No, Sex Won't Make You Rich

I have some rather, well, deflating news for you. If your plan for getting a raise at work is getting lucky at home, you need a new plan. More sex won't mean more money -- unless you're getting paid for it -- no matter what an economist (or your partner) tells you. Sorry.

Now, it's a simple -- and tantalizing -- enough idea. Healthy people tend to earn more, and people who have more sex tend to be healthier. So could having more sex make you earn more? Well, as Lydia DePillis of Wonkblog points out, that's the question Nick Drydakis, a senior lecturer in economics at Anglia Ruskin University, tried to answer by looking at Greek survey data from 2008.

But that answer isn't much of an answer. Now, the study did find a positive, and statistically significant, relationship between how much sex people between the ages of 26 and 50 say they have, and how much they say they make. And it control for things like age, health, education, marital status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, industry, and personality type. But even controlling for these things, a correlation between sex and wages doesn't tell us anything. It's just a correlation. We don't know which way -- if at all -- the causation runs. It might be that having more sex really does make people make more. Or it might be that making more makes people less stressed -- and that makes them have more sex. Or it might be that something we aren't observing is causing both.

Read more at The Atlantic.