 If we think about the bankers who consume our attention a lot these days, we're trying to keep the euro and the financial system going, then of course bankers' bonuses are high up people's minds. These are very large sums of money. Happiness research tells us that getting millions of extra euros will produce a little extra happiness in those bankers, but a small amount, once you go beyond, say, 100,000 euros a year. People like extra money, but the effect is rather small. If those bankers could find exactly the right husband or wife, then the marital relations, the personal relations, would be worth much more to them in happiness units than giant financial bonuses. When we look at what researchers call happiness equations, the patterns traced out in happiness surveys, we find all over the Western world that women are happier than men, for example, that money does buy some happiness, but probably not as much as most people think. Marriage is a huge source of happiness. I always tell people in my lectures, if you can find the right person, grab hold of them because that's going to be worth a lot more to you in happiness than the typical person's salary. We find no effects from children. So, although you may want children and I have two daughters and recommend daughters, you can't rely on happiness from children. There are strong effects from friendship networks. That seems to be a very strong cause of happiness, but to an economist, the remarkable thing is that although money matters a bit and unemployment is very nasty, probably it's fair to say that most of the fundamental determinants of happiness are not to do with economics. Can you explain that? If we take, let's say, happiness survey data on 100,000 randomly sampled people from the Netherlands, and I ask each of them how happy are you on a scale from 0 to 10 or how satisfied are you with your life or I get a measure of their mental health, measuring how well they sleep and their stress levels and so on, then when we look across those different Dutch people, those men and women from the Netherlands, we find that the patterns look very similar to the patterns for such people in America or in parts of Africa or in China. Money is associated with higher happiness, bigger income and unemployment is very negative, marriage is very positive and so on. Economists can, if they take the data seriously, and I think you should, economists can weigh up the patterns in the numbers using statistical methods and calculate how much happiness comes from being married compared to the happiness from good health, compared to the happiness from being promoted at work, the happiness from having extra friends. Now explaining to non-specialists exactly how we get the dollar or euro numbers on those different components is hard to do but some of the numbers are very large, so a happy marriage, we know for example, will give you the same level of happiness as 120,000 euros a year extra. Find the right person, that's like getting a pay rise in happiness units, a huge pay rise of 120,000 euros extra per year, far more than most people's remuneration. A lot of people say to me, your findings are all very well Professor Oswald, but how would we actually use such findings on happiness data in government economic policy and government social policy? My immediate answer is it's a little bit too early, the research has only been going on 20 years really in a serious way to know, but if we can really work out the things that are truly important to people, the true sources of happiness and unhappiness, then I think that will one day be vital to politicians and the designers of social policy, exactly how it will work, I don't know. We can't easily have a policy for improving people's marriages, but if we know that the personal factors, marriage, friendship, relationships and so on are much more important than financial things, very fast BMWs and so on, if we've really discovered that from happiness data then maybe one day we can have an economic and social policy that works around that and maybe that recognizes that probably the average citizen in the Netherlands thinks that money things are more important than actually they are. It's really personal things and health that shows up strongly in my happiness equations.