lazz:

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory | TED

“I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. We found it with respect to happiness of the experiencing self, when we looked at how feelings vary with income. And it turns out that below an income of $60,000 a year, for Americans, and that’s a very large sample of Americans—like 600,000, so it’s a large representative sample—below an income of $60,000 a year people are unhappy. And they get progressively unhappy the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. Clearly what is happening, is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery. And we can measure that misery very, very clearly.”