It's very useful to be able to rationally evaluate the value of various alternatives (e.g., a $500 flight credit vs less time waiting at the airport). It's also useful to remember that maximizing profit is a proxy for maximizing happiness, but it's not the same thing.
Money is extremely easy to measure, while evaluating levels of happiness is far less so. Those of us fond of numbers have to be careful of assigning excessive value to money MERELY because it's easy to measure. You might think that $2000 brings twice as much happiness vs $1000, but this is rarely the case. We may have the gut feeling that winning a fortune would always bring happiness, but the evidence (based on what I've seen and read about lottery winners and other cases of instant wealth), I have serious doubts about it.
It's absolutely true that I'd skip a religious service for a million dollars, and I would do so for $1. So it's a reasonable calculus to try to determine the actual "break-even" cash value... there must be a specific figure at which I'd be indifferent to whether I got the money or the service.
Since our ultimate goal is happiness, not money, it might also make sense to look at it a little differently. How much happiness (to myself OR to others) is gained by my going to the religious service, vs the happiness-value of the flight credit. Since happiness is so difficult to measure, this is more complicated than basing the calculation on cash... but the results have more real-life meaning.
Often $500 in casino comps are worth more to me than $500 cash. That's because if I go to a casino with friends or family, they'd often refuse to let me treat them... but they would accept a free room or meal that I supplied with comps, and that transaction brings much happiness all around.
Finally: there's a great benefit in life from the ability to make a plan and stick with it. There's also benefit in the ability to be flexible, to change plans based on new information. If we do some introspection, and determine which of these skills we're most in need of strengthening, that's another important metric to consider.
Stuart Resnick (RandomStu)
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/
