Does Higher Income Equal Increased Happiness?

What Does applied intelligence Have to Say?

@DouglasBlackwell Images

Mark Twain said that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Statistics is the science of producing unreliable facts, relying on numbers for palatable answers to complex problems. Seeking simplistic explanations are often led by statistical-based surveys which help to craft convenient explanations. However, our failure to do a deeper and more intelligent analysis can make us vulnerable and accepting of fallacies and illusions that are far away from the objective truth.

Let’s review a recent study that reviewed 60 other studies about whether happiness can be found by seeking higher-income jobs. The study examines what people think, feel, and how they define a “dream job.” The main conclusion from those 60 studies, was that a satisfying life and career required finding a higher-income job. However, on closer examination, it was found that these studies ignored or didn’t think people’s full answers were important enough to include in the analysis. What they were looking for was a statistical top-line answer to add up and make conclusions about.

Therefore, the framing of the question and/or the statistical-based methodology can often give the answers you want instead of what the true answer might be. Statistics can tell lies.

The study of the 60 studies found many answers that were not paid any attention to, and if they were, the survey might have discovered the truth about how people really felt about a higher income job brings you happiness. Or do you believe a higher income job is the key to a happy life? Both of those questions are restrictive but if you allow for expansion on their answers, you often can pick up the truth through further elaboration.

The applied intelligence approach allows for that objective truth-seeking approach to play out.

This is what was missed in those 60 studies over 3 decades:

1. Work That’s Engaging: What matters is not your salary, status, type of company, and so on, but rather what you do day by day and hour by hour.
2. Work that helps others: In many high-income jobs, people said that it was not meaningful. The jobs seen as lower paying but was work that helped others was more meaningful and satisfying according to the answers.
3. Work at what you’re good at: Being good at your work gives you a sense of achievement, a key ingredient of life satisfaction discovered by positive psychology.
4. Work with supportive colleagues: If you hate your workplace, your boss and your colleagues, you’re not going to be satisfied.
5. Work that doesn’t have major negatives: Being satisfied, and not feeling many negatives in what you do is important to job satisfaction. But you also need the absence of things that make work unpleasant. A long commute, for example, came up repeatedly as not desirable and people would take less to avoid that unpleasantness. Additionally, very long hours. Pay one feels is unfair. Job insecurity. All of those ranked high towards happiness.
6. Work that fits with the rest of your life: It is not necessary to get all the ingredients of a fulfilling life from your job. If a job pays the bills and you have the time to find pleasure in other activities, i.e., philanthropy, volunteering, then that job contributes to a happy lifestyle.

Therefore, the general framing of the question about higher income guided the predictable answer of “yes.” And although those factors above were listed, it was decided over and over again to be overlooked.

Pure statistical-based studies lack any intelligence and do not get to the objective truth — they tell damn lies!

If we apply the applied intelligence | ai process instead, which is agnostic, and built on Einstein's process of discovery & concluding; the avoidance of priori hypothesis — starting with preconceived notions or ideas — we may find the objective truth more often than not.

The ai system of analysis comprises the use of data science for fact-based analysis and depends on a system of logic and iteration to identify the objective truth, avoiding cursory, emotional-based analysis that is usually wrong and leads to more problems to solve.

If the applied intelligence process could have been used over those 60 studies, the following analysis or answers may have resulted:

• To find happiness in life relative to work-life balance, what you should look for is: First, work you’re good at. Second, work that helps others. Third, supportive conditions; for example, engaging work that lets you enter a state of conscious happiness and flow, supportive environments, a feel of meaningful work, helping others, and personal achievement, and the lack of major negatives associated with that job which can give you the lifestyle of balance you want.

The chart below shows life satisfaction levelling off as income increases.

@The Economist

Research from Matthew Killingsworth of the University of California, Berkeley, finds that the more happiness you want, the more expensive it gets. However, at the same time, they also found that money is not nearly as important as other factors that contribute to happiness.

Noble-winning economists Daniel Kahneman, and Angus Deaton, found that happiness, as measured by people’s perception of their emotional well-being, level off when incomes reach about $ 90,000.

The next dollar a person makes will cheer them slightly less than the last one did. The average difference in life satisfaction between two people earning $40,000 and $80,000 is about the same as that between two earning $80,000 and $160,000.

Hence, the combined research above, found that health, religion, employment and family, are most important to true happiness.

In other words — for those who still need to be told — there’s more to life than money.

The lesson is, that wealth accumulation is important because we need to live, and living well is just fine; but only if it does not happen at the expense of other measures of well-being, the research found. Therefore, a “prosperous” existence requires balance.

…applied intelligence is built on a system of comprehensive complexes of empirical facts, which can identify certain general features that can be extracted as reliable.

In conclusion, applied intelligence does not have all the answers, but one thing is for sure, the process is objective and non-emotional — ai will give you better vetted and more reliable information to apply your intelligence, in making good and insightful decisions.