Money doesn’t make you happy, says everyone, reassuringly, about not having enough money. Money does make you happy after all, says a new paper published by the UK government. “An individual’s level of personal well-being is strongly related to the level of wealth of the household in which they live,” says the report, which was designed to measure the relationship between wealth and happiness in the U.K. population. The key here is the word household–personal levels of wealth were found to be much less important than the general level in your home.
The survey is part of the Wealth in Great Britain series of studies, and uses data from the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS), from June 2011 to July 2012. The results were controlled for sex, age, ethnicity, and other factors, in order to tease out the singular relationship between money and happiness. Participants were asked four questions to self-rate their own level of happiness and self-worth
