PT153 · S3 · Q21 Columnist: Obviously, money helps

This goes in the general direction of "the wealthier you get, the less happy you are", because it's attaching a negative-sounding consequence to extreme wealth, but it's a very weak strengthener because it's only talking about extreme wealth and the highest level of happiness. So if you're top 10 wealthiest in the world, you can't attain the #1 ranking in happiness. But that doesn't mean that as you got wealthier you got less happy. Maybe you got happier and happier until you were the 100th happiest person in the world and then extra wealth didn't make you any happier (or less happy). Because the conclusion is phrased in Volume Knob style, "the more X, the less Y", it's a really sweeping claim about every stage of becoming more wealthy. Since this answer choice only deals with the thinnest slice of extreme wealth, it tells us very little about the majority of cases the conclusion is talking about.

We need to hear that when a desire isn't satisfied, one's happiness tends to decrease. This says that when a desire is satisfied, one's happiness doesn't increase. We don't really care as much whether happiness is increased by satisfying desires, but the fact that this answer seems to undermine the idea that there's a direct connection between happiness and desire-satisfaction would only weaken the argument.

We could rephrase this as "most wealthy people would prefer to be wealthier". Does that strengthen? Not really. We could maybe say "if they would prefer to be something else, then they are unhappy", but that's too much of a stretch. I would prefer to be 25 years old, but that doesn't mean I'm unhappy (or even less happy than when I was 25).

We could rephrase this as "at least one other thing (besides satisfying desires) is relevant to happiness". That would potentially muddy the waters for the author. She's saying as wealth increases, number of unsatisfied desires increase (she assumes that decreases happiness), so happiness decreases. If other things also affect happiness, then maybe as wealth increases, some of those other influences change in ways that increase happiness, which could potentially offset any increase in unhappiness we might get from more unsatisfied desires.