The Relationship Between Happiness And Money

Happiness, Aristotle argues, is the one thing sought for itself and for which everything else is done. Everyone seems to agree on this, even if their reasons for doing so might vary. The problem then becomes how to explain what this happiness means, for, as he points out, different people have different interpretations of happiness, based on their own understanding of it. Some ("men of the most vulgar type") argue that happiness is pleasure; others ("of superior refinement and of active disposition") equate it with honour; still others see it as the pursuit and acquisition of wealth (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I).

As to this last, Aristotle comments:

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for this is merely useful and for the sake of something else (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I, Chapter 5, 1096a).

In effect, Aristotle is dismissing all these definitions of what happiness is as self-evidently wrong because they are not ends in themselves. Having also dismissed other functions that we have in common with plants and animalsùgrowth and nutrition and that of perception, Aristotle goes on to say:

There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational principle; of this, one part has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And, as ôlife of th

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and Andrew Oswald, they attempted to assign money values on unhappiness: how much money would one need, for example, to make up for a divorce and to bring that person up to the same happiness level as a happily married person, all other factors being equal? According to Blanchflower and Oswald (2000), that person would need an extra $66,000 a year. See Table 1 below for a breakdown of what it would take to make a happiness equivalence using money values with all else being equal. At Home $6,000  Male $13,000  Black $31,000  Never Married $49,000  Unemployed $60,000  Divorced $66,000  Widowed $75,000  Table 1: Increase in Income Needed to Compensate Typical American for Unhappiness That Goes with Certain States (Branchflower & Oswald, 2000). Some current research equates the production of dopamine in the brain with our quest for happinessùand tries to explain why money per se is not going to do it (Johnson, 2005). According to this research, dopamine is what makes you feel good or bad, depending not so much on the act or event itself but on your expectations. An example used is that of sex: if you're expecting a night of mind-blowing sex and it turns out to be only so-so, you might feel unhappy afterwards. Bu
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