Is it possible to put a value on friendship?

Lockdown has gifted us the luxury of time. Time to bake sourdough bread. Time to learn a language. Time to shed a few kg. Time to learn an instrument. Time time to read. More realistically, time to watch Netflix.

In fact, this luxury of time reminds me of Ecclesiastes Ch.3. Anyone who has been to a church wedding or funeral would have heard it.

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;... I will spare you the rest.

 

As someone who is often too busy "doing things" rather than thinking about them, the inability to partake in my usual social activities has left me with ample time to think. Time to think about self-improvement. Time to think about the things that really matter. Time to think about the people who really matter.

As an economist, robust and objective metrics of evaluation are the cornerstone of my day job. With limited separation between work and life, my "work frame of mind" has begun seeping into "the real me". This has led me to think about how one would go about objectively valuing friendships, acquaintanceships and I-don't-know-ships.

Determining which friends are better than others should by no means be easy. Everyone is unique, each friendship is different and has its own context. This makes comparisons difficult.

In the absence of an robust and unbiased methodology, a scoring system is an obvious go-to. In order to rate friendships, criteria such as "reliability", "handling of alcohol", "ability to be a wing man", "emotional stability", have been suggested. The problem with such a method and set or criteria is that it it builds in bias. Two people could, for example, be equally reliable, but in very different ways. Person A could be punctual, while person B could be much more emotionally reliable. There are also infinite possibilities of the number of the metrics to use, as well as how to disaggregate them. Every criterion chosen for scoring brings in come element of subjectivity, making a scoring system less comparable, less objective, and ultimately less useful than it would first appear.

Academics have tried to value friendships. One of the most used models is the Friendship Quality (FQUA) scale, most famously developed by Bukowski, Hoza and Boivin in 1994. t considers the value of friendships on the basis of four dimensions: closeness, help, acceptance, and safety.

There have been various extensions and modifications to this. One such example by Ponti, Guarnieri, Smorti and Tani (2010) specifically attempts to measure both friendships and romantic relationships from adolescence into early adulthood in Italy. The researchers claimed that both the friendship quality survey and the relationship quality survey were appropriate to evaluate people's perceptions of their close relationships.

However this cannot truly be truly impartial given the subjectivity of the data. Participants in the study were asked a set of statements to which they gave a 1-5 score with 1 being most false and 5 being most true. The study acknowledges this fact, but claims its results a starting point for the development of an instrument to measure friendships and relationships.

Searching for more objective ways to quantify and therefore value friendships led me down a rabbit hole of formulae which ranged from elementary to straight-up convoluted. Most of these roughly determine friendship (and interpersonal relationships more widely) as a product of proximity, frequency, duration and intensity. The first three elements can be standard measurements, but the latter cannot. Therefore none of these formulae can truly be objective.

Jonathan Stokes, who is not an academic, but a screenwriter came up with a formula to determine relationship value.

Where FV1 = The friendship value of a friend, FV2 = The friendship value of me, and t = the amount of time spent apart.

It basically says that if the net present perceived value of either or both friends decreases, there will be a proportional drop in the force of attraction between friends. A reduction in time spent together causes the relationship value to fall exponentially. You can see the workings here.

As much as I like this formula, it also relies on subjective perceptions, so cannot truly be unbiased. In fact, it is not possible for a measure of friendship or even any true friendship to be purely objective. It is the subjectivity of relationships that makes them special. It is that idiosyncrasy that makes them frustratingly hard to measure.

I started out thinking that it may be possible to value friendships with a nice, neat decimalised form. That was naïve. There will be no such things as friends, millifriends, kilofriends and megafriends.

The one common variable across potential valuations of friendships is time. I'll write about metric time in a subsequent post.