Can money buy happiness?

Anyone familiar with "The Science of Getting Rich"?Written in early 1900's by a guy named Wattles. I like his philosophy and think he does a good job of disposing of the hangups a lot of people have about money.

Do a search by title and you will find several referneces. Should find a free copy to read in the top ten search returns.

Yes, money can buy happiness. If you disagree, feel free to send your money my way. It will make me happier in my judgment without making you less happy in yours, so that would be a win-win situation.

(Status report: I've tried this argument in about 10 discussions. Many people disagreed that money can buy happiness, but no takers on my win-win proposal so far. How do the skeptics among you explain this odd discrepancy?)

For example, how do we suppose we'll feel if our favorite college football team wins or loses, and then how do we really feel a few days after the game? How do we predict we'll feel about purchasing jewelry, having children, buying a big house or being rich? And then how do we regard the outcomes? According to this small corps of academics, almost all actions -- the decision to buy jewelry, have kids, buy the big house or work exhaustively for a fatter paycheck -- are based on our predictions of the emotional consequences of these events.

Until recently, this was uncharted territory. How we forecast our feelings, and whether those predictions match our future emotional states, had never been the stuff of laboratory research. But in scores of experiments, Gilbert, Wilson, Kahneman and Loewenstein have made a slew of observations and conclusions that undermine a number of fundamental assumptions: namely, that we humans understand what we want and are adept at improving our well-being -- that we are good at maximizing our utility, in the jargon of traditional economics. Further, their work on prediction raises some unsettling and somewhat more personal questions. To understand affective forecasting, as Gilbert has termed these studies, is to wonder if everything you have ever thought about life choices, and about happiness, has been at the least somewhat naive and, at worst, greatly mistaken.

The problem, as Gilbert and company have come to discover, is that we falter when it comes to imagining how we will feel about something in the future. It isn't that we get the big things wrong. We know we will experience visits to Le Cirque and to the periodontist differently; we can accurately predict that we'd rather be stuck in Montauk than in a Midtown elevator. What Gilbert has found, however, is that we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions -- our ''affect'' -- to future events. In other words, we might believe that a new BMW will make life perfect. But it will almost certainly be less exciting than we anticipated; nor will it excite us for as long as predicted. The vast majority of Gilbert's test participants through the years have consistently made just these sorts of errors both in the laboratory and in real-life situations. And whether Gilbert's subjects were trying to predict how they would feel in the future about a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, the defeat of a preferred political candidate or romantic rejection seemed not to matter. On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.

A large body of research on well-being seems to suggest that wealth above middle-class comfort makes little difference to our happiness, for example, or that having children does nothing to improve well-being -- even as it drives marital satisfaction dramatically down. We often yearn for a roomy, isolated home (a thing we easily adapt to), when, in fact, it will probably compromise our happiness by distancing us from neighbors. (Social interaction and friendships have been shown to give lasting pleasure.) The big isolated home is what Loewenstein, 48, himself bought. ''I fell into a trap I never should have fallen into,'' he told me.

Perhaps it's explained by most people seeing it as a cheap ploy to line your own pockets.

But, as Soz mentioned in this thread twice already, it simply doesn't hold. Money may bring a short term temporary happiness but it doesn't hold up long. Maslow demonstrated this thousands of times over.

I know. I read "The futile pursuit of hapiness" too. (It was on The New York Times' list of "most e-mailed articles of 2003".) To be pompous about it, I disagree with the epistemology of the article. If I remember correctly, the researchers relied on interviews to determine what the long-term effect of money on happiness is.

Maybe it's just me, but I am biased against this way of gathering information. In my opinion, if you want to know what people really think, look at what they do, not at what they say.

If money really had no long lasting effect on their happiness, rich people would donate much more money to charity than they actually do. The reason is the same as above: this move makes the needy recipients happier without making the rich donors unhappier. In exchange, the donors get the warm fuzzy feeling of being generous and compassionate. Again, this kind of behavior is a win-win situation if the thesis of "The futile pursuit of happiness" is correct. So why don't much more rich people take advantage of the opportunity?

My answer is that there is a discrepancy between how happy money really makes people, and how much people are willing to admit it. This discrepancy is itself very interesting, but the point I was trying to make in my last post is this: When a discrepancy between saying and doing arises, I assume by default that actions speak louder than words. Which leads me to the conclusion that money does make people happy, and that they're just in denial about it for some reason.

Here's how it expresses itself. In a recent experiment, Loewenstein tried to find out how likely people might be to dance alone to Rick James's ''Super Freak'' in front of a large audience. Many agreed to do so for a certain amount of money a week in advance, only to renege when the day came to take the stage. This sounds like a goof, but it gets at the fundamental difference between how we behave in ''hot'' states (those of anxiety, courage, fear, drug craving, sexual excitation and the like) and ''cold'' states of rational calm. This empathy gap in thought and behavior -- we cannot seem to predict how we will behave in a hot state when we are in a cold state -- affects happiness in an important but somewhat less consistent way than the impact bias. ''So much of our lives involves making decisions that have consequences for the future,'' Loewenstein says. ''And if our decision making is influenced by these transient emotional and psychological states, then we know we're not making decisions with an eye toward future consequences.'' This may be as simple as an unfortunate proclamation of love in a moment of lust, Loewenstein explains, or something darker, like an act of road rage or of suicide.

Fishin' - You are SOOO right! Thomas is making a cheap no good low life attempt to rip people off. Send it to me instead. You can trust me. Really!