The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

and the opposite case, though frequently made, has never proved widely persuasive. And in fact, studies show that people in wealthier countries do report being happier than people in poorer countries, and within a particular country, people with more money do tend to be happier than those with less. Also, as countries become richer, their citizens become less focused on physical and economic security and more concerned with goals such as happiness and self-realization. Prosperity allows us to turn our attention to more transcendent matters—to yearn for lives not just of material comfort but of meaning, balance, and joy.
    Within the United States, according to a 2006 Pew Research Center study, 49 percent of people with an annual family income of more than $100,000 said they were “very happy,” in contrast to 24 percent of those with an annual family income of less than $30,000. And the percentages of reported happiness increased as income rose: 24 percent for those earning under $30,000; 33 percent for $30,000 to under $75,000; 38 percent for $75,000 to under $100,000; and 49 percent for more than $100,000. (Now, it’s also true that there may be some reverse correlation: happy people become rich faster because they’re more appealing to other people and their happiness helps them succeed.)
    Also, it turns out that while the absolute level of wealth matters, relative ranking matters as well. One important way that people evaluate their circumstances is to compare themselves with the people around them and with their own previous experiences. For instance, people measure themselves against their age peers, and making more money than others in their age group tends to make people happier. Along the same lines, research shows that people who live in a neighborhood with richer people tend to be less happy than those in a neighborhood where their neighbors make about as much money as they do. A study of workers in various industries showed that their job satisfaction was less tied to their salaries than to how their salaries compared to their coworkers’ salaries. People understand the significance of this principle: in one study, a majority of people chose to earn $50,000 where others earned $25,000, rather than earn $100,000 where others earned $250,000. My mother grew up feeling quite well-to-do in my parents’ little hometown of North Platte, Nebraska, because her father had a highly coveted union job as an engineer on the Union Pacific Railroad. By contrast, a friend told me that he had felt poor growing up in New York City because he lived on Fifth Avenue above 96th Street—the less fashionable section of a very fashionable street.
    The proponents of the “Money can’t buy happiness” argument point to studies showing that people in the United States don’t rate their quality of life much more highly than do people living in poverty in Calcutta—even though, of course, they live in vastly more comfortable circumstances. Most people, the world over, rate themselves as mildly happy.
    It’s admirable that people can find happiness in circumstances of poverty as well as in circumstances of plenty. That’s the resilience of the human spirit. But I don’t think that a particular individual would be indifferent to the disparities between the streets of Calcutta and the ranch houses of Atlanta. The fact is, people aren’t made deliriously happy by the luxuries of salt and cinnamon (once so precious) or electricity or air-conditioning or cell phones or the Internet, because they come to accept these once-luxury goods as part of ordinary existence. That doesn’t mean, however, that because people have learned to take clean water for granted, it no longer matters to their quality of life. Indeed, if that were true, would it mean it would be pointless to bother to try to improve the material circumstances of those folks in Calcutta?
    But as I went deeper into the mystery of money, I was pulled toward research and analysis suitable for an entirely different book, away from my most pressing interest. Sure, I wanted to “Go off the path” to a point, and maybe one day I would devote an entire book to the topic, but for the moment, I didn’t have to solve the enigma of money. I just needed to figure out how happiness and money fit together.
    So was I arguing that “Money can buy happiness”? The answer: no. That was clear. Money alone can’t buy happiness.
    But, as a follow-up, I asked myself, “Can money