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Of the four essentials of a good life, happy, healthy, wise, or wealthy, which is the most important? Previously, I had thought they were all equally important, but is this like George Orwell’s book, Animal Farm where “All animals are equal!” and only later do we discover that “Some animals are more equal than others!”? Do we two-legged animals discover later in life that there is a hierarchy of qualities that are associated with the good life? Do some things more consistently bring about a longer and better life?

With those thoughts in mind, I decided to do a quantified comparison of those ideas. It seemed absurd at first. How can you quantify happiness or wisdom? But creating a four-step scale for each of those qualities seemed plausible, and then maybe they could be compared on those scales.

The easiest of these to define was wealth because it is already quantified. The first question then becomes, “How much monetary wealth does a modern American need to be well off? That is, that they may have anything they physically need if they have the other three qualities also in similarly good condition.” If they are wise they can use their money wisely and with some slack they would never have a monetary worry. If they are filled with robust health they can enjoy the modest pleasures that are readily available and without any risk to their health. And the highest level of happiness would include having some meaningful tasks in their life, being in comfortable relationships with friends and loving relationships with their family. Having that level of good on these other three qualities is equivalent to having a million dollars available for living.

Those are inevitably loosely defined standards for happy, healthy and wise that I am equating to being wealthy at the million-dollar level. The value of defining them in this measurable way is that we can then ask some specific questions for comparing each of them to the others.

“If you had a million-dollar personal estate would you be willing to drop that to a quarter of a million to keep your health, happiness, and wisdom at their current top levels?” Would you be willing to drop your wisdom to a quarter of its current level and usually make only good decisions, rather than wise ones to keep your money? Or, drop your perfect health to a quarter to good health and never be sick enough to be hospitalized to keep your money? Or, to drop your wonderful happiness to generally be happy most of the time to keep your million-dollar personal estate?

Having chosen which of those decisions you would make, ask the same question again but starting from this new lowered status on your chosen thing. In this example, we are using the monetary condition. Would you be willing to drop to one-quarter of your quarter million dollar estate, that is to sixty thousand? At this level of money, you can no longer own your own home, or drive a new car, or send your kids to college. It is still a lot of money, but you must work at any job you can get. That lack of money will impinge on those other top-level qualities even if you are still relating to everything in the same way.

Let’s do this just one more time. Which of these qualities would you be willing to drop another one-quarter of their value to you to keep the other current ones where they are at their present levels? Staying with money as the measured quality, there will now be fifteen-thousand dollars. That is still a lot of money, but it can’t create any kind of permanent security, and it can’t even provide a fancy vacation trip for your whole family, because when you come home you will be living on the edge of trouble.

Although this essay chose the monetary quality as the basis for comparison with happiness, health, and wisdom, going through a similar procedure on any of those other qualities will corrode away the satisfaction that may be derived from any of the others.

We need a high level balance of happy, healthy, wise, and wealthy to attain the ideal life.