F Scott Fitzgerald: "The rich are different than you and me."

Ernest Hemingway: "Yes, they have more money."

(Note: The accuracy of the quotation is contested.)

It seems there is no end of ways to state the idea that “money doesn't buy happiness.” The latest version to hit the bookstores is Fables of Fortune: What Rich People Have That You Don’t Want. The book is by Richard Watts, founder and president of Family Business Office.

To put it briefly, Watts’ thesis is that wealth and its trappings may be seriously over-rated. And wealth, he argues, brings with it all kinds of costs, some of them in the form of poor personal relationships and misshapen priorities. For example, Watts deals with the example of what happens when a person inherits a fortune. It sounds terrific, until one realizes that inheritance can also bring heavy obligations – not to mention unwanted attentions. (For definition purposes, Watts writes about those who have a net worth of $100 million or more, which is the average individual wealth of his clients.)

Although the 183-page book does not take long to read, it can be boiled down pretty easily into the idea of being content with what one has, rather than constantly seeking ever more material comforts and possessions.

Now, up to a point, it is hard for someone living in the affluent West to disagree with this. This is Apple Pie and Motherhood stuff: go for quality, not quantity; value relationships and invest time into them; don’t be obsessed by having gleaming possessions just because the guy down the road has them, and so on. But to play devil’s advocate here, one should recall that a lot of the benefit of significant wealth is independence. A large personal fortune means options that those who are far less well off don’t have. And for many entrepreneurs who have already achieved wealth, making even more is just a way of keeping score. The thrill of developing and building a business is part of what they are. It is hard to see what is wrong about this if it makes the entrepreneur happy over the long run.

The difficulty with such a book, I fear, however, is imagining just how this is going to come across to someone struggling to bring up a family on a modest salary (his or her partner may have a part-time job), who, if lucky, gets to enjoy a cheap annual vacation, and worries about things like college tuition and the security of employment. At a time like this, when the state of the economy is one of the big issues in the forthcoming presidential elections, it might seem a bit bizarre to read a book urging the super-rich to understand the importance of a work-life balance. The reaction of many people might be to sarcastically snort about how difficult their lives must be.

I suppose we could argue, ever since Aristotle pointed to the importance of moderation in all the pleasures of life, that excess of anything, including material wealth, is not healthy if it comes at the expense of long-range happiness. To achieve the latter requires a very different sort of “selfishness” – not gluttony and obsession with what others have, but a rational focus on happiness and wellbeing over the long term. And that is a point that applies across the board.

This industry also needs, I think, to not imagine that the wealthy are some sort of strange breed we occasionally might find out about on the Discovery Channel or in Vanity Fair. It might be a healthy step to realise that point for all kinds of reasons.