How could happiness be anything other than self-reported? It exists entirely in one’s mind – despite the number crunching and data they spit out, it remains qualitative and subjective. There’s a limit to objectively measuring something like happiness. It’s the equivilant of doing a study on how many American women think they’re fat. If 70% think they’re fat, but only 50% are overweight by medical standards – that 70% is still a valid number.

Self-reported happiness doesn’t necessarily invalidate the study here. Although, self-reporting relative past or future happiness would be suspect. We don’t know exactly what went in to the study here, though.

What I find suspicious is that they’re trying to measure something qualitative quantitatively, on the oft-held assumption that numbers and math somehow equal hard science. Economics is still a social science, and any study looking at something like happiness requires a heavy critical awareness of the limitations of bias, and balance of qualitative study methods. However, I think the value of these sorts of studies lie less in gaining an actual understanding of happiness than in translating what most of the world already knows into the numbers necessary to communicate with old-school economists and governments. If it gets governments to start considering alternative veiwpoints to economic/social development, than there’s nothing wrong with that. So long as it’s followed up in application with more specific and localized knowledge.

For the rest of us, though, I’m not sure it’s more than an amusement. Although, if any scientists are interested in testing these numbers, I might consider reducing my nookie to once a month in exchange for the 25 – 50,000. Is less sex for money anti-prostitution?

And Robert, getting laid makes you feel rich, but not getting laid doesn’t necessarily make you feel poor. They’re equating the relative degrees of happiness. The most we could extrapolate from this data is that ‘getting laid’ + ‘poor’ = happier than ‘not getting laid’ + ‘poor’. But, we might assume that, in Western countries at least, ‘getting laid’ + ‘financially stable’ = greater happiness than either of the above.

Now what would really be interesting is to see for which gender in a marriage does the happiness boost fall to most? (Though again it still wouldn’t be sex alone).

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.

Your title is misleading, money does buy happiness. So does sex. We would just like to assume that sex is easier to come by than $50,000. Of course I doubt this study looks at whether combining the two affects the hedonistic worth of sex and money, viz. is paying for sex with your extra income twice as pleasurable or half?

I really wish people would stop counting hedons and just have some fun already.