How not to buy happiness...

'An enduring paradox in the literature on human happiness is that although the rich are significantly happier than the poor within any country at any moment, average happiness levels change very little as people’s incomes rise...'

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'Unpredictable noise may be particularly stressful because it confronts the subject with a loss of control. David Glass and his collaborators confirmed this hypothesis in an ingenious experiment that exposed two groups of subjects to a recording of loud unpredictable noises. Whereas subjects in one group had no control over the recording, subjects in the other group could stop the tape at any time by flipping a switch. These subjects were told, however, that the experimenters would prefer that they not stop the tape, and most subjects honored this preference. Following exposure to the noise, subjects with access to the control switch made almost 60 percent fewer errors than the other subjects on a proofreading task and made more than four times as many attempts to solve a difficult puzzle.18