[skt5]

> Money can't buy happiness

Usually when someone says this to me, I respond with "then you're spending your money poorly". What I mean to say is that more money buys more flexibility and options, which should lead to more opportunities to leave unhappy situations or at least add more happy situations. Note that this is a generalization so there are plenty of edge cases to counter this.

[mumblemumble]

There's also this distressing hump in the money/happiness curve. More money leads to a greater sense of well being up to a point where you meet your basic sufficiency needs, and then, beyond that, the correlation goes inverse.

My guess is that there is a very strong diminishing returns effect to the utility of money, and that, at some point, other effects start to dominate. Perhaps what's happening with health care workers is a case study for what's going on there.

[jxidjhdhdhdhfhf]

Can you cite a source on that? The studies I've seen have shown that happiness increases more slowly after a certain income but the slope never goes negative.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom...

[skt5]

My intuition is on the money vs happiness curve, the first derivative is always positive unless “your spending it wrong”. The second derivative might be positive for lower values of money but probably has negative values that might highlight a diminishing returns effect.

I should have qualified in my parent post that it assumes all else being equal.

[pavel_lishin]

Having money buys flexibility and options. Merely making slightly more money doesn't.

[skt5]

What’s the difference between having a little bit more money and making a little bit more money? My guess is it’s how it is spent.