Survey Shows Richest 1% Not Necessarily Happier, But All That Money Has Convinced Them the 'American Dream' Is Real

A new survey sheds fresh light on the wide gulf in how the richest and low-income families in the U.S. view their own life experiences and satisfaction with a full 97% of the wealthy saying the so-called “American Dream” is working for them.

Standard polling typically does not gather much data on the views of the richest 1% of Americans—those who earn at least $500,000 per year—because there are so few of them, so researchers at NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health over-sampled wealthy respondents in a new study to get a sense of their ideology.

“People have a lot of views about what the experiences of the most successful people in America are. But we’ve never been, in most cases, able to look at them,” Robert Blendon of the Harvard Chan School told NPR.

The wealthy respondents displayed “near-universal life satisfaction” according to the Washington Post, with 90% of people polled saying they were “completely” or “very” satisfied with their lives and 97% saying they believed they are either living the American Dream or are well on their way to achieving it.

Those results differed drastically from those for middle-income households, which make between $35,000 and $99,000 per year, and low-income people, who earn $35,000 or less.

Less than half of the poorest respondents expressed satisfaction with their lives, and two-thirds of middle-income people said the same.

The number of rich people who expressed overall “dissatisfaction” was “statistically indistinguishable from zero,” according to Christopher Ingraham at the Post.

The poll differentiated between “happiness” and “life satisfaction.” As Ingraham noted, research in recent years has shown that “happiness” correlates with income only up to about $75,000, with earners growing no happier after they earn more than that.