We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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How much? The FT’s The Way We Live Now column reports that David Blanchflower is to appear before the Treasury select committee, as he has been appointed to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. I imagine he is up for it as an economist representative of the currently modish disguise of egalitarianism as a collectively-skewed hedonics.
So does Maggi Urry, one suspects. She writes:
Blanchflower’s most frequently quoted claim to fame is his co-authorship in 2004 of a paper entitled “Money, Sex and Happiness”. […] He calculated that increasing the frequency of sex from once a month to once a week would generate as much happiness as would a $50,000 a year pay rise. Depends, I would have thought on who the sex was with – the pay rise might be preferable.
I am a little more cynical. At British tax rates, I note that is approximately $750 a time. If you cannot get really good sex for less than $750 without a series discount then your grasp of the market is quite questionable.
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Most people I know would prefer the pay rise.
Remember John Betjeman’s remark about regrets?
Yikes! Weekly sex would get me knocked up sooner or later, costing me much more than $50k. Also, arranging a Saturday night hookup on a regular basis would ruin my reputation, giving my employer grounds for “moral turpitude” and be able to fire me from my well-paid tenured position, costing me my salary I have now. So I’d be a poor, unemployed slut with a bastard child. No thanks.
Strikes me as even more shocking that someone might be dismissed for ‘moral turpitude’ than that an Ivy League professor of economics should not have a clue about the existence of a market in sexual services.
Blanchflower was looking at what makes people happy and trying to quantify it. That’s a fair enough thing to do.
How much happiness does an extra $50000 a year buy you? Well at $20 a go from some crack whore, it may buy a lot of meaningless sex but would that really make one happy? I doubt it.
On the other hand, if you are already well off, how much happier would $50000 a year make you? Sure, it would be useful. On the other hand , if you are in a relationship that you care about, having sex only once a month must be really depressing. Once a week still sounds pretty infrequent but maybe some people are satisfied with that and at least it is a sex life.
So the question is, do I go to work on Saturday and make money or should I spend it in bed with someone I like?
Hey KentuckyLiz, your employers sound like complete fascists if they think your personal life is any business of theirs. What choices you make in caring for your reputation and health and wellbeing should be your own right to make, not anyone else’s.
Definitely too expensive. Sounds like the author may have had London or Washington prices in mind. Here in Manchester you can get a whole night of top-quality sex for about £200 (with a £50 discount for good-looking libetarian ladies). And I’ll cook you a good breakfast in the morning.
… how much happier would $50000 a year make you?
That depends where you live and how rich you are already: enormously more if you are a subsistence farmer or day labourer in a poor country; considerably, if you are me; scarcely noticeably if you are already making millions. Precisely the same is true of marginal emotional and sexual rewards. That’s where the price mechanism comes from.
We exchange what we value less for what we value more. That’s Urry’s point and mine. Blanchflower’s paper is one of many attempts to deny the price mechanism and the subjective valuations that lie behind it. That good-quality sex is actually far cheaper on the open market than it suggests (if your mind baulks at direct transactions consider, “A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”), implies that his analysis is profoundly mistaken. What a fine thing for our monetary policy!
Wolfie: precisely! That is academia for you. At least I have to commit moral turpitude…employees hired since 1998 have an employment at will contract, so they can be dismissed with no reason at all.
What counts for moral turpitude nowadays? Not sure, but it’s obviously subjective, and putty in the hands of those whose office politics lead them to want a certain outcome.
Social judgements are still double standards, and far more ruthless on women. Don’t kid yourself.