A new car or a vacation?

Here is an excerpt from WSJ(Mankiw has a link in his blog):

Think carefully about how you spend your dollars. While a new car may not boost your happiness for long, maybe a trip to Europe would.

"Money itself doesn't make you happy," [Harvard psychology professor Daniel] Gilbert says. "What can make you happy is what you do with it. There's a lot of data that suggests experiences are better than durable goods."

The car might seem like the better purchase, because it has lasting value. But, in fact, it sits in the driveway, slowly deteriorating. "Experiences don't hang around long enough to disappoint you," Prof. Gilbert says. "What you have left are wonderful memories."

This view certainly clicks with me, but I am well aware of that poeple do have quite different indifference curves, thus there is not much sense in saying one is better than the other. However, if the markets are efficient and prices are the right indicators, we might be able to find some validation for Gilbert's claim: the real prices of new cars have been falling and those of vacations have been increasing, in other words, the relative price of cars to vacations is falling, which tells us that more people are choosing vacations over cars.

A big caveat is that I ignore the supply sides in both markets.