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I thought Wolfers conceded to Caplan on his blog that the effect size is ridiculously small (like, you would need a million dollars in yearly income to actually raise your happiness by 1 SD). Wolfers responds to Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/wolfers_respond.html Caplan: http://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/the_wolfers_equ.html
I think this question is very hung up in the complexity of the concept of 'happiness' (and possibly also confounded by correlations between who does and doesn't have money. The richest people I know are also the most stressed out because they are rich because they're broken in a never ending quest of career and financial improvement. But if you took a well adjusted middle class family man and paid of his house, I bet he'd become happier.)
In terms of the complexity of happiness, I am a pretty happy guy dispositionally. I have a positive attitude, I'm relatively low stress and I love the simple things in my life. It's true that on a daily hedonic level, it would be hard to make money adjust by day-to-day mood all that much. I suspect it's also true of people dispositionally unhappy, restless, etc.
On a more fundamental level, my sense of value and meaning in the world is tied to my philosophical and religious beliefs as well as some deep ingrained pre-dispositions (like hating change, and being naturally nostalgic). Again, I doubt money could change that much, or possibly negatively.
But between my deep sense of happiness and my daily mood/disposition, I think there's a middle concept of happiness that would be helped greatly with more money. If the stress of working, saving could be reduce, the opportunity cost of my time, etc. It would affect my ' middle happiness' quite a bit.
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Once you've got to the point of "all my basic needs are met, I'm not in debt, I've helped out my family who need it, and now I have fuck-you money left over so if I lose my job in the morning I'm okay", then you don't get much extra value from more money.
At that level, now you're comparing yourself not to your former circumstances, but the new levels of rich people around you. Sure, I have ten million, but that's not rich, that's just comfortable! That guy has twenty million, and that other guy is a billionaire! I'm nothing compared to a billionaire!
And then the billionaires are at the levels of "okay so I own three superyachts, but I don't have my own space rockets like that other guy".
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Income isn't just skewed, it has a very long tail. Many variables have much more compact distributions. Happiness doesn't have natural units and could be distributed however you want depending on how you measure it, although it would be weird to me if the range of feelings human brains were capable of expressing spanned such a wide distribution (also something something CLT handwaving arguments, emotions are the sum of many small features).
1 SD can be a substantial impact, but if the result above is correct, it would be very difficult to obtain by increasing one's income from typical means (promotion, career change, getting an advanced degree, etc).
I'm pretty sure this is not correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule only applies to the normal distribution and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality gives no minimum at all for the portion of the distribution within 1 SD. And of course, this is all assuming that the standard deviation is even finite, which it may not be.
I don't follow. Ordinal data can't have a SD, since it by definition corresponds to an ordering or categorization of data, without meaningful numeric values assigned.
But 1 SD income seems like a lot, while 1 SD of height (about 2.5 inches) seems like it's not a lot. I don't think it's meaningful to talk about 1 SD being intuitively big or small since it depends on the variable in question.
That's fair (although the correlation isn't even defined if income has infinite variance).
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I think it depends on what's really at stake. I don't think money can buy happiness in the sense that I'd be significantly happier with a bunch of stuff I don't already have or couldn't already afford. I think it can buy happiness, though, in the sense that I'd be a lot happier if I never had to worry about money. A million dollars invested in 30 year treasury bonds will net you about 40k/year in tax free money, a pretty nice supplement to your existing income. 2 million would give you damn near enough to retire on if you invested what you would have been paying in taxes into a retirement fund to get ahead of inflation and maybe take up a part-time job as a raft guide or ski instructor for beer and cigarette money. For most people enough extra money to pay off their mortgage or student loans would make them feel like they were independently wealthy.
Back when I did consumer bankruptcy the effect that financial problems can have on people's lives really hit home. People would find themselves in untenable situations that caused a ton of anxiety and strained relationships (just due to stress and arguments, not borrowing money) and the constant fear that they were one step away from living in a cardboard box. When I told them to stop paying their bills until they had enough money for my fee and then after that the way out was pretty straightforward, the emotional catharsis was always palpable. Some people would break down crying when I told them there was a way out (usually after they had cried considerably when they explained their position). That aside, I couldn't begin to count the number of times clients called to schedule their filing meeting and told me how they felt like they were walking on air as they were leaving the initial consultation. Now to think that there are people who go through that anxiety all the time because their problem isn't so much debt as it is not making enough money, or not being consistently employed, then I can believe that an injection of money large enough to provide a decent cushion would make one significantly happier.
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