Introducing Planet Money: Can Money Buy Happiness?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Slow Burn – Introducing Planet Money: Can Money Buy Happiness?

Episode Date: January 1, 2025
Theme: This crossover episode features Planet Money’s exploration of whether money can truly buy happiness—a question that has spawned celebrated research, popular misconceptions, and a surprising scientific collaboration. The hosts unpack the story behind the old “$75,000 happiness plateau,” recent data that challenged it, and what new findings mean for how we make life choices.

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1. Main Theme / Purpose of the Episode

The episode investigates the enduring question: Can money buy happiness? It revisits the widely cited research that claimed happiness levels off after a certain income (~$75,000 per year) and discusses groundbreaking new data that challenges this belief. Through interviews with researchers and people who have "lived" both sides, the episode explores the heart of the debate and the surprising collaborative effort that led to a more nuanced answer.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

Revisiting the "$75,000 Plateau" Study

• Background: The 2010 study by Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton suggested happiness rises with income but plateaus at ~$75,000/year (07:00).
  • Popular Understanding: Many, including hosts and interviewees, remember being told: “Money can buy happiness, but only up to $75,000. After that, it doesn't matter.” (02:08)
• Personal Testimony: Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion confirms this plateau matched her experience—at first (04:05).
  • She felt secure at that mark but not notably happier as income increased.
  • Eventually realized, as her net worth grew, money offered her time, freedom, and memorable experiences, shifting her view: “My answer is a resounding yes.” (05:59)

Challenging the Plateau: Matt Killingsworth’s Experience Sampling

• Data Evolution: Matt Killingsworth, psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, collected realtime happiness data (“experience sampling”) using smartphone pings at random moments (12:13).
  • Unlike the 2010 study’s simple “yes/no” questions, Killingsworth’s study used a scale slider—revealing more nuance (22:10).
• Key Finding: No sign of a plateau—even at higher incomes, people reported greater happiness (14:16).
  • Sally Helm summarizes: “So you are finding there is not this happiness plateau at $75,000... It’s not there.” (14:29)
  • Killingsworth: “That's right. Rich people are happier... More money, more happiness.” (14:36–14:43)

Scientific Showdown & Adversarial Collaboration

• Conflict & Resolution: Kahneman learned of Killingsworth’s contradictory results.
  • Instead of attacking, he proposed an “adversarial collaboration”: scientists with opposing findings jointly design a study to find the truth (17:17–18:22).
  • Barb Mellors, a mutual colleague, helped mediate.
• Data Puzzle: Why did the original find a plateau and the new study didn’t? (20:16)
  • Key Technical Detail: Kahneman’s data “maxed out” -- most people were already answering at the top of the scale (“yes, yes, yes” to three questions), while Killingsworth’s slider method could capture more subtle differences.
    • “Danny’s happiness measure… can’t really distinguish between the happiest person in the world and someone who’s just happy in a more normal, run of the mill way.” (21:59)

Synthesis: Both Findings Were Partly Right—It Depends on Whose Happiness

• Breakthrough: When splitting Killingsworth’s data, both the plateau and the unbroken upward trend appeared, depending on which subset was analyzed (25:07).
  • Unhappiest 15–20%: For people struggling most, happiness did plateau around $100,000 (inflation-adjusted).
  • Happiest 15%: For the happiest, happiness increased rapidly with higher incomes.
  • Barb Mellors: “It just... the pleasure of doing science. When things come together in a way you haven’t expected.” (25:58)
• Implication: Money buys relief from hardship for the most unhappy—up to a limit. For most, more wealth is linked to more happiness, but the effect is modest and how you use money (and your disposition) matters.

Broader Reflections

• Limits of Money: Killingsworth notes: “The effect of money on happiness is pretty small… None of [the happiness contributors] really dominates over the others.” (29:34)
• Replicability & Collaboration: Their work is a model for “adversarial collaboration”—jointly resolving famous but conflicting results and improving scientific reliability (27:44).
• Practical Takeaway: While income can improve happiness, its value is relative and should be weighed among other life priorities: satisfaction, connections, meaning, and more.

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion on wealth and happiness:
  “I have this literal feeling that I don’t owe people anything. And so then I have the freedom to choose how I want to spend my time.” (04:36)
• After seeing BTS in Vegas:
  “I feel so happy. And money made this possible.” (05:27)
• Matt Killingsworth on his surprising result:
  “At some point I looked in my data and saw, huh… It just keeps going up.” (14:16)
• Killingsworth on professional anxiety:
  “I was totally confident statistically... but I’m not sure how this is going to go if I start saying this. What’s Danny Kahneman going to think?” (15:12)
• On scientific disagreement:
  Mellors: "Danny just hated the common way of engaging in disputes... So he proposed an alternative method..." (17:36)
• On combining the findings:
  Mellors: “Oh, it was so beautiful. I remember this feeling of awe… when things come together in a way you haven’t expected.” (25:58)
• Summing up both findings:
  “Is the glass half empty or half full? Yes is the answer.” (27:30)

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4. Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Highlight | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:56 | Introduction to the "$75,000 happiness plateau" and the classic 2010 study | | 04:05 | Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion describes her journey with money and happiness | | 06:26 | The scientific view starts to shift; new data questions the plateau concept | | 12:13 | Experience sampling and the design of Killingsworth’s study examined | | 14:16 | Killingsworth discovers no plateau in his data—“it just keeps going up” | | 17:17–18:22| Kahneman and Killingsworth are brought together for adversarial collaboration | | 20:45–22:43| Deep dive into the technical differences between the two studies’ measures and their effects | | 25:07 | Discovery that for the unhappiest, the plateau holds; for the happiest, happiness soars with income| | 27:44 | Broader implications for scientific collaboration and reproducibility | | 28:47 | Takeaways for life decisions; income versus other happiness contributors | | 29:53 | Killingsworth’s personal story: choosing research over higher paying tech career |

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5. Episode Tone & Style

The tone is lively, inquisitive, and transparent, blending rigorous reporting with warm storytelling. The hosts, Sally Helm and Nick Fountain, bring curiosity and humor, making complex ideas accessible. The vibe is respectful—even when challenging old assumptions—and celebrates scientific progress through collaboration.

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6. Concluding Takeaways

• The "money-happiness plateau" is not a universal limit: For many, more income continues to bring incremental happiness; for the very unhappy, money helps up to a point, after which it plateaus.
• Both the original and revised studies were valid—the results reflect the way happiness and unhappiness are measured.
• Money is only one of many factors in happiness; its influence is modest, and context matters.
• Science advances not just through challenge, but also through genuine collaboration.
• For big life decisions, money matters—but so do purpose, relationships, and values.

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For more thoughtful explorations of the economy (and happiness), follow Planet Money.

Transcript

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[Planet Money Host Intro]

Hi, We've got something fun for you today. It's a great episode about a genuinely important question from Planet Money. Planet Money is a podcast that week after week looks at the economy and figures out what's most interesting about it. Sometimes it explains the biggest and most confusing stories in the news, but sometimes it's not about the news at all, just something that's a part of all of our lives. Like decoder ring. It notices things hiding in plain sight, tries to tell the heck out of the stories about them, and then to leave you delighted and also with something to think about. This episode in particular is about the truly important question of whether or not money can buy happiness, and the study that said it can't, but actually might be wrong. I really liked it, and I think you will too. Enjoy.

[Sally Helm]

This is planet money from NPR.

Back in 2010, a piece of research came out that kind of changed the way the world thought about an age old can money buy happiness?

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, the key finding, or at least the key finding that I took from it when I was in my 20s, was that money can buy happiness, but only up to a certain point. After you make about $75,000 a year, it doesn't matter.

[Sally Helm]

Nick I also heard about that happiness plateau back when I was in my.

20S, and so did Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion. I called her up because I wanted to talk about this happiness finding with someone who felt like they had lived it. And Bernadette turned out to be the perfect person.

[Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion]

I noticed that around that mark was where I do remember feeling like, okay, I'm not lacking for anything and I'm not in this bracket where I feel like I have to keep up with the people with like the nice cars and shoes and all this other stuff.

[Nick Fountain]

Bernadette confirmed for her, $75,000 a year felt like this happiness sweet spot. She'd grown up middle class. Her dad was an accountant, her mom was a bookkeeper. There's were a big family, money was tight. Like she loves roller coasters. And she said growing up, going to the amusement park was like a really special occasion. They could only afford to send her maybe once every four years.

[Sally Helm]

Bernadette had a well paying corporate job in her 20s, and after she hit that milestone, $75,000 a year, she really felt like money wasn't improving her life.

[Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion]

I was making exactly 100k, and it was such a shock to my system that the more money that I made, I actually felt like the less happy I became.

[Sally Helm]

So Bernadette changed her whole life not to make more money, but to find a path that would make her happier. She quit her job, took out loans.

To go back to school.

After she graduated, she started a business, hustled to pay off her debt, bought and sold some real estate. And eventually, even though it had not been her explicit goal, Bernadette and her.

Husband actually had a lot of money in the bank. All right, so you're like a millionaire?

[Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion]

We are in fact, millionaire, yeah.

[Nick Fountain]

Her and her husband's total net worth today is about $1.7 million, most of that in retirement. Last year, their household income was nearly $300,000 and they're debt free.

[Sally Helm]

And in her 30s, Bernadette started to be like, wait, if you spend it on the right things, having money is actually awesome.

[Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion]

My husband and I have a lot of freedom of time and we have a lot of hobbies and interests. And I think because we are debt free, I have this literal feeling that I don't owe people anything. And so then I have the freedom to choose how I want to spend my time.

[Sally Helm]

For example, remember Bernadette loves roller coasters.

[Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion]

My husband and I, we have a season pass at our local amusement park and I ride roller coasters by myself on like random Wednesday evenings.

[Nick Fountain]

She also loves the mega famous K pop group BTS. And in 2022, she went to see them perform in Vegas.

[Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion]

I remember just thinking, like, I don't care how much this is going to cost. Like, I'm going to go to this concert with my best friend. No matter what happened, they all went to the concert.

[Sally Helm]

It was amazing. She felt alive again.

And she said afterwards, she turns to her husband and is like, I feel so happy. And money made this possible.

[Nick Fountain]

And she says that was the moment when she realized she had been wrong about how more money didn't mean more happiness. Now she felt like it did.

[Sally Helm]

Yeah.

In other words, maybe that $75,000 plateau idea is bunk. And at the end of our interview, I just asked her the big question, can money buy happiness?

[Bernadette Joy Cruz Mullion]

My answer is a resounding yes.

[Sally Helm]

Over the past decade, Bernadette has done a complete 180 on this question. And in the background, social science has been making almost the exact same 180, taking another look at what had seemed to be settled science. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Sally Helm.

[Nick Fountain]

And I'm Nick Fountain. When it comes to economics in our everyday lives, this is kind of the mother of all questions. How is money connected to our happiness? The data on this once seemed pretty definitive, but recently it has come under fire.

[Sally Helm]

Today on the show, two researchers with.

Totally opposite takes come together to try.

And hammer out a definitive answer about how income affects our happiness. And they find something that neither of them expected.

[Nick Fountain]

All right, Sally. We started with this idea about a happiness plateau, that as you make more money, get happier, but that the relationship levels off when you're making about $75,000 a year. And beyond that point, more money does not correlate with more happiness. This idea comes from a paper by two famous Nobel Prize winners, Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, famous economist and famous psychologist. They wrote it in 2010.

[Sally Helm]

And one thing to know is that in the world of psychology, Danny Kahneman was an enormous deal. He actually died quite recently, in March of this year.

So I called up another happiness researcher.

Matt Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania. I asked him about Kahneman and his work.

[Matt Killingsworth]

I mean, he's just a giant in the field. I mean, probably. Possibly the most important person who's ever existed and certainly the most important scientist has been alive in my life.

[Sally Helm]

Would you say possibly the most important person who's ever existed.

[Matt Killingsworth]

In that area of science? Like, I, you know, what, what psychologist has been more influential scientifically?

[Nick Fountain]

Matt himself was really influenced by Danny Kahneman. They actually met once when Matt was a grad student. Kahneman gave him some advice for a study he was designing to answer the question, is life worth living?

[Matt Killingsworth]

And I just remember Danny responding after a little pause, that's a very good question, with sort of a twinkle in his eye.

[Sally Helm]

That said, one thing he really respects.

About that 2010 study is the careful way that it looks at the different parts of happiness. Because there are really a couple of.

Ways you could define it, right? Like one way is to just ask.

How satisfied are you with your life? But the one that we're going to focus on and that everyone focuses on.

When they talk about this paper, it.

Has to do with emotional well being. Just like moment to moment as you go about your regular day, how do you feel?

[Nick Fountain]

Which is kind of hard to pin down, hard to study empirically. So what Kahneman and Deaton did was they looked at people's answers to a bunch of different questions about their day. Yesterday, 450,000 adults in the US were asked, did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday? Did you experience happiness during a lot of the day yesterday? How about enjoyment? They put all that together to try to get a measure of happiness.

[Matt Killingsworth]

When it came to people's sort of day to day emotional state, kind of how they're feeling, that rose, but only up to a point once, as they argued in the paper, at least once you got up to $75,000 a year that didn't seem to change.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, this is that really famous finding in the 2010 study, a happiness plateau.

[Sally Helm]

Two quick caveats here.

One, the $75,000 number is a little imprecise.

The paper actually finds that there's basically.

No effect after the 60 to $90,000 income bracket.

So 75,000 is just the midpoint of that range. And two, correlation is not causation.

[Nick Fountain]

Dream it from the rooftop, Sally.

[Sally Helm]

Tattoo it on my heart. Nick Fountain. This study looks at correlations between money.

And happiness, but it actually does not speak to the question of whether more money is causing greater happiness.

[Nick Fountain]

But nevertheless, people really latch onto this idea. They love it. And you can see why. It's nice to know that science says what we know from the tabloids, that rich people, they're just like us, just as happy or miserable as us. I was entering the workforce right when this study came out and I took it quite literally to mean aim for that solid middle class salary, but not the rat race, because it's not going to make me happier to be super rich.

[Matt Killingsworth]

So many people are so focused on money and maybe the idea that at least some aspect of our quality of life might not depend on that could be kind of liberating. I mean, so what if that person's on the yacht and, you know, I'm watching reruns of Frasier at home. But are they really having a better life than me?

[Sally Helm]

Maybe not Exactly. They over 75k? Who cares? They're just miserable in the mansion.

When do you decide to take this study down?

[Matt Killingsworth]

Well, I wouldn't quite say take it down. I mean, yeah, that really, really wasn't at least where I was trying to come from.

[Sally Helm]

A couple of years ago, Matt Killingsworth.

Found himself taking on the most important.

Person who has ever existed, Danny Kahneman.

And Matt truly, like, wasn't even trying to do this. His data almost did it for him.

[Matt Killingsworth]

A big part of how I've approached my research is doing really large scale, what's called experience sampling, which is basically the idea of, you know, rather than bringing people into the lab or, you know, sending them a paper survey to fill out, what if we could collect some data as people were going about their regular everyday lives?

[Sally Helm]

Experience sampling really is the gold standard for measuring moment to moment feelings. Over the years, scientists have found a number of ways to do it.

They check in with people throughout the day using beepers and then palm pilots.

Matt is in grad school in the late 2000s, and he launches a project called trackyourhappiness.org to do experience sampling with smartphones.

[Matt Killingsworth]

So people get sort of pinged at random moments, and then I ask them a series of questions about their experience at the moment. Just before the ping.

[Sally Helm]

Yeah, so imagine you're like doing laundry. You get a ping.

How do you feel right now? You can answer on a spectrum that goes from very bad to very good.

Move the little slider anywhere you want along that spectrum. So, like, how happy am I doing laundry? I think maybe like a little bit over the midpoint. In general, I kind of like doing laundry.

[Matt Killingsworth]

Weird.

[Nick Fountain]

Anyways, so what Matt's doing is not totally dissimilar from what Kahneman was looking at. Did you smile a lot yesterday? Et cetera, et cetera. Except Matt is looking at it right in the moment. Obviously this is self reported happiness. And there are ways that these self reports might be messy. Maybe people are lying to you or lying to themselves. But Matt does ask a lot of people at all income levels, and he asks them over and over, which should help him separate out the signal from the noise.

[Sally Helm]

And this was really the first big project of its kind. Matt has collected millions of data points from hundreds of thousands of people, and he's still going.

The data points feed into this statistical software. They're updating all the Time.

[Matt Killingsworth]

I spend time almost every day looking at it. I mean, it feels a little bit like going in and like looking at the code in the matrix, it's like, here are all of these different variables from this gigantic number of people. And I kind of get to peek.

[Nick Fountain]

Behind the curtain one day. Matt realizes, wait a second, I'm collecting all this data about how people feel throughout their day. I also have income data. I wonder if when I look at my data, I will see Danny Kahneman's famous happiness plateau of around $75,000.

[Matt Killingsworth]

And so at some point I looked in my data and saw, huh, it's actually. It doesn't look like that at all. There's no hint of, of a, of a curve or a flattening or anything like that. It just keeps going up.

[Sally Helm]

So you are finding there is not this happiness plateau at $75,000 that we've all been told about. It's not there.

[Matt Killingsworth]

That's right.

[Sally Helm]

Rich people are happier.

[Matt Killingsworth]

That's right. To at least some degree.

[Sally Helm]

More money, more happiness.

[Matt Killingsworth]

Yep.

[Nick Fountain]

Which is kind of a bummer, right?

[Sally Helm]

I mean, yeah.

Like Matt himself got into this happiness research in part because he felt like people on money too much, like he wanted to broaden their horizons. But now he was finding higher income correlates with more happiness with no plateau. And he's feeling like a little bit of trepidation here. I mean, that plateau is so famous.

[Matt Killingsworth]

I felt like I was pretty. I was totally confident. Like, statistically, this is what I'm seeing. There's no question. And I think the quality of the data is very, very high. But I'm not quite sure how this is going to go if I start saying this is what's Danny Kahneman going to think? What's the world going to think? I don't know. But at some point I just decided, you know, I'm seeing what I'm seeing. I'm going to just go ahead and say it and we'll see what happens.

[Nick Fountain]

What happens when he publishes his paper in 2021 is that people are very interested.

[Matt Killingsworth]

It really kind of happened in like an avalanche. So I, you know, because that previous finding had been so influential, people were then incredibly curious about this. You know, conflicting evidence that seemed to show something different.

[Nick Fountain]

He's hearing from all sorts of people, but not from one particular person. Danny Kahneman. Matt's been of the one time, but it's not like they know each other. He'd never reach out.

[Sally Helm]

And then one day he hears or through the psychology research grapevine, that Danny has read the paper and he wants to talk. That's after the break.

[Matt Killingsworth]

All right.

[Nick Fountain]

Across the campus at Matt's workplace, the University of Pennsylvania, a psychology professor picks up the telephone. Her name is Barb Mellors, and on the other end of the line is her good friend Danny Kahneman. They're catching up.

[Barb Mellors]

And he said, oh, by the way, do you happen to know a guy by the name of Matt Killingsworth? And I said, as a matter of fact, I do, and if you'd like me to introduce him to you, and if you'd like me to be an arbiter, I'd be happy to do that.

[Sally Helm]

So you knew what he was thinking?

[Barb Mellors]

I knew exactly what he was thinking.

[Sally Helm]

It seems he was not thinking, I want to take down that young Matt Killingsworth, I'm gonna humiliate him in front.

Of all his psychology heroes.

No, no. Danny Kahneman wanted to collaborate, and he needed Barb's help.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, he wanted to do something he called an adversarial collaboration, where researchers with scientific beefs try to figure out the truth. They agree to design a study and write a paper together.

[Barb Mellors]

I think Danny just hated the common way of engaging in disputes, which is exchanges in journals where each side sort of caricatures the other. So he proposed an alternative method in which both sides jointly design an experiment that gets to the heart of the dispute.

[Sally Helm]

Why is that? Is there an incentive to kind of.

Caricature the other side journals?

Like, why does that happen?

[Barb Mellors]

Oh, that's human nature.

[Matt Killingsworth]

That's.

[Barb Mellors]

That's our natural, more base instinct, I think.

[Nick Fountain]

But in this case, Danny does not want to attack Matt's research. He wants to do this adversarial collaboration thing to work together to find the truth.

[Sally Helm]

And he asks Barb to help set it up and serve as arbiter to mediate any disputes. So Bar reaches out to Matt, asks if he's game to meet. Matt says yes, of course.

Their first conversation is on Zoom. And Matt told me there was a.

Little bit of tension in the air.

[Matt Killingsworth]

Danny was maybe not 100% pleased. He was a little bit prickly, which. Which was understandable, but stressful, maybe. Yeah, on my side of the equation. I mean, you know, he's kind of at the pinnacle of influence and prestige. And, you know, having someone like that, even 1% not happy with you, doesn't necessarily feel great. But at the same time, there's kind of part of me that's like, you know, I'm a scientist. I study data. Here's what I found. And that's what it is. So you know, right?

[Sally Helm]

And you'll know he will respect that. Like, that's what he's like too.

[Matt Killingsworth]

100%.

[Barb Mellors]

The question we were trying to answer was this.

[Sally Helm]

Barb Mellors again, could there be a.

[Barb Mellors]

Reality in which both Danny and Matt might be right? Suppose we start with the assumption that both of their data sets are valid and good. How could it happen? What do we have to know that would put the pieces together?

[Nick Fountain]

Barb was like, look, everyone agrees that Matt's experience sampling data is awesome.

[Barb Mellors]

It's very good. Yeah, unusually good.

[Sally Helm]

But Danny and Angus Deaton had really good data too.

Theirs came from the professional polling company Gallup, who called more than 450,000 people to ask them these questions. So it was a puzzle.

Why did Danny find a plateau and Matt didn't?

[Barb Mellors]

The graphs look totally different and it's really a big question mark. How could these guys, both of whom have really great data sets, have such different findings?

[Sally Helm]

They start trying together to imagine what they might be missing and eventually they realize there might be an alternate vision of reality here, one that actually aligns surprisingly well with both of their studies if they just look at the data in a slightly new way.

[Nick Fountain]

And to understand this, we're going to need to get a little bit nerdy about the two different kinds of data that Danny and Matt were working with. You ready, Sally? Crack those knuckles.

[Sally Helm]

Let us do it. Okay, so remember, Dani's 2010 study relied.

On people answering questions about their emotional well being over the course of the previous day. It was essentially three questions. Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday? Did you feel happiness a lot yesterday? How about enjoyment? And importantly, these were yes, no questions. So if you are the happiest person in the world, your answers will be yes, yes, and yes.

[Nick Fountain]

And here is a key fact. In Danny's data, a lot of people were answering yes, yes, yes.

[Barb Mellors]

On average, in the entire data set, the overall happiness measures were about 85%, meaning just about everyone was at the maximum of the happiness scale on that day they were measured. Okay, so that's a problem.

[Sally Helm]

It's a problem because the happiest person in the world answers yes, yes, yes. But a lot of people who are less happy also answer yes, yes, yes. On average In Danny's data, 85% of people were answering yes, yes, yes.

[Nick Fountain]

So Danny's happiness measure, it can't really distinguish between the happiest person in the world and someone who's just happy in a more normal, run of the mill way. It's like people are maxing out the scale.

[Sally Helm]

Yeah. Because the only way they can describe their happiness is with these three. Yes, no questions. But if you gave them a bigger spectrum, they might be able to tell you more about just how happy they feel. And this is where we get to Matt's study. Remember, he had people report their happiness on a range that went from very good to very bad.

You could put the little slider anywhere along that spectrum.

And in Mat's data, very few people were putting it at the absolute maximum.

It was rare for someone to say.

At this moment, I am feeling so good that I think I'm at the very top of this happiness scale.

[Matt Killingsworth]

So there's almost always some room for it to be higher. And I measure over and over. So even if someone were, I'm just as happy as I could possibly score on this at Tuesday in the afternoon. Well, Wednesday morning, you're not going to be there. And I'm going to average all of those responses to say, on average, how happy does this person feel in everyday life? So I kind of had a much more sensitive measure of the variation, and.

[Sally Helm]

That could explain why Danny found a plateau and Matt didn't. Maybe the rich people in Danny's sample were happier. They just had no way to tell him that. All they could say was, yes, yes, yes.

[Nick Fountain]

But not everyone was saying, yes, yes, yes. Something like 15% of people were saying no, yes, yes, or no, no, no. Those were the people who did not smile or laugh a lot yesterday, who didn't feel enjoyment much yesterday. They're basically the sad people, or at least the people who were feeling sad yesterday.

[Sally Helm]

So Danny's data couldn't see the whole range of happiness, but it could see the sadness. In fact, another way to say it is that Danny wasn't actually measuring happiness. He was measuring unhappiness. He had basically given the variable the wrong name.

[Barb Mellors]

You know, it's an error, it's a mistake. And he had to sort of gulp and deal with that.

[Sally Helm]

They had found this big error, and they could have just stopped right there.

Case closed, end of story.

But they did not.

[Nick Fountain]

No, because this wasn't a takedown. It was a collaboration. And now that they understood Danny's mistake, they went back to the data sets to search through them again and see if there was any more insight they could mine. And what they found was so rad.

[Barb Mellors]

Yeah.

[Sally Helm]

Okay, so remember, the key realization was that Dani was really talking not about happiness, but about unhappiness. And there were unhappy people in Matt's sample, too. People who put the slider low who.

Said, I feel very bad right now.

[Barb Mellors]

So we thought, well, maybe we could see that flattening if we looked at the least happy group.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah. If they zoom in on the unhappiest 15 to 20% of people in Matt's sample, people at all income levels who said they felt bad, would they see a different relationship between money and happiness? Was it possible that for that unhappy group, at a certain point, money stopped mattering? In other words, would they find that plateau?

[Barb Mellors]

And that's what we did, and that's what we found.

[Sally Helm]

They found Danny's plateau hiding in Matt's data, but only for the unhappiest 15 to 20% in that group. People who made the least money reported the least happiness. People who made more said they were happier, but only up to about a hundred thousand dollars a year if you account for inflation. That is basically what Danny found all those years ago.

[Barb Mellors]

Oh, it was so beautiful. It. It just. I remember this feeling of awe and just the pleasure of doing science. You know, there's just a delight that you feel when things come together in a way that you haven't expected.

[Sally Helm]

So this result, remember, it doesn't show anything about the causes of any of this, but it's like maybe money can kind of mitigate unhappiness up to a point. And after that point, maybe you're just a person dealing with one of the many problems that money can't fix. Heartbreak, depression, grief.

[Nick Fountain]

All right, so mystery solved. Plateau identified. But it turned out there was another surprise lurking in Matt's data, something that none of them had predicted.

[Barb Mellors]

For the happiest people, those at the top 15%, what you find is that at that point, happiness goes up really fast.

[Sally Helm]

For the very happiest group, there is.

Actually an accelerating relationship. More money correlates with more and more happiness. Again, it's not clear why, but maybe.

These are people who just, like, know how to spend money really well on things that make them happy. So for the unhappy group, there was the plateau, and for the happiest group.

There was, like, the opposite of a plateau. Do you think that they were both sort of right or both sort of wrong?

[Barb Mellors]

Is the glass half empty or half full? Yes, is the answer.

[Sally Helm]

Barb definitely thinks the collaborative study added to what both of these researchers did on their own, and that is important.

[Nick Fountain]

Psychology has been in the midst of what's been called the replication crisis. A lot of the results that one paper found, they don't replicate when another paper looks at the exact same thing. Economics has this problem too. And maybe adversarial collaboration could help people get closer to the truth of the matter.

[Sally Helm]

Yeah, you know, in a way, it's.

Easier to tear down someone else's study to be like, your data is bogus. My data is awesome. And of course, some studies do deserve to be torn to shreds.

But in this case, realizing that everyone had actually done a good job, that raised harder and more interesting questions, it meant they learned something that they hadn't expected.

[Nick Fountain]

They also did confirm that, on average, getting more money does at least correlate with more happiness, which is an important thing to know because we all make decisions about how much to pursue or value money in our lives. And if there is a takeaway from Matt Killingsworth's research, it's about how to weigh those trade offs.

[Matt Killingsworth]

If you're at some critical juncture in your life, especially, you know, maybe thinking about someone in college and they're kind of like, well, I could major in art history or I could major in electrical engineering, and I'm kind of, you know, 50, 50 on both of them. Well, there might be some reasons to think about the engineering.

[Sally Helm]

I feel like you're saying, but not saying, yeah, you can follow the money like if you're 50, 50 on art history and electrical engineering, to think, well, I'll make a lot more money as an electrical engineer. Maybe I should do that. Might make me happier.

[Matt Killingsworth]

Yep.

[Sally Helm]

Why are you saying it but not saying it, Matt, what makes you hesitate to say it?

[Matt Killingsworth]

I think there's just a risk of feeling like that should overwhelm your other considerations. And I think, you know, that's just a personal decision people have to grapple with.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah. Matt said the effect of money on happiness is pretty small. Actually. There are really lots of things that affect our emotional well being, social connections and exercise and living in the moment. And none of them really dominates over the others. You just have to find your own balance.

[Sally Helm]

And that's actually what Matt did himself. Before he was a psychology researcher, he.

Studied engineering, worked in tech. Staying on that path would have probably meant more money.

But he felt drawn to these big questions about what makes life worth living, and he decided to follow those instead.

[Nick Fountain]

Today's show was produced by Sean Saldana with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kessler and Emma Peasley. It was edited by Meg Kramer, engineering by Sina Lofredo. Fact checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Nick Fountain.

[Sally Helm]

And I'm Sally Helm. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

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