Stressed, satisfied

Contrary to recent headlines, our take of a new study is that money cannot buy happiness, but it's tough for Americans to feel happy or satisfied if they're poor.

Angus Deaton, an economist at the Center for Health and Well-being at Princeton University, and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, analyzed a 450,000-person survey to assess the age-old question: "Does money buy happiness?"

To get their answer, the pair looked at two aspects of well-being. First, emotional well-being, or how an individual feels day to day. In other words, are you happy? Second, they looked at self-evaluation. How does a person assess life when asked if he is satisfied with it?

The researchers found being poor does hinder both emotional well-being, that is, happiness, and self-evaluation.

But being rich does not make people happier. In fact, researchers found no improvement in emotional well-being (happiness) beyond the $75,000 income level. The median income for the U.S. is about $71,500.

What did improve as people rose further up the income ladder was self-evaluation. When asked, richer people tended to express greater satisfaction with their lives, even if a day-to-day evaluation of how they felt showed they were no happier than their middle-income friends.

Americans, it appears, think they need more money to have a positive evaluation of their lives and their worth, perhaps not recognizing the happiness they've already achieved.

But we Americans are a strange lot. Measured against other countries, we ranked ninth in self-satisfaction but finished fifth among 151 countries in terms of stress.

In a finding that won't surprise many parents, children at home was associated with significant increases in stress, sadness and worry. And smoking, they found, was "an impressively strong indicator of low well-being."

So if you're fortunate to live a middle-class life, appreciate what you have, don't stress about your income, don't smoke and know that someday the kids will grow up.