Inside the Happiness Racket
I think that up to $85K or so money can buy happiness, but more than that doesn't make anyone happier. The amount tells us pretty much what is needed to get basic economic security.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17929/inside-the-happiness-racket
Why has this private, personal emotion gained so much public importance? In the 19th century, captains of industry worried about the toll that repetitive physical labor would eventually take on a worker’s body. Today, in the “knowledge economy,” they worry about the gradual depletion of mental productivity—the creeping of boredom, apathy, pessimism and absenteeism among workers that in turn threatens a company’s bottom line.
When an employee is unhappy at work, it stands to reason that one of two things is fundamentally at fault: the employee or the work. The happiness industry exonerates capitalism. It’s not that the job is underpaid, the hours unreasonable or the product pointless. It’s that the employee is just unhappy. She should be encouraged to eat better, exercise and practice mindfulness. Or, if those things fail, seek a pharmaceutical remedy. In the American Psychiatric Association’s 1980 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the number of “official” forms of mental illness ballooned by more than half, followed by a similar rise in the number of antidepressant drugs approved to treat them.
Then, of course, there’s “retail therapy,” based on the hope that money really can buy happiness. The British economist William Stanley Jevons theorized that the value of a commodity might lie in whether we believe it will make us happy, rather than in any inherent quality, such as the labor that went into producing it. The supposedly objective capitalist market was suddenly transformed into a “vast psychological audit.”
But what makes us happy? Ask someone and they will most likely answer with fuzzy metaphorical language rather than quantifiable data. For treatment purposes—such as getting a miserable, unproductive patient back to work—such narratives are time-consuming and scientifically useless. Nor are they much help to marketers: Any viewer of Mad Men is familiar with the idea that ads work best when they appeal to the desires we didn’t even know we had.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks for posting. 
I will have to read the article a bit later, but from the OP, I very much agree with the premise.
