Finding happiness for me has been my passion for some years and the more I have thought about it and taken steps to be happy, I have become happier. Now, some research makes me reconsider the assumptions that I had up to now that after a certain income level the happiness flattens out. Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have demonstrated that happiness actually keeps improving with income. Their findings prove that rich people report higher well-being at any given point as well as over time. What impressed me even more is that there is no maximum wealth threshold at which point higher incomes stop mattering. While reading a related article by Adam Davidson, I found out that United States, unfortunately, is an exception. Even though we are thrice as rich as we were in the 70s, our happiness has remain stagnant. Why? Simply because the rich have gotten richer while the middle class and poor have lost whatever stability that they used to have, like, jobs, pensions, etc. A typical American has no guarantee that he will have a decent job his whole life or that he will be able to save enough for retirement or that he can manage to go to bed each night without any worries.
My Life In Bits And Pieces in Massachusetts.