Does money buy happiness, according to science?

February 28, 2024

By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024. Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the oppor...

Can you have causation without correlation? (Surprisingly, yes)

March 14, 2022

Here are five ways you can have causation without correlation: 1. Averaging: increasing A sometimes causes increasing B, but other times, it causes B to decrease. The two balance out. Since correlation measures the average relationship, the correlation is zero. For example, if you drive up a symmetrical hill and then down the other side, there’s no correlation between how many times the wheels have revolved on the hill and the car’s height above sea level, even though the revolving of the...

What’s the link between depression and anxiety?

January 10, 2021

This image is from my colleague Amanda Metskas’ post on the Clearer Thinking blog, “Understanding the two most common mental health problems in the world:” https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/understanding-the-two-most-common-mental-health-problems-in-the-world

If you study depression and anxiety (in the U.S.), you find that they are correlated to a shockingly high degree (e.g., in one of my studies, when I correlated PHQ-9 depression scale scores with GAD-7 anxiety scale scores, I found that r = 0.82 ). Additionally, many studies have found that SSRIs (and other medications) help people with both depression and anxiety, as do certain therapeutic modalities such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, suggesting further linkage. Fin...