Researchers find more money doesn't result in more sex

By Eric Dash
The New York Times

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"Money does seem to buy greater happiness. But it does not buy more sex," says the report by David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, and Andrew Oswald of England's University of Warwick.

Blanchflower and Oswald are among the leaders in the fast-growing field of "happiness economics," which applies econometric techniques, traditionally limited to quantifiable matters like wage rates, to the amorphous arena of human emotion.

Areas of research include how happiness is affected by democracy — it increases individual happiness — or new cigarette taxes — smokers, oddly, become happier.

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.

Since happiness is notoriously difficult to define, the surveys make no attempt to do so; the respondents simply record how happy they believe themselves to be on a sliding scale.

By factoring out the measurable effects of other life events, the study revealed — to no one's surprise — that, "The more sex, the happier the person."

Possibly the least expected finding of the paper, Oswald said, was that in general, "Greater income does not buy more sex, nor sexual partners."

"That was surprising to us as economists," Oswald said, "because by and large, we think money can buy anything." In fact, the study found that men who paid a prostitute for sex reported they were considerably less happy.

The economists also compared the levels of happiness produced by a vigorous sex life with other activities whose economic values had been calculated in prior research, allowing them to impute, in dollars, how much happiness sex was worth.

Their conclusions:
 
• Increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to at least once a week provided as much happiness as putting $50,000 in the bank.

• A lasting marriage offers about $100,000 worth of happiness a year — that is, on average, 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.

• Divorce imposes an emotional toll of about $66,000 a year, though there may be a short-term economic gain from the immediate relief provided by leaving your spouse.

The economists' study struck at a number of conventionally accepted notions. . "The 'Sex and the City' view of the world is falsified by the data," Oswald said

Married people, he said, were shown to have about 30 percent more sex than their single peers, and were found, at least statistically speaking, to be significantly happier.

Likewise, Oswald said, the amount of happiness obtained from "being in a gay relationship is almost identical to being in a heterosexual one," and regardless of sexual orientation, the "happiness-maximizing" number of partners is one.

Of course, not everyone is convinced one can put an accurate price tag on sex — or at least its emotional payoff.

"Does it matter if it is good sex or bad sex?" asked Leonore Tiefer, a clinical therapist and associate professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. "To me, that is of critical importance."

Then there is the problem of distinguishing cause from effect.

"Is your sex life good because you are seeing life through rose-colored glasses?" asked Edward Laumann, a University of Chicago sociology professor who directed the 1994 National Health and Social Life Survey, a landmark study on sexual attitudes and behaviors in the United States. "Or is your happiness a result of your sex life?"

And what about the lurking variable of love?

Oswald concedes the limitations of his statistical analysis.

"All we can do is paint outlines of the numbers," he said. "We can't hope to pick up a myriad of details."

He said he would like to carry out more highly detailed, long-lasting and cross-cultural studies.

"It would be great to assign Mr. and Mrs. X a certain amount of sexual activity and a certain amount of income, and see how it impacts their happiness," he said. "But I think it would be hard to get government funding."