talking to people who are pretty materially successful is that material success doesn't count for a lot of it, right? There are a lot of times when my material success comes at the expense of social connection with my friends, right? Because I'm so booked up, I have so many kind of talks and things to do. I'm so busy with papers and students that I don't have time to just take a break and kind of wander around. And so I think this is also something that our minds can get wrong. We assume like, well, you know, it's you got to get the material success first. And I think that's true to a certain extent, right? If you don't have the basics kind of taken care of, like food and shelter, obviously, that's a problem. But I think all too often, our accomplishments wind up being at an opportunity cost of the stuff that really makes us happy. So,

you know, Liz, I thought a lot about that after Lori said that. And this idea of the opportunity cost, I think, was interesting to me. I mean, I guess they say no such thing as a free lunch. And I think that even comes with getting money, even maybe for those people who got the $10,000. There is more that comes with it. Lori's referring to the opportunity cost. She's talking about it in terms of, I have to work so hard to make this money. And as a result, I may not have other things in my life. What do you think about that?

Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. And I think sometimes we under appreciate opportunity costs. You know, we focus on the really salient piece, which is, oh, I'm going to get this raise. And we don't think about, oh, what is this going to mean for some of my social relationships, for my feelings of having enough time to do the things that are important to me, you know, in controlled scientific experiments, often what we're trying to do is go in and very surgically change just one thing, right? So in our experiment where we gave away $10,000, we really tried to change nothing else about people's lives. Like those in the control group filled out all the same surveys. Like there was barely any additional time burden on the folks that got the money, right? But of course, that's not necessarily how real life works, right? It's rare that someone hangs up, hands us $10,000 and doesn't expect anything from it.

No, I think you're making a really, really good point. These people, it wasn't like they were getting a raise because with the raise might come additional responsibilities and an opportunity cost and they just got the money. And you even went so far as to say not have a gift tax on it.

Right, exactly. And I mean, the effects of receiving the money were substantial, but they were not so big that they couldn't possibly be outweighed by other things. If people had had to accept moving away from friends or family to get this money or having a lot less free time, it might not have been an overall net win for happiness. So

money can be very associated with happiness as long as it doesn't come with an opportunity cost and then you've got to balance that opportunity cost. Exactly.

And if you do get that money, then it's a matter of thinking really carefully about how you spend it because money isn't just something that like automatically rains down on us in the form of like drops of happiness, right? We have to find ways to turn it into happiness. So

let me ask the question that I've sort of been asking all, all long and I just want to make sure I fully understood how you answer this. Can money buy happiness? Money

can absolutely buy happiness and if you hear anyone say money can't buy happiness I would say tell them to try giving some of it away. Wow

I love that. You just that was very clear. You want to have enough money to be able to give it away. That's

right and again I think there's this maybe myth that we need to wait till we make a certain amount of money before we can start giving. And I think that that's a misunderstanding, because we see in our research that even people struggling to meet their own basic needs who use a little bit of money to help others do get this benefit from it. In contrast, I was just chatting with a friend who is very financially successful and has been able to give a lot of money to charity. And he was saying how he doesn't necessarily feel that his larger donations have made him happier. So I don't think that there's always a clear relationship between the exact amount that you give and how it makes you feel. Instead, I think it's about the way that you give. And when you're able to give in a manner that enables you to see how you're making a difference and to feel a real sense of connection with the people or cause that you're helping, that's where I think the good feelings naturally bubble up. And that's what we as humans evolved to experience, right? We didn't evolve in a situation, you know, where we were donating money to a charity on the website. We evolved to help others directly in our community, where we could see the benefits that we were providing to those individuals.

How much do you think this has to do with the fact that we live in a country that has great wealth disparity? I do look at a place like the United States and think, we're one of the wealthier countries. I don't think we're the wealthiest, but we're one of the wealthier countries and rates of loneliness and isolation and dissatisfaction, reported dissatisfaction are really, really high. And I guess it gets at this point again that maybe for individuals having more money as a general rule is going to make them happier, but not necessarily for large organizations or in this case, a country. Well,

I would say it's true that, you know, wealthy countries have a lot of problems and that living in a wealthy country isn't a guarantee of happiness. But that said, like it is way better to be living in a wealthy country than a poor country on average in terms of happiness. So what you want is a wealthy, low-inequality country. If you get to pick where you're going to be plunked down into a country, choose that one.