Worth noting that although those factors likely increase the expected strength of the relationship between money and happiness, when it comes to interpreting that strength, there are factors potentially reducing the proportion of the relationship that can be explained by “more money causes more happiness:”
Reverse causality (Being happier plausibly makes you earn more money through various social and health impacts)
Confounding variables (E.g. being a hard worker makes you happier, and being a hard worker just happens to make you more money on average)
Also, if you perceive success (i.e. status) as being strongly associated with having higher income, then the actual mechanism by which higher income raises your happiness may be through a status gain, rather than a consumption increase. And as status is a positional good, this would be a reason to down-revise our expectation that increasing a person’s consumption at these levels will actually increase a society’s net happiness.
Worth noting that although those factors likely increase the expected strength of the relationship between money and happiness, when it comes to interpreting that strength, there are factors potentially reducing the proportion of the relationship that can be explained by “more money causes more happiness:”
Reverse causality (Being happier plausibly makes you earn more money through various social and health impacts)
Confounding variables (E.g. being a hard worker makes you happier, and being a hard worker just happens to make you more money on average)
Also, if you perceive success (i.e. status) as being strongly associated with having higher income, then the actual mechanism by which higher income raises your happiness may be through a status gain, rather than a consumption increase. And as status is a positional good, this would be a reason to down-revise our expectation that increasing a person’s consumption at these levels will actually increase a society’s net happiness.
Good points.
Note that, if you are going to start thinking about these cofounders, you have to consider cofounders working against this relationship as well:
there is often a trade-off between more lucrative and more personally rewarding jobs
intuitively I think people who get more stressed are harder workers, though I’m certainly not confident in this claim.