Didn't say it was new, but I think it does prove that you can increase longevity with money. I'd say being alive is a proxy for happiness (lets say at least 51%).

>If money could buy happiness, they there would be zero cases of rich people killing themselves.

Man that analysis is just incredibly faulty. As far as you know they killed themselves months or years later than they otherwise would have. I have way more experience with suicide than I would prefer and can tell you that money troubles are a SIGNIFICANT factor for suicidal ideation and attempts [1].

[1] Wang, Y., Sareen, J., Afifi, T. O., Bolton, S. L., Johnson., E. A. (2012). Recent stressful life events and suicide attempt. Psychiatric Annals, 42.3, 101-108.

Money cannot buy happiness, if you don't know what you need, or what you need cannot be bought.

I am not saying that all cases of human suffering falls into that category, but a lot of them do.

>As far as you know they killed themselves months or years later than they otherwise would have...

That means, they tried to buy happiness, but failed to do so, right?

It might not be able to "buy happiness" but it can alleviate a lot of unhappy stuff forced upon people, like not affording health care, living in a dump, working 2 shitty jobs, etc...

Money alone cannot make you happy, sure. But it does not follow that, therefore, being rich isn't so great, which is often what people are trying to suggest by trotting out that old saw.

So ... just to make sure I get it, your argument is there is no theoretical limit like Y approaches zero as X approaches infinity on the graph, and if there is a line it doesn't have a negative slope, because finding individual points with a small Y and large X somehow proves the line, if it exists, is flat or has a positive slope, despite the entire point of the article being that enormous piles of data imply the opposite, because ...

My argument is that there is no line...