ABSTRACT
Wealth is often on peoples minds when they think about happiness. The rich seem happy, the poor seem sad, and those in between always seem to be striving for more. For many, building wealth serves as the ultimate goal: While recognizing that other things are important, they often make our most important decisions on the basis of their impact on their wealth. Wealth tracks part of the external conditions of happiness. Subjective well-being has come to represent a generic form of happiness, and it is most often taken to be some combination of life satisfaction and positive (hedonic) affect. Within contemporary societies, wealth serves as a bridge between our needs, wants, and desires and their satisfaction. People need things, and things cost money; wealth allows us access to the things they need. This bridge is essential to the satisfaction of our basic needs for food, clean water, and shelter.
