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

This article examines wealth's relationship to well-being through two independent, two-millennia-apart bodies of inquiry: contemporary behavioral science and classical Indian philosophy. It reviews Daniel Kahneman, Matthew Killingsworth, and Barbara Mellers's 2023 adversarial collaboration, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, resolving a decade-long public dispute about whether happiness plateaus at a specific income threshold, and identifies the specific mechanism the researchers found responsible for approximately 74% of the relationship between income and life satisfaction: a subjective sense of control over one's life circumstances. It examines Kautilya's Arthashastra and its genuinely contrarian classical Indian philosophical position establishing Artha (wealth) as the foundational Purushartha enabling both Dharma and Kama, alongside the textual tradition's explicit warnings against excessive pursuit of any single aim. The article identifies a precise, two-thousand-year-old structural parallel between Kautilya's warning and the 2023 study's own finding about diminishing returns for the unhappiest cohort, while treating both bodies of evidence on their own separate methodological terms. It concludes with a practical, evidence-grounded and Dharma-informed framework for relating to wealth without collapsing either tradition into the other.