Hacker News Reader

Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

It's well known since ancient times that money doesn't buy happiness.

That’s just what people with money tell the people without money to stop them from rioting. We have research that suggests that money indeed does buy happiness.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...

There are exceptions of course. Some people are just predisposed to being unhappy no matter the circumstances, but generally speaking more money directly correlates to increased life contentment.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. As I understand it, happiness increases for most people as their income increases. However, this doesn't mean that a person is happy overall since there are other factors. So, it's not that money can buy happiness in a binary sense, but it's a factor and often a significant one.

The article even ends with this quote from one of the authors of the study (emphasis added):

“Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit.”

> Specifically, for the least happy group, happiness rises with income until $100,000, then shows no further increase as income grows. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.

Exactly. There are other things you can do to be happy and some personalities are simply miserable, but there's nobody who's better off with less money. I'd be curious to see if this holds in societies with better social safety nets for whom money isn't as directly tied to survival or options in how to live.

And it only takes an ounce more wisdom to recall this phrase: "Money can't buy happiness, but it helps."

Money can’t buy happiness, but being broke will certainly make you unhappy

Money buys you Freedom. A much more general category theory type framing.

Money fills your Maslow. After that, you are responsible for your happiness. And there sure are a lot of rich people who aren't very happy.

Or as Daniel Tosh put it:

"It buys a WaveRunner. You ever seen a sad person on a WaveRunner?"

These comment sections are getting more and more useless by the day.

Maybe not, but poverty definitely causes unhappiness

Maybe but this happiness chart seems to reflect economic recessions (including some unofficial ones)

Money doesn’t buy happiness but it does buy groceries, day care, car insurance, etc.

The thing is that Americans don’t have much money. A few billion and millionaires skew the numbers horribly.

The average American ain’t doing very well by OECD standards… literally bottom of the ladder.

Not if you pop in to the HN thread for that article, funnily enough.

It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the grocery store" or "having to check how much money's in the account before you start pumping gas") and credible safety from various very-real threats (e.g. homelessness, not being able to afford important medical treatment). Like, it's extremely good at that.

It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).

Not really the standard line anymore. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...

And little money buys even less. What’s your point?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com