Objective: The aim of this paper was to examine the relationship between income, subjective wellbeing, and culture among people from a higher socio-economic class across the world. Rationale: Ed Diener proposed the law of diminishing marginal utility as an explanation for differences in subjective wellbeing among different income groups across different countries (Diener, Ng, & Tov, Balance in life and declining marginal utility of diverse resources, 2009). Thus, people with higher incomes would experience less subjective wellbeing due to income, and culture should emerge as a significant predictor. Method: Data from this study came from another study (https://siddharthgargblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/14/love-for-money/). I used an online survey to collect data on annual income in US dollars, subjective wellbeing (WHO-5), and country of residence (Indicator of Culture). 96 responses (Indians = 24, Foreigners = 72) were entered in IBM SPSS and a regression analysis was conducted. The raw dataset used in this study can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8869040.v1Results: ANOVA showed a significant difference (p < 0.05) between Indians and foreigners on levels of subjective wellbeing. Linear regression shows the regression coefficient of culture to be significant (Beta = -.254, p = .014) but the regression coefficient of income was not found to be significant. The overall model was found to explain 8.2% of the variance in wellbeing.Conclusion: The sample of this study is too small to make any kind of generalization; it does lend a little bit of support to the idea of diminishing marginal utility of income on subjective wellbeing and provides a rationale for further research.
The assumption of equal marginal utility of income: how much does it matter?
