And yet it doesn't make the top 20 in happiness.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Really makes you think.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Really makes you think.
I now make $215K/year and can spend $500 on a really nice dinner on a whim for me and my wife and not even feel the need to budget for it. I can have a top-of-the-line gaming PC and play all my games at 100+ fps with maximum detail settings.
I'm a fuckton happier now than then.
The way I see it, there are really only two people that truly believe (or at least claim to believe) that money doesn't buy happiness:
1. Business owners that use it as an excuse to keep wages low. Just convince the workers that a higher wage won't make them happier!
2. Poor people that tell it to themselves to cope with being poor.
Certainly, you reach a point of diminishing returns. $100M won't make you 10x as happy as $10M. But I know there's some article that's been passed around a LOT that says the diminishing returns begins at $70K/year, and that's just flat out wrong. $70K/year won't even buy a house in most cities.
Here's another anecdote: many ultra-rich people have committed suicide because they were unhappy. If money bought happiness, they wouldn't have done it.
Happiness is a complex thing. You can visit remote third-world villages and find people living very difficult lives yet very happy because that's all they know and don't bother comparing their situation with others.
US ranks pretty high in GDP-per-capita. Given the remaining factors, I imagine the obesity rate and intensified political polarization is skewing the result. The perceptions might be informed in large part by rate of consumption of news media content on social media (other developed countries have this problem, but lesser polarization may mute the impact).
Among good news is that the obesity rate has stalled in recent years, iirc.