From The New York Times:
Dear Graduates: Money Is a Means
By DANIEL AKST
Published: May 28, 2006
...It's graduation season, and once again affluent commencement speakers are fanning out across the land in something like an organized smear campaign against the almighty dollar. So I feel that it's my solemn duty to offer a little corrective: Graduates, it's not fashionable to say it, but money will, in fact, buy you a better life, all other things being equal. And if it can't buy happiness outright, it can certainly help you avoid a lot of misery.
...As you graduates will learn sooner or later from experience, happiness is at least partly inborn, though it also has a lot to do with good health, good relationships and time spent pleasurably. Sad to say, money can help with everything except your natural disposition. Chances are that even the crankiest among us will consider ourselves better off with a more desirable spouse, better schools for our children, higher status and surer access to health care. That is to say nothing of the wherewithal to tell the boss to take a hike if you don't like his tone. As Dostoyevsky reminds us, money really is "coined liberty."
Read the rest here.
