How much is your wife or husband worth? About ?70,000 (US$110,000) a year, according to Andrew Oswald, economics professor at the University of Warwick in Britain, and Andrew Clark of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientif-ique in Paris.
In a paper to be presented to a British Association Festival of Science conference at Leicester University in England this week, Oswald tries to quantify the precise monetary value of different life events.
So, for example, the happiness generated by being married is equivalent to ?70,000 of extra income. And the pain caused by bereavement would require around ?170,000 in extra income to compensate for it. It would be easy to poke fun at that kind of academic doodling. The figures look curiously precise.
You might want to factor something in for who the spouse is, how often you have to see the in-laws, and how friendly they are in the morning.
Even so, a fascinating point is being made. The dismal science is slowly becoming a bit less dismal. Economics is starting to take account of more than just jobs, output and inflation.
That is long overdue. One widely observed paradox of the last few years, is that although most developed countries keep getting richer and richer, measurements of the quality of life suggest we are becoming worse rather than better off.
Average incomes rise, but so do divorce rates, the numbers of single people, stress-related illnesses, drug addiction, depression and other everyday woes of modern life.
Plenty of studies have shown that even though wealth goes up, people don't feel any happier. One reason might be that although traditional economic analysis is very good measuring precise changes of output, levels of unemployment, growth of retail sales and so, it has always been very bad at measuring other aspects of life, such as job satisfaction, personal fulfillment, and health.
That isn't to say that money doesn't make you happier. Other things being equal, it does.
But other things are not always equal. Personal happiness involves a rich blend of factors, only a few of which are captured by traditional economic analysis.
Take marriage. Again, there is lots of research to show that married people are happier than single people. They have more money, they are more stable, they eat better and take better care of their bodies, and they are less prone to depression.
Married men, in particular, thrive compared with unmarried men, due largely to what sociologists refer to as the "guardian" effect of their wives (although there are some guys in a bar near me who have a less genteel phrase for that phenomenon).
Oswald's paper and other studies of happiness economics take survey data on people's well-being, and use mathematical analysis to correlate the amount of satisfaction derived from specific events to different sums of money.
That is used to come up with a precise monetary value for life events. The basic techniques have been around for years -- for example, economists have long tried to quantify the costs to local residents of a new airport. Happiness economics uses the same principles, but broadens them out.
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