Does getting a year-end bonus or raise make you happier? Does the lift it gives you tend to quickly fadejlbet, especially if others around you also won out in the annual compensation sweepstakes?

If the answer is that a boost in income doesn’t greatly improve your sense of well-being, then you are a proof point of the Easterlin paradox, the economic theory that more money, over the long run, won’t buy more happiness.

The paradox was put forth by Richard A. Easterlin, an economist, a demographer and a seminal figure in the field of academic research into happiness. The University of Southern California, where he was an emeritus professor, called him the “father of happiness economics” in announcing his death.

Mr. Easterlin died at 98 on Dec. 16 at his home in Pasadena, Calif.

Mr. Easterlin’s work challenged both conventional wisdom and a core economic tenet: that economic growth in a society leads to a general improvement in feelings of well-being.

Economists, policymakers and ordinary citizens had long taken it as a given that increasing a nation’s gross domestic product — its total economic output — improves its people’s happiness.

But in the 1970s, Mr. Easterlin, then at the University of Pennsylvania, published research showing that even though incomes in the United States had risen dramatically since World War II, Americans said in surveys that they were no happier.

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The gang in question is Tren de Aragua, which sprang from a Venezuelan prison and developed into a feared criminal organization focused on sex trafficking, human smuggling and the drug trade.

I noticed an empty seat next to an extremely large and intimidating-looking man. He was wearing a weathered motorcycle-type jacket, and his hair was rather wild, matching the expression on his face.

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