A study has finally confirmed that money can indeed buy happiness.
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize laureate and professor at Princeton University, and Matthew Killingsworth, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, have resolved their conflicting studies about the correlation between financial income and emotional well-being. In a follow-up research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the two researchers confirmed that more money makes people feel happier, but there's a big caveat -- this is only true for already happy people; for the unhappy, there is no further increase in positive feelings beyond $75,000.
In 2010, Kahneman and his co-author, Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton, published a landmark study showing that people's joy meters plateau at a certain amount. A decade later, Killingsworth questioned the results with another study, noting that happiness levels did rise with higher salaries.
To reconcile their disagreeing results, the two collaborated on follow-up research which then proved that while an increase in income staved off unhappiness for a time, it did not continue beyond the threshold for the least happy people.
"This income threshold may represent the point beyond which the miseries that remain are not alleviated by high income. Heartbreak, bereavement, and clinical depression may be examples of such miseries," the authors wrote in their study.
The collaborators also concluded that certain assumptions and analytical procedures should have been followed more closely in the first two studies for it to produce more accurate results.
As Princeton University's Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy has put it, "Money can keep buying happiness for already happy people, but among the most unhappy, the money helps stave off unhappiness only to a point."
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