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> money has no effect on happiness past a certain point

The question is where that "certain point" is. Obviously happiness as measured on a finite scale must level off somewhere. But apparently "somewhere" is north of $128k/yr.

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No, the models proposed by Easterlin is a fundamentally different model of happiness economics than the one proposed by the researchers in the article (I updated my comment to flesh this out a bit). Basically, Easterlin's research hints that happiness increases with income only at a cross-sectional level (by comparing different people at a given time) but not at the longitudinal level (the same people wrt to their changes in income). What I'm saying is that maybe the way the question is framed has a fundamental effect on the way people would rate their happiness: "I rate 7/10 in Happiness vs. I'm happy but less than if I made double the money".

I agree. The first thing I thought was that this framing is really just showing people think they'll be happier with more money, which is the orthodox that the 70K study claims to refute.

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