nice article, thanks Jake.
Clooney, since you're going to become an economist, I am surprised you don't know how they measured happiness in their research.
Don't dismiss anything you don't understand.
The way they did it was, they used Econometrics models in order to estimate the relationship between sex & money. Although sex & money were the main focus, i am sure they included many other demographic variables such as age, income, marital status, race etc..They surveyed 16,000 Americans to get these data, and then they probably used ordinary least squares (OLS) or other estimating method in order to find if there's significan't relationship between sex & money.
So you think that happiness can't be measured huh?, the article mentioned:
This was the first effort to study "econometric happiness equations in which sexual activity is an independent variable."
In this econometric model, i am confident the way they measure happiness was they used happiness as a dummy dependent variable while sexual as activity as one of their independent variable.
Y = a + bX+ .... + u;
where Y = happiness, X = sexual activity, u = error term, a and b are parameter estimates.
Happiness (Y) takes the value of 1 if the individual is happy, and 0 otherwise. This is how they measure happines in this model. Of course Y will never reach 1, because there will always be other variable in u (error term), variables left out of the model. But, all they wanted to find out was if sexual activity (X) was statistically significant in influencing happiness.
"The paper finds that sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations," the economists wrote.
What this means is that b ( the estimate for sexual activity) is positive.