Wealth and Mental Health: The Economics of Happiness

Gregory Mankiw stated in his book Principles of Economics that rational people will always do their best to achieve their objectives. While a person's objectives may differ from those of their peers, they have the same sole purpose of fulfilling their needs. In order to do that, a person needs to possess the required resources. If a person is able to fulfill his most basic needs (i.e. clothing, food, shelter) and still has abundant resources to be allocated to tend his less essential needs, they are what the society perceives as a wealthy person. As there are different kinds of resources available to a person, we will focus on one that is relatively easy to analzse from a macro lens, which is money. Therefore, we shall define wealth as the possession of a large sum of money hereinafter.