On the Brazil/Bulgaria thing (Brazil twice as happy as Bulgaria), you could easily make the argument that it's the weather. Or did the researches index for that?

Betsey Stevenson visited my college recently and I attended the lecture she gave about the correlation between GDP and happiness. At the end of her lecture, I asked whether a) She could explain the reason why countries like Mexico, with a vast wealth disparity between the rich and poor was happier than the U.S. and b) whether their was a relationship between the happiness of a given country and government policy, neither of which she could answer outside of a "shrug".

Interestingly, I disagreed with Stevenson's premise on the same grounds as you, only from a different angle. I took an African American History course which highlighted the African Community's communal support (i.e. we'll all cooperate to get one kid into college and then kid will help our town). My question with the findings was how they could account for such a socioeconomic standing-one where GDP was not likely to be a significant factor, such as a segregated poor black community or the Native American tribes (who did not share western concepts of wealth and gain). According to Stevenson's theory, these people should all be unhappy, an idea which is both illogical and, from a historical perspective, ridiculous.

For centuries before civilization the human race was nomadic-concepts like "wealth" were foreign to these ancestors, who lived from season to season and couldn't be bothered with "profits" when "food for today" was the problem every single day.

Long story short, happiness existed before money, or else we would never have come this far. Of course an economist like Betsey Stevenson would never agree that the happiness derived from wealth comes from it's SOCIAL capacity (choices, respect, security), because then, all we would need to do was make a society where capital was used expressly to generate income and was subordinate to overall social good. If we did that, what would happen to the American Dream?