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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
That's a lot of extra income for a small increase.
This is hardly surprising.
We all know people who've gone into high-earning jobs and ended up miserable.
But this result may be too optimistic.
If we look at day-to-day happiness, income seems even less important.
Positive affect is whether people reported feeling happy yesterday.
The left axis of the chart below shows the fraction of people who reported yes.
This line goes flat around $50,000, showing that beyond this point, income had no relationship with day-to-day happiness in this survey.
And here's the graph the text was referring to.
It has a positive affect line superimposed on it, this time with fraction of people on the y-axis.
And we notice that this flattens off even earlier than life satisfaction.
The picture is similar if we look at the fraction who reported being not blue or stress-free yesterday.
And here's a third graph, this time it has not blue and stress-free lines superimposed on it.
And we notice that those level off very quickly.
These lines are completely flat by $75,000, so beyond this point, income had no relationship with our happy, sad, or stressed people felt.
We think there's a good chance this result is an error, and day-to-day happiness does continue to increase with income, at least a little bit.
A more recent study found exactly this, though it found that day-to-day happiness increases more slowly than life satisfaction.
Everything we've covered above is only about the correlation between income and happiness, but the relationship might be caused by a third factor.
For example, being healthy could both make you happier and allow you to earn more.
If this is true, then the effect of earning extra money will be even weaker than the correlations above suggest.
Showing 901–920 of 4,140 · page 46 of 207
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