We've been talking about the idea that our minds lie to us when it comes to happiness. We've been talking about the kinds of spots where our minds seem to lie to us. One of the big ones that come up when we ask this question, if only I had blank, I would be so happy is the topic that you all yield really quickly, which is money. We all believe that if we had a lot of this, maybe we wouldn't be perfectly happy, but we'd be a lot happier. That's why there are songs like "I Want to Be a Billionaire" by Bruno Mars. I want to be a billionaire so fucking bad. Buy all of the things I never had. We all think if I was a billionaire, I'd be a lot happier. But is that really true? It's definitely something a lot of students think. If you survey college students when they're first entering college about the things that they find most important in life, as these researchers have done, you'll find a really interesting pattern. Because these researchers didn't just survey college students for one year coming in. They've actually been looking at college students since the 1960s and asking them different questions like, "What do you think is important for life?" The graph I'm showing you here is the graph of how many college students say being very well off financially is important in life. What you can see is it's pretty high, and it's been going up since the 1960s. This is interesting because if you look at other questions, you'll see just the opposite pattern. This is the answer to the question, "How important is it to develop a meaningful philosophy of life?" That's tank, but nobody cares about having a meaningful philosophy of life anymore, they just want to be a billionaire. This is what people think. But is that the case? Does more money really make us happy? This is one of the biggest questions in the field of happiness research right now. But we have some important answers. One of my favorite answers to this question of whether or not money really makes us happier, comes from a very famous study by Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton. These [inaudible] of these two guys are famous because they both separately won the Nobel Prize in economics. It's two Nobel Prize winners who came together to do this study. They really wanted to look at this question. As your salary goes up, does your happiness level go up? They didn't do this in a small way, they worked with the Gallup polling agency to study over 400,000 Americans. This was back in 2008, 2009. They got their salary information, and they asked them three different questions about their happiness levels. They asked about these folk's positive emotions, do you experienced smiling, happiness daily enjoyment, like how's your positive emotion doing? They asked about the opposite of negative emotions, so you do not feel sad, do not worry. This is the opposite of feeling blue all the time. They also asked about people's stress levels. Are you stress-free? Did you not report stress on the previous day? is basically the question. They're going to plot each of these three measures of happiness across people salaries. I'm going to show you the graph that they came up with. This is a pretty famous graph in the field, and it's a little complicated. I'm going to walk you through it. What you're seeing across the bottom is people's annual income. But it's score, what we might call logarithmically. The numbers jump up. It starts at 10,000, and it doubles to 20,000, then it doubles again to 40,000. This is going up pretty steeply because it's on a logarithmic scale. Then each of those graphed lines is actually pointing to a different measure of people's happiness level. The top one is people's positive affect, whether they're experiencing lots of joy in things. The middle one is whether people report being not blue. It's the opposite of sadness. Going up is less negative emotion. The bottom one is when you report being stress-free. You're going to notice two things about this graph. When we look at people's low-level of income, those lines are going up. If you jump from a $10,000 salary to a $20,000 salary, both of those are below the poverty line in the US right now, your happiness is definitely going to go up. One takeaway is, if you're not earning very much money, getting more money will actually make you happier. But the other important takeaway is, every single one of those lines levels off. It's just flatlines. It seems to flatline at the same level. It's around $75,000 at the 2009 level. What does that mean? That means if you in 2009 were earning $75,000, even if I double or quadruple your salary, it's not going to improve your happiness on any of these three measures. That is not what we think, but it's what the data really show. Money is not buying us as much happiness as we think unless you really don't have many money, in which case, you really will get more. If you don't have enough money to put food on the table, to put a roof over your head, getting those resources is definitely going to affect your well-being. But once you get the basics, getting more doesn't really seem to help. We assume lots of money will make us happy, but not so much. There's a related goal too that we think will make us happy. It's all the stuff that money can buy. If I put that, if I had blank, I would be happier. Playstation 5, new car, all this stuff we think that would make us happy. When I think of my own personal awesome stuff goals, I often go to a particular specific reference point. I often think if I had the awesome stuff that Beyonce had, I would be very happy. Just like full disclosure, Beyonce has a lot of awesome very expensive stuff. She has a very nice apartment in California that she bought for $88 million, she's got a fantastic, very nice convertible car, another 28 million that she dropped on that, she's got a private plane, only 40 million for that, she has diamond encrusted shoes that cost her $300,000. The upshot is, it's very good to be Beyonce. She's got some really nice stuff. But the question is, does that really nice stuff make Beyonce happier? Would I be happier if I had awesome stuff like that? Again, this is something researchers really look at. In fact, Richins and Dawson looked at this in particular. They actually looked in the context of what they referred to as a materialism scale. How materialistic are you? Here are some of the items on that scale. I like to own things that impress people, I like a lot of luxury in my life, my life would be better if I own certain things that I don't have, I'd be happier if I could buy more stuff. The more you answer yes to those questions, more materialistic you are. But does that predict your happiness? They looked at a correlation between these two things. In other words, as your materialism goes up, does your life satisfaction go up? What they find is that there is a very significant correlation, but it's a negative correlation. What does that mean? As you get more and more materialistic, on average, your life satisfaction goes down. The question is, does money and awesome stuff really make us happier? The answer seems to be no. In fact, it doesn't make. More money won't make you happier unless you're really living in poverty, unless you really desperately need money. Getting more when you're at a reasonable middle-class income isn't probably not going to make you happier, and seeking out money, seeking out material goods and the stuff that money can buy, seems to make us less happy not more. One of the big things we think will make us happy, lots of money and good stuff doesn't make us as happy as we think.
