Money Can Buy Happiness.

Thank you once again for your round.I'm not sure whether you have misunderstood my positions, or are misrepresenting them. I will first provide some clarifications, then go on to demonstrate further that Money Cannot Buy Happiness.Rebuttals You are misrepresenting the distinction between mood and emotion.Mood: A mood is an emotional state. Moods differ from emotions in that they are less specific, less intense, and less likely to be triggered by a particular stimulus or event. (1)Emotion: state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others. (as per your definition).You try, in your paragraph, to distinguish between an Emotion and a 'Mental State' (which is not frequently used in the literature), however you acknowledge in your own definition that an emotion is a 'state of mind' i.e. mental state. You say "Happiness is an emotion, not a mental state" but claim that an emotion is one type of mental state. I object to the usage of the term mental state as it is informal and not in the psychological literature.You then say that I said we have no means of determining happiness. This is not what I said and it isn't true. Although we can't objectively measure the 'stuff' of happiness, we have gotten pretty good at using standardised indicies and meaned scales to determine a person's relative happiness against a standard control index. Same as for pain; we do have pain scales, which are hard to validate in the objective sense but are statistically reliable enough to use as a guide of relative pain (which is where we derive 'thresholds', etc). Regardless, this entire detour is a deviation from the topic, however I of course must rebut your contentions to avoid concession.In your next paragraph you concede the debate: "you cannot go to a store and buy a jar of happiness". You then go on to bizarrely implement what can only be described as poor syllogistic leading. Specifically, your fallacy is called 'Affirming the Consequent' - I haven't the space to expound here, check source (2).This is not a small error, it is the cornerstone of this debate. Let's say we cut out the middle man and give a person a house, or food, or take them overseas. The happiness they derive comes from those experiences or whatever the case may be. People are excited and rewarded by money because of its purchasing power, which is linearly correlated with the value of goods produced in the economy. It is representative, symbolic of real things. Of itself, it is nothing. This is why money cannot purchase happiness, but the things that money purchases can sometimes lead to satisfaction and a happier life.Since you seem to be permitting anecdotes, let me supply one for you. Last year I spent two and a half months travelling through South-East Asia. The poorest country I visited on my trip was Cambodia, and they were by far the happiest and kindest people. I'm not saying they're related, and I have no evidence of this, it is purely anecdote, but that's how it is.Render of new arguments in simple structure:1. Even if money brings happiness, it is not purchasing happiness.2. According the Happy Planet Index, some of the poorest countries are happier than the US or other Western countries:- Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Vietnam, Costa Rica and Nicaragua are all examples of poorer countries who have happiness threshold far, far above the West (3). Costa Rica sits at an index of 64.0, while the US is a dismal 37.3 (4) - wouldn't want to live there! My country isn't a whole lot better, admittedly. 3. The fundamental point is that not only can money not buy happiness in the technical sense, it also objectively doesn't.Over to you.(1) [http://en.wikipedia.org...] (2) [http://en.wikipedia.org...] (3) [http://www.happyplanetindex.org...] (4) [Ibid.]