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Gabriel comments on [Link] Personality change key to improving wellbeing - Less Wrong Discussion
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If personality correlates with well-being more strongly than economic factors then it seems unlikely that economic factors would influence personality to any significant extent. Because otherwise we would see a stronger correlation between those factors and well-being. So I don't see a contradiction there.
Edit: now I see a possible contradiction. But I don't agree with the reading of the second quoted sentence as drawing unwarranted conclusions.
The contradiction is between "nothing to say about causality" on the one hand, and "something to say about causality" on the other hand.
I think they meant that they can't say anything concrete about the causal relationship between personality change and change of life satisfaction, not about any kind of causal relationship at all. But you're still right. It's possible that personality change doesn't cause changes in life satisfaction and then we still can't do better than trying to make people richer.
On the other hand, the hypothesis that changes in life satisfaction follow changes in personality seems quite reasonable. They said "Fostering the conditions where personality growth occurs [...] may be a more effective way of improving national wellbeing than GDP growth." This seems to me more like raising that hypothesis rather than presenting a conclusion. (And if readers can't tell the difference then it's hardly the scientists' fault.)