Money and Happiness  By    |   Thursday, April 3, 2008 Filed
under: Science and Technology Tags: , ,  Money, or the love of
same, is the root of all evil. So sayeth the Bible. But humans
have no trouble turning that wisdom on its head and shaking
loose the opposite axiom—Greed is Good. All of us have
occasionally looked to money as a route toward happiness,
notwithstanding the fact that one of the most banal lessons of
Hollywood movies is: Money CANNOT buy you happiness. Think
Scarface, whose leetle friend was no substitute for the real
thing.  So which is it? Study after study has suggested that
income level, beyond the level of basic needs, has very little
effect on personal satisfaction, self-worth, or overall
happiness. Yet research by Robert H. Frank and others had
demonstrated that most people implicitly assume personal
spending will lead to more happiness.  Two psychologists at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Elizabeth W. Dunn
and Lara B. Aknin, together with Michael I. Norton of the H