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As bosses in the UK decline their bonuses, they might console themselves with a film called Happy being shown this weekend in London. One of its findings is that vast wealth is not guaranteed to give you a permanent smile. However, the link between salary and happiness is as controversial as a banker's bonus.
This Saturday, Feb 12, has been designated World Happy Day by the producers of Happy—a 75-minute documentary by Oscar-nominated director Roko Belic (Genghis Blues)—when the film will be screened at venues across the world.
The movie, which has already been shown at film festivals, including the London International Documentary Festival, examines what makes people happy. When it looked at material happiness, it found that in the U.S., once a person makes the equivalent of $50,000 a year, anything above that makes no difference in happiness at all. A rickshaw driver in India was said to be as happy as a middle-class U.S. citizen.
That's all very well and good but our research tells a slightly different story.
We aimed to find out that if money doesn't matter, why do so many people behave as if it does? Why are so many executive boards adamant that they'll lose talent unless they pay for it to stop walking out of the door?
Rewind a couple of decades. Richard Easterlin wrote a seminal paper in 1974 in which he suggested that more money didn't bring greater happiness. He showed that as industrialised economies doubled, happiness levels remained static. So if money doesn't make societies happier what about individuals?
Well our findings showed that pay is not associated with motivation, interest in your work, feeling you have an impact on the world or a sense of achieving your potential. In fact it's negatively associated with all of those. People don't want money as a reward for being interested or motivated at work nor does money have much sway on an individual's performance, time off sick or willingness to stay with an organization. We were so surprised by this that we checked it out twice on two different groups of 1,000 people each, one before the recession and one during it. The findings were the same both times.
But here's the big news. There is a strong correlation between money and happiness with life. A Gallup survey showed that in the USA 90 percent of people earning the equivalent of $250,000 called themselves very happy while just 42 percent of those earning under $20,000 said the same. But money doens't make you happy at work because work isn't where you get to spend it. It is actually out of work where it matters—where not having enough creates an enormous pressure. And of course having it enables you to make greater choices.
There are some important things that will impact your overall life happiness in relation to money. That includes what your attitude to money is, why you value it and how you intend to spend it. If you want cash to do good things with it, especially for others, you can increase your happiness by earning more.
That's supported by investor Warren Buffet who said he felt "overjoyed" as he donated 83 percent of his vast fortune (then around $62bn) to the Bill and Melinda Gates charitable foundation. But it was the act of giving that created the happiness, not the money itself.
