Can money buy happiness? According to a study published in 2018 by Purdue University and coordinated by dr. Andrew Jubb, there would be one cheap threshold beyond which the money stops affecting subjective well -being positively: 95 000 dollars per year for the “life satisfaction” And between 60 000 and 75 000 dollars for the “emotional well -being“. But be careful, above this threshold, the link weakens or even reverses. The news has gone around the world, but raises questions that go beyond the numbers: what do we mean by” happiness “? How do you measure?
Money “buys” happiness up to a certain threshold
The study of Jebb Et al. (2018), conducted on a large international champion, distinguishes between Two dimensions of happiness: “life satisfaction” and “emotional well -being”. The first is a general and reflective evaluation that people give to their existence, as when one wonders: “How satisfied are my life overall?”. It is, therefore, a cognitive judgmentbased on comparisons, expectations, objectives achieved or missed. The “emotional well -being”, on the other hand, concerns the emotions lived in everyday life: it includes emotional states such as joy, serenity, stress or anger, and is linked to how you feel during everyday activities. The results show that money helps up to a certain point, then it can become a source of anxiety, social comparison or loss of meaning. This curve, decreasing over a certain threshold, is not an absolute novelty: already Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (2010), in a famous study conducted on over 450,000 US, had identified a threshold of 75,000 dollars per year beyond which emotional well -being stopped growing, despite the increase in income.
Happiness as a social imperative
From a sociological point of view, the happiness it cannot be understood only as an individual emotion but it is (also) A social fact. Resuming Durkheim, we can define happiness as a “cultural rule”: with this we mean that the exercise or search for happiness orieves our behaviors, desires and expectations. According to Illouz, in many contemporary companies, happiness has become almost a moral obligation, a promise of the market, a personal and collective successful indicator. In this sense, being happy is not only a private question, but also a political and economic imperative In the name of which collective, political, personal and, in fact, economic choices are taken. Sara Ahmed (2010), in her essay “The Promise of Happiness”, claims that happiness is used to strengthen certain ideals: the productive, optimistic, self -sufficient individual. Those who deflect from this ideal, for poverty, protest or psychic suffering, are perceived as a dysfunctional. Happiness, therefore, is not neutral: it has a genealogy, produces exclusions, creates hierarchies.
Always Eva Illouz (2012) underlines that the culture of well -being is now “colonized” by the psychological and neoliberal discourse, which invites individuals to “work on themselves” To be happy, shifting attention from structural conditions to personal responsibilities. In this context, poverty and unhappiness risk being interpreted only as individual failuresshifting attention to the search for structural, social and cultural causes.
But, as he deepens together with Edgar Cabanas in Happycracy (2018), happiness It is no longer just a life objective, but an compulsory pre-approach from which to start to build any other area of one’s existence: work, relationships, success. Happiness thus becomes one “Standard of emotional efficiency“
According to the authors, this “happiness regime“It is perfect to governing us without the use of coercion: since it is an internalized mechanism the only thing it needs to work is that We believe it and we self -bearing ourselvesputting into practice behaviors and narratives that support and reproduce this model of happy (and therefore) efficient/productive individual. According to the authors, it is a new form of social control, which transforms the subjects into “entrepreneurs of themselves”.
Is it possible to measure happiness? Between metrics, experiences and critics
The World Happiness Report from the United Nationsfor example, classifies countries annually on the basis of “perceived happiness“, Calculated through a mix of objective (PDP per capita, life expectancy) and subjective (perceived freedom, social support, confidence in the institutions). These metrics are accompanied institutional tools such as Oecd Guidelines On Measuring Subjective Well-Boing (2013), which propose to integrate standardized measurements with more contextual and culturally sensitive approaches.
In any case, The measurement of happiness through monetary or subjective indicators opens methodological and theoretical questions. First, there is a tendency to treat happiness as ameasurable entity and comparable, neglecting the fact that it is historically, culturally and linguistically built (Ahmed, 2010), that is, what people mean by “happiness” depends on the social context in which they live, on the culture in which they grew up and even on the words available to describe it. Furthermore, it is assumed that individuals know how to “say” how happy they are, reducing the complexity of experience to a scale from 1 to 10 (Sointu, 2005).
Finally, the link between income and well -being is strongly mediated by factors such as the level of perceived inequality, social security and the quality of relationships: it is therefore a relative indicator, not absolute (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). Said in simpler words, it does not only count how much you earn, but also how you feel compared to others, if you feel protected and if you have significant ties in one’s life.
