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You may be interested in this newer paper, reconciling the work of Killingsworth and Kahneman & Deaton. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

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I work in this area and I really dislike it when happiness is plotted against income only on a log scale, as is done here. The log scale effectively conceals the flattening-out of the relationship, which is the thing that shows you how progressive taxation + redistribution make the average person better off.

Whether it's a straight line up to $75K followed by a flat line from there on, or a curved (log) relationship all the way up, seems to me to make rather little difference.

Fig 2 of [1] shows high variance of happiness while income variation has only a small effect. There is roughly a 5 % (percent it is?) happiness delta for an income delta of about $ 500.000. However, the happiness delta between the different happiness levels is about 25 %.

Would “Income and emotional well-being: It doesn’t really matter” be a better title for the study? Or do I miss something?

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120#fig02

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