Given the choice between more time or more money, which would you pick? For a beach vacation, you might pay more for a direct flight to gain a couple of extra hours getting sand between your toes. On the other hand, you might take a better-paying job that requires late nights at the office.
One of us, Professor Hershfield, recently faced such a choice. He was invited to teach a weekend seminar out of state. But he had a baby girl at home, born 12 weeks earlier. The pay would offset the costs of child care, but the job would require two days of not oohing, aahing and bonding with the baby.
The value of the money was easy to quantify. But it was harder to put a value on the amount of time that would be lost with the family. He determined that there were only 222 weekends left before the baby would start kindergarten, when quality family hours would give way to car pools to friends’ houses.
For a research project, we put this question to more than 4,000 Americans of different ages, income levels, occupations and marital and parental status. In a paper in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, which we wrote with our student Uri Barnea, we found that most people valued money more than time. Sixty-four percent of the 4,415 people we asked in five surveys chose money.
Is money the right choice? We had also asked our survey respondents to report their level of happiness and life satisfaction. We found that the people who chose time were on average statistically happier and more satisfied with life than the people who chose money.
Read more: What Should You Choose: Time or Money? – The New York Times
