Why Money Doesn't Buy Happiness What do the experts say? All in all, it was probably a mistake to look for the answer to the eternal question--'Does money buy happiness?'--from people who practice what's called the gloomy science. For when economists tackled the question, they started from the observation that when people put something up for sale they try to get as much for it as they can, and when people buy something they try to pay as little for it as they can. Both sides in the transaction, the economists noticed, are therefore behaving as if they would be more satisfied, or happier, dare we say, if they ended up receiving more money (the seller) or holding on to more money (the buyer). Hence, more money must be better than less, and the only way more of something can be better than less of it is if it brings you greater satisfaction. The economists'conclusion: the more money you have, the happier you must be. Suicidal CEOs, miserable magnates (大资本家) and other unhappy rich folks aren't the only ones giving the lie to this.'Psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness,' writes Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of extreme poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter.' That flies in the face of intuition (直觉), not to mention economic theory. According to standard economies, the most important commodity you can buy with additional wealth is choice. If you have $20 in your pocket, you can decide between steak and peanut butter for dinner, but if you have only $1 you'd better hope you already have a jar of jelly at home. Additional wealth also lets you satisfy additional needs and wants, and the more of those you satisfy the happier you are supposed to be. The trouble is, choice is not all it's cracked up to be. Studies show that people like selecting from among maybe half a dozen kinds of food at the grocery store but find 27 choices overwhelming, leaving them habitually on edge that they could have chosen a better one than they did. And wants, which are nice to be able to afford, have a bad habit of becoming needs. Satisfying needs brings less emotional well-being than satisfying wants. What do the common people say? The nonlinear (非线性的) nature of how much happiness money can buy comes through clearly in global surveys that ask people how satisfied they feel with their lives. In a typical survey people are asked to rank their sense of well-being or happiness on a scale of 1 to 7, where I means 'not at all satisfied with my life' and 7 means 'completely satisfied.' Of the American multimillionaires who responded, the average happiness score was 5.8. Homeless people in Calcutta came in at 2.9. But before you assume that money does buy happiness after all. consider who else rated themselves around 5.8: the Inuit of northern Greenland, who do not exactly lead a life of luxury, and the cattle-herding Masai of Kenya, whose huts have no electricity or running water. And proving Gilbert's point about money buying happiness only when it lifts you out of extreme poverty, slum dwellers in Calcutta-one economic rung above the homeless--rate themselves at 4.6. Studies tracking changes in a population's reported level of happiness over time have also dealt a death blow to the money-buys-happiness claim. Since World War II the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has tripled in the United States. But people's sense of well-being has barely been altered. Japan has had an even more dramatic rise in GDP per capita since its postwar misery, but measures of national happiness have been flat, as they have also been in Western Europe during its long postwar boom, according to social psychologist Ruut Veenhoven. An analysis of