Does getting a year-end bonus or elevate make you happier? Does the raise it provides you are inclined to rapidly fade, particularly if others round you additionally gained out within the annual compensation sweepstakes?

If the reply is {that a} increase in earnings doesn’t significantly enhance your sense of well-being, then you’re a proof level of the Easterlin paradox, the financial idea that more cash, over the long term, gained’t purchase extra happiness.

The paradox was put forth by Richard A. Easterlin, an economist, a demographer and a seminal determine within the area of educational analysis into happiness. The College of Southern California, the place he was an emeritus professor, referred to as him the “father of happiness economics” in asserting his demise.

Mr. Easterlin died at 98 on Dec. 16 at his residence in Pasadena, Calif.

Mr. Easterlin’s work challenged each standard knowledge and a core financial tenet: that financial development in a society results in a normal enchancment in emotions of well-being.

Economists, policymakers and odd residents had lengthy taken it as a provided that rising a nation’s gross home product — its complete financial output — improves its individuals’s happiness.

However within the Nineteen Seventies, Mr. Easterlin, then on the College of Pennsylvania, printed analysis displaying that although incomes in the USA had risen dramatically since World Struggle II, Individuals mentioned in surveys that they had been no happier.

He discovered comparable outcomes for Japan, which had grow to be one of many world’s wealthiest nations after rebuilding from wartime devastation. Regardless that Japanese incomes jumped fivefold from 1958 to 1987, Japanese individuals mentioned that they, too, had been no happier.

Mr. Easterlin recognized what got here to be referred to as the Easterlin paradox in a 1974 paper, “Does Financial Development Enhance the Human Lot?”

Inspecting opinion polls from 19 international locations, he discovered that prosperous individuals had been happier than poor individuals. However as incomes rose, individuals’s happiness didn’t rise commensurately.

In relation to cash, Mr. Easterlin noticed, individuals’s happiness depends upon how properly off they’re in contrast with these round them. As people develop richer, if their associates, co-workers or neighbors additionally develop richer, they could not really feel that they’ve gained something, solely that they’re maintaining with the Joneses.

“Regardless that I’m happier as a result of my earnings is greater, I’m much less pleased as a result of everybody else goes up too,” he defined in an interview in 2021 recorded by the College of Southern California. “So the result’s, due to social comparability, individuals fail to get pleasure from enchancment in earnings as a supply of happiness.”

Mr. Easterlin’s paradox has been cited 1000’s of occasions by different students, and it has crossed over into fashionable utilization — affirmation to anti-materialists and skeptics of development at any value that, because the cliché has it, cash doesn’t purchase happiness.

Most radically, some economists have mentioned the paradox implied that policymakers shouldn’t search to boost G.D.P., as a result of it might make little distinction to individuals’s sense of well-being.

In 2008, the paradox was attacked by a few rising younger economists, Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, who argued in a paper {that a} broader physique of opinion polls performed within the 34 years since Mr. Easterlin first printed his thesis undermined his conclusions. They discovered proof suggesting that financial development in international locations was certainly related to rising happiness.

Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton psychologist and a Nobel laureate in economics, informed The New York Occasions that yr, “There may be only a huge quantity of accumulating proof that the Easterlin paradox might not exist.”

Mr. Easterlin responded that although he agreed that individuals in richer international locations reported being extra glad with their lives than individuals in poor international locations, he was skeptical that wealth defined their happiness. He referred to as the work by Mr. Wolfers and Ms. Stevenson “a really tough draft with out enough proof.”

“Everyone needs to point out the Easterlin paradox doesn’t maintain up,” he added. “And I’m completely keen to imagine it doesn’t maintain up. However I’d wish to see an knowledgeable evaluation that exhibits that.”

In 2009, when Mr. Easterlin was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics from the Institute for the Study of Labor, in Bonn, Germany, Mr. Wolfers wrote in a weblog entry for the podcast “Freakonomics” that he and Mr. Easterlin “disagree on a reasonably essential subject,” however he went on to credit score Mr. Easterlin as the daddy of financial evaluation of happiness.

“His analysis has been the inspiration for a lot of my very own curiosity within the economics of happiness,” Mr. Wolfers wrote.

Richard Ainley Easterlin was born on Jan. 12, 1926, in Ridgefield Park, N.J., to John and Helen (Sales space) Easterlin. His father turned a commissioner of Broward County, Fla.

Richard earned a grasp’s diploma in engineering from the Stevens Institute of Know-how, in Hoboken, N.J., in 1945, however then switched his area to economics. He earned a grasp’s in economics in 1949 and a Ph.D. in 1953, each from the College of Pennsylvania. He remained at Penn educating economics for greater than 30 years, together with three stints as chair of the economics division.

In 1982, he moved west to show economics at U.S.C., the place he turned college professor on the Dornsife Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He was awarded emeritus standing in 2018.

In addition to his work on economics and happiness, Mr. Easterlin analyzed demographic developments. He proposed the Easterlin effect, which holds that child booms and child busts happen for financial causes.

When jobs are plentiful, he wrote, {couples} marry younger and the nation’s fertility charge rises; when jobs are scarce, marriage is delayed and fertility falls. In his view, the 1946-65 child increase occurred as a result of there have been ample job openings, an enchancment in incomes and an increase in confidence amongst {couples} to start out households. The alternative elements converged within the child bust of the late Sixties and ’70s, he mentioned.

Mr. Easterlin is survived by his spouse, Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at U.S.C. whom he married in 1980; his kids, John, Nancy, Susan, Andrew, Matthew and Molly Easterlin; and eight grandchildren. He was beforehand married to Jacqueline Miller.

Though Mr. Easterlin lengthy believed that no public insurance policies would enhance the sum of human happiness, he modified his thoughts within the Nineteen Nineties, recognizing that elements apart from earnings had been essential to a way of well-being.

“Enhancements in earnings have comparatively little impact on happiness,” he mentioned within the 2021 U.S.C. interview, when he was in his mid-90s, “whereas enhancements in well being and household life have substantial affect.”