Below an income of … $60,000 a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. … Money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

Kahneman made this remark while discussing findings from large-scale survey research on well-being and income in the United States, work he conducted with Angus Deaton. The results—widely summarized as a “$75,000 threshold”—distinguished between “emotional/experiential well-being” (day-to-day feelings such as stress, sadness, enjoyment) and “life evaluation” (how people rate their life overall). In interviews and public talks around 2010–2011, Kahneman emphasized that emotional suffering rises sharply with low income, but that beyond a middle-income level additional money does not systematically improve everyday emotional experience, even though it may still raise people’s evaluative judgments about their lives.

The statement draws a sharp line between two roles of money. Up to a moderate level, income reduces concrete stressors—unpaid bills, insecurity, inability to handle emergencies—so emotional suffering increases as resources fall away. Past a threshold, however, additional income does not reliably improve the felt quality of everyday experience; it may buy comfort, status, or options without proportionally increasing calm, joy, or freedom from worry. Kahneman’s point is not that money is irrelevant, but that its main psychological power is protective: it prevents misery more than it produces sustained experiential happiness.