Hi Hanzo, thanks for taking the time to read through. The 72 was not an original question of mine. It was actually posed to me from a friend in college, which was posed to him from a professor. This question has impacted my life even until now, and naturally I started asking other people.

I mentioned in my analysis that even though the p-value is 0.047 in the ANOVA, there isn’t enough sampling of the top three income brackets to make a confident analysis. There was one person who made 200k-250k, one person for 150k-200k, and five people for 100k-150k. If we were to remove the top three brackets that didn’t have enough sampling, the ANOVA results indicate income vs happiness is not statistically significant. Having said that, I would be really interested in seeing the results if we had more participants in that bracket. The majority of respondents did not make an income because they were students.

The two papers you linked to me are really interesting. I’ll have to take a closer read, since they go against the commonly believed “satiation point” where happiness is marginal after that threshold. Haha personally I almost want to believe that there is a satiation point, I think it would ground me and not make me greedy for more. The greed is the mental state that I think can be changed that would affect perception of happiness. Otherwise we will be in an infinite loop of getting a raise, being happy for a short period, getting greedy, and then being unhappy again. And in that loop, perhaps money doesn’t affect happiness.