Big in boardroom, bored in bedroom

The findings are echoed in Canada, where new research reveals that people living in poor rural areas have sex more than eight times a month, compared with six times a month in prosperous British Columbia.

Andrew Oswald, an economist at the UK’s Warwick University, saidthe Canadian findings echoed his own surveys of young Americans. “People only have a limited amount of energy – it’s a form of budget constraint,” he said. “More seriously, there are some real questions here about the point of economic success: we have never been so wealthy, but stress is rising and we are not happier.”

With more UK divorce petitions citing a refusal to have sex, rising levels of reported sexual dysfunction and plummeting birth rates in the industrialised world, Oswald says we need to think harder about the purpose of economic activity.

Heart transplant pioneer Dr Christiaan Barnard, who has treated hundreds of stressed businessmen said: “It is a well-known fact that economically depressed people who have very little to enjoy in life will turn to sex — what else is free that is available for them to do? It also explains why poor people have more children.”

Unemployed John, 22, who lives in a London tower block, prides himself on his sexual performance. “I look on it as an artform. I have sex most nights, if not every — with my partner and several others.”

The Observer News Service