I believe that’s included in the data. The effect holds regardless of age.

As you move right along the curve, you’re making more money, but also time is passing. How do you know the reduction in satisfaction is due to the increased money and not the other travails that come along with age?

Suppose someone’s happiness peaks when they hit $100K at age 30. Ten or twenty years later, they’re making more money, but they’re also worried about how to pay the kids’ college, that they’re not putting away enough for retirement, and questioning whether their life really is on the track that they’d planned for 20 years earlier.

Half your statement is false. We derive an ought from an is all the time. Engineering and medicine are full of examples (“to perform x successfully, you ought to do y rather than z” is an empirical fact, discoverable by science).

The other half is correct:

One cannot simply assume an ought statement is true. You have to demonstrate it empirically. This applies as well for values (you ought to value x only if you already value y and pursuing x obtains y, for example).

And all values are subjective in the sense that they only ever exist in a subject, not outside of any subjects (there cannot be any such thing as a “cosmic” value; values are only a property of valuers). But they are still objective facts of the world (that you value x is an empirical fact discoverable by science; psychology, neuroscience, and sociology, for example, study such facts).

A complete system of moral realism nevertheless follows. Hence your claim that it “never” does is false. For my formal peer reviewed demonstration of this fact (complete with logical syllogisms), see my chapter on it in The End of Christianity. But you can also peruse my many blog articles on metaethics as well to get an idea of why.

You can never derive an Ought from an Is. Science can only determine what is, never what ought to be. Why “ought” one be happy? Why “ought” we value human flourishing? Of course on the presupposition that we value happiness science can have something to say. However it simply is NOT an objective feature of the world that some primates in a tiny corner of the universe ought to be happy.

Hence morality can never be a science.

Yes, but the question is what any particular individual finds satisfying over the short, medium or long terms. It could be argued that meaning is also a “credible core goal in life.” Alternatively, you could include it in “life satisfaction” along with other contributors. Many people think that struggle and challenge are of key importance in their life. They don’t necessarily measure their life satisfaction or degree of happiness by their moods on a minute-to-minute basis, much less their income and wealth.

That’s all already included in the data. Everyone of every status and attitude (regarding what satisfies them) is already being counted. So we already know the answer here: after about six figures, nothing changes. Even for people who “need challenge” and “seek meaning” and are “in retirement” and “just starting out” and on and on. Indeed, they found the variation after the average satiation point was not even observable logarithmically.

Beyond this, every person will have a different definition of personal life satisfaction, whether it includes meaningfulness or anything else for that matter.

The data already account for that. The differences found, were small. Even with extreme differences in circumstance. Hence the conclusion.

(There cannot be “many people” significantly above the mean, BTW—if you know how averages work, getting a lot of people who more than double the mean income, would draw the average up, and be so unusual—violating the bell curve theorem—that the study would remark upon it; the more so in this study, where the standard deviations just don’t make what you are saying possible, and instead actually show the higher incomes reducing satisfaction. There just aren’t many at all who vary much at all from the mean, once you hit low six figures. And if this disturbs you, you can request the raw data from the researchers and see if you can try and find these “many” people you are imagining. I’d agree they’d be worth studying.)

There is too much history of social engineering evolving into dictatorship and state-enforced suppression of difference.

No one is talking about social engineering. To the contrary, we are looking at empirical evidence of how much wealth a person needs to achieve satiation without social engineering (i.e. the amount they need to control all by themselves, and make their own decisions with).

Maybe they’re actually morally “better.”

I didn’t mean better or worse persons; I meant, they require and deserve no difference in treatment. Surely you don’t mean to say a special system of justice should treat rich people differently than poor people because the rich are “better” than the poor? I mean, if you want to go back to the Middle Ages, or join the ranks of King Goerge’s men chafing at “all men are created equal” as a concept to construct our society on, we have a much bigger dispute between us than the implications of this study.

Some choose to live a simple life with little challenge and are quite happy to earn a wage that is commensurate with low contribution and performance. Others want more.

And the data show, no one really needs more. Once they hit the low six figures. In fact, the tendency is to need less (as further wealth, tends to reduce satisfaction; and no statistically significant increases are observed even on a logarithm curve).

The variances, just aren’t that large. You seem to be imagining something that’s arithmetically impossible. You might want to grasp the logic of bell curves and standard deviations; and then look at how the satiation curve drops after six figures—which contradicts any claim of an abundance of people only happy at higher incomes; to the contrary, they tend to be less happy at higher incomes. There just aren’t any significant number of people happier at higher incomes, than at lower ones.

And then, if still you are nonplussed, you can request the raw data and, again, try to find in it any of these mythical unicorns you are defending as somehow morally special people who deserve to be treated differently than the rest of us. Though there would remain a lot of work yet to do even if you found them (e.g. will these millionaires with unusually high satisfactions that you are looking for actually drop their satisfaction at lower incomes? and for rational reasons?). And, I should note, it would remain highly statistically improbable you are one of them.

Furthermore, I’ve seen studies where “life satisfaction” and “happiness” evolves over the life course. I’m not mistaken, younger adults tend to have lower life satisfaction than older adults.

They controlled for such factors. No statistically significant differences from the general results were observed. Insofar as age affects satisfaction, it has no apparent effect on the satiation-to-income correlation. So more money doesn’t help young people, any more than old people.

Any attempt to impose “average” interpretations on individuals is dictatorial and repressive.

No, it isn’t. Some such attempts to do things like that might do so, but which attempts do and when, is an empirical question. You can’t just declare “everyone is different, therefore there should be no laws.” As if for example, we should have different speed limits on highways according to individual tested driving skill, or some such inefficient nonsense. Which would be dictatorial and repressive—for attempting exactly the opposite. It’s far easier on everyone to have the same limits for everyone, and not get insane over differences of vehicle handling and driver skill and have a zillion different speed limits on a single stretch of road. Because, in point of fact, the differences, really aren’t that large. Certainly not large enough to justify such a much more oppressive and confusing and costly system of speed limits.

And here the same is even more the case. No, there just isn’t any evidence in the data that anyone differs enough that they will be significantly impacted by my recommendation. Full stop. That’s the empirical fact of the matter. So my recommendation is not “dictatorial and repressive.” No more than any other tax law conceivable. And my personal recommendation remains valid: you are extremely statistically unlikely to be an extreme outlier; you are far more likely to be just like the vast majority of everyone else. So you should keep that in mind in your own life plans for satisfaction and belonging.

Should we ban child rearing on the grounds that it makes people unhappy?

No one is talking about banning anything, or meddling in any way at all.

That this is your panicked response to what I suggested, indicates you are reacting emotionally and not rationally. See to that.

To the contrary, we are talking about letting people do whatever they want. All we are talking about is how much income they need to do it—no matter what it is they choose to do. Because every possible choice, is represented in the data. They counted people with children, and without, for instance. They are all included. The results are the same (except of course as I noted, children slightly increase the income required for satiation, but trivially compared to seven figure incomes and above). Moreover, my proposal let’s people have higher incomes. Millionaires will thus still exist. Just half the surplus goes to the community, not all of it. So there is no “banning” anything even in that sense. You can calm down.

A final factor is that people tend to weight negative experiences and outcomes approximately twice as much as positive ones.

Not relevant to the study or its results or my application of them.

You seem “sure” it’s relevant. Explain how. And why you think that. Because it sounds like you are rationalizing, grasping at straws, like a Christian apologist, or Luke Skywalker confronted with Darth Vader exclaiming he’s your father.

The ultra-rich aren’t hoarding wealth, unless they’re keeping it in a sock under their mattresses.

That’s not what hoarding means.

We don’t hoard food in a catastrophe only to stuff it under a mattress and not eat it.

Hoarding is not a threat to the community because the hoarder doesn’t use it. Hoarding is a threat to the community because the hoarder is not letting others use it who need it.

For every ten million dollar yacht, there could be hundreds of far better paid employees in the yacht-owner’s business. For every billion dollars burned on useless derivatives that tank whole markets and ruin the lives of millions of working class citizens who don’t even know what a derivative is, there could be thousands more on Medicare.

Wealth directed at business is not taxed (if a company takes profits and invests them back into the business, it’s fully deducted). Wealth taken home by individuals, is taxed. And should be in ways that keep income disparity in check, without significantly affecting their life satisfaction. Because all studies in economics and history and political science show, increasing income disparity beyond a certain point is never good. And this study shows, taxing half the surplus, will have no significant effect on anyone’s satisfaction.

All accumulated wealth is the result of consuming less than one needs to in order to accumulate it for investment purposes.

“Everyone spends their money” is true. It is therefore a useless observation.

The question is: how much money do they really have to spend to be happy. That is wholly unaffected by such minutiae as what they spend it on, which we are unconcerned with. They can spend it on anything; all people were included in the study, regardless of how they spent their incomes. It is affected, however, by whether they have it to spend. Hence the question is: at what point, do they not need more money to spend, to be as happy as they are likely ever to be. And we know the answer now.

What’s more, taxing the “excess” wealth and income away would only result in giving even more power to the state

Not relevant to the present issue. Indeed we need to maintain a balance between giving and withholding state power. The state needs more power to serve the whole purpose for which it exists. But it should not have too much power lest that result in abuses that take away from the purpose it serves. But that is all a question of governance: how we direct the revenue of the state. It is not a function of how much revenue the state has. That’s a completely different question than what we are addressing here.

What we know as an empirical fact is that other Western nations, who are more successful than us on every measure of life satisfaction and social dysfunction, are investing more money in their state operations than we are, and doing so more smartly than we are. So it cannot be argued that my proposal will give the state “too much money” or leave the people with “too little money.” So your objection here simply isn’t rational.

Your concerns about state power, are concerns about how to use money. Not about how much money is needed for it.

Once again, history demonstrates that governments are the least efficient and effective means of allocating scarce resources, which means they will be uneconomically allocated.

That’s actually not true. I know it’s a common myth. But it’s false.

Most private operations fail. When you compare all operations, public and private, and include failures and successes, no differences obtain. Corruption, incompetence, and inefficiency are the same. The ability to fix corruption, incompetence, and inefficiency are the same.

The solution to bad government is not the absence of government. The solution to bad government is better government. This has been proved countless times now. Absence of government produces the Third World. Improved government produces the First World.

And again, this is simply a matter of how to govern. Not a matter of how much income a government has. Obviously governments doing better in revenue, tend to do better things than governments that aren’t doing so well in revenue. There is a reason the U.S. is the only First World nation on earth that doesn’t have free national health care for all its citizens—and yet spends more money on its health care, with poorer quality of results. We are less healthy. We have higher infant and maternal mortality rates. And so on. Even on measures when we aren’t the worst, we are nowhere near the best.

This is the difference between paying for your society, and not paying for it. This is the difference between letting the rich hoard wealth, and making them pay their fair share of the society their wealth depends on.

Ultimately, I think this kind of “soak the rich” attitude is based on envy and resentment.

Half satiation surplus is not a soak. When you walk away with six or indeed still even seven or eight figures a year, you aren’t being soaked. Soaked is when we tax the middle class at rates that are higher than they need to pay their rent or mortgage. When taxes threaten your survival, or keep you trapped in valleys of low opportunity, you are being soaked. When taxes leave you fat and rich and content with life, you aren’t being soaked.

We need to find ways of all living together in society, while ensuring that there is the possibility of free choice and the exercise of free will. Arbitrarily defining a level of income as “enough” is the wrong way to go about that. There may be a rationale for progressive taxation, but trying to base it on a dubious psychological and emotional basis is not it.

To the contrary, it is the only valid measure to base it on. Even by your own reasoning. Just think this through. On what basis should we set how much tax burden we place on people other than what won’t significantly impact their life satisfaction yet will sufficiently fund a flourishing society they can enjoy the benefits of living in?

Nothing in my proposal impairs free choice or free will. The rich keep half their income above satiation. They still have more opportunity than everyone else. Indeed, a person earning $500,000 taxes at 50% over $100,000, walks away with $300,000. They walk away with more money, indeed more than twice as much money, above $100,000 than everyone else on the planet earning less than $100,000. They have vast surplus still left over to burn on any frivolous thing they want. So stop bitching about free will. That’s a bullshit argument here.

I am not doing anything “arbitrarily” here. Basing conclusions on vast bodies of evidence is exactly the opposite of being arbitrary. I am doing exactly what you want: taking into account what a good society costs, that won’t significantly impact anyone’s life satisfaction. Only, unlike you, I am doing this based on actual evidence, rather than armchair rationalizations and imagined facts that aren’t anywhere in evidence or aren’t even logically relevant to the question. I suggest you get on board with evidence-based reasoning. And drop the tactic of arguing from armchair fallacies and ideological assumptions. The world, and your own life, will be the better for it.

How do you know what any particular person gets out of something? You’re arguing from the general to the particular instantiation. In other words, this is what the average is, therefore it should apply to you also.

What you mean to argue is, “yes, most people this is true of, and thus will be true of, but maybe there are some exceptions, for whom they could never be satisfied unless they made, say, a million dollars a year.”

You could say, that these weird outliers (and for the averages to be where they are, arithmetically, they would indeed have to be rare), should get “special exceptions” from the remainder of the polity, and behave differently than the rest of us (it’s at least logically possible that’s true; it would fall under the objective relativism option I lay out in my chapter on moral facts in The End of Christianity).

But you’d first need to show that’s true (so, you have some empirical work ahead of you). It’s certainly biologically improbable that humans vary so extremely on such a dimension, particularly as “wealth” did not exist when we evolved. So why should a person require something to be satisfied, that never existed when their own satisfaction measures were constructed? And if it’s just a construct, e.g. something learned, this only argues we should stop constructing and teaching that, because it is to no one’s advantage to be like that. And claiming the contrary, is again a claim requiring evidence, leaving yet more empirical work ahead of you.

Meanwhile, from what I am observing, in the data and the world and from the science of psychology: if anyone is such a wealth addict that they can’t be satisfied at a low six figure income, they sooner need therapy, than coddling.

Of course. The actual percentage would have to be decided empirically (and over decades or even centuries, an honesty polity will assemble data on where the sweet spot is, as far as economic impact for example) and democratically (the body politic deciding what kind of world it wants to live in and what its members should pay for the benefits of living in it).

“There’s no evidence you should have that freedom, at least wholly unchecked. There is no rational argument for it. You don’t get anything out of it. It won’t improve your life or make you happier by any known measure. So why would you even want it?”

How do you know what any particular person gets out of something? You’re arguing from the general to the particular instantiation. In other words, this is what the average is, therefore it should apply to you also.

RC: “The only credible core goal in life is personal life satisfaction (satisfaction with yourself, who you are and have become; and with your life, as lived and achieved).”

Yes, but the question is what any particular individual finds satisfying over the short, medium or long terms. It could be argued that meaning is also a “credible core goal in life.” Alternatively, you could include it in “life satisfaction” along with other contributors. Many people think that struggle and challenge are of key importance in their life. They don’t necessarily measure their life satisfaction or degree of happiness by their moods on a minute-to-minute basis, much less their income and wealth.

Beyond this, every person will have a different definition of personal life satisfaction, whether it includes meaningfulness or anything else for that matter. If we’ve learned anything from psychology over the last 150 years, it’s that people tend to differ along many dimensions, sometimes with a huge range of variation. Some people practise poly-amory, while others practise monogamy. Neither is right, so long as no one is being harmed or is being coerced. I only read your summary of the article, but I don’t get the impression the figures they include report the distribution of responses. It is crucial to know how narrow or wide the set of individual responses is. Assuming the distributions of responses are Gaussian, the standard deviation could be large or small. So, there may be many people either far above or far below the mean/median/mode. If it’s like most other traits, behaviours, and values, there must be a significant spread around that.

One of the key problems in society, especially large communities, is to find a way to live together without being at each other’s throats. Trying to define a level of “life satisfaction,” however detailed, based on scientific studies or moral injunctions, whether from religion or any other system of hypothetical imperatives, can and probably will lead to more dissatisfaction and unhappiness than letting people figure out for themselves what these are. There is too much history of social engineering evolving into dictatorship and state-enforced suppression of difference.

RC: “Any objectively true moral system (relative or universal, it makes no difference) follows necessarily from what is the ultimate goal in any prospective moral agent’s life (as I’ve demonstrated formally in The End of Christianity; though I’ve briefed it many times on my blog, perhaps most succinctly in my amusing debate with Ray Comfort last year). So it’s of great significance that income levels beyond six figures are useless to that goal. That’s an empirical fact. We should aim our life goals then to the realization of no higher an outcome; and we should not treat those who acquire more, as morally equal to those who don’t. What that translates to in particulars, would require more empirical evidence and argument to reliably know. But it’s a data point we need to start working with from now on.”

That’s exactly the point! “We should not treat those who acquire more, as morally equal to those who don’t.” Says who? You’re drawing an unwarranted conclusion from the study. Maybe they’re actually morally “better.” Or maybe using such language is emotionalizing what is essentially a personal choice. People make choices in life. Some choose to live a simple life with little challenge and are quite happy to earn a wage that is commensurate with low contribution and performance. Others want more. Presumably, they’re willing to pay the price in the short, medium or long term to achieve it. It doesn’t necessarily follow that all will experience lower levels of life satisfaction and negative moods. As we don’t know what the spread is around the average reported levels of satisfaction and positive/negative moods, it’s hard to tell whether any particular individual is feeling better or worse with their circumstances. Any attempt to impose “average” interpretations on individuals is dictatorial and repressive.

Furthermore, I’ve seen studies where “life satisfaction” and “happiness” evolves over the life course. I’m not mistaken, younger adults tend to have lower life satisfaction than older adults. Also, life satisfaction, happiness and mood tend to bottom out when people are raising children. Raising a family is no picnic. It can bring joy, usually for short periods, but it can also cause misery, worry, anxiety, stress and fear. What about that? Should we ban child rearing on the grounds that it makes people unhappy?

A final factor is that people tend to weight negative experiences and outcomes approximately twice as much as positive ones. Negative emotions last longer and are felt more bitterly than positive ones. I don’t know how that fits into the whole discussion, but surely it isn’t irrelevant.

RC: “In the area of the political, I would tentatively suggest the following appears to be the case: our progressive tax system should be steeper for the wealthy; and indeed, I’d argue, in the U.S. our standard deduction on income taxes should be maybe half our lowest average satiation income. Only people who earn more, should pay at all (of course they always still do pay, in sales and other taxes, regardless; but maybe those taxes shouldn’t even exist). The desire to attain happiness (and escape struggle) will continue motivating people to earn taxable incomes. And those well above satiation incomes literally don’t need their surplus, in the way those below satiation incomes do. Retaining it should therefore be treated as a privilege and not a right. The ultra-rich are hoarding, not sharing. Insofar as they can do external good with it (philanthropically and economically), I do not think it makes sense to tax all of it away—most of all to avoid over-centralization of power by having governments do all the hoarding instead, which is no better an outcome; and to remain competitive with other countries; among other reasons. But I suspect we could be retasking half of beyond-satiation surpluses to national welfare, security, research, and infrastructure, without folly. As many other nations do. (Note this does not mean taxing income at 50%, but taxing after-satiation income at 50%; the rest of one’s income would be taxed progressively the same way as ever, if at all.)”

The ultra-rich aren’t hoarding wealth, unless they’re keeping it in a sock under their mattresses. That demonstrates a poor grasp of economics on your part. All accumulated wealth is the result of consuming less than one needs to in order to accumulate it for investment purposes. What’s more, taxing the “excess” wealth and income away would only result in giving even more power to the state and its political and bureaucratic masters so they can spend it in ways they find appealing, rather than those of the people who created the income and wealth in the first place. Once again, history demonstrates that governments are the least efficient and effective means of allocating scarce resources, which means they will be uneconomically allocated. If not economically, then the only other options are through political lobbying and favouritism.

Ultimately, I think this kind of “soak the rich” attitude is based on envy and resentment. We need to find ways of all living together in society, while ensuring that there is the possibility of free choice and the exercise of free will. Arbitrarily defining a level of income as “enough” is the wrong way to go about that. There may be a rationale for progressive taxation, but trying to base it on a dubious psychological and emotional basis is not it.