Money can buy you happiness — but only of one kind: study

Money, it turns out, really can by you happiness or at least one form of it, according to the biggest study to examine the relationship between income and well-being around the world.

Money, it turns out, really can by you happiness or at least one form of it, according to the biggest study to examine the relationship between income and well-being around the world.

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Pulling in big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall, the survey of 136,000 people in 132 countries found.

But the survey also showed that a key element of what many people consider happiness, positive feelings, is much more affected by factors other than hard cash, such as feeling respected and having friends and family to rely on in a pinch.

“Yes, money makes you happy. The effect of income on life satisfaction is very strong and virtually universal around the world,” said Ed Diener, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Illinois who led the study. “It makes you more satisfied than it makes you feel good. Positive feelings are less affected by money and more by day-to-day activities.”

Previous studies had suggested that money is associated with happiness. But the relationship appeared weak, and earlier work tended to focus on individual countries and global evaluations of life without parsing out the effects on specific emotions or examining differences across nations.

The new survey makes that crucial distinction.

“It’s sort of a new era for the study of well-being,” said Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.

The reason for the distinction is probably that when people are asked whether they are “happy,” the first thing they do is take stock of their lives by comparing themselves to their equivalent using the most obvious measure: income.

“People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity,” Kahneman said. “That was unexpected.”

But day-to-day positive feelings depend a lot on other things, researchers said. “The thing I think is exciting about this is money can make you feel better in a limited way,” said Barbara Fredrickson, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina. “But positive feelings like enjoyment and laughing can do a whole lot more for people.”

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