"Once I've got enough money"

Money is the next thing behind most of the others. The house needs it, the retirement is made of it, the job is partly about it. And there's a widely repeated finding that money stops mattering above a certain income, which would make this the easy chapter. It isn't the easy chapter, because that finding has been argued over by the people who produced it, and the honest version is more interesting.

The 2006 paper from chapter 5, by Kahneman and colleagues, found people with higher incomes barely happier in their moment-to-moment experience and more tense. Then in 2021 Matthew Killingsworth published a very large study, nearly two million reports from over thirty-three thousand working adults in the United States, who were pinged on their phones through the day and asked how they felt. He found that both how people felt in the moment and how they rated their lives rose steadily with income, with no sign of a plateau at the figure of seventy-five thousand dollars that earlier research had suggested. So two findings pointed in different directions, from two of the most careful researchers in the field.

What happened next is the part I'd want you to remember. Killingsworth, Kahneman and a third researcher, Barbara Mellers, did a joint reanalysis to find out who was right, and published it in 2023. The answer was both, for different people. For the least happy people, the flattening was real. Above a certain income, more money did nothing for how they felt. For everyone else, happiness kept rising with income, and for the happiest group it rose faster.

Two things follow. The first is that money does matter, and I'm not going to tell you it doesn't. The rise in both Killingsworth papers is with the logarithm of income, which in plain words means each doubling adds about the same amount. Going from twenty thousand to forty thousand does about what going from forty to eighty does. That's a real gain and a steep price for it.

The second is the uncomfortable one for this book's reader. The group for whom more money stopped helping was the unhappy group. If the hum is a level, and it's a low one, then the reconciled finding says money is exactly the next thing that won't reach it. It reaches the people who were already fine. Kahneman's 2006 paper had a phrase for why people get this wrong, and it's the focusing illusion again. When you evaluate a life you focus on conventional achievements, and income is the most conventional of all. It's the easiest feature to see and the one the Thursday afternoon notices least.