What it does include on the other hand, are various insurances. e.g. insurance to unemployment (including the 'final unemployment': pensions) and sickness. These aren't really taxes per se, but rather individual insurances earmarked per person.
Finally, it hints at combining tax rates with redistribution. For example, healthcare subsidies get deducted from medical insurance premiums in the study. But it's only one of many different forms of redistribution. They don't make similar deductions for rent subsidies (which are quite substantial). I felt that was lacking, either include it all or nothing at all.
Which brings in perspectives... this study essentially adds sales tax to the traditional income tax as a way of determining collective burdens, which is super interesting. But the authors do not change the denominator from income to something else that's related to sales tax. So it's a claim about income+expense tax, as a percentage of income. Rather than say taking all your taxes, including those related to expenses, as a percentage of total expenses. If you did this, you'd see tax systems become progressive again, as rich people have a higher savings rate (i.e., income that's not spent, and thus not hit with sales tax). The authors do mention in the beginning of the article, but don't discuss the implications after. If you wanted, you could see this as a form of deferred taxes.After all, un-spent after-tax income isn't taxed with sales-tax, until it's spent. When its spent, it's taxed, removing the regressive element. And if it's not spent but saved/invested instead, you don't pay sales tax, but you do have to pay tax on capital in the Netherlands. Which is exactly the tax that this study left out!
So, extremely interesting and it's definitely the case that we can't blatantly call the Netherlands progressive without sales tax context. But to make the opposite claim, to say the Netherlands is regressive or flat, probably can't be made as easily either. It really depends on your perspectives.
At least they had movies on and weren't blasting Fox News.
The result of that is that distributive justice is a lot stronger, and the impact of a regressive tax system is magnified. A median salary in the US might generate unsatisfactory, whereas in the Netherlands even a below-median salary has quite good outcomes because of this.
For example, the median healthcare insurance expenditure in the Netherlands is about $1.5k a year, and healthcare outcomes are quite good. Tuition fees in university for undergrad and graduate degrees are about $2.5k a year across the board, with a tiny fraction of students being the exception like dental or piloting schools. Student loans are currently at 0% and set to go to 1% next year. Tuition-waving subsidies exist for children of poor parents. Childcare is heavily subsidised. Traffic policy and public infrastructure is such that a car is not necessary, and employers tend to reimburse all public transportation costs for most employees. Lastly, it just feels like culturally the Netherlands is slightly more sensible with its consumerism and interest in toys. Most seems to be spent on things with higher lifetime values, meaning the effective value of money seems to do a bit better, but that's just intuition from anecdotes.
In short, when you get your after-tax income, you tend to be able to spend a very large portion of it on things you don't really need, but just enjoy. Nice food, vacations, hobbies. There just isn't an need for a $100k salary for your kids to go to a nice school, have childcare or a good insurance, or a car to get your family places. Nor do you need $100k to cover interest payments + principal on 6% student debt of $100k.
That having been said, your numbers on Asian/Australian vacations definitely cater to a certain tourist. I've done a month in Asia on 1k, but I was 19. Similarly I could do 3k in Australia, but I'd be a certain kind of vacation. You AirBnb and eat some simple Asian takeaway like food and travel by bus. That's not everyones idea of a holiday. It's a different vacation from getting taxis to hotels and eating in restaurants.
In my experience, the best way to fix that "problem" is to get some kids :)
Although we still live very well in absolute terms, a lot of people I know have and will have a worse quality of life than their parents did, despite being more successful and earning more money! It’s kind of depressing.
I live near Seattle where $100K is probably a reasonable income (give or take $30K).
Now, I make more than that by a large margin where my cash target side of the house is roughly $300K not including stocks. I live pretty well, so what do I do with the extra money?
Well, I trickle down. I have four employees for my house and land. When you not only provide for yourself, but you provide for others then I claim that there is extra happiness to be had. My house keeper, for instance, makes $40K with an average of 20 hours of week, flexible timing, and a monthly stipend for benefits.
You can buy happiness, but only if you spend it on people rather than things.
No one said you need it. They're saying at that income a lot of pain points go away. As others pointed out, much of it has to do with a reduction of stress. A lot of small problems can be solved with money. It doesn't mean that people will solve them with money - but knowing that you can eases the brain quite a bit.
And then of course, there's health care. With good employer paid insurance, the deductible for a couple is about $3300. So if you have any kind of chronic medical condition, you'll pay that much each year at least. If your employer did not pay and you had to purchase it (e.g. you are self-employed), it'll cost perhaps $500/mo for the premium, with a deductible anywhere from $6000 to $10K.
>Perhaps people need to become a bit more frugal?
There is that as well. People here tend to change their smartphone every 2 years, and always buy a brand new expensive one. They'll pay a pretty high fee for cable TV. They'll insist on 50-100 Mb/s Internet, when, in my experience, 15Mb/s was fine for a couple (no degradation in quality for services like Netflix). They'll generally pay $15-30K for new or recently new cars. And many people change cars too often.
Consequently, many Americans spend nearly everything they make on stuff that ultimately contributes very little, if anything, to their contentment. Since buying those things didn't actually make them happy, they figure they need more money, and more debt, to buy more things. It's a trap we've created for ourselves.
Oh, and our health care system is ridiculously expensive.
-> Most thorough study yet about the subject comes out, says 100k is the magical number.
You: Well I'll keep believing my thoughtless, data less opinion anyway.
Me: Rolls Eyes
Sure, you can be skeptic, but at this point, if you needed to take a decision based on this, you'd do better go with the 100k magic number, the odds are definitly more in its favor then your belief.
I think the biggest difference would be the outsized political, social influence and your own private jet.
But of course even at $10m you could easily afford to rent a jet pretty frequently.
edit: the figure I used is just the cheapest possible aircraft you can rent. if you actually want a jet, you are looking at $10,500 and up, which would make your monthly flight eat more like 32% of your budget. most people are going to find this untenable.
In my case, as soon as I started making decent money, I got a hearing and glasses (I didn't have them before), started taking physiotherapy to fix my shoulders, going to the dentist, changing the oil in my car on schedule, buying shoes as they wore out instead of pushing them until they gave me hip and knee problems, etc... I wouldn't say I was "unhappy" about any of those things before I could afford them, but I simply didn't spend money on them.
I've definitely experienced this. There are lots of things that you ignore when you're poor because they're just not feasible, but once you've got the money, they're not only feasible but foolish to not do.
At some other point, either your expenses fail to keep up or you start to have such blatantly unneeded expenses that it is obvious that you can same some money with minimum effort.
And none of that even require a very large salary.
> “Two things I ask of you, Lord; do not refuse me before I die: Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.
One thing I didn't see in the comments here, though I may've just missed it, is that with more money you have more of an opportunity to give it away. You can make a real difference for people in need. I suspect not many in the HN crowd tithe, by which I mean giving 10% of your income to charity, but perhaps it's something to consider, and probably more fulfilling than a slightly nicer car.
God's teachings on money are sprinkled throughout scripture.
You are right: God expects us to give from what He provides us with.
One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered. Proverbs 11:24-25
Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like a green leaf. Proverbs 11:28
Better is a little with righteousness than great income with injustice. Proverbs 16:8
He who oppresses the poor to make more for himself or who gives to the rich, will only come to poverty. Proverbs 22:16
Do not toil to acquire wealth; be discerning enough to desist. Proverbs 23:4
Basically, the concept of sacrificial giving is that it does hurt to give it. Jesus made it clear that giving from your surplus is fairly meaningless. Trusting in God and being obedient are what He expects. When you feel led to give, give. The more you sow, the more you reap. But Jesus is very plain in telling us to give in secret so as to please God. Men you give in public to be seen and approved by men is wrong.
Tithing is something that is largely forgotten in the post-Christian world we now find ourselves in. Peace.
That's simply not true. The 2016 World Giving Index[1] shows that their three measures of charity have all increased over time, including financial donations (page 16). Many of the top ten countries for percentage who donate money have had decreased religiosity (page 21).
1: https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/about-us-publi...
Anyways, if you don't want to give 10% of your income to charity, consider giving a mixture of 10% of your income or time to really help your family. As a baseline that is (you can always help more).
Some are in families that don't need help. However, I know people that are part of a family where they are clearly the most educated person and also in a minority within their family of being able to properly read and write. Governmental institutions can be a real hazard, even if they are accomodating. When you don't have decent reading and writing skills everything of that sort is tough.
Then, there are people who clearly have poor people within their families. I mean all kinds of poor people: poor in mind, poor in spirit or poor in finances (or all three). In some cases money will solve the problem. In most cases I don't think it will. But giving them some smart attention may at least alleviate some of their suffering. I say smart attention because people who have all three could hurt you if you do not watch out.
I try to do this and find it hard. But I also think it's a better use of my time because it shows the real difficulty of solving problems for people in need. Just giving money away abstracts you away from that process. And as a bonus, they are my family :)
I'm noticing that slowly but surely it is also easier to help people that I don't know. Since it becomes easier to empathize to their situations, because I've seen them more close up.
> Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.
Taking care of your family is definitely a priority. I would also encourage supporting local charities and getting involved with the work too (ie volunteer days).
You're right that its not just about the money, it just happens to be a resource that a lot of us have available, and merely giving can be a good place to start.
Governments have taken upon themselves to help those in need, and taken from the population to do so. Could one not argue that a certain proportion of your income has already gone to charity? (presuming you're paying income taxes)
Also I think that the evidence doesn't really support the idea that having too much money is bad for your happiness.
I would say that having no debt, or at least having manageable debt, along with knowing you are saving enough for retirement, and making enough that you don't have to second-guess if you can afford every purchase you make, is the real cutoff.
For example, if you don't have mortgage debt then you are probably renting. So I consider mortgage "manageable" debt, along with any short-term debt that you can pay off within a year.
The other thing to consider, is life is full of stress-inducing "things" (situations, people, material objects, etc). Often times throwing money at the stress makes the stress lower or go away. So if you make enough where you can throw money at most of your stress and not break the bank, then that would greatly impact your happiness.
Robots are miserably bad at this, so far.
Some kind of organization is ideal, because I often live out of the clean laundry hamper and it's a chore to hunt for stuff every time you need clothes.
With a human you never have to worry about software upgrades, charging batteries, or wake up in a cold sweat in fear of your hired help violating Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics.
Well, that could mean that robots may too violate the laws of robotics!
I open a car factory. It is fully automated.
See?
Besides, the original question is totally boring if you allow human automation. Of course I can hire someone to do labour. No one needs that explained to them.
Cooking, cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, driving to places, filling out tax returns, shopping for clothes or household goods....
Fully automated solutions for any of the above either do not exist or are prohibitively expensive.
The alternatives are not prohibitively expensive, on the contrary. You have restaurants, apartments, parks and public transport as alternatives.
It seems to me that quite some people here want to get rich to afford hiring people to manage things that they don't actually want to own. That's why I think more money doesn't make you more happy, as happiness comes from the sense of accomplishment, not from being able to command an army of workers to work on things you don't care about.
That's often due to them actually wanting those things but not for themselves but for showing them off as status markers.
I'd still hate the tax returns, but others like cooking and mowing I enjoy when I'm free of time constraints.
If you no longer have to work, and you choose not to work because your current job isn't ideal, it can be hard to get the motivation to search for a new job. At the same time, without work, it can be hard to find purpose.
So you might be stuck in a situation where you aren't working and struggling to find meaning.
There are plenty of financial reasons, but isn't that what we're talking about? If you have enough money that you don't have to work for the rest of your life, you probably have enough money that you can spend your time on whatever act of creation you find fulfilling.
Purpose without existential risk of failure is not usually perceived as genuine.
If you have enough money and only put a fraction of it to use, you might create things, but you're never really risking anything. I'd wager more people join the military for purpose than the local paintball team, not despite but because the former really puts your life at risk.
Says who? That may be associated with lutheran ethics of hard work, but doesn't look like an universal nor an essential requirement. Was Mother Theresa devoid of purpose because there's no way she could fail at taking care of people?
That's just as common in many other non-Western cultures, such as Japan, South Korea, China. All three are materialistic and work-centric. Japan has extreme work identity, South Korea is barely a notch lower than Japan on that. Both put the US - and the entire West - to shame on work-centric life (for better or worse depending on your views on such things). China today is one of the greatest materialistic work cultures that has ever existed. You see it in all of China's markets and businesses today, and the move from rural to urban to seek greater materialism and elevated work identity. It's an intense fever there, eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/china-plans-bu...
One of them was the president of an insurance company and he was ousted in a Machiavellian political maneuver, because he fully expected to hold that position until his health failed him or he died at the post.
You can see it in the current crop of 80-year old politicians in my country. One of them wants to go up for re-election and he would be in power until he was 90 years old...
If you have financial independence, you have the choice to work or not, and if you do work, to do whatever work you find most meaningful.
Without financial independence, you have no choice but to work, and for the vast majority of people without financial independence there isn't much choice of what kind of work to do either.
Volunteering and creative experimentation fills that gap just fine.
That's certainly the line that society wants people to believe. A lot of people want a job that gives them a sense of purpose, but I'd be surprised if as much as 2% of the workforce think their job gives them a sense of purpose right now. I think we're just lucky that the majority of people don't question whether or not their job is ultimately necessary, and choose not to bother when they realise it's a waste of time.
The next level above financial independence is financial freedom (you can just get whatever you want, from shoes to houses) - off the top of my head I would guess this is probably around the 0.01%, which would be about 32k people in the USA. As an example of freedom, these people can buy nationality and avoid immigration limitations (going rate is ~$1-5m).
The article is way off just comparing salaries. There are 3 social classes in terms of having a meaningful lifestyle distinction - those who have to work for someone else, those who don't, and those who have full freedom to decide where they go and what they do each day. All they did was compare a bunch of people in the same social class (somewhat shockingly the Romans considered this equivalent to a slave class).
J suspect that ceteris paribus, being frugal reduces happiness - by definition, it's not getting things you want to get.
Once you can afford something that was way out of reach before, you buy it and after the first few moments you realize it is not as great as you expected. Do this a few times, and you'll learn what is important. The more wealthy people I know do have a slightly above average car and house, but IME the biggest difference is that they have far more extreme - both in amount and in price - experiences, i.e. weekend trips, fine wining and dining etc.
Higher earners tend to just upgrade and spend more (apartment, clothes, restaurants, hotels etc), and aren't really living that differently - that lifestyle can certainly soak up maximum income achievable in a salaried job.
I think this is what the article inadvertently pointed to, that the higher salaries could lead to a sense of frustration that nothing really changed.
No, it's before tax income.
Income Variables. Participants were asked to report monthly household income rather than yearly income to facilitate responding. Respondents were asked the question, “What is your total monthly household income in [local currency], before taxes? Please include income from wages and salaries, remittances from family members living elsewhere, farming, and all other sources.” Households were defined as a person’s home that had its own cooking facilities, which could have been anything ranging from a one-room flat to a single house.
From the study's supplementary information: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
Dollars are also represented as International Dollars, which are adjusted for the local purchasing power, expressed in units equivalent to one USD in the US.
I'm my parents' last child and am soon to graduate Grad school and enter 'the working world'. I can definitely feel their relief in knowing decades of parental sacrifices and obligations have paid off and finally come to an end.
Savour that pride and relief -- you've earned it.
Many people I have talked with about happiness are really talking about non-anxiety. Basically defining being 'happy' as having zero anxiety and being 'un-happy' as worrying about (anxious) one or more things.
In that model not having debt relieves future obligation anxiety, owning a house addresses 'where will I live' anxiety, savings address 'what if something comes up' anxiety etc.
If that model held true for the survey participants then once you had enough income to offset your anxieties you would not get any more 'happy'.
Raise the baseline too high and you may never reach it, and never be happy, despite having a good life. Is that what you want?
Because it can be. Because we’re the richest country in the world and yet for some reason we force people into bankruptcy because they didn’t have health insurance on the day they had a medical emergency.
I want:
1. People not to have to worry about seeing a doctor because they can’t afford it.
2. People not to have to worry about having shelter.
3. People not to have to worry about where their next meal will come from.
4. People to be able to provide a solid, basic, decent life for themselves and their families.
5. People to be able receive an education without it being onerously expensive.
Among other things.
I don’t think these are intractable problems for a civilization that sent people to the moon, perform open heart surgery, and deliver energy consistently and safely to millions of people.
If you're always questioning if you're happy enough, you'll never truly reach happiness.
So one obtains shelter, and healthcare, and an education, and all those things you listed. And they're still not happy? If cake is the baseline, is more icing going to make that much better?
I have observed that people who reach that state aren't looking for "more money" so much as they are looking for something that is more fulfilling for them personally. And the article observes that as well.
Are you? When I just Googled "richest country in the world", not a single result placed the US in #1.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the median salary in the US was higher than the median salary in Luxembourg/Ireland/Singapore/Brunei/oil-rich-middle-east. Along with a lower tax burden resulting in higher net pay.
This sums up pretty much.
It is not the Money ($) i need. But what I think is rather basic things to live.
A place called Home. It doesn't have to be free, it could be even be rented that I dont own it. But it should be affordable, without being anxious about Landlord kicking you out, or hike the rent to a ridiculous level so you cant continue to live. It shouldn't take your entire working life, 25 - 30 years of continuously working and giving 40% of your salary, what if you are sick in between this 30 years? What if you were fired? This whole living burden is what causes people anxious, and hence do not risk into taking another higher paid job and move up the ladder. The stagnation of wages.
I dont need a house, just a small flat, 150 Square Feet will do, with an open kitchen and a small toilet and shower. The whole flat is probably the size of many Americans's houses bath room. Hopefully along with Water pipes that doesn't include heavy metal like lead poisoning, hot water system that could shower longer then 3 min in Winter. Is that too much to ask for? I am not calling for free housing, but one that is affordable.
Food is Cheap, I used to live in UK with less then 1.5 pound budget per day. Good Quality clothes are actually not expensive in terms of production cost, most are rent, labour and marketing. And Medical is affordable if you have insurance.
So Food, Medical and Clothes are actually easily affordable in most developed countries. ( Name be one place that it isn't ) As long as you have a job. Any job in fact, even labour intensive job or lower end jobs could easily afford all of these.
So out of all the basic needs in Maslow thoery, shelter is the most expensive, most unaffordable, and also most anti competitive. But all government are very happy with that, as it is basically modern slavery.
After the house it's a bigger house, after the fancy car it's a super fancy car, and then a pilot's license, then co-owning a private plane, then your own one, etc.
When you get enough for the house you move into a new neighborhood where there's always someone richer than you, and when you get enough for that you won't buy his, but a similar one in a fancier neighborhood because you don't want to live with the plebs in the small houses.
This problem can't be solved before we stop measuring ourselves by money. Unfortunately that solution is always paired with being to accomodating on salary negotiations. If I stop caring about money, no one will willingly pay me more, even if I might "deserve it".
I definitely haven't solved it, but my goal is being content with what I have, while not being a doormat, financially. I'm better at the latter than the former.
I lived back in communist Eastern Europe and I can assure you nobody was content in any way. It was a nightmare.
You have to realize how fortunate you are. Everyone in your country is taken care of. Screw the high salaries of Amercians, they're not worth it
At face value, this seems very natural. However I think a lot could be gained by tackling the necessity of even asking that question.
Nietzsche has this really interesting point that every philosopher since Plato was most interested in “the truth” without seriously considering if “the truth” was a bad thing, worth all the effort, or perhaps not as valuable as other concepts.
In the same way, a lot of religions invert the happiness question, to great effect. In Christianity, suffering is turned into a much more worthwhile and meaningful pursuit; other religions distance themselves from happiness and instead take more stoic and detachment-based paths. All of them don’t tend to address “maximizing happiness” though because I think, being the product of thousands of years of experience, any religion that tried to do that failed in the face of life and history and would not succeed in gathering adherents.
Can you elaborate on that? not a christian, just curious.
I'm not particularly good at actual theology, and I'm sure different sects of Christianity have different interpretations, but as I understand it, because of Christ's sacrifice, personal suffering is seen as something noble, or even venerable. I think it's easy to take this too far (e.g. people not accepting help because it's "noble" to suffer, or that they "deserve it"), but I digress.
As an example, you work and get paid (a form of misery because you don't have control over your own time), or you don't work and have all the time you want in the day (the misery is you are hungry cold and wet).
I found that self sacrifice in relationships almost always pays off, and is very biblically based concept. For example, being patient with a spouse you are angry with actually hurts emotionally (chosen misery), but you resolve things this way. The opposite would be to blame or fight back, and extend or lose control of the misery (ie, forced on you).
I've learned to chose my misery. Save now (misery chosen), spend now (misery forced later), etc... Maybe suffering would work equally well with misery.
> Slang meaning "money" dates from 1940s, but compare breadwinner, and bread as "one's livelihood" dates to 1719. Bread and circuses (1914) is from Latin, in reference to food and entertainment provided by the government to keep the populace content. "Duas tantum res anxius optat, Panem et circenses" [Juvenal, Sat. x.80].
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-...
...which by the way I find extremely plausible, just judging by the fact that most of our senses (hearing volume & frequency, light intensity, etc.) are perceived in a logarithmic way.
That being said, my personal opinion is that money does not make people happy, but it definitely prevents a lot of causes of unhappiness.
I generally have found this to be a tautology. Being less unhappy means being more happy. In fact, I've found that being content with things has improved my happiness significantly.
It's not just about maximizing every positive experience, but minifying the negatives as well.
This is another great link on debunking popsci like 75K is where people are happy sort of headlines that points to your point.
If it's truly a logarithmic relationship (rather than asymptotic), this would imply that billionaires are an order of magnitude happier than everyone else.
log(10,000) is 4
That doesn't seem to be 4 times as happy.
What a joke.
A person making 500k or more or someone with high net worth is going to have a more full life (not needing to work, help community, help family)
But think about it: A single person making $105k is just touching the top 10% of income earners in the US: https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
Having spent some time in about that bracket in an average cost-of-living area (earned slightly more, but I'd spent the previous few years being a broke grad student), I can attest that it felt amazingly rich - there were few things I would have done with more money. My life satisfaction came from my job, my relationships, and my hobbies.
There's a lot of evidence supporting the general conclusion that happiness is either logarithmic in income, or asymptotic after a point. Just blowing it off as "a joke" doesn't hold water. There's also considerable evidence that things like friendships, family, good relationships with neighbors, etc., are much more important contributors to happiness than income.
We're talking about human happiness, the capacity for love, freedom, and self actualization. Happiness.
We're not talking about buying overpriced liabilities such as fancy cars, furniture and clothes.
I make over 150k and it's awful working 160 hours a month.
Think about why this study is messed up:
Wage earners spend the Best part of day typically indoors, taking orders from another person.
Wage earners send their children to be taken care of by strangers.
Wage earners send their kids to the zombie factory (public schools)
The fact is that someone with a few million can:
- take care of their own children/babies - educate their own children - take care of their aging parents - take care of sick relatives - can explore the world
Don't tell me that having 2M in the bank will not make you, your family, and neighborhood FAR "happier" than someone making 300k in wage slavery.
I can tell you for a FACT that making that much money (millions) will objectively lead to higher quality of life for people and their families.
I'm personally working hard now to accumulate several investment properties and live free for life so that I can retire before 40 so that:
- I can raise my kids - help parents, family, friends - explore world and learn - focus all my free time on healthy living - get best medical treatments
You damn right it will make me happier to be able to do yoga 3 times a day, raising my kids and also building cool shit without Having to answer to a boss.
You know it's true that lots of money makes you immeasurably more fulfilled. Don't listen to socialist lies that you only need some bullshit 105k (<75k after tax)
Few can produce ground-breaking ideas or are lucky enough to actually earn a million dollars quickly (as opposed to stealing it).
I would be an order of magnitude happier if I could work on my own projects instead of working for someone else. There's a reason people do side-hustles and punish themselves trying to get something going outside of their normal $100k salary... it's for the hope of having true financial freedom. The study is correct that $100k vs $150k doesn't make much difference at all... but if I had $1 million in a bank it would be a huge difference.
Socialists were the first and the main critics of Wage Slavery. More recently, you have the Situationist movement, which coined the slogan "Ne Travaillez Jamais!" (Never Work!) and has a body of work criticizing this model (both in capitalist and in marxist-leninist countries).
Anyone saying you "only need 105k" is not a socialist.
Oh, and the better kicker: I was even happier in grad school when I was earning $24k/year. One of the happiest times of my life. That doesn't apply to everyone's grad school experience, but for me, it was awesome. Lived in a shitty apartment above central square in one of the more expensive regions of the country (hi, Cambridge, still love you but glad I don't have to deal with your housing market). My roommates and officemates at work have become life-long friends.
I will indeed tell you that having 2M in the bank has been a much smaller factor in my happiness than almost anything else, particularly the effect of the people in my life. My day-to-day happiness is much more affected by whether I got a good night's sleep, whether my children are healthy, whether my wife and I are communicating well, whether I'm healthy and able to do the things I like or whether I've once again managed to injure myself pretending I'm 24 instead of 42. :-)
(I'm not unsympathetic to the desire for FI, btw -- quite the opposite. But I've noticed that I want it primarily in a theoretical way, for the comfort in knowing I could quit, not because I actually want to quit. Yes, I'm lucky that I have .. multiple .. jobs that I absolutely love, but I've also chosen to accept a 66% paycut to work in a job I love instead of blasting to FI in industry, and I'm good with that. Sometimes it annoys me and I go do some consulting or bitcoin mining to help make up the difference. :-)
If your earning $200k and sweating bullets to keep a high pressure job your not going to be as happy as the $120k job for life middle management. Also as the higher your income goes the few jobs at they bracket exist.
Whereas if the $200k job is for a person largely guaranteed a job at that pay somewhere I feel that would provide more opportunity to do things you like and increase happiness.
I've come across of a few of these studies. Has anyone separated out 'income security'?
What I'm lacking is a thorough study of determinants and causal effects. Not just intuition that we're satiated, but something deeper.
For example, where is the study that compares a $200k wage earner vs a $200k capital earner, to provide indications that money merely be an approximation for 'freedom' or 'lower stress'.
Where's the study that looks at whether diminishing returns to happiness from money are due to social isolation the richer you get? i.e. making $100k a year makes you look great in an $80k crowd, and still allows you to mingle with a $40k crowd. But making $5m a year detaches you completely from being able to have meaningful relationships with 95% of people without eventually being viewed as different, unable to understand their daily plight and always doubting whether people envy you or dislike you.
I don't know if any of those things are true, but they are interesting to investigate. Not another superficial article talking about 'researchers have found the most basic correlation and share superficial 100 year old intuitive ideas about why that might be which they never investigated'.
From a common sense standpoint, it's not so much that having money makes you happy, but having to worry about money definitely can make you unhappy.
Probably bad analogy: Eating a meal that I'd rate 9/10 doesn't make me much happier than a meal that's 8/10, but having to worry about whether I'm going to be able to eat today at all would definitely make me sad.
For example, what if being predisposed to certain kinds of anxiety tend to cause one to both make more money in order to have more security, and never be satisfied with that security?
It very obviously can. I'm happy when I'm not living in a ditch. When I'm warm in Winter. When I have food and I'm not afraid of starving to death. When I can afford to pay my rent or mortgage. And those are the primitives. I'm extremely happy when I can spend a month at the beach (say I live in the mountains or midwest), or hop on a plane and enjoy the glorious creations of cultures from Paris to Rome to Tokyo to Buenos Aires.
Up to a point? I call bullshit on that too. That's a lack of creativity. Assuming we're not talking "point" = the scale of the universe or something beyond reasonable human potential. I'd be very happy spending my life trying to figure out how to benefit humanity with the $127 billion Bezos is sitting on. It'd be an immense joy, it'd be challenging, it'd be rewarding, it would fundamentally further my happiness.
There are various types of personal happiness, some are more core than others. Articles that discuss the up to a point benefits of money always collapse due to that.
Vastly under the radar yet a perfect fit for his boating interests.
Sounds like satiation point is where the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy have been satisfied.
This article [0] makes the point that mastery, belonging, and autonomy contribute to happiness, as well as the worldview of abundance vs one of scarcity.
[0] Why so many smart people aren't happy https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/why-so-...
Not to mention subject to massive binning effect. You might have binned single people with married couples with kids, both of which have different requirements.
For example; I want a new PC, so I work for 6 months working and thinking on that new pc. Then finally, when I have enough money to buy it and do it, I love it. The effort that cost me gives it an extra value to me. Exactly like when you worked as a kid for the game you really wanted to have. Didn't matter if the game ended being horrible, for you that game was special, and also you could continue playing it after some years with nostalgia feelings.
If I have enough money, this effort is allmost zero. At the moment i get a new need i could satisfy it.
Of course, this is just another hypothesis, and could explain why some people says aren't happier with more money, probably they want something harder to get and still achievable with money/work.
What's interesting is that there's no mainstream concept for not-materially-insecure. Perhaps, if there were, it would turn into a demand by the population. And we can't have that.
The best indicator of happiness related to income I have seen concluded that the income is relative to the income of your peers: if they make more money, you will be less happy, if they make less, you will be more happy. This goes well with the idea that people feel more fortunate when they are around people who are less fortunate.
In short, if you want to feel happy about your life, hang out around people who earn less.
This doesn't match my experience at all. I feel best when I'm around those who are equal to me (in both income and wealth, because income alone is kind of less interesting).
It's an empathy/social norms thing. I work about half the year, sometimes less, and spend the rest of the year on a mix of personal projects and travel.
Explaining that to someone who works a checkout 50 hours a week, who learns their rota a week out, and might have a few weeks off in a year, is frustrating. (I was there, once).
It doesn't make me feel lucky - it makes me feel that most people are in a terrible place - it makes me unwilling to engage socially for fear of appearing an out of touch prat (the reality is that I'm almost too in-touch...!)
I've always wanted nicer things-not because I have to compete with my neighbor, though...
There are two very important things to make you happy:
1. Reason and Prospect
2. Freedom (to execute)
Money can increase your level of Freedom (e.g. so you don't have to spend your time working for someone else). A Reason doesn't have to be the reason of your life. It just has to be something you want to accomplish (be rich; be a good parent; be admired; etc.) in combination with an idea to get there (prospect).
- family size.
- at around $2-5 Million in assets you could live off the interest and do what you want for work or not.
- a wise man.
There's not one number. The number is relative to where you live.
Here's a quote I like:
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute — and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." A. Einstein
It doesn't fit 100% but you get the idea.
Is there anyone who is happy 24/7/365?
Why is there such measurement of happiness? When it cannot really be measured.
Some times when there is one kid playing with me i am happy and when some times there are 10 kids around me screaming i am not happy.
I think these days we really need a down vote and dislike buttons as i don't understand why money and time is being wasted into such misleading research efforts.
You can be happy with $0 and happy with $1,000,000. and also you can be not happy with $0 and not happy with $1,000,000.
It is the amount of time you are happy, and i don't think anyone on this planet can be happy 24/7/365.
The number of happy moments may be something that is measurable but that also cannot be tied to any other factor.
I think if the AI is built on top of such false big data then its just going to result into artificial stupidity.
We don't need more of those.
Second, because my experiences with many other people in my wealth/income bracket have driven me to try to avoid being anything like them or having other people view me the way I view some of them.
"Are you happy?" is such a first-world-problems question. I'd settle for being able to answer "yes" to "are your basic needs met?" for myself and my family in perpetuity...
I don't think the study properly correlates to 'happiness'. As the article describes, it's more like 'satisfaction'. These are not the same [0]
[0]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-distinction-between-happin...
1) Most people don’t know how to buy more happiness past some point.
2) There’s also a point at which you’re ridiculously ecstatic 24/7, so you’re really more interested in self-actualization than “happiness”.
I should clarify that I don’t yet know a good way to get instant long-term happiness, there is some work and time involved.
Personally, I’m deeply skeptical of any psychology or sociology research that relies on magic numbers like “105,000”. As far as I can tell, the study doesn’t even account for cost of living.
80% of people in the US make less than $75k. the idea that people experience diminishing returns on income is a strong argument in favor of redistribution, and is a couple notches more sophisticated than just saying outright that rich people don't deserve what they have. how many people are likely to seriously interrogate the claim that they deserve more than they are paid and/or would use it more efficiently?
You could feel rich in a poor area with your brand new Camry and feel poor in the Hamptons with your brand new Mercedes.
I guess the author is really satisfied with his life. I'd give myself no more than 5.