Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Is the working environment unpleasant?
Based on this, the best job was... Actuary.
That is, someone who uses statistics to measure and manage risks, often in the insurance industry.
It's true that actuaries are more satisfied with their jobs than average, but they're not among the most satisfied.
Only 36% say their work is meaningful, so being an actuary isn't a particularly fulfilling career.
So the career cast list isn't capturing everything.
In fact, the evidence suggests that money and avoiding stress aren't that important.
Money makes you happier, but only a little.
It's a cliche that you can't buy happiness, but at the same time, better pay is people's top priority when looking for new jobs.
Moreover, when people are asked what would most improve the quality of their lives, the most common answer is more money.
What's going on here?
Which side is right?
A lot of the research on this question is remarkably low quality, but several major studies in economics offer more clarity.
We reviewed the best studies available, and the truth turns out to lie in the middle.
Money does make you happy, but only a little.
For instance, here are the findings from a huge survey in the United States in 2010.
This is a graph with household income on the x-axis and life satisfaction from 1 to 10 on the y-axis.
And there's a line labeled life satisfaction that begins by increasing quite rapidly, so that for every given increase in household income, there's quite a lot of life satisfaction increase.
But by the end of the graph, it's flattened out, so that life satisfaction isn't increasing much as household income goes up.
You can see that going from a pre-tax income of $40,000 to $80,000 was only associated with an increase in life satisfaction from about 6.5 to 7 out of 10.
Showing 881–900 of 4,140 · page 45 of 207
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