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What gives? You could imagine some furious exchange in which Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton made sharp objections to Dr. Killingsworth’s paper, to which Dr. Killingsworth answered equally sharply, leaving readers confused and exhausted.
Professor Kahneman saw such a dynamic as “angry science,” which he described as a “nasty world of critiques, replies and rejoinders,” and “as a contest, where the aim is to embarrass.” As Professor Kahneman put it, those who live in that nasty world offer “a summary caricature of the target position, refute the weakest argument in that caricature, and declare the total destruction of the adversary’s position.” In his account, angry science is “a demeaning experience.” That dynamic might sound familiar, particularly in our politics.
Instead, Professor Kahneman favored an alternative that he termed “adversarial collaboration.” When people who disagree work together to test a hypothesis, they are involved in a common endeavor. They are trying not to win, but to figure out what’s true. They might even become friends.
In that spirit, Professor Kahneman, well into his 80s, asked Dr. Killingsworth to collaborate, with the help of a friendly arbiter, Professor Barbara Mellers, an influential and widely admired psychologist. Their task was to look closely at Dr. Killingsworth’s data to see whether he had analyzed it properly, and also to understand what, if anything, had been missed by Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton.
Their central conclusion was simple. Dr. Killingsworth missed a threshold effect in his data that affected only one group: the least happy 15 percent. For these largely unhappy people, average happiness does grow with rising income, up to a level of around $100,000; but it stops growing after that. For a majority of us, by contrast, average happiness keeps growing with increases in income.
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