happiness

Many factors determine happiness, but one has stirred considerable controversy over the years: money. While the old adage says that money can’t buy happiness, several studies have determined that the more your income increases, the happier you are, up until US$75,000 a year. After hitting that threshold, more income doesn’t make a difference. But in a new analysis of more than 40,000 U.S. adults aged 30 and over, my colleague and I found an even deeper relationship between money and happiness. Because the survey data spanned five decades, from 1972 to 2016, we were also able to see if the link between money and happiness changed over the years. That’s where things got interesting: Today, money and happiness are more strongly related than they were in the past. It seems money buys more h...

Losing one’s job undoubtedly makes someone less happy, a feeling tens of millions of people around the world are experiencing right now. Even as the labor market recovers, as we saw in the latest U.S. employment report on Nov. 6, the number of people who have been without a job for more than 26 weeks continues to increase. Governments have implemented a wide variety of labor market policies to address the pandemic’s impact, from beefing up funding of existing unemployment policies to supplemental income programs like the US$600 checks that the U.S. sent out during part of the pandemic. While these policies are intended to alleviate the economic pain of losing one’s job, we, as happiness researchers, are more interested in how they might affect people’s well-being during the pandemic. Br...

Tag: happiness

Money Buys Even More Happiness Than It Used To

Generous Unemployment Benefits Job Policies Create More Happiness For Everyone