ABSTRACT
Economists are concerned with human welfare, and have often assumed that human happiness can be measured by how much money people have. But does money make people happy, and if so, how much, which people and why? Others apart from economists seem to assume that money will make them happy: there is widespread participation in the British National Lottery, and in the Football Pools, while advertisers commonly offer large prizes as an incentive to buy. Governments and political parties appear to have increasing individual and national prosperity as their main aims. Wage bargaining is often very intense, so much so that workers sometimes lose their jobs through driving too hard a bargain. Workers will work longer and faster if offered a wage incentive (Furnham and Argyle, 1998).
