The Long Way Back to Ourselves

8.5

Happiness: What the Research Shows

This episode reconstructs how the much-quoted threshold of $75,000 from Kahneman and Deaton's 2010 study, above which money supposedly stopped mattering for well-being, was challenged and then resolved in a 2023 adversarial collaboration. For roughly four out of five people, well-being keeps rising with income; for a minority, it flattens out. The most stable single finding comes from the Grant Study, running since 1938, whose leaders concluded in 2023 that the quality of close relationships predicts health in old age better than cholesterol levels. Throughout, the episode stresses that every figure in happiness research rests on uncalibrated self-reports.