Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

What Motivates the 1% When Money Stops Solving Problems?

Researchers asked thousands of millionaires what it would take to reach perfect happiness. The most common answer was a tenfold raise. New Hampshire rebuilt its tax code around these people.

Ask a millionaire what it would take to make him perfectly happy, and the most common answer is a tenfold raise. Harvard Business School researchers put the question to hundreds of people worth at least $1 million: rate your happiness on a ten-point scale, then name the wealth increase that would carry you to a perfect 10. The answer picked most often was ten times more. Five times more came in second. Merely doubling ran third. And the pattern did not budge whether the respondent held $1 million or more than $10 million. The goalposts move at every altitude.

That result answers the question this piece set out to test. Money solves most problems, the thinking goes, so once somebody has all of it, what is the point? The research gives a blunt answer. The point was never the money. The point is the scoreboard, and a scoreboard has no finish line. New Hampshire, which rebuilt its tax code around the people at the top of that scoreboard, should sit with what the evidence says about them.

The number that never arrives

The perfect-10 question comes from a 2018 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Grant Donnelly, Tianyi Zheng, Emily Haisley and Michael Norton, built on two surveys of more than 4,000 millionaires across 17 countries. Its headline finding is how little wealth moves the needle. In one sample, only people worth more than $8 million reported more life satisfaction than those holding $1.5 million to $2.9 million. In the other, the line sat at $10 million. Even then the gain was small: the $10 million-plus group averaged 8.03 on a ten-point happiness scale, against 7.81 for those worth $1 million to $1.9 million. Eight figures buys about a fifth of a point.

The study found one thing that mattered more than the amount: where the money came from. Millionaires who earned their wealth were measurably happier than those who inherited it, a result the authors tie back to Andrew Carnegie’s old warning that enormous bequests deaden the talents of the child who receives them. I wrote a book, Generational Malpractice, about what unearned advantage does to the people downstream of it. The Harvard data adds a footnote: it does not even make the heirs happy.

The scoreboard

Norton, the Harvard professor on the study, has a simple model for why the chase never ends. People judge their lives on two questions, he told The Atlantic in 2018: am I doing better than I was, and am I doing better than other people? Most of what makes a life good is hard to score. Whether you are a better parent than last year resists measurement. Money does not. It is the one dimension of standing that comes with a running total.

So the total becomes the game. In the same interview, Norton described asking wealthy respondents how much more money would make them perfectly happy. At every level, he said, people answered “two or three times as much.” The person with $1 million wants $3 million. The person with $30 million wants $90 million. Contentment stays two doublings out, forever.

The other scholars in that Atlantic piece fill in the rest. Jeffrey Winters, the Northwestern political scientist who wrote Oligarchy, told the magazine that people who use money to make money hit no total that registers as enough; each new increment carries its own thrill. Brooke Harrington, who studies the wealth-management world, put the mechanism plainly: feeling rich is a comparison against your reference group, so the question is never what you want to buy but what you must buy to hold your place. And the novelist Gary Shteyngart, after embedding with hedge-fund managers to research a book, watched them compete on their trading terminals all day and then across a poker table at night. Finance publishes no bestseller list. The number at the close of trading is the standing.

What the research settled

For years the tidy version of this science was the $75,000 plateau. In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that day-to-day emotional well-being climbed with income and then flattened somewhere between $60,000 and $90,000 a year. In 2021, Matthew Killingsworth ran a stronger design, pinging tens of thousands of people on their phones to sample mood in real time, and found no plateau at all. Happiness kept rising with income.

The two camps then did something rare in academic life. Killingsworth, Kahneman and Barbara Mellers reanalyzed the data together and published the resolution in PNAS in 2023. Both had been right about different people. The flattening is real, but only for roughly the least happy fifth of the population, whose miseries stop improving around $100,000. For everyone else, happiness rises with the logarithm of income, and among the happiest it accelerates.

Note what a logarithm means in dollars. Each doubling of income buys roughly the same bump in mood, so the jump from $60,000 to $120,000 feels about like the jump from $500,000 to $1 million. By the eighth digit, a marginal dollar is close to inert as a consumption tool. That is why the chase runs on comparison instead. The money stopped being a way to buy things a long time ago. It is a way to keep score.

New Hampshire placed its bet

New Hampshire spent the last decade legislating as if the marginal dollar were still the motivator. The Interest and Dividends Tax, the state’s only levy on personal investment income, was phased down from 5 percent and erased outright for tax periods beginning January 1, 2025. The pitch was competitiveness: lighten the load on capital and the capital stays and invests.

Look at who the load was on. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy modeled the accelerated repeal and found that only households in the top 5 percent of incomes see any reduction in their overall effective tax rate. The state’s own Department of Revenue Administration data, as reported by the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, showed half of all Interest and Dividends revenue came from the 2.5 percent of filers with more than $200,000 a year in taxable interest, dividends and distributions — the kind of flow that implies several million dollars in financial assets per taxpayer.

Now look at what it cost. NHFPI estimates New Hampshire has given up more than $1 billion over eight years across its cuts to business taxes, the rooms and meals tax, and the I&D repeal, as InDepthNH reported in April. The state closed fiscal year 2025 with collections $197.7 million below the prior year, ran a $67.3 million deficit, and tapped the rainy day fund to cover it, leaving a $225.2 million balance. The Pew Charitable Trusts ranks New Hampshire’s post-pandemic revenue recovery fourth worst among the 50 states. This is the arithmetic behind every legislative shrug at school funding, the same base aid our Supreme Court says the state has set unconstitutionally low.

And the class this architecture serves is not an abstraction here. On federal returns for 2021, per NHFPI’s analysis of IRS data, the top 1 percent of New Hampshire filers — 6,742 households — reported $19.1 billion in adjusted gross income, or 24.5 percent of every income dollar in the state. Under the current code, ITEP calculates, a Granite Stater in the bottom 20 percent of incomes pays about 8.9 percent of income in combined state and local taxes. The middle pays 6.7. The top 1 percent, those above roughly $721,000 a year, pay 2.8.

The top of the top is on the Forbes 400. Rick Cohen of Keene, owner of C&S Wholesale Grocers, appeared on the 2025 list at $22.1 billion, up from $10.4 billion a year earlier, most of the fortune tied to his warehouse-automation firm Symbotic, as Manchester Ink Link reported. Alex Karp of Lyman, the Palantir cofounder, sat at $14.3 billion. Nothing either man can buy in New Hampshire changed when those estimates moved by billions; that is the Harvard finding wearing a local face. Forbes assigns both its lowest philanthropy score, a 1, meaning less than 1 percent of personal wealth given away so far, a rating they share with 159 of the 400.

Here is the inversion worth staring at. The wellbeing research says money reliably stops solving problems for the people who hold most of it, and keeps solving problems all the way down the rest of the distribution. New Hampshire’s tax code runs the other direction. It asks the least, proportionally, of the people whose problems money can no longer fix, and the most of the people whose problems it still would. A legislature that believed its own competitiveness story never tested it against what the wealthy say about themselves: that no amount lands, that the target is always a multiple away, that the game is position. You do not hold people like that with a 3 percent dividend-tax repeal. You just hand them the savings.

The one purchase that still works

There is one place in this literature where money buys happiness on command: spending it on other people. Dunn, Aknin and Norton showed it in Science in 2008 and in follow-up work since, and even the wealthy agree. In the 1985 study of very rich Americans the Harvard paper builds on, respondents said money added to their happiness when used to help others, and through the freedom it bought over their own time. Norton turned the finding into a TEDx talk whose title gives the whole game away: how to buy happiness.

So, once they have all the money, what is the point? By their own answers: the next doubling, then the one after that. I do not write that as a sneer. The treadmill is standard human equipment; wealth just removes the belt’s end. The sneer belongs to the policy — to a state that looked at people who told researchers a tenfold raise might finally do it, and concluded the urgent public project was sparing them 3 cents on a dividend dollar, while the bottom fifth of its own citizens pays triple the rate and the schools wait on a court order. Money can solve most problems. New Hampshire keeps aiming it at the people who ran out of problems it can solve.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note: Every hyperlink in this article was verified live on July 24, 2026. Three sources block automated retrieval and are cited without links or with intermediary records: The Atlantic (article text confirmed against complete third-party mirrors), PNAS publisher pages for the 2010 and 2021 papers (findings confirmed via the 2023 PNAS resolution paper and its PubMed record), and Forbes (2025 Forbes 400 figures confirmed via Manchester Ink Link’s contemporaneous report; Forbes’ rolling estimates have moved since September 2025). All wealth and happiness findings described here are correlational, as the study authors themselves caution. Corrections: granitestatereport@gmail.com.