Society & Culture - Posted by Peter Dunn-Warwick on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 13:45 - 3 Comments 
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(6 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Happiness is earning more (than they do)
Researchers were seeking to explain why people in rich nations have not become any happier on average over the last 40 years even though economic growth has led to substantial increases in average incomes. “Earning a million pounds a year appears to be not enough to make you happy if you know your friends all earn 2 million a year,” says Chris Boyce. (Courtesy: iStockphoto)
U. WARWICK (UK)—Simply being highly paid isn’t enough. To be happy, people need to perceive themselves as being more highly paid than their friends and work colleagues.
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“Our study found that the ranked position of an individual’s income best predicted general life satisfaction, while the actual amount of income and the average income of others appear to have no significant effect,” says lead researcher Chris Boyce of the department of psychology at the University of Warwick.
“Earning a million pounds a year appears to be not enough to make you happy if you know your friends all earn 2 million a year.”
The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.
The researchers from Warwick and Cardiff University were seeking to explain why people in rich nations have not become any happier on average over the last 40 years even though economic growth has led to substantial increases in average incomes.
The researchers examined seven years of data on earnings and life satisfaction from the British Household Panel Survey, a representative longitudinal sample of British households and found that satisfaction was much more strongly related to the ranked position of the person’s income (compared to people of the same gender, age, level of education, or from the same geographical area).
University of Warwick news: www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/
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3 Comments
Jill
I know that economic growth has increased over the past 40 years but I believe that “real” salaries in terms of buying power have declined since the 60′s – with the exception of the above mentioned CEOs etc. Perhaps this might have something to do with the dissatisfaction as well.
For many people happenings means to earn more money and that’s good because we need it because money is a source to survive but I think that it’s not the most important thing to reach happiness, happenings means to live very good and supporting other when they need.
That helps explain why CEOs with obscene salaries still want bigger bonuses even though there is no way they can spend all the money. Now there needs to be some research as to how these people determine to their own satisfaction they are better paid when it is difficult to determine how they rank themselves