Money Buys Happiness

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Money Buys Happiness, But Not Sex

Great sex at least once a week is worth $50,000 in happiness, while the emotional lift of a long-lasting marriage is worth $100,000. A divorce will cost you $66,000 of happiness.

Two economists--David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in England--have done the first rigorous econometric analysis of money, happiness, and sex, and their findings have turned conventional wisdom upside-down, reports The New York Times. Their conclusion in "Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study": "Money does seem to buy greater happiness. But it does not buy more sex."

One of the things they wanted to measure is this: How much happiness is sex worth? The answer: $50,000. That is, having sex at least once a week provides as much happiness as putting $50,000 in the bank. A lasting marriage offers about $100,000 worth of happiness a year, which means a single person would need to receive $100,000 annually to be as happy as a married person with the same education, job status, and other characteristics, notes The Times.

The study: This new branch of economics actually has a name: Happiness economics. It applies econometric measurements to human emotion. In this study, Oswald and Blanchflower analyzed the self-reported sexual activity and levels of happiness of more than 16,000 American adults who participated in a number of social surveys since the early 1990s, notes The Times.

The results: The more sex someone has, the happier he or she is. But when that happiness is measured in dollars through econometrics, the researchers concluded that increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to at least once a week offered as much happiness as putting $50,000 in the bank.

There was one surprise finding: A larger income does not buy more sex or sexual partners. "That was surprising to us as economists," Oswald told New York Times reporter Eric Dash, "because by and large, we think money can buy anything." And in case you're wondering, the study also found that men who paid for sex with a prostitute were considerably less happy. "The 'Sex and the City' view of the world is falsified by the data," Oswald concluded.