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Comment by mhaymo | Hacker News Reader

> Earning more money doesn’t increase satisfaction with life. It just compensates for the lack of satisfaction (“Utility” in the formula) caused by longer commutes.

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.

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Agreed. As I read this piece, I was struggling to find the part The Guardian got wrong. If anything this is an argument over semantics.

If you are dissatisfied with a commute, earning more money doesn't necessarily increase your satisfaction with having the commute. You still dislike the commute, and you are dissatisfied with is, you are just willing to accept it as the price you pay for more money and lower rent.

> 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.

Well, not everyone earns the average income (obviously). So the percentage is wrong for everyone.

Indeed, but harmless generalisations and simplifications like this are part of the art of making it read like a newspaper article rather than a contract.

Yeah, I'm a bit confused as well. It seems that the author doesn't believe that there's an "overall satisfaction" level made up of smaller bits of satisfaction pieces.

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.

It seems the author is unwilling to acknowledge the impact money has on satisfaction or happiness. But utility and happiness are two different things.

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.)

"How can money compensate for a loss of utility without increasing utility?"

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.

Say I live in New York and have a 2 hour commute to Long Island or whatever. Winter comes around, it gets dark at 4:30PM and I get home at 7. By the time I get home, I want to eat, zone and get to bed.

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.

I'm in a similar situation (live in NJ instead of NYC) but I do wonder: $6000 / year = $500 / month. I could save at least that much (more like $500-$1000 / month) living in Long Island or NJ instead of Manhattan.

Having said that, I do hate long commutes. I would love to live in Manhattan, but it is just prohibitively expensive.

NYC != Manhattan. Normal people can't afford to live in Manhattan. If you do, you're paying for the privilege.

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 "as well off" phrase refers to "being equally compensated". So the absolute utility "number" remains the same. In order for that to happen, a decrease in the contribution that commute has on utility, needs to be compensated for by an increase in the contribution that one of the other factors (salary or rent) has.

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