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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

This research says nothing of the sort.

It identifies a correlation between income levels and life satisfaction. It is by no means trivial to assume the causal direction. People with high incomes are far more likely to be in satisfying careers, far more likely to have had a stable childhood and a good education. With the exception of the oil-rich Arab states, high income tends to be a result of a long period of good governance.

This data could indicate that money does indeed buy happiness, or it could indicate that the factors that create life satisfaction also tend to increase earning power. It would be reasonable to assume that it's probably a bit of both.

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The data also literally doesn't say it. Sneaky of them to plot income on a log scale so you don't see diminishing returns.

Wow, that's sneaky indeed. The writer of the article doesn't seem to realize.

"If extra income didn't matter for well-being, you'd expect the line to flatten. Instead, it steepens."

Yeah, a log scale on the x axis will do that...

Yeah, they clearly don't realize that, that's why the article says, "Statistical note: This graph is logarithmic. That means doubling your income from $1,000 to $2,000 raises satisfaction by the same amount as doubling your income from $10,000 to $20,000."

Sorry, I read too quickly and missed that. In that case, I suppose the writer does realize that it's a log scale, but proceeds to make incorrect inferences from the slope of the line anyway, which is even more baffling.

What kind of correct inference could possibly be drawn? The data is arbitrarily scaled to begin with. By criticizing the interpretation of the log graph, it seems to me you've implicitly accepted that the authors' quantification of happiness is a meaningful measure, that it makes sense to say that one level of happiness is twice as much as another and that asking someone to imagine a ladder can establish that.

Tucked away in a footnote in the paper: "We should add a caveat, that this inference of 'diminishing marginal well-being' requires taking a stronger stand on the appropriate cardinalization of subjective well-being (Oswald 2008)." You say caveat, I say giant ontological turd hitting the fan...

Yes, exactly. However it does seem to shatter the myth that "people are happy about their lives in poor countries", which is the rhetoric we tend to hear every time someone wants to make a case against materialism in developed world.

Yup.

But to push my own biased opinion, I've often found that people who have positive attitudes, despite adversity, often do better in life-- both in happiness and relationships and career success.

Indeed. Another likely link is that income is often interpreted as status/standing in society. So the happiness might just as well be due to respect/esteem.

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