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https://youtu.be/4q1dgn_C0AU

“The surprising science of happiness”, from Dan Gilbert, is one of the best TED talks of all time (over 4M views). In his amazing & funny 20’ presentation, he explains how our brains are wired and how it relates to happiness. The article reminded me of this great content



I found that video incredibly unconvincing. It just feels like pseudoscience telling people what they want to hear, and the data was underwhelming (assuming it's not flawed to begin with).

I think a more plausible explanation is that people just lie to themselves to believe whatever they want. These people are only "happier" until they're forced to confront a reality that contradicts their beliefs. In other words it's willful ignorance masquerading as synthesized happiness.

There's also data backing up what I'm saying. There's a study that's regurgitated constantly saying people aren't happier after making a certain amount of money ($75k), but almost nobody bothered to actually read the study. I think this contradictory study is a lot more convincing.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118


Thank you for raising skepticism about old studies!

The new one that you mention is slightly suspect as well though :) It is based on data gathered from trackyourhappiness.org. Why would someone install an app to track their happiness? I doubt that this is a representative group of people.

Another interesting paper about this is "Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved", Kahneman and Mellers, 2022 https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2208661120


You may be interested in this newer paper, reconciling the work of Killingsworth and Kahneman & Deaton. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120


I work in this area and I really dislike it when happiness is plotted against income only on a log scale, as is done here. The log scale effectively conceals the flattening-out of the relationship, which is the thing that shows you how progressive taxation + redistribution make the average person better off.

Whether it's a straight line up to $75K followed by a flat line from there on, or a curved (log) relationship all the way up, seems to me to make rather little difference.


Fig 2 of [1] shows high variance of happiness while income variation has only a small effect. There is roughly a 5 % (percent it is?) happiness delta for an income delta of about $ 500.000. However, the happiness delta between the different happiness levels is about 25 %.

Would “Income and emotional well-being: It doesn’t really matter” be a better title for the study? Or do I miss something?

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120#fig02


Measuring happiness by asking people to rate if from 1-10 seems pretty questionable.


Do you have a better idea? (Happiness is a fully subjective thing, so subjective measures only, please).




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