Monday, December 27, 2010 at 10:08PM BEST of KMOB in 2010: News flash...Money CAN buy happiness! That is, up to a point. Sort of.
[The week between Christmas and New Year's reprises some of the most popular and commented-on blogs of 2010. Here's the first of five!]
The age-old question: are wealth and happiness related?
For people in the world of commerce it's a particularly compelling issue--will the accumulation of money make you content? In the last analysis, the amassing of money represents the fundamental measure of success in the world of free enterprise and commerce, if not for people, certainly for the enterprise. Other professions have other superordinate goals as their reason for being--for medicine it is health, for law it is justice, for educators, it is the acquisition of knowledge. But in business, money is the vehicle of success.
There are new findings to consider.
For many people--as separate from commercial enterprises--the acquisition of money is similarly thought to be a measure of success and what produces happiness, the more you get the happier one is. Or so the common belief goes. But the question for many is: It this really true? A new study by Daniel Kahneman with the Center for Health and Well-being at Princeton University sheds some light on the matter.
In his recent study conducted by the Gallup Organization of 450,000 subjects, produced some interesting results: It seems that there are two aspects of subjective contentment, one called emotional well-being and one called life evaluation. Emotional well-being is associated with the quality of a person's everyday life events like feelings of joy, stress, sadness, anger, etc.; life evaluation points to the reflections an individual has when they think about their life. It seems, in short, that happiness is really an notion that is made of these two parts.
And the envelope, please...
So, Mr. Kahneman's study asked the question of a large number of people as to whether money buys happiness on each of these two measures of well-being. You might be surprised at the findings...
[1] A person's income [and education] are closely linked to a person's life evaluations;
[2] But an individual's daily emotions are kind of linked to income, but, in fact, more closely associated with--and are predicted better by--health, care-giving, loneliness and smoking.
What's more, there are, indeed, limits to how much emotional well-being rises with increased income: it seems that an annual income of about $75,000 represents the plateau for happiness-to-income-generation; after $75,000 happiness doesn't grow.
So what's the answer to the question?
So, in short, happiness may be related to income--at least in part! Positive life evaluations rise steadily with increased income [and education], but not so much for emotional well-being. Emotional happiness does rise, but only to a point--and then there's no relationship!
So the answer to the question, Can money buy one happiness?, is...
Yes, in part, but only to a point. Sort of.
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