I'm not all that surprised that people are more likely to be happy if they earn more, since that makes it easier to save more. A lot of my present-day happiness is rooted in financial security from my Stash. That gives me the flexibility to do more of what I want and less of what earns me money, which is not always the same thing.
Yep, I have a (rather hedonic) friend who took this study as a refutation of hedonic adaptation, and as a response I wrote a very similar analysis as you:
Yeah, this paper is really just a subset of
earlier research (Kahneman/Deaton), and they reproduced the same result for the particular question they analyzed, which is not exactly "happiness".
Rather, they analyzed something more akin to "life satisfaction", using a visualization of a ladder. Here is the question they analyzed:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time, assuming that the higher the step the better you feel about your life, and the lower the step the worse you feel about it? Which step comes closest to the way you feel?They also looked at a simpler version of a similar question:
All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days? Use a 0 to 10 scale, where 0 is dissatisfied and 10 is satisfied.Both Stevenson/Wolfers and Kahneman/Deaton concluded that by this metric, life-satisfaction rises with income, with no income level where the life-satisfaction gains end. This makes sense, because the questions immediately put you in a comparative frame of mind, and since most people *think* more money will make them happier, having less income than their peers causes them to give a lower rating for their life-satisfaction. And heck, causation probably goes the other way too; people with an alcoholic husband who beats them, and thus have a low life-satisfaction, are probably less likely to have the ability to achieve higher incomes.
But Kahneman/Deaton also analyzed other types of questions, more akin to actual emotional "happiness". For emotions like "enjoyment", "smiling/laughing", "stress", "worry", they asked:
Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How about _____?For these personal, actually-felt emotions, with no implied comparison to their peers, they concluded that improvement again rises with income, but improvements end somewhere around $75,000.
Furthermore, the concept of hedonic adaptation involves *spending* money on things, e.g., "does buying nicer stuff make you happier?" These studies don't actually use any spending data, they only use income data. In many cases, income is a reasonable (and often only-available) proxy for spending, but it's a particularly bad fit for the life-satisfaction question. As the fixer points out, it seems quite reasonable to assume that the savings, security, and flexibility afforded by a higher income can raise life-satisfaction levels, regardless of whether that increased income is used for current spending.