dollars Would you be happier if you had more money? Most people think they would. Studies show however, that people's happiness does not increase commensurate to their wealth. The United States is the richest country in the world, and yet many people here are no happier than people in countries who live with much less. Published every year, the Human Development Index, or HDI, is a scoring mechanism used by the United Nations to measure, for lack of a better term, Gross National Happiness. The HDI takes into account three indicators: lifespan, educational attainment, and adjusted real income. According to the 2004 Human Development Report, the top-ten "happiest" countries, in order according to that index, are: Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, Belgium, Iceland, United States, Japan, and Ireland (192).

When we look at different countries with different cultures, and try to compare their overall levels of happiness, the convoluted data can skew our perspective. Comparing one country's happiness level to another's becomes quite difficult.

But within any given country, except at the level of poverty or below, an increase in income does not seem to make much difference in a person's level of happiness. The average American family with a household income of between $50,000-$90,000 are no happier than well-off families with substantially more income . A recent research paper reported that many studies show little correlation between income and happiness. Instead, what was found is that people with more disposable income spend more time on activities that we typically associate with negative feelings, and were more often in moods that they described as hostile, angry, anxious, and tense.

Often we imagine that wealth will bring us pleasures that we cannot experience without it. While this may be a fantasy that does have validity, we must also keep in perspective that pleasurable experiences do not necessarily equate to happiness. The idea that money cannot buy happiness is nothing new. Attachment to material possessions is frowned upon by religions all over the world. Even with all the money they made, John Lennon and Paul McCartney couldn't buy love.

So why then do so many of us try so hard to make more money, if we know deep down inside that it won't make us happier? Why do the world's governments focus on per capita income as a metric for quality of life? Maybe the answer to those questions can be found by looking to our primitive past and into our very nature. We evolved from hunter-gatherers who worked hard to feed themselves, find a mate, and raise children. In the past, nomadic societies tended to have very few material possessions; there was simply no point in owning many things if you have to carry them around from place to place. But our hunter-gatherers ancestors eventually settled, took to farming and husbandry and developed systems of money. Ever since then, the limits to material acquisitions for us have disappeared.

Accumulation of money in times of plenty to safeguard against times of lack is both wise and prudent, and no one knows this better than good old Mother Nature. This basic wisdom is reflected to us throughout the natural world. The squirrels store away enough food in the fall to get through the winter, but do not bother to put enough away to last through the spring and summer of the next year; I believe there is a profound lesson to be learned from our furry friends, since they often seem playing happily a majority of the time.

For many of us, accumulation of money has for many become an end rather than a means. Money itself has become the de-facto method for measuring one's status or success. The accumulation of money gives us something to do that seems purposeful. Perhaps we are acting to fill a deep and ancient need to stockpile. It feels like a good use of our time and energy, so long as we don't think too much about why we're doing it.

Money can bring great pleasure, there's no doubt about that. But if money can truly buy happiness, why are so many of the worlds rich plagued with the same (albeit more expensive) problems as the rest of us? Millionaires and billionaires alike often spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on relatively meaningless and temporarily fulfilling material things. We see and hear about it in the press and we also see those rich and famous folk struggling to find happiness still. Money, apparently, only goes so far toward reeling in that fleeting thing called happiness. When it is spent on ones self, the power of money is quite limited. But when it is used to bring others up from that critical level of poverty and below, something magical happens...Happiness.

Let's consider the life famously wealthy investment genius Warren Buffet. Warren is now seventy-seven years old, and for the past sixty-five or so years, he has worked diligently at accumulating one of the greatest fortunes the world has ever seen. This year he surpassed Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates as the world's richest man, and at $62 billion dollars he collected more than enough nuts to see himself through every winter to come a very long time ago.

Buffet had earned enough money by the mid 1960's to live very comfortably on the interest for the remainder of his life. So what is the point of his excessive accumulation of wealth? Is he just a money hungry mogul obsessed with more for the sake of having more, or is there more to his story?

Interestingly, Warren has never been a huge spender (proportionate to his available spending money) and some time ago he announced his plans to give away his money bags upon his death. Recently though, he made the decision to accelerate his plans to give away much of his fortune during his life to charities focused on world health - fighting such diseases as malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis- as well as improving U.S. libraries and high schools. Perhaps the idea of this colossal gift was his motivation for accumulating wealth all along.

Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller made huge donations in their lifetimes as well, but even when adjusted for inflation, Warren Buffett's is still greater. By make such a huge monetary contribution, all at once, Warren has given tremendous purpose to his life. His gift cannot have been motivated by a belief that he will benefit from it in an afterlife, since he is an agnostic. So why, then, did Warren do it? And what, then, does his life teach us about the nature of happiness?

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