This is one of the most absurd tropes in capitalist societies where you literally need money just to exist. No only that, but money literally buys happiness because you can pay other people money to do things you don’t want to do, and that frees your time to spend on things you enjoy doing.
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I remember back in the 90s John Stossel did a piece on money and happiness, and he complained that surveys show that happiness stops increasing somewhere around 60-80K per year income, so clearly money does not buy happiness.
Median household income at the time was about $30K per year.
Clearly having too much money doesn’t buy happiness, but having enough money to live comfortably does. It’s also important to account for inflation and other cost of living increases when considering household income.
Clearly having too much money doesn’t buy happiness
I don’t think that has been demonstrated. Are the super-rich, on balance, the same happiness compared to the merely middle-class?
It’s also important to account for inflation and other cost of living increases when considering household income.
Yes, I probably should have stated that these were non-adjusted values. This particular 20/20 story was probably in the mid-90s or so, so $30K bought more than it does now.
Yeah, I doubt that having more money makes people less happy. At worst it just stops playing a significant role in happiness.
Having money doesn’t make people happy, its withholding money from others that makes people happy.
Money on its own doesn’t make you happy, but it certainly makes it easier to avoid many of the things that make people unhappy (hunger, lack of security, inability to care for your kids/loved ones, etc).
That’s a pretty good reason to seek it and hold on to it, even if the bare notion that “money doesn’t make you happy” is true.
Then there’s the fact that we’re innately and/or culturally programmed to get satisfaction from feeling richer than our peers. There are genuinely few people who don’t have this impulse in them somewhere. Good luck coming up with a functioning political system that doesn’t acknowledge this.
