It’s an age-old question: Can money buy happiness? As The Wall Street Journal reports, over the past few years, new research has given us a much deeper understanding of the relationship between what we earn and how we feel. Economists have been scrutinizing the links between income and happiness across nations, and psychologists have probed individuals to find out what really makes us tick when it comes to cash.
The results, at first glance, may seem a bit obvious: Yes, people with higher incomes are, broadly speaking, happier than those who struggle to get by. But dig a little deeper into the findings, and they get a lot more surprising—and a lot more useful.
In short, the latest research suggests, wealth alone doesn’t provide any guarantee of a good life. What matters a lot more than a big income is how people spend it. For instance, giving money away makes people a lot happier than lavishing it on themselves. And when they do spend money on themselves, people are a lot happier when they use it for experiences like travel than for material goods.
“People think that experiences are only going to provide temporary happiness, but they actually provide both more happiness and more lasting value,” says Ryan Howell, associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, who published a study earlier this year showing that people think material purchases offer better value for the money because experiences are fleeting and material goods last longer. Read the full story.
