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Hey Ethbro, I read dozens of studies on income and happiness. What I found is summarised here: https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/ https://8000

Hey Ethbro, I read dozens of studies on income and happiness. What I found is summarised here: https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/ https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/. Some took a longer term view, in particular the ones on lottery winners. Saving for retirement is obviously sensible. But I think the result will be the same - you won't be much happier retiring on $120,000 a year than $60,000 a year. What will matter at that point is having social connections and feeling that your work is/was meaningful.

ethbro 10y ago
I'm always impressed by attempts to empirically answer questions which typically receive less rigorous research, and the log-relationship and plateau of income vs happiness both bear out my personal experience. However, I specifically asked about retirement because it shares some interesting characteristics with your supported findings. A) Retirement accounts are intangible. I may receive pleasure and happiness from imagining the money I have in them, but believe it would be a hard case to make that I received true happiness from increasing them B) Enabling retirement would seem to dovetail with the plateau effect. To wit, if I make $40k now, but am unable to save enough to make $40k in retirement, my happiness would plummet if I ever retired. If I make $60k now and save enough to provide $40k worth of retirement income, then my happiness would be substantially improved. Therefore that +$20k has a secondary effect of making me much happier later in life I doubt it would change the findings, but if true, might shift the numbers a bit.
- robertwiblin 10y ago
  Hey Ethbro, it's a good point that maybe retirement saving isn't fully dealt with in our article. I'll add a sentence about that tomorrow. Basically I would just aim to stay about $40-60k both while you're working and in retirement. So it's more a consumption target than income target. :)
  - ethbro 10y ago
    Consumption target seems a perfect way to think about it and elegantly sums up the implications! :)
    - robertwiblin 10y ago
      I reworded the bit on retirement to help deal with this.

ethbro 10y ago

I'm always impressed by attempts to empirically answer questions which typically receive less rigorous research, and the log-relationship and plateau of income vs happiness both bear out my personal experience. However, I specifically asked about retirement because it shares some interesting characteristics with your supported findings. A) Retirement accounts are intangible. I may receive pleasure and happiness from imagining the money I have in them, but believe it would be a hard case to make that I received true happiness from increasing them B) Enabling retirement would seem to dovetail with the plateau effect. To wit, if I make $40k now, but am unable to save enough to make $40k in retirement, my happiness would plummet if I ever retired. If I make $60k now and save enough to provide $40k worth of retirement income, then my happiness would be substantially improved. Therefore that +$20k has a secondary effect of making me much happier later in life I doubt it would change the findings, but if true, might shift the numbers a bit.

robertwiblin 10y ago
Hey Ethbro, it's a good point that maybe retirement saving isn't fully dealt with in our article. I'll add a sentence about that tomorrow. Basically I would just aim to stay about $40-60k both while you're working and in retirement. So it's more a consumption target than income target. :)
- ethbro 10y ago
  Consumption target seems a perfect way to think about it and elegantly sums up the implications! :)
  - robertwiblin 10y ago
    I reworded the bit on retirement to help deal with this.