It Turns Out Money Does Buy Happiness, At Least Up to $500,000

Money really does buy happiness, and the correlation extends well beyond the $75,000-a-year salary threshold that had been seen as the upper limit for making an impact, according to a team of scientists including the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who introduced the idea of a happiness plateau more than a decade ago.

Contentedness does increase steadily in line with incomes and even accelerates as pay rises beyond $100,000 a year — as long as the person enjoys a certain baseline level of happiness to begin with. That’s according to the authors’ study of 33,391 people living in the US, published March 1 in the Proceedings of the ...