The Guardian’s bogus claim about money, long commutes, and life satisfaction
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I don't understand this line. How can money compensate for a loss of utility without increasing utility? An earlier quote from the paper asks "how much additional income would a commuter have to earn in order to be as well off as somebody who does not commute?", and the phrase "as well off" implies to me that the person is as satisfied.
Apart from the "40% of salary" detail, it seems to me that The Guardian got it right.
> If anything this is an argument over semantics.
This is also explained in the article.
"A person w/ a 1hr commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office"
That's a take away from someone reading the original article. This is obviously not true, even disregarding the 40% part, and not what the original article even suggested, but it's being interpreted that way.
While I strongly dislike pedants, word choice is important, and can change the meaning even if technically correct.
Direct, measurable cost of the commute?
Distance of commute correlates positively with time of commute. Not perfectly but close enough. My current 30 minute commute is twice as long (and far) as my previous employer, therefore I put twice the wear and tear on my car. I'm driving 20 more miles per day than I used to, at 50 cents/mile I need to earn $10 more per day just to break even, or about a buck an hour more. For a "computer guy" this is a rounding error, but for a part time fast food worker or part time retail worker, a long commute can be a large fraction of total income. The primary beneficiary of high school kids having after school jobs are the car makers, gas stations, insurance co, etc, the kids often net less than half their income, or sometimes end up in net negative income territory.
Yes, the long commute lowers your satisfaction in one area, but the increased salary raises your satisfaction in another area - these areas then average out.
Sure, you're less happy about your commute, but you're more happy about your salary, and that averages your level of happiness back to equilibrium. It's not just about tolerating unhappiness from your commute, it's actually about balancing/averaging your overall happiness.
I don't doubt that walking to work makes you happier, but you can't go to a shop and exchange that walk for a bigger house or a nice vacation. Money can do that. If you're unhappy with the communte, you can spend the extra money on getting more happiness out of other aspects of your life. That is utility.
It's silly to argue that money doesn't provide utility; nothing provides such flexible, universal and measurable utility as money does. But does it buy you happiness? Only if you're poor, other research has shown. Once you have comfortable wealth, money stops providing additional happiness.
So overpaid CEOs should take a pay cut to be able to walk to the office.
(Would he accept an hour-long communte for $500 extra per month? Of course not! That's pocket change to him. But for 40% on top of his already excessive salary? Probably.)
Unless I have responsible teenage kids or a spouse who doesn't have outside employment, that means that I NEED to hire out all sorts of routine tasks needed to get through life in a comfortable way. Things like snowplowing (or lawn mowing) ($100+/mo), cooking ($30-50/day to get takeout for a family of 4), household cleaning $80/week), laundry ($40-100/week), etc. $6,000/year. That's alot of money when you think that a professional, high paying job in something like IT pays $70-120k.
I made the choice to live close to where I work -- about 10 minutes. That means that I recapture about 18 hours of my life back every week compared to someone commuting 2 hours.
Having said that, I do hate long commutes. I would love to live in Manhattan, but it is just prohibitively expensive.
The choice (that millions have made) is to get the heck out of NYC. My family is a great example of that diaspora. My grandparents all immigrated to Brooklyn and Queens from 1935-1945. Of about 80 people in the extended family, exactly 10 are still in NYC. The rest of us are scattered from Jersey to Boston, with a branch in upstate NY.
That story is repeated dozens of times in the old neighborhood.
The second point seems to me to be almost as poor. The blogger claims that the 40% more money claim from the Guardian is bogus since the footnote clearly shows that their calculation is in absolute Euro terms not percentages. However if you read the next sentence of the footnote:
"Full compensation for commuting one hour (one way), compared with no commuting, is estimated to require an additional monthly income of approximately 515 Euro or 40 percent of the average monthly wage. This valuation implies that the time spent commuting is worth 1.6 times the hourly wage or the average compensation for working. [...]" (Page 17, Footnote 14)
It seems that the research authors themselves argue that their research implies commuting is worth a multiple of hourly wage. Thus we easily verify that the weighted commuting hours (1.6*2) is 40% of the normal (8 hour) working day.
The Guardian could have been more accurate by adding a "average" to their quote, but I think that this is implied by the context anyway.
Certain areas are quite conducive to this lifestyle. NYC metro area, for example. There are quite beautiful villages in upstate NY sitting on a Metro-North stop, about 1.5 hours from Grand Central. If you only had to do that twice a week, it's completely manageable (especially in Autumn when you can gaze out the window on the Hudson Valley line at the incredible fall foliage).
Housing price, cost of living, and public school quality play a significant role in determining where to live for many people.
I've avoided positions in cities like New York and Washington DC precisely because I didn't want to (a) live in a shoe box, (b) spend 3+ hours in a daily commute, and/or (c) pay for private schools.
I would take a pay cut to reduce my commute and relocate to a lower-cost area. How much is almost entirely based on how much I can reduce my mortgage payment.
Your choice of where to live is determined by a plurality of factors that are hard to boil down to 'satisfaction' vs. pay.
This only worked because I had contacts in the business. That got me steady contracting work all this time (decades).
Now, I use collaboration tools. Actually I got a contract writing them for a Mt View startup, and we dogfood the product. Its great; I'm in constant contact with my team, we find bugs fast, and the product is gaining traction.
So last time I travelled it was to an offsite planning meeting (folks from 4 states met in a Chicago rental office). And that was more than a year ago.