Joe Pinsker

speaker

1,247 appearances 30 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2022 last heard Jan 2025

Joe Pinsker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Can Money Buy Happiness? Not as Much as You Think · 30 May 2024 podcast

In other words, it's giving you more control of your life. voice-verified

And as a side note, another kind of interesting area where voice-verified

researchers are still figuring out the happiness equation is that it may look different for different people. voice-verified

You see different patterns in terms of whether more money makes people happier. voice-verified

And there seem to be these individual differences, maybe based on some traits or characteristics that researchers are still trying to identify. voice-verified

And we just don't know as much about that area at this point. voice-verified

The way an economist would talk about it is as diminishing marginal utility. voice-verified

That's sort of the feature that money has. voice-verified

And the way to think about it really is that if you add a certain dollar amount to your salary, let's just say $10,000 to name an example, that's going to add less and less happiness each time you tack it on to your current pay. voice-verified

So giving a $10,000 raise to someone who makes $30,000 is likely going to generate more happiness and voice-verified

than giving that same $10,000 raise to someone making $130,000. voice-verified

The rule of thumb here is that you want to think in percentage terms, not dollar terms. voice-verified

So a raise of a certain percentage is expected to keep bringing you the same amount of happiness as you progress forward. voice-verified

And so if someone doubles their income from $50,000 to $100,000, to get the same amount of happiness again, you'd have to double it again to $200,000. voice-verified

I guess so. voice-verified

And that's become, I suppose, an important part of my job here at the journal. voice-verified

As I worked on this story, I tried to think about how I could boil down the lessons from this area of research as concisely as possible. voice-verified

And I actually ended up with a string of 10 words. voice-verified

It's money buys happiness with diminishing returns and no magic number. voice-verified

So money buys happiness in the sense that having more money is definitely linked to being happier. voice-verified

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