However, Blanchflower admitted he wasn't sure if happiness led to more sex or more sex led to happiness.
RELATIVE ENVY
Many decades ago, the "sage of Baltimore" editor Henry Louis Mencken defined wealth as earning US$100 more than your "wife's sister's husband." Behavioral economists now say part of the reason we are richer but not happier is because we compare ourselves to people better off materially.
"The argument is that if you want to be happy there's a very simple thing you can do: compare yourself to people who are less well off than you: poorer, smaller house, car," said Sharp.
"What a lot of people do is quite the opposite and that's one of the causes of frustration and status anxiety," he said.
Cornell University Professor Robert Frank says a majority of Americans, asked whether they would rather earn US$110,000 while everyone else earned US$200,000, or earn US$100,000 while everyone else earned US$85,000, chose option B.
"The kind of house people feel they need depends on the kind of house that others around them have," said Frank in his paper "Spend more, save less: Why living in a rich society makes us feel poorer."
The Happiness Institute aims to show you how to overcome these unhappiness drivers by focusing on "more than just your bank balance".
"If I compare myself to Bill Gates then I'm always going to be well down," said Sharp, adding a better benchmark might be Kerry Packer, Australia's richest person who has had a kidney transplant and heart surgery in recent years.
"On a health scale I'd like to think I'm leagues ahead of him. Would you really want to have US$4 billion if it meant your kidneys are shot?" said Sharp.
RSS