I'm sure there are far far worse stories than this but for example, my father, an eletrical engineer, left a job at a big company for a small start up at 50. The company went bankrupt 10 years later. His gamble to make it big failed. At 60 no one would hire him. (a) they expected him to retire at 65. (b) health insurance premiums are like 6x to 10x for the company for him vs someone 20-35 years younger.

So, he now drives a delivery van at 67. No retirement for him. Let's hope he has no serious medical bills.

My point is of course that $75k or whatever is fine day to day but you need a lot more to survive retirement.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement/

At 47 myself I find it a much harder choice to choose a job with less pay knowing that I risk the same fate as my father. I'm not saying I won't take that risk. I might. But it's not as easy as choosing happiness today for less money. Today effects tomorrow. It might be better to try to find happiness in the higher paying job so that you can be happy for longer than to trade short term happiness now and possible suffering later.

Yea, there's no guarantee either way. YMMV etc. Again, all I'm saying is it's over simplifying to say the only thing to consider is "will this life style make me happy today even though I'd be making less money"

All my (little) retirement money got either paid into the German or Swiss system. And no, I don't think my retirement is safer than that of my US friends.

Frankly, my plan is to just never retire. But of course that's just the naive idea of a 20-something.

Social Security will pay ~$1,800 a month assuming a birth date in 1945 and a maximum salary of $65,000.

Medicare covers most things - including serious medical. My grandfather and grand mother both had massive hospital bills due to Alzheimer's covered by Medicare. The major exception is nursing home care - that is not covered by Medicare.

[1] http://www.socialsecurity.gov/planners/benefitcalculators.ht...

[2] http://www.medicare.gov/navigation/medicare-basics/medicare-...

If so, greggman's argument is no longer valid.

The chocolate example: The conclusion completely ignores the utility of having had chocolate on each day before the end of the week. If the result, that the marginal utility of a piece of chocolate a week later was less for people who had a lot of chocolate in between, surprised you, you've forgotten what marginal utility is. Do I need to really mention what's wrong with this comparison? Do people only enjoy chocolate on the weekend?

The children with goldfish: Imagine you earned a salary in NY strip steak as part of an experiment. Would you consider that experiment useful in drawing conclusions about money and utility or happiness?

The money in an envelope example: I'm not going to say anything about this, because I said in my intro that I'm going to ignore self-reporting bias caused by confronting someone about whether they acted ethically or not. (hint: if someone trusts you to do something and you don't do it, you may be less happy than someone who did do it--especially it is consistent with social expectations).

I don't mean to dispute the point the article is making, but honestly, after seeing the substance, I'm less inclined to believe it than I was beforehand.

I think that the strong potential for ideological differences to erupt in a flame war in this thread is high, and therefore want to suggest perhaps we look at the actual research mentioned before attacking it as reported in the New York Times (a place we largely deride for awful science reporting in most other cases), rather than make assumptions about it based on our ideological gut reactions to the conclusions.

I'm not arguing with anything you said, and agree the article provided weak (if not no) evidence for the idea that increasing money has marginal utility for happiness.

What evidence did it provide that has convinced you that increasing money doesn't have marginal utility for happiness?

No surprise, of course, that New York itself stands out as being a particularly difficult place in which to be happy :

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/09/07/what-salary-buys-h...

Note that this is not directly related to the central tenet of the article, which I actually found quite interesting.

In my own case, I've found that the amount of money I need to be satisfied with my income tends to scale less than linearly with COL. In higher-COL places I spend a bigger proportion of my income on rent, and do more low-cost entertainment, in part because more low-cost entertainment is available. For example, I've lived in both Houston and Santa Cruz, and I was quite happy doing a lot of free and cheap things in Santa Cruz, with its great beaches, hiking, etc. In Houston, I had to spend money for entertainment.

With regard to the "giving", I wonder what theories there are about why many people feel good when giving things up to benefit others. Is it just a societal/cultural thing, influenced by religions?

Imagine two cultural scenarios: one where everyone is looking out for themselves and helping no one, and another where people are genuinely concerned with each other and eager to help when needed. Which culture would you want to live in?

I think we tend to by default project our motivations onto others (especially in the absence of data). So if we are primarily selfish in our motivations, we think the people around us are selfish. So my guess is that being generous makes us feel like the world is a generous place.

Also, our parents probably taught us that sharing with others is good. So we get a little psychological "stroke" of affirmation about our inner goodness by being generous.

That being said, I would still prefer the society where everyone helped each other out as, and it was a way to maintain status quo in the hierarchy rather than some act of "charity" (with the implications of 'I am your better by helping you out').

So you started with the idea that everything's about power, and then came to the insight that charity is also about power? If this were actually true, we'd have too many people willing to help. As you said, they just want to maximize their position in the hierarchy, right? In the volunteer organizations I've been in, I've never seen too many volunteers. (I'm in the 25-34 age group in a power-hungry East Coast city where people take themselves extremely seriously.)

Charity feels good because in our sacrifice we enter into another's needs on their behalf. This forces us to get over ourselves temporarily. I don't think it to be socialization; there's something more at work here.

It makes sense to me that once you reach a reasonable salary level (such as the $75,000 threshold mentioned), that any additional increase in salary doesn't really affect happiness all that much, because at the end of the day it's still tied to your job. If you don't come to work every day, you don't get paid. And if you have a family to support, you can't really arbitrarily take a one (or many) years off to pursue other interests you may have in life. So while doubling your income level to $150,000 might marginally improve your happiness, the effect is limited because you're still (more or less) having to work the same amount.

I suspect that the next threshold has less to do with salary, and more to do with having enough of a savings such that you no longer have to go to work every day. Now, a lot more options are open to you. You can choose to continue working if you want, but you can also choose to stop, and instead spend time with your family, travel the world, write a book, or whatever else you might want. At that level, you also don't have to worry about serious medical bills or other unforeseen emergencies destroying your savings.

Money rarely makes people happy. Stuff that money can buy is where they find happiness.

To me, more money equals security for the future. I often struggle to buy new things, constantly rationalizing why I should save rather than spend. These types of transactions don't make me happy.

I do find happiness spending money on trips or events though, as the article indicates.

What about activities where there is opportunity for improvement but are not rewarded financially? Like playing a sport non-professionally, improving your cooking abilities, improving your relationship with others, etc.? Can improvement not be measured since money plays no role?

I do believe you seek some kind of return in everything you do. Your job's return is money, but it doesn't necessarily have to be money.

Sports, relationships, etc. also have returns, but not in the form of money. If, for example, it is the adrenaline rush that draws you to sports, that feeling should increase as you improve. That is your payback to show that you are getting better.

So no, I don't think money necessarily has to play a role, but I think there needs to be something to show yourself that you are improving. Money just happens to be what the measure used in the workplace, as that is the primary reason for working.

I'm in the ballpark of the given number, and yes, I'm relatively happy with how much I make and what I can do with it, but I'm not going to stop trying to make more.

I want to make things, and money is a sign that the things I'm making are valuable to people. Money is a signal that tells me I'm on the right path.

Additionally, I'd love to take a few years off and spend more time with my family. Being tethered to a job, regardless of how much it pays, will not allow me to do that. Making a shitload of cash will.

Money may not buy happiness, but I find happiness much more attainable when I'm not living paycheck to paycheck and/or not knowing how I'm going to pay for dinner.

This pretty much sums it up as far as I'm concerned. We all have only one shot at life on this planet, so unless you're comfortable spending all of your productive years working for just enough money to stay afloat, you'll want to save up as much money as you can, to buy yourself the freedom to make radical changes to the course of your life when the time comes that's what's necessary to 'increase happiness'.

I always get a little annoyed when people say or write stuff such as 'money does not buy you happiness'. In our modern, western societies, it actually does buy you happiness, provided you have enough of it, and don't blow it all on materialistic things. All those quasi-romantical perspectives how it's immaterial things like health, family and friends that make you happy are missing the point. It's not about money, that's just a medium of wealth, but about the opportunities you have for yourself and your loved ones to enjoy life. If you're lucky enough to have good health, family, friends and the financial means to make the most out of the privilege of having all that, you can be much happier than when you have to miss either one of those.

I realize that this may sound awfully shallow and materialistic, but it's just my observation of how this world turns. Sure enough you can be happy without being wealthy, but in the end, almost everyone would prefer being happy and wealthy, for the simple fact that it provides opportunities that are simply unattainable if you're happy but broke.

That's pretty much the point though — for most people, once they get beyond the point of needing to worry about how they're going to pay for dinner (whatever that number might be in their personal situation), the value of extra money tapers off very quickly. Up to then, more money brings more happiness. After that, not so much.

The points made here also happily co-exist with using money to keep score of how much you're on the right path etc. The studies referenced are more to do with how you then spend that money, than with how much you actually bring in. Earning huge amounts, but then giving most of it away, is perfectly congruent.

I would argue that people wish to make at least enough money where they aren't struggling from paycheck to paycheck. That way they can easily afford to put food on the table, put clothes on their kids' backs, pay for their kids to go to college, and go on a family trip every once in awhile.

For me, a mindfulness meditation practice has made this daily decision much easier. I need so little to be happy, and find so much everywhere to be happy about.

We get what we expect, so expect the good.

This strikes me as a position that can only be taken by the already-fortunate. If you don't me saying so, it reads like "let them eat cake". It's easy for us bourgeois, upper-middle, people with relatively few worries to talk down to the poor "but can't you just choose to be happy and not sweat the little stuff?!" "take some time off and meditate on your happiness!"

But when you don't know where your next rent check is coming from, how you will put food on the table next week for your loved ones, and you are one flat tire away from missing work, getting fired, and complete ruin... happiness really isn't a decision you make every day.

There is a bar at which the basic needs of life are no longer constant worries, and a person can actually take the time to reflect and breathe. Most of this country is below that bar.