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Can buy me joy

Your friend's pay can affect your happiness

No one can really say if money can buy happiness, but research has suggested that for people with money, feeling good just seems to come with the turf.

The hitch, researchers say in a new study, is that for many people, that happy feeling comes only from knowing that they have more money than their peers.

The study, by Glenn Firebaugh, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University and Laura Tach, a graduate student at Harvard, was presented last weekend at an American Sociological Association conference.

If happiness were just a matter of needing to make more money than one's peers, it might not be so complicated.

But since incomes tend to rise regularly, the competition never ends for some people — and happiness can remain elusive, the researchers said.

"Our analysis indicates that Americans are on a hedonic treadmill for most of their working lives," the authors write.

The findings are based on a review of 30 years of information gathered by the General Social Survey, which asks Americans about their income, health, ways they rate their level of happiness and other matters. Information from more than 16,000 people, ages 20 to 64, was used for the study.

People whose incomes did not rise enough in relation to their peers' tended to fall on the happiness scale, the researchers said.

The New York Times

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