Current Events > How much money does it take to buy happiness? For Americans it's $105k a year

(+) Yeah! (+)

Apparently anyway.

https://qz.com/1211957/how-much-money-do-people-need-to-be-happy/

Take three people. All are unmarried, 33-year-old women who live in the United States. One makes an annual salary of $40,000, another makes $120,000, and the third makes $200,000. Who do you think is the happiest?

According to a recently released study (paywall) in the burgeoning field of happiness research, the two higher-earning women are likely to report more satisfaction with their lives than the one who makes $40,000. But, perhaps surprisingly, the psychologists who conducted the study find that the one making $200,000 is probably no happier than the one making $120,000. This is because both the $120,000 and $200,000 women have incomes above $105,000, which according to their research is the point at which greater household income in the US is not associated with greater happiness. The technical term for this cutoff is the income satiation point.

The study is based on a life-satisfaction survey conducted on over 1 million people as part of the Gallup World Poll. Respondents across the world were asked to rate their lives on a scale of 0-10, where 0 is the worst possible life and 10 is the best possible life. (This author would give himself an eight.)

The researchers analyzed the relationship between this score and household income. They find that in every region of the world, after accounting for a persons age, gender, and marital status, people with higher incomes are happier. But they also find that there is a level of income at which happiness no longer increases with more money. This varies by region, with Australia and New Zealand the highest and Latin America and the Caribbean the lowest. They even find some evidence that in certain places, when incomes rise above the cutoff level, life satisfaction gets lower.

These psychologists, from Purdue University and the University of Virginia, are not the first to study how income relates to life satisfaction. In 2010, the Nobel prize-winning duo of economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, famously found that the satiation point for US households was about $75,000 (about $84,000 in 2016 dollars). This new research improves on Deaton and Kahnemans work, because the data is able to account for the number of people in a household, has more detailed income numbers, and includes responses from many more countries.

And no America isn't the highest country, surprisingly there's a few areas higher. Of course this is average and places like SF and NYC aren't going to apply to $105k a year.
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how much do doggos cost
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makes sense

a jump from 120k to 200k is also likely a lot more stress at work without really changing your life too much if you're good with money. or at least not as much as going from 40 to 120 would
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I remember a few years ago some study saying that this amount was around 75k
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DifferentialEquation posted...

I remember a few years ago some study saying that this amount was around 75k

It's in the op
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