You’ve probably heard before that the mo money we come across, the mo problems we see (Wallace 1997). While that may be the case when mo money is acquired posthumously, statisticians and economists now have evidence that your happiness is proportional to the logarithm of your wealth (see chart below). In other words, sadness is for poor people! The corollary is that the more money you currently have, the more you would have to acquire in order to attain an additional happiness unit. Much like crack cocaine.
See also a more formal paper about this topic. I didn’t read it because it looked super boring, but the charts at the end are interesting. For instance, did you know there is a “U-shaped life satisfaction in rich English-speaking countries”? (Figure 5)
