Octopussy and The Living Daylights
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014
In "Octopussy," the title story to this collection, Ian Felming describes a character Major Smythe, who becomes rich through a combination of luck, murder, and deviousness. His wealth doesn't bring him happiness, however; he becomes an alcoholic, has a couple heart attacks, his wife commits suicide, and he's socially ostracized and basically drinking himself to death when James Bond arrives on the scene. It's similar to some of the studies in books like Stumbling on Happiness
where researchers find lottery winners and those who lose a limb are equally happy a year after their respective events. I don't think that data was present in Fleming's day, but he had an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon.
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