There's an interesting article in today's Los Angeles Times which measures the value of sex and money in a persons happiness.
Basically, it says that increasing one's sexual encounters from once a month (sadly a fact for many married folks) to once a week can bring as much happiness as a $50k raise.
So gals, now you realize you should all be millionaires for the value you bring to all our lives.
Hope this raises some spirits.
Here's the lead-in to the story followed by the link (don't know how long the link will last).
Happy? Let's Sum It Up
Researchers tap the `dismal science' of economics to quantify well-being. It isn't money that leaves you feeling like a million.
By Stuart Silverstein, Times Staff Writer
July 3, 2006
Midway into his career as a professor, USC's Richard Easterlin deduced something that seemed astonishing, at least for an economist: Money doesn't buy happiness.
Grandparents and sages have said as much through the ages. Yet when Easterlin published his first happiness research in the 1970s, fellow economists brushed it off. "People don't take this as serious stuff," he said. "They think it's maybe cocktail party conversation."
Things are looking up these days for Easterlin, 80, and the small but increasingly visible network of researchers relying on the so-called dismal science of economics to find the keys to happiness.
If earning more money generally does surprisingly little or even nothing to make societies happier, they wonder, what works better? Good health? Marriage? Sex? By one reckoning, boosting the frequency of sex in a marriage from once a month to once a week brings as much happiness as an extra $50,000 a year.
Happiness economists review thousands of attitude surveys and apply high-level math to calculate the satisfaction connected with activities and demographic traits. It sounds like sociology, but the economists are more apt to focus on money and work.
Consider the sex study. Through surveys and some fancy math, economists essentially created a ladder of happiness and found that the extra sex and the extra $50,000 provided the same boost.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...home-headlines



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