If I was ridiculously rich I’d probably spend my time hanging out just doing new things that interested me.  What might those things be?  I thought of two experiments I’d love to try given the money and time:

1. 1)Pricing parental love.  Wendy and I were talking about how frequently people see their parents (she used to see them frequently as they live up the subway line from us; mine lived a few hundred kilometers away).  I’d love to see a survey that looked at how frequently people visited home based upon how accessible their parents were (e.g., same city and can take subway, same city but not on subway) and adjusted for things like income, race, car ownership, etc.  In theory, one could bizarrely price the cost of visiting one’s parents.
   

2. 2)Conversation patterns.  I’d like to know if certain consistent patterns emerge in conversation if you put people together in pre-arranged ways.  For instance, if you have a couple and you add a single person; two couples and two single people, etc.  Can you consistently predict what will happen?
   

If anyone knows of either of these studies already being done, please let me know.