Wealth and Well-Being: 7 Things Money Can and Cannot Buy, According to Science and Dharma

By Dr. Narayan Rout | Author | Researcher |    The Economy of Human Life Series  ·  28 min read  ·  Published: June 28, 2026

Contents In This Research Pillar

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. 1. Does Money Actually Stop Making You Happier After a Certain Point? The Real, Resolved Science
3. 2. If Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness Directly, What Is It Actually Buying? The Real Mechanism
4. 3. What Does Indian Philosophy Actually Say About Wealth? Kautilya’s Surprisingly Contrarian Position
5. 4. Does Even Indian Philosophy Warn Against Pursuing Wealth Too Hard?
6. 5. Is There a Real Connection Between This Ancient Warning and the 2023 Scientific Finding?
7. 6. What Is Dana, and Does Giving Money Away Actually Make People Happier?
8. 7. So What Should You Actually Do With This — A Practical Framework
9. The Quest Sage Insight
10. What You Can Do With This
11. Conclusion: Two Different Methods, One Honest Convergence
12. Frequently Asked Questions: Wealth, Well-Being, and Dharma
13. References and Sources
14. Further Reading on Related Topic

For more than a decade, one of the most-cited “facts” in popular psychology was a specific number: $75,000. Above that household income, the claim went, more money simply stops making you happier — a finding traced to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s own research. Then a younger researcher, Matthew Killingsworth, ran a larger, more granular study and found something different: happiness kept climbing well past that number, with no plateau in sight. Two credible, well-credentialed scientists, looking at related but different data, reached genuinely opposite conclusions — and for years, the public got whichever version showed up in whatever article they happened to read.

What happened next is the actual reason this topic deserves a serious article rather than another recycled headline: in 2023, Kahneman and Killingsworth did something genuinely rare in contested science. Rather than continuing to argue past each other, they teamed up with Barbara Mellers and designed a single study specifically built to test both of their competing predictions directly, agreeing in advance on what result would count as which of them being right. The resolution, published in a top scientific journal, turned out to be more interesting than either original claim. And roughly 2,300 years before either researcher was born, a very different kind of inquiry — Kautilya’s Arthashastra, a foundational text of classical Indian statecraft — had already made a strikingly specific, structurally similar argument about wealth’s real, conditional relationship to a good life. This article examines both, on their own separate terms, and names exactly where they meet.

Dharmasya Mulam Arthah |
The root of Dharma is wealth — and the root of happiness is Dharma.

— Classical Dharmashastra verse tradition on the interdependence of the Purusharthas

Get the actual, current science precisely right here, because this is one of the most confidently misquoted findings in all of popular psychology, and the real 2023 resolution is genuinely more nuanced and more useful than the popular $75,000 figure ever was.

Daniel Kahneman’s influential 2010 research, conducted with Angus Deaton, found emotional well-being rising with income but appearing to plateau around $75,000 in annual household income — a figure that became one of the most widely repeated “facts” in popular psychology and personal finance writing. Matthew Killingsworth’s later, larger research, using real-time experience-sampling methodology (asking people to report their momentary feelings throughout ordinary daily life, rather than relying only on retrospective surveys), found happiness continuing to climb well beyond that figure, with no clear plateau detected. (Ref. 1) Rather than letting this disagreement play out indefinitely through competing papers and media commentary, the two researchers, joined by Barbara Mellers, conducted a formal adversarial collaboration — a specific, rigorous research format in which researchers holding genuinely opposing views jointly design one study in advance, capable of clearly distinguishing between their competing predictions, rather than each separately interpreting ambiguous data in their own favor.

The actual resolution, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023, found that both researchers had been partly right, for different reasons neither had fully anticipated. For roughly 80% of the study’s participants, happiness continued rising with income well past $75,000, with no plateau detected up to the highest incomes tested, approximately $500,000 — vindicating Killingsworth’s broader finding for the large majority of people. But for the unhappiest 20% of the sample, identified by their baseline emotional well-being scores, happiness genuinely did plateau early, around the $100,000 mark, with additional income beyond that point providing no further measurable benefit — vindicating Kahneman’s original finding specifically for this less happy subgroup.

This is the part of the 2023 research that gets dramatically less coverage than the headline resolution, and it’s arguably the more important finding for anyone actually trying to make practical decisions about money.

The research identified a specific, named psychological mechanism responsible for the substantial majority of the relationship between income and life satisfaction: a subjective sense of control over one’s own life circumstances — the practical ability to make meaningful choices about how one spends time, where one lives, and how one responds when something unexpected goes wrong. (Ref. 2) Statistical analysis found this single factor, sense of control, accounted for approximately 74% of the total relationship between higher income and greater reported happiness. This is a genuinely significant reframing: money’s primary psychological value, on this evidence, is not the direct pleasure of consumption, acquisition, or status — it is the considerably more specific, more durable benefit of expanded personal agency and reduced vulnerability to circumstance beyond one’s control.

This single mechanism finding does more practical work than the entire $75,000-versus-no-plateau debate combined, because it tells you specifically what to actually optimize for with money, rather than simply how much of it to acquire: choices and decisions that expand your genuine sense of control over your own life — flexible work arrangements, an emergency fund that removes the panic of an unexpected expense, the ability to leave a genuinely bad situation — appear to carry disproportionate happiness value relative to their dollar cost, compared to equivalent spending that doesn’t meaningfully expand agency.

Having established what current behavioral science actually shows, it’s worth turning to a genuinely different, much older body of inquiry on the same basic question — and being precise about what it actually argues, since this is an area where popular spiritual writing often flattens real philosophical disagreement into one vague, unified “ancient wisdom” position.

Classical Hindu philosophy organizes human aims into four Purusharthas: Dharma (ethical and spiritual duty), Artha (wealth and material prosperity), Kama (desire and legitimate enjoyment), and Moksha (liberation). A considerable body of classical literature treats Dharma as the senior, controlling aim that should govern and constrain the pursuit of both Artha and Kama. Kautilya’s Arthashastra, however — composed in its core form likely between the 2nd century BCE and 3rd century CE, traditionally attributed to the statesman and strategist Kautilya, also known as Chanakya — takes a distinctly different, more practically grounded position. (Ref. 3) Kautilya argues that Artha is, in fact, the foundation enabling both Dharma and Kama, on the practical grounds that material security and genuine prosperity are real preconditions for fulfilling one’s ethical duties and pursuing legitimate enjoyment at all — a hungry, destitute person, on this view, is not well-positioned to practice Dharma regardless of their sincere intentions.

This is worth stating with real precision: this is a genuinely contrarian position within the broader classical Indian textual tradition, made by one specific, highly influential text, not a settled consensus or “the” Hindu view on wealth. Reporting it honestly means naming it as Kautilya’s specific argument, sitting in real, productive tension with other classical voices that subordinate Artha beneath Dharma more strictly — exactly the kind of internal philosophical diversity this platform’s standard requires representing accurately rather than smoothing into one tidy position.

Finding	Source	Year/Era
80% of people: happiness rises with income, no plateau to $500K	Killingsworth, Kahneman, Mellers (PNAS)	2023
Unhappiest 20%: happiness plateaus around $100K	Killingsworth, Kahneman, Mellers (PNAS)	2023
Sense of control explains ~74% of the income-happiness link	Same dataset, mechanism analysis	2023
Artha (wealth) as the foundation enabling Dharma and Kama	Kautilya, Arthashastra	c. 2nd century BCE – 3rd century CE

Yes, directly and explicitly — and the warning is structural, not a vague caution, which makes it considerably more useful than a generic “money isn’t everything” sentiment.

The broader textual tradition surrounding the Purushartha framework explicitly warns that excessive, unchecked pursuit of any single aim — including Artha — ultimately damages all three aims together, rather than benefiting the one being pursued. A frequently cited verse chain in this literature holds that the root of happiness is Dharma, and the root of Dharma is Artha — establishing wealth’s value as instrumentally connected to Dharma, not independent of it, and warning specifically that wealth pursued in violation of Dharma, rather than in support of it, undermines the very happiness wealth was meant to enable in the first place. (Ref. 4) It’s worth being fair to Kautilya’s broader text here: the Arthashastra itself spends extensive, detailed effort on practical statecraft, taxation policy, and economic administration, treating wealth generation as a serious, legitimate, even necessary function of good governance — this is not an ascetic rejection of wealth, but a specific, structural warning about wealth pursued as a disconnected end in itself.

There is a genuine, specific structural parallel here worth naming directly — and, in keeping with this platform’s standard, bounding just as directly, so the comparison stays honest rather than overstated.

Kautilya’s warning holds that wealth pursued without proper reference to Dharma fails to deliver the happiness and stability it promises. The 2023 adversarial collaboration found something structurally similar from a completely different direction: for the unhappiest 20% of its sample, additional income above roughly $100,000 provided no further measurable happiness benefit — a population for whom money alone, disconnected from whatever underlying source of their unhappiness actually was, simply stopped working. Both findings converge on the same underlying structural insight, even though neither could have known about the other: wealth’s contribution to well-being appears to be conditional on something beyond the wealth itself. Kautilya names that condition Dharma. The 2023 research’s broader mechanism analysis names it sense of control and underlying baseline psychological state. (Ref. 5) This is a real, citable structural parallel — not an equivalence claim. One is a 2,300-year-old normative philosophical argument about how a ruler and a society should relate to wealth; the other is a 2023 empirical psychological finding about income and self-reported life satisfaction, arrived at through entirely different methods, separated by roughly two millennia. Naming the parallel’s actual, bounded shape honestly is considerably more valuable than collapsing the two into a single, overstated “ancient India predicted modern science” claim.

This is where the Dharma tradition’s own practical answer to wealth’s proper direction has a genuinely real, independently-arrived-at modern research counterpart, in the same carefully bounded sense as the parallel examined in Section 5.

The Indian philosophical and Dharmashastra tradition’s practical answer to how wealth should relate to Dharma, beyond simply avoiding excess, is Dana — structured charitable giving, understood within the tradition not as optional generosity but as a core ethical obligation woven directly into the proper, complete use of Artha. (Ref. 6) This connects directly to a genuinely real, separately-arrived-at body of contemporary behavioral research: multiple studies in the psychology of prosocial spending have found that spending money on others, rather than exclusively on oneself, is associated with measurably greater happiness than equivalent self-directed spending of the same amount. The Dana tradition prescribed this practice as ethical obligation many centuries before any psychologist measured its happiness effect — a real, citable, independently confirmed parallel, reported with the same honest precision as Section 5’s larger structural comparison.

Pulling both bodies of evidence together into something genuinely usable, without forcing either tradition to say more than it actually claims.

• Stop optimizing for a target income number, and start optimizing for sense of control — per Section 2’s mechanism finding, this single factor explains roughly three-quarters of money’s happiness effect; an emergency fund or flexible work arrangement plausibly delivers more well-being per dollar than equivalent spending that doesn’t expand genuine agency.
• If you’ve crossed a comfortable income threshold and still feel persistently unhappy, per Section 1’s unhappiest-20% finding, more income specifically is unlikely to be the fix — the honest, evidence-backed next step is addressing the underlying source of that unhappiness directly, not simply earning more.
• Hold Kautilya’s framework as a genuine, practical check, not guilt: before a major financial decision, ask explicitly whether this pursuit of wealth is in service of your Dharma — your actual responsibilities and values — or has become disconnected from it, per Section 4’s structural warning.
• Build deliberate, structured giving (Dana) into your financial life as a practice, not an afterthought, per Section 6 — both the classical tradition and modern prosocial-spending research independently converge on this producing real, measurable well-being benefit.
• Resist treating either tradition examined in this article as having fully “solved” wealth and well-being on its own — the most honest, most useful position is holding the real, current science and the real, specific philosophical argument together, each doing different work, rather than picking one to the exclusion of the other.

Here is the argument I think this research actually supports, stated as a claim rather than hedged: both Kahneman and Killingsworth were right precisely because happiness was never really about the money in either of their datasets — it was about what the money could or couldn’t change about a person’s actual circumstances and underlying state. The 2023 study’s real discovery wasn’t a number. It was a mechanism, sense of control, that explains why money helps most people and stops helping a specific fifth of them. Kautilya made the identical structural discovery two thousand years earlier, using an entirely different method — not measurement, but careful, generations-tested observation of how rulers and societies actually behaved when wealth was pursued in proper relationship to duty versus pursued as an end disconnected from it.

I think the genuinely original synthesis worth drawing from holding both traditions together is this: science and Dharma are not offering competing answers to “does money buy happiness” that need to be reconciled into one. They are answering two different, equally necessary questions. Science, at its current best, can tell you the mechanism — sense of control, roughly 74% of the effect — and the conditions under which money’s benefit runs out. Dharma, at its best, was never trying to measure that mechanism; it was trying to tell you what to actually do about it, two thousand years before anyone could run a controlled study to confirm the advice was sound. Neither tradition needed the other to be right. It’s genuinely interesting, and worth taking seriously, that they ended up pointing in the same direction anyway.

• Identify one specific decision in your financial life right now that would genuinely expand your sense of control — not your spending power, your control — and treat it as a higher priority than an equivalent amount spent on status or consumption.
• If you’ve noticed more income stopped translating into more happiness for you personally, take that seriously as real, evidence-consistent information per Section 1, rather than assuming you simply need to earn even more.
• Use Kautilya’s framework as a periodic, practical check on major financial decisions — ask directly whether this pursuit of wealth still serves your actual responsibilities and values, or has quietly become an end in itself.
• Build a specific, recurring giving practice into your financial planning, however modest, per Section 6’s Dana-and-prosocial-spending parallel — treat it as a structural part of your financial life, not a leftover after everything else.
• The next time you encounter a confident claim that ‘science proves’ or ‘ancient wisdom always knew’ something about money, check which specific, bounded finding is actually being cited — per this entire article’s standard, the real evidence is more precise, and more useful, than either tradition’s most popularized soundbite.

Money’s relationship to happiness was never a single number, and the 2023 resolution of Kahneman and Killingsworth’s decade-long dispute proves it precisely: happiness keeps rising with income for most people, plateaus early for a specific unhappy minority, and the real mechanism behind most of the effect is a sense of control, not consumption. Kautilya’s Arthashastra, two thousand years earlier, argued wealth is the genuine foundation for Dharma and Kama, while warning explicitly that wealth pursued without reference to Dharma fails to deliver the very happiness it promised.

The governing argument this article has tried to make explicitly: these are not two versions of the same finding, dressed in different vocabulary across two millennia. They are two genuinely different, independently valuable inquiries — one measuring the mechanism, one prescribing the response — that happen, on careful and honest examination, to converge on the same real insight about where money’s power to make a life good actually runs out, and what it takes to extend it.

1. Killingsworth, M.A., Kahneman, D., and Mellers, B. (2023). Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10), e2208661120. pnas.org

2. Kahneman, D. and Deaton, A. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(38), 16489-16493. The original $75,000 plateau finding. pnas.org

3. Killingsworth, M.A. (2021). Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(4), e2016976118. The earlier finding that prompted the 2023 adversarial collaboration. pnas.org

4. Kautilya. Arthashastra. Foundational classical Indian text on statecraft, economics, and the Purushartha framework’s treatment of Artha. wisdomlib.org

5. Purushartha (the four aims of human life): Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha. Classical Dharmashastra framework and verse tradition on their interdependence. wisdomlib.org

6. Dunn, E.W., Aknin, L.B., and Norton, M.I. (2008). Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness. Science, 319(5870), 1687-1688. Foundational prosocial spending and happiness research. science.org

7. Rout, N. Purushartha: 4 Efforts of Human Life for Meaning. TheQuestSage.com. Companion piece on the full four-aim framework this article’s Artha discussion sits within. thequestsage.com

8. Rout, N. Artha-Dharma: Indian Economics. TheQuestSage.com, Sl 73. Companion piece on the broader Artha-Dharma economic framework directly relevant to this article. thequestsage.com

9. Rout, N. Money Mindset Review. TheQuestSage.com, Sl 8. An earlier companion piece on wealth psychology within the platform’s archive. thequestsage.com

The Economy of Human Life Series

• Purushartha: 4 Efforts of Human Life for Meaning (TheQuestSage.com) — The companion piece on the full four-aim framework this article’s Artha discussion sits directly within.
• Artha-Dharma: Indian Economics (TheQuestSage.com, Sl 73) — A companion piece on the broader Artha-Dharma economic framework relevant to this article’s Section 3 and 4.
• Money Mindset Review (TheQuestSage.com, Sl 8) — An earlier companion piece on wealth psychology within the platform’s archive.
• Behavioral Finance: 6 Psychological Traps That Are Quietly Costing You Money (TheQuestSage.com, TQS-2026-145) — A companion piece on the psychology of money decisions, directly relevant to this article’s discussion of wealth and well-being.

---