Assuming a soothing tone reminiscent of the cleric, these advisors are now telling investors there is a bright side to loss. They can spend time with their families - a change, we are told, that is worth all the lucre in the world. Best of all, the new financial losers no longer have to feel all that guilt over doing better than some of their fellow citizens. In short, people are generally happier when they don't have quite so much money. Balderdash, says a new study by Jonathan Gardner and Andrew Oswald of the UK's Warwick University.
Money does buy happiness.
And, alas, the more money, the more happiness. To arrive at this conclusion, so distressing for the newly impoverished, the study sifted through a decade of data from the British Household Panel Survey, a representative sample of some 9,000 adults living in the UK in the 1990s. Both mental stress and unhappiness decline in the year after a windfall. There are several caveats here. One is that the UK windfall data has only been available for a couple of years.