A price to happiness? Yes, and you can even get quotes

A Brisbane researcher has managed to come up with a “price list” of events in people’s lives. Men and women, it seems, have very different values. Some things men see as negatives, women interpret as positives.

The study by Queensland University of Technology Professor Paul Frijters, recently named this year's Best Australian Economist under 40 by the Economic Society of Australia, is an eye-opener, although some may consider it an eyesore. The professor’s work is the result of monitoring 10,000 people since 2001. Money may not buy you love, but apparently you can put a price on it when it’s around. It also affect human happiness far more than previously thought. What’s the point of a scientific valuation of this kind? Evaluating stress. Frijters says the insurance industry and courts should be very interested because of compensation claims. In today’s stress mines on the job and everywhere else, it’s a major factor in settlements. The work was quite an achievement in itself. The study was constructed out of random population samples. The large number of people in the study means that disproportionate, extreme, samples are whittled down to size, and can’t affect overall results. This is a much stronger, statistically more reliable method of getting data from samples. If samples are too small, they’re usually out. The amounts quoted, however, are surprising, and Fritjers’ work is actually producing lower values than other studies. Rather than trying to put price tags on life’s whimsical little inventory of brickbats, Fritjers works on “psychic values”. He started with a happiness scale of 1-10, on which most Australians registered 8. From that he derived a scale for valuations. Apparently the “weaker sex” is quite a bit more hardheaded in terms of valuations. A woman can value a divorce, for example, like a loss of $9000. A man will value it as a loss of $110,000. Some people definitely won’t agree with the male/female values. According to the study, a woman will put the loss of a spouse or child at $130,900, while the man will value it as $627,300. Interestingly, this highly controversial valuation isn’t based on the actual loss of the person, but the effect on the happiness of the subject. Given the better averaging structures of the study’s methodology, this is an extraordinary result. Moving house is valued as a positive by women and a negative by men. To women, it’s a plus of $2600. To men, it’s a negative of $16,000. This is unlikely to be the last we hear of this area of study, but it may be the first time anyone’s found a working method of studying it.