Making Money Can Make You More Happier
Making more money can make you happier
Lateadra H. Harris
22July2013
Mrs. Karen Ferrelli
Many of us today aren’t satisfied with how much we have. That’s why we are constantly striving for a bigger pay raise at work. This includes spending our pay checks on lottery tickets just to have more money in our pocket. “Is it crazy to question how much money we need to be happy? The notion that money can’t buy you happiness has been around a long time”. (ELIZABETH W. DUNN). But it turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness, people with a comfortable living standards are happier than people living in poverty. In this research paper I will prove that making more can truly make people happier.
Why, then, do so many of us bother to work so hard long after we have reached an income level sufficient to make most of us happy? One reason is that our ideas about the relationship between money and happiness are misguided. We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies buying more, and buying for ourselves are ineffective at turning money into happiness.
The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark. (ELIZABETH W. DUNN). This is a large amount of money that supposedly to make a human being happier. In research The New York Times conducted with a national
Lateadra H. Harris
22July2013
Mrs. Karen Ferrelli
Many of us today aren’t satisfied with how much we have. That’s why we are constantly striving for a bigger pay raise at work. This includes spending our pay checks on lottery tickets just to have more money in our pocket. “Is it crazy to question how much money we need to be happy? The notion that money can’t buy you happiness has been around a long time”. (ELIZABETH W. DUNN). But it turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness, people with a comfortable living standards are happier than people living in poverty. In this research paper I will prove that making more can truly make people happier.
Why, then, do so many of us bother to work so hard long after we have reached an income level sufficient to make most of us happy? One reason is that our ideas about the relationship between money and happiness are misguided. We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies buying more, and buying for ourselves are ineffective at turning money into happiness.
The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark. (ELIZABETH W. DUNN). This is a large amount of money that supposedly to make a human being happier. In research The New York Times conducted with a national
Cited: ELIZABETH W. DUNN and MICHAEL NORTON. "Don’t Indulge. Be Happy." The New York Times. July 7, 2012. The New York Times. 22July2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/dont-indulge-be-happy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.