How much money do you need to make you happy? It's a reasonable question that is damned hard to answer yet the people at Skandia International have conducted one of those surveys that purports to provide a response.
There is always a problem with asking questions like: are you happy or would you like more money or, as the condom company Durex does, how often do you have sexual intercourse. Respondents are tempted into mendacity, furnishing responses they believe will show themselves in a better light.
For what it's worth this is what Skandia's Wealth Sentiment Monitor found: 80 per cent of respondents affirmed that a certain income level could bring them happiness. A majority, 53 per cent, said they would be happy with an annual income of between HK$200,000 and HK$800,000, whereas 22 per cent said they needed "at least" HK$800,000 and 21 per cent thought they needed an income in excess of HK$2 million.
Skandia then calculated a crude average of these requirements and came out with a figure of US$197,000 for Hong Kong respondents, which compares with a global average of US$161,800, placing Hongkongers in third place in a global table that is headed by Dubai then Singapore. Germans appear to be looking for less than half the amount required by Hong Kong people and those in Britain think they can be happy with about 25 per cent less.
As you can probably tell I am not convinced by any of this. The basic question is inherently incapable of producing a sensible answer. The definition of happiness is illusive and when you ask a question containing a premise (in this case that income and happiness are correlated) you are bound to get unsatisfactory answers.
Yet this is an area where income, financial security, aspirations and planning merge and where it is easier to find negatives than positives. In other words it is not hard to see why people who are struggling on low incomes can become unhappy and why people haunted by financial insecurity might be stressed.