Peter Kaminski

Here's an interesting piece about affluence and happiness. It describes a sort of Prisoner's Dilemma of spending; there is a competitive pressure to spend money on the trappings of wealth, instead of things that make you happy.

How not to buy happiness, Robert H. Frank

Introduction:

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. Richard Easterlin and others have interpreted these observations to mean that happiness depends on relative rather than absolute income.

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 their incomes.