Economists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton's popular 2010 study, which focused on US-based responses, claimed that happiness only grows with an increased salary up to $75,000. In other words, after this point, more money doesn't translate to more happiness.

To broaden the scope of Kahneman and Deaton's research, S Money focused on a 2018 Purdue University study — which also identified a "satiation point" of $60-75,000 — which collected data from 1.7 million respondents, spread across 165 countries.

They converted the study's satiation point into local currencies to see how local purchasing power and the cost of living would rank each nation on a global scale. This was ranked against each country's purchasing power ratios, based on the IMF. Here's what they found.

Key Takeaways:

• There are ten countries in the world where the cost of happiness, or desired income to be happy, exceeds $100,000 per person: Iran ($239,700), Yemen ($172,140), Australia ($121,191), Zimbabwe ($118,342), Norway ($117,724), Switzerland ($115,745), New Zealand ($114,597), Israel ($112,506), Iceland ($111,908) and the United States ($105,000)

• Santa Barbara, California, has the highest estimated cost of happiness in the US, with a desired income of $162,721 — whereas the place with the lowest, Knoxville, Tennessee, requires just more than half of that, at $88,032

• Among cities, half of the top 10 with the highest cost of happiness are in the US — Santa Barbara (CA), Honolulu (HI), New York (NY), Seattle (WA) and San Francisco (CA) — while the remaining five are split between Tehran, Isfahan and Mashhad (in Iran) and Brisbane and Sydney (in Australia).

Click to enlarge images

Money can't buy us happiness, but it's a tool that can give us security and safety and a sense of control over lives. At the end of the day, life is really about our connections with others. It's our relationships that keep us happy.

[Marc Schulz, Psychology professor at Bryn Mawr College]

Via S Money.