If money fails to buy joy for you, then you’re probably spending it the wrong way
Story Highlights
- It is various different ways that happiness could be measured
- Happiness that we get moment-by-moment is somewhat consequence of the decisions we make regarding money and time.
- Money spent for nurturing any social ties could be considered as being spent well.
The economy looks buoyant in this spring with Dow Jones average, that’s industrial, closing at over 15,000 for first time. Unfortunately, paycheck are stuck in winter doldrums still, even though paychecks are the indicator of economy most people do care about. After adjusting for inflation, an average worker can now make less than in the year 2009.
Adding more to this pain, one new study of Brookings Institution debunks folk wisdom which is that if there’s more money, there’d be problems aplenty. The researchers, Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, found out that it is the richer people who are likely to be happy more than the ones earning less.
This was thought to be in direct contrast to the well-publicized study in 2010 that claimed money doesn’t cause people to become happy (in US) past $75,000 of household income in a year.
So answering the question about whether money does buy happiness is complicated, as it is happiness which is complicated. Though if the money is not buying happiness for you, this is widely-known: you’re probably spending it wrong, and there’re moves that could be made to have this changed, even in times of tepid economy.
One thing to be known about happiness could be the fact that it is in many different ways it could be measured.
When the winner of Nobel Prize for economics, Daniel Kahneman, and from Princeton, Angus Deaton set out for answering the question that whether money does buy happiness, they had household income plotted against variables like how much was the stress that people feel and whether people laughed or smiled much the last day. With this, it was shown that even though people who have household incomes above $75,000 for a year laugh and smile, they experience stress as well, and such equilibrium doesn’t tend to change a lot as one earns more.
Looking on other side, the time that Deaton and Kahneman looked at question on how people did feel about their lives overall , they found that this kept on rising with income that is over $120,000 each year.
Curiously, some headlines about 2010 Deaton and Kahneman study showed another finding that the money buys this other happiness form. Study by Wolfer and Stevenson confirmed this.
A Gallup poll analyzed by them had only 23 out of the 1014 people who have household incomes above $250,000 in a year. But the ones with incomes ranging from $250,000 to $500,000 said that they were quite satisfied with the lives they were leading, which is a much higher proportion compared to the ones having middle-class incomes. All the 8 respondents to survey having annual incomes above $500,000 consider themselves to be very happy.
In order to be really sure, these measures for happiness raise a lot of questions. Are you only happy because it is you saying that you are? Or is the answer to the question whether the number of times that you did laugh last day better yardstick? This we know: Happiness that we get moment-by-moment is somewhat consequence of the decisions we make regarding money and time.
One study that was published in 2004, many working women at Texas were asked to tell how they had felt during the different points that occurred during those days. Commuting was at the bottom of happiness scale. So what basically matters is how you spend the money you have. Time managing is one other factor to give you happiness, that is, utilizing it in the best possible way and also saving it for enjoyment.
Gretchen Rubin wrote that the money spent to nurture social ties happens to be the money well-spent.
Research has also found that having the money spent on others scores much big mood boost comparing to spending it on one’s own self, for instance, treating a friend at lunch.