Happiness comes at a price

It has long been the question asked by philosophers: how exactly do you find happiness? Throughout history, people have looked for different ways.

Some have turned to religion, new-age philosophy or drugs, while others have given up and resigned themselves to misery. But now two professors claim to have found the answer - and it all comes down to cash.

They have worked out the cost of happiness and discovered it is worth far more than most of us are paid.

They set about finding out how much it would cost to compensate for some of life's most serious setbacks. Their formula, produced after interviewing 10,000 people over the last 10 years, puts the price of losing your health as the most expensive, at £500,000.

A hefty £132,000 could help you find happiness after a broken marriage - a sum which Zoe Ball and Norman Cook may easily be able to afford, but which is well outside most people's price range. On the other hand, the blissful state of a marriage like that of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones is deemed to be worth an extra £70,000.

If you were to lose your job, it would require £100,000 in compensation for the emotional damage suffered, on top of the loss of salary. And failing to get married comes in at £70,000.

Perhaps surprisingly, no compensation is required for not having children. It seems their good points and the happiness parents experience are cancelled out by the years of sleepless nights, tantrums, stress and frustration.

The list was drawn up by Professor Andrew Oswald and Andrew Clark of the University of Warwick School of Economics, who were asked to invent a way of working out the cost of happiness to the nearest pound. The research will be used as a guide for courts who need to estimate how much compensation to award victims of crime who suffer emotional damage.

Prof Oswald said that after asking people about major life events, they constructed a "mental health scale" which moved up and down according to how happy respondents were. This was then linked to variations in their income.

Researchers asked what sort of salary would make up for life's losses. In other words, the £132,000 placed on marriage is the average amount for which someone would be willing to sell their partner, and still be relatively content.

"Not surprisingly, we found that as people get richer, they get happier," Prof Oswald said. "It shows you can buy happiness - but it is very expensive." The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, will be passed to the Government, he said. Whether it means a happiness tax at the next Budget remains to be seen.