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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Sometimes these questions are filled with hope.
Other times they're filled with worry, even in the case of people who already have a lot of money.
Philosophers and religious leaders might say that academic research isn't the only place we should look for answers to that question, but getting some clarity on it in the data would certainly be nice.
One interesting thing about this new research I wrote about is that it encourages us to think in percentages rather than dollars.
So if you think about the effect that a $10,000 raise might have for someone internationally,
it's going to be probably a different impact in their life if they make $20,000 versus $200,000.
But if you think in percentages rather than dollar terms, and instead of saying $10,000 raise, you just say a 10% raise, that proportional increase will probably lead to a similar size boost in happiness across income levels.
Researchers have been able to say that the more money somebody has, the less happiness the additional dollar brings.
When people hear that, though, they might take it to mean that the majority of the effects of money on happiness take place at low levels of income.
So if somebody who doesn't make that much money gets more, it's going to have a bigger effect.
But if you look at how incomes are actually distributed in the U.S., that is to say...
how much money a bunch of different people make, it's actually the case that at the high end of income, income grows so much that it's large enough so that people are actually getting enough additional dollars to continue getting happier.
In other words, the amount of dollars you have to add to your salary does keep increasing, but at the very high levels of income, salaries actually do go up that much as people get raises and receive bonuses.
Pay bumps matter a lot for people who don't have much money, and that's because it just takes a smaller amount of dollars to make a really big difference in their lives.
I've talked with lots of people who talk about the power of moving from a state of being financially insecure to being financially stable, and they say that that's a really huge change.
That's not something that somebody who already makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year can do.
They've already made that one-time transition.
You probably don't need me to tell you no, but these things that we've been talking about, they're patterns in the research.
There are exceptions.
There's actually a lot of variation in how individual people's happiness is shaped by money.
Showing 101–120 of 1,247 · page 6 of 63
← Previous
Next →