College students gearing up for financially constrained early careers in academia, nonprofit work, or god forbid K-12 education will likely find comfort in the conventional wisdom that money can’t buy happiness. If so, they might be pleased to hear that a 2010 paper by Agnus Deaton and Nobel laureate Daniel Khaneman seemed to have proved this fact. The paper reported a stop in the increase of emotional well-being after an annual salary threshold of $75,000 (roughly $110,000 today). These students would, however, soon face a harsh reality if, in the process of staying current on behavioral science research, they stumbled across a 2021 paper published in the same journal that produced an antithetical conclusion. Money, author Matt Killingsworth reported, not only continues to buy happiness after that $75,000 checkpoint, but the rate at which it rises may even start to increase.

Who was right? Should these students (their major ends with the word “studies”) be diabused of their allegiance to this pollyanna maxim, or can they sanely continue to hold on to hope?

Like Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, both states of the world were presumably true until the original researchers and then reporters at Planet Money peered into the box of methodology and called out that the cat, in a tragic turn of events, was dead. 

A psychology professor from University of Pennsylvania described the data as “unusually good.” Killingsworth’s methods and conclusions also held up to scrutiny. It was the analysis of the heartwarming (for our rhetorically useful college students, at least) 2010 study’s methods that killed the cat. 

The data came from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey, which contains a series of discrete yes or no questions that Khaneman and Deaton used as “hedonic indicators”. These binary data points encoding answers to, for example, “Did you feel happiness or joy today?” are not inherently wrong, but they are quite limited in what amount of reality they can express. Consider a person whose income begins to afford them consistent positive experiences, such that, as this income rises, they switch from consistently answering “no, no, yes” to saying “yes, no, yes,” and then “yes, yes, yes” to these hedonic indicators in the daily survey. Even if they continue to get happier once they can afford grander vacations, a nicer home (for gen-Z, just “a home”), or organic eggs, they’re still stuck at that past response of “yes, yes, yes” in the data. 

In this way, when people become consistently happy, they get trapped by the data. The ceiling is too low. For the 2010 paper, most people hit this data ceiling when they began to earn around $75,000 annually, which yielded the famous plateau result. If we then defer to the better data of the 2021 study, where people could rate their happiness on a scale of 1-5, we can conclude that the initial saying is false. Money can, in fact, buy happiness. 

However, there is an important qualification to consider. Money can buy happiness… for most people. A minority of people whose salaries met or surpassed $75,000 kept replying a combination of “no no no” to Gallup’s hedonic measure questions in the 2010 study. Even with higher and higher incomes, they seemed to be unable to escape their plight, suggesting that some series of external problems or characteristics that cause unhappiness can’t be solved with more money. Concretely, a more lucrative career in a field that you hate, or at the expense of a tumultuous home life, or while dealing with burnout and depression cannot ensure a higher number of “yes” responses.

From a revised conclusion taking into account both the better data from the 2021 paper and the corrected conclusions of the 2010 paper—something along the lines of “money can buy happiness, except when it can’t”—there is still something interesting happening at an income of around $75,000. Most people, upon reaching this threshold, are more happy than unhappy on a series of indicators. If they are ever able to “solve” their unhappiness, they are able to do so here. 

Let’s suppose those college students from the beginning merely want contentment on a daily basis. Then $75,000 may still be a realistic and perhaps even rational maximum salary goal to strive for. Any more might just be excess. 

In my own life, I’ve tried to practice identifying things that significantly increase my own experienced well-being in ways that other, often more expensive purchases, have not. Accordingly, here is an incomplete list of ten things that have improved my own “experienced well-being:”

1.  The internet. Basically the entire collection of accumulated human knowledge, free. 
2. Nice socks and underwear. Treat yourself. You could be wearing the same underwear as Jeff Bezos. (The brand, not the same exact pair. Or maybe even that. I don’t know)
3. Sunsets. Maybe you could get a better view on a distant beach or mountaintop, but your hometown grocery store parking lot at 9:00 in the summer would beg to differ. 
4. The feeling after a run. Ahh running, the most democratic sport, what humans evolved to do, why our butts are so big and our feet are so long. 
5. Going to the beach and having two towels: one for drying and one for laying so you don’t have to dry yourself with a soggy and sandy towel the second time you come out of the ocean (given you have access to the beach). 
6. A good book. The library has hundreds of stories passionate artists poured their hearts into and slaved over. Billionaires aren’t personally contracting these stories to be written, at least not the good ones. 
7. A good meal. It takes effort, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. 
8. Sunscreen. Those formulations are FDA approved. They don’t work any better if you’re rich.
9. While we’re at it, ibuprofen. Consuming too much can even build up tolerance, so, if anything, less is more.
10. Flying. Not cheap, but a ticket puts you 10,000 feet above the ground moving 550 miles per hour to where you want to go. Really the only thing Taylor Swift does differently is avoiding the TSA. 

I’ll leave the rest up to you, reader. I hope you find ways to buy some happiness with the time and money you already have.