Dear Economist

Should I associate with happy people because they make me feel good by association, or unhappy people because they make me feel good by comparison? Or do economists claim that I should be indifferent?
D.K., New York

Dear D.K.,

Economic theory makes no such claim: it insists merely that your preferences be consistent and complete because that makes the mathematics easier. Although many economic models concentrate on your demand for physical goods, that is merely to keep things simple. There is no theoretical reason to insist that your happiness cannot depend on the happiness of others.

Your question, then, should be addressed empirically, and a fascinating new paper in the British Medical Journal tries to do just that. The authors, James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, find that happiness is contagious.

If just a single nearby friend becomes happy, your chances of being happy rise by a quarter. Physical proximity seems to be important, and happiness is far more contagious among people of the same sex.

This has a ring of plausibility, yet there are some curious results – for instance, that a happy next-door neighbour seems to affect your mood more than a happy spouse. Meanwhile, in another BMJ study, Jason Fletcher and the economist Ethan Cohen-Cole use a similar data set and methodology to demonstrate that height also seems to be contagious, which seems rather unlikely.

The trouble is that it is hard to separate genuine contagion from other effects – such as a shared physical environment, or people befriending others who seem similar to them. My recommendation: by all means seek out happy people, but do not expect miracles.

Also published at ft.com.

Dear Economist,

When you think about it, Christmas is a strange ritual. Is there any economic logic to it?
FR, London

Dear FR,

The late Cambridge economist, Nicholas Kaldor, is said to have observed that the money supply surges in December and then falls back in January, before dryly remarking, “At last I have discovered the cause of Christmas!”

Professor Kaldor – a staunch critic of monetarism – asked whether central banks might be able to halt the Christmas spending spree by keeping a tight rein on the money supply in December. No, he concluded: people would turn to credit cards. How ironic that this year, the central banks desperately pumped money into the economy in an attempt to ensure that Christmas wasn’t cancelled.

But you are right: the spend-and-give, spend-and-eat side of Christmas makes little economic sense. Mainstream theories suggest that consumers should prefer to smooth their consumption rather than binge at Christmas and then, broke and fat, cut back in the new year. So economists are turning to psychological research to understand what is going on. Demarcation seems to be an important part of the story: we look forward to Christmas, enjoy it while it is happening (if done right), and recall past Christmasses fondly. All of which only happens if the day itself stands out.

Gift-giving works best when co-ordinated – on birthdays, anniversaries and at Christmas. A.A. Milne, in Winnie the Pooh, wished people “happy Thursday” instead of happy birthday; Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty received unbirthday presents. Alas, neither concept has caught on. Perhaps that is no bad thing. I am always forgetting my wife’s unbirthdays, and live in fear of forgetting our anniversary. But even I remembered Christmas.

Also published at ft.com.

Dear Economist,
Can economics help me pick out the perfect Christmas gift for my brother?
Tim Maly, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Dear Tim,

Your letter obliges me to disinter the influential research of the economist Joel Waldfogel on the “deadweight loss of Christmas”. Fifteen years ago, Waldfogel published an academic article demonstrating that the recipients of gifts would not generally have been willing to pay what it cost to provide the gift. A £30 sweater was valued at £20, for example, creating a “deadweight loss” of £10. Siblings were not the most incompetent givers – that honour goes to aunts and uncles – but they were not especially competent either.

Waldfogel’s work is often misinterpreted as suggesting that gift-giving is pointless. That is not true. He explicitly excluded the sentimental value of gifts from his calculations, and, of course, the sentimental value is part of the purpose of giving presents. That may explain why the economists Sara Solnick and David Hemenway have discovered that we prefer unsolicited presents to those we have specifically requested. It may also explain why gift vouchers are a bad idea: they have no sentimental value but still create deadweight loss, since many expire without being used, or are sold at a loss on eBay – as the economist Jennifer Pate Offenberg has documented.

All this points to the optimal gift-giving strategy: you need to minimise the deadweight loss while maximising the sentimental value. This suggests buying small gifts and striving for emotional resonance. Look for something inexpensive, and consider supplementing it with a letter, a photo, or time spent together.

If you feel a financial transfer is necessary, slip a cheque into the envelope too. I wish you, your brother, and all the readers of this column an optimal Christmas.

Also published at ft.com.

Dear Economist,
My young son came home from school and asked me: “Mummy, what’s a credit crunch?” How can I explain this to a five-year-old?
Ms LG, London

Dear Ms LG,

Once upon a time, there was a blameless girl called Consumerella, who didn’t have enough money to buy all the lovely things she wanted. She went to her Fairy Godmother, who called a man called Rumpelstiltskin who lived on Wall Street and claimed to be able to spin straw into gold. Rumpelstiltskin sent the Fairy Godmother the recipe for this magic spell. It was written in tiny, tiny writing, so she did not read it but hoped the Sorcerers’ Exchange Commission had checked it.

The Fairy Godmother carried away armfuls of glistening straw-derivative at a bargain price. Emboldened by the deal, she lent Consumerella – who had a big party to go to – 125 per cent of the money she needed. Consumerella bought a bling-bedizened gown, a palace and a Mercedes – and spent the rest on champagne. The first payment was due at midnight.

At midnight, Consumerella missed the first payment on her loan. (The result of overindulgence, although some blamed the pronouncements of the Toastmaster, a man called Peston.) Consumerella’s credit rating turned into a pumpkin and Rumpelstiltskin’s spell was broken. He and the Fairy Godmother discovered that their vaults were not full of gold, but ordinary straw.

All seemed lost until Santa Claus and his helpers, men with implausible fairy-tale names such as Darling and Bernanke, began handing out presents. It was only in January that Consumerella’s credit card statement arrived and she discovered that Santa Claus had paid for the gifts by taking out a loan in her name. They all lived miserably ever after. The End.

Also published at ft.com.

Dear Economist,
Due to multiple disruptions to my schedule since the first of the year I have not had the opportunity to take down my Christmas tree. At this point, should I leave the tree up for the remainder of the year or take it down now?
D. Seattle

Dear D. Seattle,

We all procrastinate from time to time. I, for example, received your e-mail in the spring of 2007. Forgive me if in the interim you have solved your dilemma, but it is possible that my answer will still be useful.

I think we can postulate a utility function along the following lines: having a Christmas tree up during the Christmas season brings positive utility, but diminishing marginal utility over time. After a while, the marginal utility is negative: the tree becomes an irritation, offering neither use nor ornament.

Given that parsimony is a virtue in economic modelling, let us assume that if the tree (presumably plastic) survives the year, its presence at the following Christmas will not seem like old news, but will be as welcome as ever. Assume also that putting up the tree and taking it down bring disutility, although in my experience this is not necessarily the case.

All these simplifying assumptions create a bias towards leaving the tree up; despite that, working through a few numerical examples suggests to me that in almost all cases you are better off taking the tree down. Even now, in early December, I would advise you to dismantle your festive foliage and enjoy the thrill of renewing it on Christmas Eve.

If the tree is still up, I would suggest that your problem is deeper than poor cost-benefit analysis: it is a profound tendency to put off action that is troublesome in the short term. We have developed an institution to deal with this. It is called the New Year’s resolution.

Also published at ft.com

I was recently stood up on a first date. The guy sent me a message four hours after we were supposed to meet, saying he hadn’t made it because he’d had to work and had been unable to call because his phone battery was dead. I was disappointed and angry. When he apologised and proposed meeting up later that week, I said no.

I found these excuses all too familiar. Using “working” as an excuse without respecting my time was exactly what my ex-boyfriend did to me. I always forgave him, and tried to be understanding. But he did this repeatedly and each time he knew that I was going to forgive him. Never again!

However, maybe everyone needs a chance to make things right. Am I punishing this guy for my ex’s behaviour?

BC

Dear BC,

This is an experimentation problem: how much do you need to see of a man’s behaviour before deciding you’d be better off without him? It is also a signalling problem: you need to ensure you don’t appear to be a doormat.

With your ex-boyfriend, you made both mistakes: ignoring plentiful evidence of his selfishness, while encouraging him to walk all over you by forgiving his abuse. (Economists call this latter problem “moral hazard”.)

Yet I think you have been harsh on the new chap. Admittedly, he got off to a poor start. If you have a queue of suitors, by all means move on. If not, it would be wise to allow him one chance. Your “no second chances” policy gives him the right incentives in future, but that is irrelevant unless you give him another try.

You should make the price of a second date high but not infinite. Insist on lobster and champagne. If he complies, he has made it worth your while. He will also have learned to keep his phone charged in future.

Also published at ft.com.

Should my co-workers and I accept a pay cut to preserve our jobs?
David A, London

Dear David A,

In principle, of course you should: this is so obvious that I’m not even sure why you bothered to ask. Another way of phrasing this question is to ask whether you would rather have most of your old salary or none of it.

You might object that unemployment has one big advantage over a pay cut: it means that you don’t have to work. For most people, however, this is not an advantage. The economist Andrew Oswald, one of a growing clan of “happiness economists”, has found that unemployment is extremely distressing, far more than could be explained by mere financial loss. If he is right, jobs bring happiness and self-respect, and even a severe pay cut is worth taking on the chin if that’s what it takes to stay in work.

It is true that taking a pay cut may result in a lower salary for many years, but losing your job, especially in a recession, is worse: your skills depreciate rapidly and you are quite likely to be worse off for the rest of your life.

You might reasonably ask why it isn’t more common to see swingeing pay cuts in place of redundancies. They are preferable for employees and probably preferable for employers, too. After all, sacking people is costly, as is going short-staffed and re-hiring people when things pick up. Far better just to squeeze salaries.

But that’s too easy. I suspect that there is a strong bias against salary cuts because otherwise employers would be demanding them every couple of weeks, with the flimsiest of excuses. Sacking somebody, in contrast, is not something an employer will tend to do lightly.

That is why “either pay me properly or sack me” is a good negotiating position. But, like many good negotiating positions, it may occasionally backfire.

Also published at ft.com.

I have worked full time for six years and presently earn £40K. I am also about to attain chartered engineer status, which sounds good. However, I stumbled on an old letter the other day that confirmed my admission into nursery aged four, 29 years ago! Looking back at all the money invested in my more than 20 years of formal education, I feel short-changed by my income and quality of life.

Do you know how I can calculate a “fair” figure that will reflect my master’s degree and international experience? I want to use this as the minimum salary for my next job.
G

Dear G,

I’m not going to attempt to calculate your “fair” figure: it would do you no good. Employers care very little about what salary would be a fair reward for your background; instead, they want the best possible people for the lowest possible cost. Competition from other employers typically leads them to compromise on both counts.

Your fair figure might eat away still further at your fading happiness. It seems that you were satisfied until you reflected on your education and inflated your aspirations. This is sad but typical, if the economist Andrew Oswald is to be believed.

Oswald has compared people’s circumstances with their happiness. He finds that, other things being equal, happiness rises with money, good health and a successful marriage, but falls as a person’s “expected income” rises. Expected income is the income that another person of the same age, sex and education level would typically earn. In other words, more educated people have richer peers and so tend to be less satisfied.

What is especially sad is that your income would comfortably put you in the richest 10 per cent of UK citizens, who are themselves relatively rich. As for being short-changed, I doubt that you personally paid for your nursery education. Put away your admission letter, and forget about it.

Also published at ft.com.

I am a father of three teenagers and happily married for almost 20 years. In my opinion the secret to my success is a traditional one, which is that there is no doubt about who wears the trousers. I am wondering whether there is any support in economic theory for my view?
Harry R, Surrey

Dear Harry,

There is ample support in economic theory for your view – it is just a shame there is little support for it in practice. Economists have always tended to use a “household” model of decision-making, which treats domestic decisions as being made by one person – the kind of benign dictator with whom you, as paterfamilias, identify yourself. This had the chief virtue of simplicity.

Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate, then advocated treating the household as if it had more than one decision-maker. This helped to explain rococo details such as the existence of divorce lawyers.

Changes that increased the bargaining power of women, such as the introduction of “no fault” divorce, turned out to have the logical consequence that women became less likely to be physically abused by husbands. They also reduced the likelihood that couples would invest in each other – for example, by financially supporting one partner through a professional course.

The plot now thickens. The economist William T. Harbaugh, with colleagues, has discovered that children as young as 11 seem to make rational consumption choices as well as adults do. And a team including the economist Anyck Dauphin has demonstrated that British teenagers do influence household consumption, especially if they have access to their own income. The paterfamilias household is no more.

How, then, should we reconcile this with your own situation, which seems comfortably wedged in the 1950s? My guess is that your wife and children have decided that it suits them to maintain your delusions of control.

Also published at ft.com

My sister and I both use the same car. When we started to share, we were both students and never had more than £10 to pay for petrol. Now that neither of us are students, we still only put a tenner’s worth of petrol in because we figure, “What is the point of one filling the car up for the other to get the benefit of driving it?” – commonly known as “sisterly love”. Of course, this means that we are endlessly having to stop to put in petrol.

Is there an optimal amount to put in the car in our situation, or, perhaps, a better way to deal with the predicament, bar getting a car each?
Lucy

Dear Lucy,

It might sound strange, but your letter reminded me of Somalia. Your method of ensuring equitable payment for fuel works, but is quite a hassle. Living in a quintessential failed state, Somali entrepreneurs also have to go to great lengths to ensure payment in a situation where the rule of law has broken down.

For example, electricity is locally generated using second-hand equipment from Dubai. The suppliers offer a simple menu of choices: daytime (good for businesses), evening or 24-hour electricity. They charge per light bulb. The costs of collecting payment are probably as high as the costs of producing the electricity, but at least the lights tend to stay on.

Clearly there is a superior solution for the two of you: leave a notepad and pen in the glove compartment, and each of you note both your mileage and your petrol expenditure. If the two fall out of sync with each other, the heavy driver can compensate the heavy filler. This is time-consuming, but not as time-consuming as incessantly stopping for petrol.

This system assumes that you and your sister would not lie to each other. Perhaps this is not true, and family tensions call to mind downtown Mogadishu. If so, it is time to buy another car.

Also published at ft.com.