佚名/Anonymous
In terms of happiness, your spouse—if you have one—is worth$100, 000 a year.
That’s the finding of two economists who have tried to put a monetary value on happiness, measuring the emotional value of everything from religion to racial discrimination in dollars.
Such a calculation, admits economist David Blanchflower is“a little bit off the wall”and may prompt wry comments within some marriages on“cashing in”.
The two economists are, of course, speaking of averages. They have used an annual survey of some 1,500 Americans from 1972 to 1998 to measure self-reported happiness and the factors that go with it. But it turns out that the happiness value of a stable marriage is“incredibly high”, says Dr. Blanchflower, a professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N. H., whose study has just been published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass.“Don’t give it up lightly.”
Blanch flower and his partner Andrew Oswald, an economist at Warwick University in Britain, begin with this question:“Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are happy, pretty happy, or not so happy?”
The survey results include detailed characteristics of those surveyed-married, divorced, single, income level, race, gender, etc. With that data, they found which factors are associated with greater happiness.
Extra money does buy some happiness. But not as much as many would suspect. Constructing a sort of happiness index that assigns 3 to“very happy”, 2 to“pretty happy”, and 1 to“not too happy”, the two reckon that an extra dollar provides 0.00000409 in additional happiness. Or $10,000 would give you 0.04 units of extra happiness.
The two economists, using this index, assign a dollar value to other factors associated with more or less happiness.
Using that device, a lasting marriage is worth $100,000 per year compared with being widowed or divorced. Being“separated”is the greatest depressant of happiness, followed closely by the death of a spouse.