New Research Suggests That Money Actually Can Buy You Happiness

For millionaires and billionaires, it sure seems like money can buy happiness.

New research shows that ultra-wealthy individuals are more content than those earning six-figure salaries, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. That’s according to Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the Wharton School who studies the causes of human happiness. Killingsworth worked on a similar study last year, and he has now updated his findings to include the super-rich.

“The results suggest that the positive association between money and well-being continues far up the economic ladder, and that the magnitude of the differences can be substantial,” Killingsworth writes in his abstract.

The self-published research shows that those with a million- or billion-dollar net worth say they have an average life-satisfaction rating of 5.5 to 6 out of 7, Bloomberg noted. Those who make about $100,000 a year report a rating of 4.6, while those who earn $15,000 to $30,000 place their rating just above 4. That means that the happiness differential between high earners and mid-level earners is almost three times that of the discrepancy between mid-level and low earners.

“The magnitude of the difference between the low and high end of incomes is gigantic,” Killingsworth told Bloomberg. “Within the bounds of what money can explain, a huge amount of that difference occurs above the median income.”

For the update, Killingsworth used data from his prior research, along with numbers from a 2018 study of millionaires and a 1985 survey of Forbes’s list of the richest Americans. Those prior studies, Bloomberg wrote, asked similar questions and saw people rate their satisfaction with life.

In the past, some researchers have described a “happiness plateau,” in which levels of contentment stop rising alongside income. A 2010 paper put that plateau at an income of about $60,000 to $90,000 a year, with anything more not resulting in higher levels of happiness. But last year, Killingsworth worked with an author of that study, Daniel Kahneman, to show that the plateau could actually be closer to $500,000 a year. (Kahneman died earlier this year.)

Now there’s the possibility that no plateau exists at all. If millionaires and billionaires are generally happier than their less-wealthy counterparts, perhaps those extra zeroes in their bank accounts are contributing to the contentment. The jury’s still out on whether money can buy you love, though.