ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Wealth redistribution promotes happiness.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Reevaluating the role of geographical regional factors in subjective well-being.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Income and education show distinct links to health and happiness in daily life.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Article
- Epilogue to the war: Afghanistan reports the lowest well-being in recorded history.Science advances · 2025Article
- Discourse on measurement.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- How spending decisions shape happiness in everyday life.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Reply to Rohrer and Wenz and Arslan: The association between income and emotional well-being.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Efficiency and resilience of cooperation in asymmetric social dilemmas.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Money and happiness: A consideration of history and psychological mechanisms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Interventions to Modify Psychological Well-Being: Progress, Promises, and an Agenda for Future Research.Affective science · 2023Review
- The income-happiness nexus: uncovering the importance of social comparison processes in subjective wellbeing.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Inequality, well-being, and the problem of the unknown reporting function.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How much happiness could be gained if the world's wealth were distributed more equally? Despite decades of research investigating the relationship between money and happiness, no experimental work has quantified this effect for people across the global economic spectrum. We estimated the total gain in happiness generated when a pair of high-net-worth donors redistributed US$2 million of their wealth in $10,000 cash transfers to 200 people. Our preregistered analyses offer causal evidence that cash transfers substantially increase happiness among economically diverse individuals around the world. Recipients in lower-income countries exhibited happiness gains three times larger than those in higher-income countries. Still, the cash provided detectable benefits for people with household incomes up to $123,000.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.