What's the value of friendship?

by Lucy Rock, Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Philosophers and poets have long pondered the importance of friendship: Euripides thought "a loyal friend worth 10,000 relatives," while Ringo got by with a little help from his.

With marriage in terminal decline in many nations, many of us are realising the value of ours. In the United Kingdom for instance, within 25 years half of those aged 45 to 54 will not be married (compared with just over 70 per cent who are in a marriage today).

For the increasing number who remain single or childless, friends are the new families - a trend reflected in TV series such as Friends and Will & Grace.

But juggling friends and work is not easy. Take my week: Saturday night was spent with neighbours, drinking, eating and gossiping; Sunday I met Dawn, a former colleague from three jobs ago, for lunchtime Bloody Marys; on Monday I was kickboxing with Sally, whom I met on holiday 10 years ago; on Tuesday I went to Guys and Dolls with school-friend Rachel; Wednesday is pub quiz night with a bunch of hacks (we never win); on Thursday I had dinner with old university friends.

By Friday I was exhausted and broke, and spent the evening slumped on the sofa wondering if I had the money, time or stamina to keep up with everyone.

I love my friends and am grateful they've stuck by me all these years. But the older I get, and the more people I befriend, the more difficult it is to keep up with them. And I'm not alone.

Economic significance ignored

As more of us go to university, hop between jobs, move around the country and marry later, we build up large, varied networks. And yet, for all their increasing importance in our lives and the high cost of maintaining friendships, we have no idea of the economic significance of friends.

Thanks to economists and sociologists, policy-makers know almost everything there is to know about marriage and the family, and its impact on health and national wellbeing. Employers, too, can turn to any number of studies about how husbands, wives and children affect workplace performance.

Yet important economic questions about friendship remain unstudied and unanswered. Is there an optimum number of friends? Does having friends affect health and productivity? Is friendship the same for men and women?

John Ermisch, professor of economics at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University, England, also believes it worth studying, but is sceptical about whether friends play a more important role now: "It may be true for younger people, partly because of delaying family-related events such as babies and marriage.

"It's a life cycle thing. By middle age, family are important again, especially if you have children. Things like having a baby reduces the amount of time you see friends regularly.

"To a lesser extent a partnership does as well. The other thing that happens over a life cycle is that friends are substituted for other friends ... those with children make friends with other mothers." Prof. Ermisch has been looking, as part of a wider study on mobility, at how friendship networks affect people's decision to move house.

"If you have a large and dense friendship network this reduces the chance that you will move more than 30km away.

You find that after people have moved, old friendship networks are dropped." Interestingly, he has found that those who move once are more likely to move again because they have fewer friendship ties.

Proper regard for the economics of friendship could influence all sorts of areas: employers might find that encouraging workplace social clubs increases productivity and makes workers less likely to leave companies which give priority when allocating Christmas holiday leave to employees with families may realise single people have 'families' of friends they are just as close to and people could be allowed compassionate leave if a best friend was terminally ill.

And friends we've neglected would understand it's not because we don't like them any more it's just the income and substitution effect.