Money and Happiness / Does being rich help bring more happiness?

So how rich do you want to be? The usual answer is "rich enough to be happy".

But riches do not confer happiness! I have lost count of the number of friends, lovers and acquaintances I have told this to, especially when I first passed seven noughts of cash in hand. I don't bother anymore. The incredulous look on their face is always the same. What they are really thinking is, "Well, maybe you are not happy with all that dough, Felix, but I know that I would be. Just try me!"

Still, let me repeat it one more time. Becoming rich does not guarantee happiness. In fact, it is almost certain to impose the opposite condition–if not from the stresses and strains of protecting wealth, then from the guilt that inevitably accompanies its arrival. [NW: I definitely saw the "stresses and strains of protecting wealth" while working for Edwina.]

Even leaving any moral dimension–heaven, camels and the eyes of needles–out of the equation, consider at least the wise sentiments of the author James Baldwin in his book Nobody Knows My Name, in which he concluded:

"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it, and thought of other things if you did."

• What's it like then, being rich,
  Knitting gold to warm an itch?
  Very much like being poor;
  Wealth is just a key, no more.
  (...)
  Wherein lies the difference
  from us–this odd ambivalence?
  Envy, malice, obligations;
  Toadying from poor relations.
  Grown far richer than his neighbor,
  Why would any rich man labor?
  Wealth is salt in wine immersed,
  Quaffing but excites the thirst.