Happiness pays

By Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Andrew Oswald. Some say money buys you happiness, but our research shows that it is the other way round – being happy when you are young helps you earn more.  Why should this be? Well, it may simply be that happier people are more productive and get promoted faster.
In our study, we looked at the happiness of thousands of randomly sampled young people and showed that, even allowing for other influences, their happiness tells you a lot about who is going to have higher earnings in life. We present the first in-depth investigation of whether today’s happiness is a predictor of income a decade later. More...