Wealth & Money Quote by Kin Hubbard

Hubbard lands the punchline with the calm confidence of someone who’s watched America chase its own tail for a living. “It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness” opens like a shrug, but it’s a baited hook: the real joke arrives in the deadpan accounting that follows. “Poverty and wealth have both failed” treats the grandest human pursuit like a busted product that didn’t pass consumer testing. That little word, “failed,” is doing the heavy lifting. It suggests we keep running the same experiment, expecting different results, and then acting surprised when the data comes back messy.

The intent isn’t inspirational; it’s corrective. Hubbard, a newspaper humorist in an era obsessed with hustle, temperance, and self-made myths, punctures the era’s two most comforting stories at once: the moral romance of hardship and the shiny promise of prosperity. Poverty doesn’t ennoble; wealth doesn’t deliver. The symmetry is the satire: if both extremes disappoint, then happiness can’t be an outcome you purchase, earn, or deserve through suffering.

Subtext-wise, he’s also mocking the way public debates reduce life to economics. People talk as if the right bank balance will solve the existential math. Hubbard’s line implies the opposite: money changes the scenery, not the plot. Coming from a journalist, it’s also a wry indictment of certainty itself. The world keeps offering gurus, slogans, and policies that promise happiness, and the most honest report he can file is that the headline never matches the lived details.