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Article: How not to buy happiness.
- Article from:
- Daedalus
- Article date:
- March 22, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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An enduring paradox in the literature on human happiness is that although the rich are significantly happier than the poor within any country at any moment, average happiness levels change very little as people's incomes rise in tandem over time. (1) Richard Easterlin and others have interpreted these observations to mean that happiness depends on relative rather than absolute income. (2)
In this essay I offer a slightly different interpretation of the evidence--namely, that gains in happiness that might have been expected to result from growth in absolute income have not materialized because of the ways in which people in affluent societies have generally spent ...