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It’s called diminishing returns in economics.
Basically, if you have very little of something, any additional amount of it will increase your satisfaction by a lot, but only up to the point of satiation, after which happiness will not increase further regardless of how much more you have.
But a three year old can understand this. Give them one ice cream, they’ll be delighted, give them ten, and they’ll start throwing up.
“I guess I’ll have to rent it” - Weird Al
It may be essential, but not sufficient. That’s all this statement claims.
Put another way “having money isn’t everything, not having it is”
Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a lot of the prerequisites
I’d argue it can by happiness in a very literal sense since you can pay people to do things you don’t want to do, thus freeing up your time enjoy however you like.
Having to not do certain things may not make you happy either. Maybe you have some other problems
Being able to spend your time doing things you want to do obviously makes everyone happier.
Does that? Yes. That alone? No!
That’s just how rich people say they’re too dumb to figure out what makes them happy.
Context matters. This is an appropriate statement to make to someone who has enough to live a comfortable life but is always chasing more. But to say it to someone struggling to make ends meet is just incredibly disrespectful.
after a certain point*
i doubt someone like elon musk is as happy as he is rich, id argue the opposite.
being debt free and unworried about cash would make me happier tho
Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it will buy away the sad
Money can buy happiness, but happiness doesn’t have a delivery service. You have to go pick it up yourself.
Money can’t buy happiness, but you can buy a yacht and pull right up next to it
Not to be confused with the fallacy that these essentials are exclusively the product of exchanging money-- while you can pay for better health and better safety, there are also things you can do with little to no money to improve those for yourself, though the freedom to do so unfortunately is not default and financial security does empower an individual to better use what resources are available to them-- maybe not everyone can trivially access hiking trails, or be in the health for it, and even then they should have a good pair of shoes, a water bottle, and reliable mode of transportation to/fro the trails, which again not everyone has unfortunately.
Imo, the idealistic answer is to work to ensure everyone an essential baseline level that can reliably empower them to live as healthy and opportune of lives as is reasonably possible, while of course having in place infrastructure and accomodations to those less fortunate in health and/or opportunity. I’d like to think this is more than a utopian idea, and closer to a reality than one might originally think, or perhaps I was somewhat unique or grossly digressed from the status quo in pessimistically believing that we might be far from this being a reality. Perhaps my pessimism was also influenced by my financial stress at the time, among the other throes of life.
“Money can’t buy happiness” is a great mantra for rejecting the capitalist enshirining of wealth as a virtue. It’s important to see happiness as something more complex than income.
The issue is that when interpreted as “poverty is no excuse for unhappiness”, it loses all valid meaning.
See also: “Life isn’t fair”
Alternatively, we could say “money can buy happiness, and that’s the problem”.
“‘Money doesn’t buy happiness.’ Do you live in America?..because it buys a WaveRunner. You ever see a sad person on a WaveRunner?” -Daniel Tosh
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