Money can't buy happiness. But according to Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman it can stop you being unhappy. How much does it take to keep the blues away? About $60,000 a year, says Kahneman, a pioneer in the field of behavior economics.
As reported here, Kahneman recently gave a TED talk where he said experience is essentially divided into the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self" and to be happy you have to balance the two. Kahneman said: "We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. We know that money is very important, goals are very important. We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things."
It gets really interesting then when he gets into an exchange with TED host and curator Chris Anderson. Analyzing the results of a Gallup survey, Kahneman nominates $60,000 as the threshold for happiness.
"When we looked at how feelings vary with income,'' Kahneman says. "And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans, and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000 … people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat."
In other words, $60,000 is not going to make you happy, it's a flat line. But anything below that will leave you miserable. As Kahneman says: "Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly."
You can watch the video here.
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