The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter

those still living on dirt. And the moms became much happier. Depression among mothers fell by half. And their stress levels fell. Mothers in homes with new cement floors reported a 69 percent increase in satisfaction with their life. This happiness cost about $150 per family. Unsurprisingly, the Mexican federal government expanded the program to the rest of the country.
     
     
    MONEY IS MORE abundant in industrialized countries. But even there it will add to happiness. The Eurobarometer surveys have been asking European Union citizens about the satisfaction with their lives for more than three decades. Among the richest 25 percent of the population, almost a third reported being “very satisfied,” according to a study in the late 1990s. Among the poorest 25 percent, only about 23 percent are equally pleased.
    Results were similar in the United States. The General Social Survey, a set of polls taken since the early 1970s of Americans’ behaviors and beliefs, finds that more than 40 percent of Americans in the richest quarter of the population are very happy. But among the poorest quarter of Americans, only 25 percent are equally satisfied.
    Money might not ensure happiness forever. But as Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, put it: “There’s no one single change you can imagine that would make your life improve on the happiness scale as much as to move from the bottom 5 percent on the income scale to the top 5 percent.”
    New York’s Eleventh Congressional District, where I live, is of modest means—stretching from fairly poor areas like East Flatbush and Crown Heights to the fairly posh Park Slope. The typical family in the district earns $51,300 a year, according to the census, about $12,000 less than the national median. It is a grumpy place. In 2009, pollster Gallup, the health-care consultancy Healthway, and America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry lobby group, released a district-by-district index of well-being based on surveys of people’s satisfaction with life, work, and health. My district came out in 421st place in the nation, fifteen rungs from the bottom.
    The happiest congressional district in the country is about as far from New York’s eleventh as one can get without leaving the contiguous United States. California’s fourteenth district hugs the Pacific between San Francisco and San Jose, encompassing much of the high-tech corridor of Silicon Valley. It has lovely scenery, and certainly better weather than Brooklyn. It also has a median family income of $116,600 a year.

THE TREADMILL OF HAPPINESS
    There is a limit to the link between money and happiness. It derives from one of the most distinctive human traits: our capacity to adapt. People bounce back from bereavement. A British study found that while people who became disabled reported a big drop in happiness, many recovered much of the lost happiness within a year or two. A study of marriage and happiness in Germany found that German widows recover from the blow of their husband’s death within two years.
    Bliss doesn’t last either. German women become progressively happier in the two years in which their relationship moves from courtship to marriage. Yet after peaking the year of their wedding, happiness drifts back down over the next two years to close to where it was before. The same thing seems to happen to people who strike it rich. Studies have found that the burst of euphoria people experience when they win the lottery fades relatively quickly, even if the prize is in the millions. Within six months of having won, the happiness reported by big winners is back down around where it was before.
    In the 1970s, the economist Richard Easterlin of the University of Southern California made what is probably the most intriguing finding in the history of the economics of happiness. Poring through twenty-five years of surveys about happiness, he concluded that despite stellar economic growth, Americans were not significantly happier