How happy are you?

Does money buy happiness? If so, I don't see it.

By Vincent Van Gogh

I consider the graphic below to be a piece of art. It is a study in maroon, with a lighter area toward the middle. It denotes nothing one can think of as science, because it is a representation of a profoundly idiosyncratic and unrepresentative data set. It reminds me of Van Gogh's famous painting, which depicts a yellow vase of yellow sunflowers on a yellow table with a yellow wall. It is a study in yellows. The splotch of maroon is a study of another color, and of happiness, and money, and self-evaluation toward the end of a long life. The maroon shape looks a bit like the USA, with Texas in the south, Florida a peninsula. Maybe it is a commentary on the nation, with a distorted mirror image. Who knows?  Neither have scientific meaning. They are art. They are something to observe and consider.

A Heat Map of Wealth and Happiness

The chart below reports the responses of some 400 college classmates. The vertical axis is a self-reported index of a person's happiness on a zero-to-ten scale. The horizontal axis is self-reported net worth. 

The responses were part of an anonymous survey Harvard classmates, class of 1971. We are all about 72 years old. Of the 1,600 who graduated, about 10% of us have died. Nearly all the classmates who are alive were contacted and given a chance to participate. About 30% did participate. 

By John Posner

This isn't a representative sample of anything, including our very privileged class. We are mostly White. We are about 75% male. All of us were pretty good at high school, or we wouldn't have been in the sample. We are all college graduates and nearly all have post-graduate degrees. Lots of lawyers, physicians, academicians, and people who managed money. The median net worth is about $5 million dollars. 

Most of the respondents report their happiness as about an eight on a zero to ten scale, with some sevens and some nines. That is the sweet spot: very happy but could be happier. Only about 60 out of the 400 consider themselves to be in the generally unhappy zero-to-five range. Maybe those people exist in large numbers in the class and they expressed that unhappiness by refusing to take part in the survey. That is why this is something to ponder; not something from which to draw sharp conclusions. 

There is some skew toward thinking oneself happy if one has more money. That makes sense. If one is alive and wealthy then one might think one should be happy, and mark the survey that way, even if, objectively, one isn't any happier than the people who ranked themselves a six instead of eight. But there is less skew than one might think. At any given net-worth level, the range of reported happiness seems to be about the same, with most people in the seven-to-nine range. People with a net worth of  less than $1,000,000 people with $25 million are in that same range spread, mostly seven-to-nines. The light-colored portion of the chart is where the people cluster--the people, that is, who responded to the survey. That represents 250 of the 400 people. They are prosperous and think they are happy.

A few people are relatively unhappy. About 20 people--5% of the sample--score themselves at one to five. There are as many unhappy rich as unhappy people who aren't rich. The people who consider themselves unusually happy--the nines--also include both rich and less-rich. Money matters, I suppose, but apparently not much.

The original group of 1,600 graduates tended to have in common an achievement orientation. They were part of that class because they had ambition, at least back when they were age 16 and applying to colleges. Financial success is a form of achievement, and by age 72 most found unusual financial success. Theoretically that should make them happy, but there are many ways to fulfill ambitions and some throw off more money than others. 

One way to look at this study in maroon is not to over-think it. A bunch of 72-year-old Boomers look at their lives and decide they are mostly quite happy, pretty much without regard to how much money they have. Now wealth consists of having ones health and relationships with spouse and kids.

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John Posner prepared the heat-map graphic. He is a retired technical writer. In retirement he volunteers for Habitat for Humanity. He played the trumpet in college, and he has taken it up again.

Posner, doing work for Habitat for Humanity

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