Economics 101: the declining margin of return on money, wealth and income.

You need water. Once you have about a litre or two to drink each day, you can't drink any more without health risks. A few litres more for cooking, and you don't need to worry about starving or getting really sick from raw food, or losing your teeth to stone grit and hard roots. 150 litres for a bath, once a week, and you'll be reasonably clean as well as never go thirsty.

You need sleep. Once you can sleep for eight hours a night, you'll do just fine. You'll never need more than your biological set level of sleep unless you are sick or traumatized.

You need food, but you'll get used to whatever diet you can afford and after a while, even the most expensive dainties cloy or make you obese.

And so it goes. All the basic necessities of life are cheap to somebody with $77,000, except maybe housing, and that depends on where you choose to live, so it's part necessity and part luxury, part snobbishness, part extravangance and rivalry with richer people. Keeping up with the Jones and the Smiths doesn't necessarily make you an iota happier, although it will always cost more and more and more.

When a poor country hits about $3,000 per capita, it starts to demand health care and education and other "luxuries". The UK went through this stage in the late 1700s-early 1800s. The USA was well into this stage by the 1830s-1850s. Countries like China have progressed past $3,000 per capita in two stages: the Mao stage where they concentrated on equality, education, extending life expectancy and health care, and the It's Glorious to Get Rich stage where a reasonable level of health and longevity is possible for the majority and the powers that be are concentrating on wealth production, consumer goods and services, and also new luxuries such as shutting down the dirtiest coal plants and building massive solar and wind power facilities.

As individuals you might think you need more than $77,000 because you are used to it, but there's scarcely a country on Earth where that is the median income. Luxembourg is one. It may be the only one. The US median family is well below that still.

It's easier to acquire new tastes and "needs" than to lose them. It's easier to buy more stuff until you run out of room than to figure out what you can do without. It's easier to eat too much than to eat well and stop before you are full.

But this is basic economics because everything that grows in this universe goes through a stage of rapid growth and then slacks off eventually. Everything but cancer. And who wants to be a cancer?

It's the S-shaped curve in various forms--declining marginal utility, population growth, energy consumption, wealth creation, and so on.

The children of the founders are not interested in more money--they have too much. They want more power, prestige, leisure, display, travel. The children of the second generation may not be interested in even those. They may give up social climbing and snob display for more laid-back leisure or for the arts, music or charity work. They may become socialists and take an interest in spreading around money that both embarasses them and hassels them with lawyers and accountants and bailiffs and estate agents and so forth.

A few old families will strike a balance between getting and spending that enables them to go on for several centuries, but in the end, once you have an aristocratic title, it is often no necessary to have a lot of money--the title is solid--it is the highest form of situational good--it's something you have that nobody can get because you have to be born with it.

Would you rather be an English Duke with $77,000 a year in interest and dividend income or a nouveau riche vulgarian with $77,000,000? And who is the the guy with $777,000,000 or $7 billion going to want to invite to dinner--the Duke or the vulgarian? IIRC, there are about 26 English Dukes in the world, counting the Royal Dukes (who don't really count for the hereditary peers) but there are hundreds of billionaires and many of them are white trash or worse.

Money can't buy some things, and the happiness of a peasant with his health and many children or a king with the longest pedigree in Europe, are two different kinds of things that money can't buy.

Even for the very, very rich, there are still a lot of things money can't buy or they'd all die of boredom and despair.

We define ourselves in many ways. Money is always a way of keeping score and shuffling goods around, it is not happiness.

At some point you pass beyond an event horizon, and you've accumulated so much that all of your desires are met except the acquisition of even more, and the power to inflict suffering on people beneath you.



These guys have so much money that they could easily indulge every desire they have as often as they want, and they'd never get within a stone's throw of burning through their money. Not even a tenth of it. But instead they devote their time and energy to polluting your lakes and rivers, buying your governments, destroying your communities, and making sure your school teachers don't have health insurance. They have everything they could ever want, and this is what they choose to do with themselves.

caramba421: Yeah, money can't buy happiness, but broke can't buy shiat.

I've heard it a different way:

Money doesn't buy happiness, but debt sure does buy grief.

I make more than 75K Doubling my salary would make me twice as happy as I am now.

Stupid article is stupid.

"Unlikely", subby? This is well-established in psychological research. These studies have been going on for decades, and the basic findings remains the same: Poverty sucks, so increasing income increases happiness until a certain freedom from suffering is attained. Above that point, the curve levels off and money stops buying happiness. This is not a controversial finding.

Pawn takes the King: I feel... just... CAPITAL.

BummerDuck: No wonder that person doesn't make sh*t. thinks the world owes them something.

Americans watch their standard of living take a nosedive while they scream at each other about who is the most entitled, while Sweden's biggest concern is making sure the people of Sweden are happy.

What a pathetic joke this country has become. Done in by being too proud to admit that anything is wrong.

I've heard it was right around that number for about 2 decades now, and at this point I think it's pretty accurate given what my financial goals are.

I could believe that but it also probably goes up when you become independently wealthy too.

I read "emotional well-being" as something closer to sanity than happiness, which puts it out of the reach of most of you no matter how much you make.

I'm sure the 80% of Americans who don't make that salary feel awesome.