The price of happiness? £50,000pa

I've blogged on this topic before (here, here and here, then here, and some other research which gives a much lower figure to the plateau here.)

Happiness rose with income too, but plateaued when people reached an annual salary of $75,000. For those on more, happiness appeared to depend on other factors... the emotional strain of negative experiences, such as getting divorced or being ill, appear to be exacerbated by being poor. "More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain,"

As I mention above there is some evidence to put the figure lower. The other things I blogged about suggest there are nuances, as does the second part of the quote above. Some of that is to do with the wealth that society holds in common: infrastructure, health care, parks, working week, stress and so forth. Some of that has to do with issues of goals and fulfilment. I wonder about the methodologies. The older study was a correlation of a number of studies, and so I'd tend to trust it. I wonder whether the newer study used a different sort of definition. In the older studies a lot seems to depend on things like equality and participation, so maybe the newer study is showing the effects of studying people whol are aware of differentials and feeling disempowered ...? I think that the issues in the Spirit Level are relevant here.
The price of happiness? �50,000pa | Science | guardian.co.uk:

Money Makes Way For Happiness,

But it doesn't buy happiness: rather it can and often does create conditions for greater contentment, less anxiety etc. Read about it in this article, WorldChanging: Money Makes Way For Happiness, But Happiness Still Can't Be Bought: "income is actually a much better metric for happiness than we ever thought it was,” says Stevenson. It appears that the wealthier we and our countries are, the happier we are, overall. And, says Will Wilkinson, research fellow with the Cato Institute, double the income per capita in a country and you’ll get a significant increase in happiness."
This doesn't mean that we must keep increasing GDP to keep people happy; we need to attend to what it is that greater income has tended to 'deliver' to societies which is things like choices, less anxiety, a sense of security. Policy, in a resource-limited world, should concentrate on creating conditions for health, a sense of security and the ability to make choices. Much of this can be done in terms of good communities and proper social protections...

Thought for the century

This is thought provoking:

nef's (the new economics foundation) analysis also looks back over the last 40 years and comes to surprising and worrying conclusions. In an age of climate change, when it is more important than ever that we use our resources efficiently, nef's Index, published in association with Friends of the Earth, reveals that:

* The UK comes a poor 21st in the league of 30 countries. Only transition economies, and Portugal, Greece, and Luxembourg do worse.
* Europe as a whole has become less efficient, not more, in translating fossil fuel use into relatively long and happy lives. In fact, the Index reveals that Europe is less carbon efficient now than it was in 1961.
* Across Europe people report comparable levels of well-being whether their lifestyles imply the need for the resources of six and a half, or just one planet like Earth. The message to politicians is that people are just as likely to lead satisfied lives whether their levels of consumption are very low or high and therefore they should not be afraid of policies to reduce demand

The rest of the article is worth a read.
UK 21st in European league of carbon efficiency and well-being

Despite stresses ... prayer can help

This is in the USA, but this storyMoney really can't buy happiness, study finds | Chicago Tribune tells us:
"TOP OCCUPATIONS IN JOB SATISFACTION
1. Clergy
2. Physical therapists
3. Firefighters
4. Education administrators
5. Painters, sculptors ..."
Worth looking at the specifically Christian comment here. The question they end up asking there is "Are the statistics about pastoral burn-out and depression inflated? Do we overstate the hardships of ministry as a perverse way to make us feel more noble and courageous for continuing? Or, are most of us actually experiencing deep contentment, pleasure, and spiritual satisfaction in our labors?"
I think, in as far as this might play out in the UK too, that clergy actually tend to feel keenly the difference between themselves and their parishioners when it comes to employment, not least because, ultimately, they are paid by these parishioners. One response to the tensions around this is to retreat into self-justification (which presents as emphasising hours worked and specifically to try to show value for money by having a list of achievements). However, the dark side of that can be sudden 'snaps' and depression when things are not such as to produce ready markers of worthwhileness. And yet the ability to set own hours and goals, to a large extent, and to be dealing with a sense of fulfilling vocation is known to be worth a lot in terms of working against stress. I suspect the sets of figures are both true, just of different people at different times and products specifically of the questions asked, I suspect.

It's also worth having a look at this report from the Church Times. One of the interesting things reported there was, "A study by the Revd Dr Kelvin Randall of 340 clerics from England and Wales found that the younger clerics burned out more quickly, and felt more depersonalised. One reason the researchers gave was that older clerics had learnt to pace themselves. The Church needed therefore to introduce “strategies to care for and support its younger clergy.”" and even more interestingly and perhaps not surprisingly (but it's nice to have it confirmed) "In another study, of 1278 male stipendiary Church of England clerics who had responded to the burnout surveys and to a prayer survey, those clerics who had a “positive” attitude to prayer did better than those who had not."