Hot dates better than a big bonus

Money buys you reasonable amount of happiness, but maybe not as much as sex.

By DAVID BLANCHFLOWER
Money buys you a reasonable amount of happiness, but maybe not as much as sex.
Sure, those with higher incomes are healthier and happier than those with lower incomes. But for the typical individual, a doubling of salary makes a lot less difference than life events like marriage or unemployment. A hot date is likely to make you happier than a few thousand dollars extra in bonus. There really is some evidence in this.
A few years ago, my colleague Andrew Oswald and I found that to “compensate” for the loss in happiness of a major life event, such as being widowed or a marital separation, it would be necessary to provide the average individual with $100,000 in extra income a year, or more than double his income.
We can also use these data to calculate the money value of sex. On average, the amount of happiness bought by going from sex less than once a month to at least once a month is roughly equivalent to about $40,000 of annual income. Sex brings a lot of happiness, but diminishing returns from sex does set in after that. Some is a lot better than none.
IN THE most recent survey data from the General Social Survey, conducted in 2008 by the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, the typical adult American reported having sexual intercourse two to three times a month (among people younger than 40, the median amount of sex is once a week).
About 6 percent of the population reported having sex at least four times a week. Forty percent of American women older than 40 say they didn’t have sexual intercourse in the previous year. The figure for men is 21%. These celibate folks are especially unhappy.
There is evidence that sex has disproportionately strong effects on the happiness of highly educated people. Highly educated females have fewer sexual partners. The number of sex partners men have is uncorrelated with their level of education. Money buys neither more sexual partners nor more sex for men or women. People with one sex partner over the preceding year are happier than those with multiple partners.
Even with the iPad, the Blackberry and portable GPS devices that tell you how long your shot is to the flag, Americans are no happier today than they were in the 1970s. We know this from the answers to questions posed in the General Social Survey.
Respondents are asked “taken all together, how would you say things are these days – would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?”
In 1972, 30% of respondents said they were “very happy.” When the question was asked in the 2008 survey, 30% of respondents also said they were “very happy.” The obvious concern is that such qualitative responses tell you little or nothing about an individual’s level of well-being. It does seem, though, that they do say something. There is a large body of evidence now that shows these reports are strongly correlated with objective characteristics such as unemployment and ill health, as well as assessments of the person’s happiness by friends, family members and spouses.
Happy people have a lower risk of coronary heart disease and lower blood pressure; they even heal faster from injuries. Happy people are demonstrably different from less happy people on skin-resistance measures of response to stress and electroencephalogram measures of prefrontal brain activity.
Interestingly, in these surveys women report having higher levelsof happiness than men, but the gap has narrowed sharply over time.Women’s happiness has fallen while men’s has barely changed.
Asimilar story is found in the health data where women are now moresubject to stress-related illnesses related to work than they were inthe past. Hence, the feminist movement has made women more equal, butless happy.
Harvard University’s Erzo Luttmer has shown that anincrease of 10%, say, in neighbors’ earnings, or a 10% decrease inone’s own income, have roughly the same negative effect on well-being.My happiness rises if I get a new BMW but doesn’t if my neighbors alsoget one. Here, neighborhood should be thought of broadly as anyrelevant comparator group, including colleagues and friends.
Acouple of hot dates will probably do more for your sense of well-beingthan a higher bonus. Money isn’t everything. Go and raise yourhappiness. Do it for the good of the country. – Bloomberg News
Thewriter, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policycommittee, is professor of economics at Dartmouth College and theUniversity of Stirling.