Our research gave a surprising result.

Money can’t buy happiness. Many of us are told this at some point in our lives, but that doesn’t seem to stop many people from wanting more of it – even very rich people. The question is, how much money do we each need to satisfy our desires?

Economists often treat people as having unlimited economic wants but limited resources to satisfy them – a foundational economic concept known as scarcity. This idea is often presented as a basic fact about human nature. Our recently published research found instead that only a minority of people actually have unlimited wants, and that most would be happy with a limited, if still significant, sum of money.

We surveyed people about this issue in 33 countries spanning all inhabited continents, obtaining responses from about 8,000 people in total. We encouraged participants to focus on what it would mean to have all their wants fulfilled by asking them to imagine their “absolutely ideal life”, without worrying about whether it was realistically achievable.

To assess economic wants, we asked people to consider how much money they wanted in this ideal life. But money rarely comes for free and we thought their responses could be influenced by what they imagine it would take to obtain large amounts of money – working long hours, high-risk investments or even criminality.

So we made it about chance, by asking them to choose a prize in a hypothetical lottery. They were told the chances of winning each lottery were the same so their choice was about how much money they wanted in their ideal lives, not which lottery they were most likely to win.

The lottery prizes started at US$10,000 (converted to local currencies, so £8,000 for UK participants) with options increasing by a multiple of 10. At the time we ran the study, the top prize of US$100 billion would have made them the richest person in the world.