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Comment by pil0u | Hacker News Reader

Last time I checked, Nobel Prize Daniel Kahneman published a study[0] in 2010 on 450'000 Americans concluding that people's emotional well-being increases with log(income) but stops increasing at around $75k/year.

Has this changed this dramatically during the past decade?

[0] https://www.princeton.edu/~deaton/downloads/deaton_kahneman_...

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There's a recent paper¹ claiming Kahneman & Deaton's study was flawed and happiness does increase above $75k/year.

¹ https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

Someone else pointed out the recent paper, but I'll also point out that $75k per year in the US puts you in the 1% of global population for salary. So it's not like $75k is attainable for most people.

https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=...

Adjusting for inflation, (since that number was from a paper published in 2010), that number is now $103k.

Someone else mentioned the potential flaws with the study, but even assuming the study is correct, people keep sharing the $75k number (in 2010) without adjusting it for inflation.

Adjusting it for inflation[1], $75k in 2010 would be $103k today.

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Huh, this is really interesting! I knew the normative properties of log wealth, but the connection between well-being and log income surprises me.

What's the connection between wealth and income? Linear or something else?

I could see my happiness topping out at roughly 1 million a year. Unfortunately I am roughly 1/16th of that per year right now. So it is likely I will never know.

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