Money buys happiness? I wouldn't bank on it Exponents of the "dismal science" of economics (as chirpy Thomas Carlyle called it) do not, of course, believe in ghosts. But they might believe a report on a different page of this paper yesterday of another scientific study by the University of Buffalo (why not?). It found that people who helped others were healthier and lived longer, which are elements of wellbeing that scientists recognise. It is better to give than to receive, then. But what happens if you have nothing to give? Poverty as privation is a real evil. One of those tremendous sentimental Victorian problem pictures, The Doctor by Luke Fildes, shows a labourer's wee bairn lying wrapped up across two chairs while its mother sits sorrowing with her face in her arm, uncomforted by her husband's hand on her shoulder. The doctor looks grave as an uncertain dawn lights the window of the poor cottage. Tell the story yourself. The parents are doomed to tragedy by their poverty, which has left their child at death's door. Or the child is saved by the generosity of the doctor, treating it without charge. Take your pick. The poverty didn't help, even if riches could not buy an hour's extra life for a stricken loved one, as the Queen herself found with Albert's death from typhoid. So, would we all be happy if we had a fair share of the cake? It was a question that 23 centuries ago did not escape the attention of Aristotle, if I may mention his name. I won't bore on about him. Sharing property might remove the temptation for someone to be a robber because he is hungry or cold, he concedes, but necessity is not the cause of the worst crimes. Men do not become tyrants in order to keep warm. Once there's enough to live on, for the school fees and health insurance, bankers and tyrants might be expected to stop their tyrannising and overweening banking. But they don't. It's the power game that keeps them happy, not the money itself. When I say "keeps them happy" I mean "feeds their addiction." It is a negative kind of satisfaction. A morning spent without the distraction of making big bucks is a morning left exposed to the empty horror of being a little rational animal on the bare surface of the Earth lost in space. The poor, by contrast, live in the shelter of one another, as the Irish proverb has it. They are none the less human for being poor. Which traveller was it whose proffered money was turned down by the man who had shown him the way through the tangled streets of Toledo with the words: "No, it is I who have given you something that a poor man can." The trouble comes when a wave of prosperity washes over a culture and then recedes. I've certainly seen that in Spain over a generation. Ordinary people lived in two-room houses, with a pig out the back if they were lucky. They set little store by reading and none by television, but were very good at talking and meeting their friends without spending money. Then economic growth struck. Their squalid houses were demolished, and they moved into flats near the station with mod cons and outgoings and nowhere for the pig. The economic tide went out, leaving them exposed, unemployed, perhaps with grown-up children living at home. They have meanwhile lost the art and resources to live happily poor. Their only salvation now is Allister Heath's economic growth, and there's no sign of that. The Buddha and Jesus had nowhere to lay their heads, but radical self-denial is too brave a step for most. I am as frightened as most of a single-bar-fire old age, ending in Stafford Hospital. Not long to go. Yet we are creatures programmed for optimism, which is a trust in things somehow working out. That certainly isn't a trust in money.