The paper was a longitudinal study and not an experiment, so it's not entirely clear whether happiness truly caused the higher earnings. But the study did show that happier teens were more likely to get a college degree, to get hired and promoted and to be optimistic, extroverted and less neurotic.
"Early happiness probably changes so many things about your life that even if later in life you're not as happy as you were, those formative experiences continue to play themselves out," said Norton, coauthor of the book "Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending."
How much is happiness motivating people to do better and how much is it simply causing others to give us more opportunities? In other words, can unhappy people fake it until they make it?
"I would bet they would get some of the benefits," Lyubomirsky said. Still, she said, most of the value of happiness probably comes from how it affects the person feeling it, not what others perceive.
The study results may even have policy implications for central banks and political leaders looking to take lagging American and European economies out of their recent downturns, said lead author Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, an assistant professor of political economy and behavioral science at University College London.
Previous research by De Neve's coauthor, economics professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England, has suggested that low unemployment makes people happier than low inflation. Perhaps if governments focused on stimulating job growth, even if those measures boosted inflation, they would lead to greater happiness — and thus more prosperity overall, De Neve mused.
A little individual happiness, spread over entire populations, could have a massive combined effect, perhaps pulling depressed economies out of their slumps.
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