Key Points
In contrast, looking back at the legacy of Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024), a 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics who fused Psychology and Economics, its noteworthy that, starting in the 1990s, a significant part of his work concentrated on the assessment of objective happiness" through moments" of life..
Nevertheless, Kahnemans research on happiness took a more objective shape when, in a 2010 paper with Angus Deaton, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2015, Kahneman discovered a monetary happiness plateau.".
Kahneman and Deaton reported thatin the American context, of coursea measure of emotional well-being (or happiness) increased but then flattened somewhere between an income of $60,000 and $90,000 a year ($75,000 being the median)..
However, in contrast to Kahneman and Deatons 2010 findings, Matt Killingsworth of the University of Pennsylvania found a linear relationship between happiness and (log) income in a 2021 study that used experience sampling..
According to this study, Kahneman and Deaton may have arrived at the right conclusion if they had expressed their findings in terms of unhappiness as opposed to happiness, as their measurements were unable to discriminate among degrees of happiness because of a ceiling effect..
