Arthur C. Brooks explains why money removes unhappiness but cannot create lasting happiness. Different parts of the brain process unhappiness and happiness, he says. Beyond meeting basic needs, love, not money, reliably brings abundant happiness.
The thing to think about with money is what we find very clearly in the literature, and it's not in this particular book. It's actually, I'm working on it for my next book, which is that what money does is that it doesn't ever bring happiness, but it can eliminate the sources of unhappiness. This is the same thing that government policy can do. And so that's what one of the great big lies is. That's really one of these lies that's very close to the truth, which is why it makes it so insidious, is that it's true, you can feel better if you're at a very low economic level or you lack basic services to get them, but that's because it's eliminating your unhappiness, which by the way, is being processed in the different hemisphere of the prefrontal cortex than the happy cognitions that's so incredibly important for us to figure out. You know, we can actually eradicate a lot of sources of unhappiness that are very avoidable in our society and in our lives and our family's lives, with a little bit of help, as it turns out. But you pass a certain level and that's it. No longer will it eliminate the unhappiness and it will never bring happiness. That's when the only thing that will abundantly bring it, and reliably so, which as you just point out, Matthew, is love.
