The Happiness Plateau

By Rich Kozlovich

 

On March 9th Arden Dier published a piece entitled, $75K Yearly Income Where Happiness Plateaus? There's More to It,  with the subtitle "$75K Yearly Income Where Happiness Plateaus? There's More to It" saying:

Study suggests only the unhappiest 20% see emotional well-being flatline after $100K. Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has admitted his influential study from a decade ago—suggesting happiness increases with household income only up to $75,000—didn't get it right. The question of whether money can buy happiness has been much debated since Kahneman's 2010 research with fellow Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton. In 2021, University of Pennsylvania happiness researcher Matthew Killingsworth published a study indicating there was actually no limit to the amount of money that boosted happiness. Hoping for a final answer, Kahneman and Killingsworth teamed up for a new study and found that for most people, Killingsworth's findings ring true.

The truth of the matter is, I think these studies are a load of horsepucky.  Time and circumstances change all the parameters, they always have and they always will, so they're always going to have to come back and admit they were wrong, and why.

There's a book out there entitled "Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It", which I found to be enlightening, and boring, as my eyes have to tendency to roll back into by head reading too many charts and statistics.  But one thing came clear to me, the happiness quotient is ignored by political leaders, and I can explain why.  They don't have a clue!  The reason for that is happiness is as difficult to define as defining "fair".  What's fair?  Who wrote the Book of Fair?  No one, and it's been my observation that fair is usually defined by who's ox is being gored.  And that's pretty much the same for happiness.

After reading that book, I concluded Machiavelli had the answer in his book The Prince, (which should be required reading starting in junior high school) published in 1532, where he outlines there are only two groups in the world.  The privileged and the masses.  The privileged only want to maintain, or expand, their privileges, and the masses just want security.  Individuals within those groups will have varying wants, but for both classes happiness is predicated on those two criteria.

Having owned a pest control company, I became involved in my industry's affairs serving as an officer of four trade associations in Ohio, and President of two of them. One of my associates once said I was "an enigma" to him. I answered, I'm easy to understand. I don't want money, power, position, privilege, or prestige, I just want what's right.  A nationally prominent scientist friend of mine told me once he always wanted to be important, to be someone, and he was, and he was amazing. I said I never wanted to be anyone, I just wanted to have a nice life, and I only got into these things because I didn't like being pushed around. It's the Serbian in me.

Happiness for the two of us, who were very much alike in many ways, was very different. Time and circumstance change our parameters. He wanted to be more prominent, and I wanted to be less prominent, so trying to find the "plateau" for happiness is in my opinion nothing more than academic welfare. It doesn't exist as a permanent equation.

Time and circumstance will change those parameters, but Machiavelli understood this one all important fact. If neither the privileged or the masses, as groups, are threatened as a group, governments are safe from both the privileged and the masses. Assuring their positions in life, the government can then reach in and pluck out any troublesome individual from the respective group and the group will not only remain silent, they will find justification for such action. And we've been seeing that currently.

When one or both groups feel threatened as a group, governments fall, and we're seeing talk of that now.  It's the first time in my 76 years I've seen the phrase, "America is in an existential crisis", touted more and more often, and with supporting evidence.  

As for these kinds of studies; I consider them academic welfare, since the parameters will change as circumstances change, and they'll have to do another study to apology for the errors of the last study.