I wonder how much any of those associations are with income per se versus career satisfaction per se?

I imagine people who are making more money are probably a better fit for their career, feel more needed, and so forth and so on. I do imagine there's some relationship with income and accumulating more money per se, but I wonder how strong that relationship is once you remove the effects of career satisfaction independent of monetary gain, if such a thing is even possible.

I guess it's hard for me to interpret these effects because there's so much going on in the background in terms of meeting life goals, feeling welcome where you're at and feeling like you're able to contribute what you're best at, and so forth and so on.

The other thing is the ordinate axis is hard for me to make sense of. Like, in Figure 1, life satisfaction goes from say, 2.7 to 3.2 on a scale of 1 to 4? That seems like a relatively narrow range to me, even if it is statistically significant, and my guess is those dots are hiding a lot of variability.

So maybe that's what people mean by diminishing returns? Not that there's no actual continuing increase, but that the increase is incredibly small on some absolute scale of happiness? It's hard to know what to make of the happiness numbers — if, say, consequential changes in some measure of happiness occur far below anything on that ordinate axis, none of these increases with income are of any practical significance.