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Everyone wants to be happy, right? Wrong, says Ed Diener, a psychologist in the emerging field of “subjective well-being”- a professor of happiness in all but name-at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He’s found that happiness is more than just a warm glow, it’s firmly rooted in culture. And guess what? Money really does make you happier-but for maximum gain you have to be poor to begin with. Michael Bond asks Diener how science goes about adding to what philosophers and artists have told us about happiness over the centuries.

So the big question is-where do you find the…

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