Happiness & Commuting The Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox
I live in Chicago. At least 10 people have recommended I get a car and move out of the city. Why the hell would I do that? Besides the costs of having a car, it makes no sense to suffer the commute. I enjoy reading on the bus/train and people watching. Not to mention that public transportation is safer.
Pros of commuting:
1. I feel like an alpha male and potentially sing a cheesy 80′s song on my way to work.
Cons of commuting:
1. Potential for traffic accidents
2. Annoying traffic
3. Winter driving in Chicago
4. Parking
5. Parking Fees
6. Fuel Costs
7. Insurance Costs
8. Car Maintenance
Anyways enough of the rant. On to what sparked this long winded post- an article by Jonah Lehrer on commuting.
Click Here To Read: Happiness & Commuting The Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox
Introduction (via Jonah Lehrer @ Frontal Cortex)
The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting.
In other words, the best way to make yourself happy is to have a short commute and get married. I’m afraid science can’t tell us very much about marriage so let’s talk about commuting. A few years ago, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer announced the discovery of a new human foible, which they called “the commuters paradox”. They found that, when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimate the pain of a long commute. This leads people to mistakenly believe that the big house in the exurbs will make them happier, even though it might force them to drive an additional hour to work.
Excerpt (Via Jonah Lehrer Frontal Cortex)
Why is traffic so unpleasant? One reason is that it’s a painful ritual we never get used to – the flow of traffic is inherently unpredictable. As a result, we don’t habituate to the suffering of rush hour. (Ironically, if traffic was always bad, and not just usually bad, it would be easier to deal with. So the commutes that really kill us are those rare days when the highways are clear.) As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert notes, “Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.”
But if commuting is so awful, then why are our commutes getting so much longer? (More than 3.5 million Americans spend more than three hours each day traveling to and from work.) In my book, I cite the speculative hypothesis of Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who argues that long-distance commuters are victims of a “weighting mistake,” a classic decision-making error in which we lose sight of the important variables:
Related Research Abstract (via Ideas.repec Alois Stutzer & Bruno S. Frey)
People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals’ utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we find that people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well-being. Additional empirical analyses do not find institutional explanations of the empirical results that commuters systematically incur losses. We discuss several possibilities of an extended model of human behavior able to explain this ‘commuting paradox Click Here For The Full Paper
Click Here To Read: Happiness & Commuting The Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox
