Thread by @ReformedTrader

1/ Putting a price tag on friends, relatives, and neighbours (Powdthavee)

"Using the British Household Panel Survey, I find that an increase in the level of social involvements is worth up to an extra £85,000 a year in terms of life satisfaction."

researchgate.net/publication/22…

2/ "While there is substantial evidence that people with strong social ties tend to report higher levels of happiness and satisfaction, this article will be one of the first to compare this impact to the impacts other occurrences in our lives."

3/ "Think of a person who derives satisfaction from spending time with friends and also enjoys money. In principle, it is be possible to calculate exactly how the time spent with friends is worth in terms of income: a valuation for social relationships."

4/ "There is monotonicity in the dummies for frequencies of social interaction with only exogenous personal characteristics, i.e. age, age-squared, and gender, as additional controls.

"With more controls, social interaction continues to be very strongly positively correlated.

5/ "People who meet up with friends or relatives (neighbors) on most days tend to report 0.38 (0.24) score points more satisfaction than those who meet up with friends less than once a month to none at all, ceteris paribus."

6/ "An individual who only sees her friends or relatives less than once a month to never at all would require an extra £63,000 a year to be just as satisfied with life as an individual who sees her friends or relatives on most days."

NOTE: This is $123,000 in 2022 dollars.

7/ "Moving very poor health to excellent health is worth an extra £300,000 a year." [$585,000 in 2022 dollars]

"Even a move from 1σ below the mean of income to 1σ above is not large enough to compensate for a divorce, which has one of the smallest estimated compensations."

8/ "There is evidence that persistent personality traits predict reported well-being.

"Given that personalities jointly influence life satisfaction, frequency of social contacts, and income, cross-section equations will be unreliable without controlling for in-born dispositions.

9/ "Given that >80% report meeting w/ friends, relatives, or neighbors at least once/week over the past year, is there happiness to be gained from an increase social network status? Repeated observations on the same individual allow controls for unobserved individual differences.

10/ "The coefficient on income continues to be positive and statistically well-defined.

"There is a statistically important positive inborn personality bias on the observed relationship between frequency of social contacts, income, and life satisfaction in our sample.

11/ NOTE: Homeownership no longer has a meaningful effect on life satisfaction after controlling for individual fixed effects. Home maintenance now has a _negative_ impact.

This is similar to what Hoffman


and Bucchianeri find:

.

12/ "Table 6 is based on Table 4’s fixed effects estimates.

" “Seeing friends or relatives once a month (on most days)” is now worth £57,500 (£85,00)." [$112,000 ($166,000) in 2022 dollars]

"This is 9x larger than the £9,800 average real household income/capita in the dataset.

13/ "The largest valuation continues to come from health." [$942,000 in 2022 dollars]

"The differences between OLS and ‘within’ (i.e. fixed effects) may be from people adapting to changes in income faster than changes in social capital."

More on this:

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14/ "Although the equivalent valuation of a move from “seeing friends or relatives less than once a month” to “seeing friends or relatives on most days” of £85,000 a year of extra income is very large, it only
applies to 1% of the entire sample.

15/ "The largest group (of approximately 20% of the representative British sample) contains individuals who moved between “seeing friends or relatives once or twice a week” and “seeing friends or relatives on most days”.

16/ "The extra income required to compensate those who see their friends or relatives only once or twice a week to have the same level of life satisfaction as those who do so on most days is still large (i.e. £85,000 - £69,500 = £15,500 per annum)." [$30,000 in 2022 dollars]

17/ "Our results are backed up by the substantive evidence in the psychology and sociology literature that social relationships provide a significant protective effect to well-being.

18/ "There seems to be little change in the magnitudes of the social network coefficients once a set of neighborhood variables have been included in the fixed effect estimation.

19/ "Our measures are correlated with things that we expect them to have some influence over (social life, leisure time) & uncorrelated with other things that we believe frequency of social interactions do not have a direct relationship with (satisfaction with income, health)."

20/ "There is a 74% reduction in risk of all-cause mortality for those with a meaningful purpose in life. The ikigai effect makes Alzheimer's 2.4x less likely.

“Optimism is related to an 11-15% longer life span & to greater odds of exceptional longevity.”

21/ A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind

22/ "This paper finds that going from having no social network to seeing people most days of the week is worth $166,000, 9x larger than average per capita income. Excellent health is worth $942,000 vs. poor health. So why do these results seem odd?"

23/ Does Happiness Lengthen Life? The prediction of longevity in the elderly

24/ "Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone who is dying misses friends."

bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-o…

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26/ To Do or to Have? That Is the Question

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29/ Neural bases of social pain: evidence for shared representations with physical pain (Eisenberger)

30/ Happily Ever After? Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Happiness in Germany

31/ Lost Touch? Implications of Physical Touch for Physical Health