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Whenever I see an article that cites academic research in an oversimplified, generic way, one of my hobbies is to dig into the source papers to see if those glib statements are accurate1. For example, here’s a journey through an article that states that we supposedly get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.

Having said that, naturally this paragraph from The Guardian’s The secrets of the world’s happiest cities intrigued me:

Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.

This seemed exactly like the type of sweeping statement that every journalist thinks they can get away with because really, who’s going to read a 40-page academic paper to see if it’s true? Either that, or they don’t understand the research themselves. But let’s assume they’re cunning, not stupid.

Source: xkcd

Anyway, off I went to read the Stutzer and Frey paper Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.

To understand what the paper actually says, we need to dig into the methodology just a little bit. The authors based their study on the principle of economic equilibrium, which is “a state where economic forces such as supply and demand are balanced and in the absence of external influences the (equilibrium) values of economic variables will not change.” They apply this to an underlying mathematical model that predicts that both the monetary and the mental costs of commuting are compensated for on the labor market (higher salaries) and the housing market (lower rent).

In short, what this means is that Utility (the authors use commuters’ reported satisfaction with life as a proxy measure for individual utility) is made up of three factors in this model:

• The negative effect of spending more time commuting
• The positive effect of earning a higher salary
• The positive effect of paying less for rent

The important thing to understand is that it’s all about equilibrium. When people spend longer time commuting, they self-report lower life satisfaction (Utility in our model). So this lower satisfaction has to be offset by higher salaries and/or lower rent to keep the equation in a state of equilibrium.

Ok, now we’re ready to look at that statement again. The Guardian’s claim is derived from this section in the paper:

Before we discuss the potential explanations, we want to calculate how high the hurdle is. How far short of full compensation does the equilibrium prediction fall for people in the data set? In other words, how much additional income would a commuter have to earn in order to be as well off as somebody who does not commute?

The money quote is from this 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 shows us that there are two main issues with The Guardian’s quote:

1. 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. Remember, this model is about economic equilibrium. You’re still less satisfied, the additional money just makes you ok with that. To put it another way: more money doesn’t increase satisfaction, it just makes up for the lack of satisfaction caused by the longer commute. You’re not happier, you just deal with the unhappiness because you’re getting paid more.
2. It’s not “40% more money”, it’s 515 Euro, which equals 40% of the average monthly wage. For example, for commutes of 23 minutes (as opposed to one hour), that number is 242 Euros, which is equal to 18.86% of the average monthly wage.

A more accurate statement would therefore be this:

Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 515 Euro more (or 40% of an average monthly wage in Germany) to compensate for the dissatisfaction caused by their long commute.

You might think that this is a storm in teacup. Why bother? So they printed a mildly inaccurate statement that most people will gloss over anyway, what’s the big deal? Well, the problem is that these things have a tendency to spread far and wide. Look at the number of retweets here:

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 http://t.co/XZoOEKPs5H

— Charles Montgomery (@thehappycity) November 10, 2013

The statement is now even further out of context. Immediately we make the connection in our brains: more money = a more satisfied life. That’s not only not what the research says, we also know it’s just not true.

That’s why I think it’s important to call this kind of inaccuracy out, and why I want to encourage us to read the academic papers behind the easy percentages that get thrown around online. I learned a great deal about different economic and happiness models from this paper. It wasn’t boring at all, and I now understand what the research actually says. I think that’s time well spent.

---

1. Yes, I need to get out more. Noted. ↩

Tom Chatfield looks at the meaning and value of our time and attention in What is the real cost of your online attention? He makes the point that we are now all amateur attention economists who have to make increasingly complex decisions about how we spend our time:

We watch a 30-second ad in exchange for a video; we solicit a friend’s endorsement; we freely pour sentence after sentence, hour after hour, into status updates and stock responses. None of this depletes our bank balances. Yet its cumulative cost, while hard to quantify, affects many of those things we hope to put at the heart of a happy life: rich relationships, rewarding leisure, meaningful work, peace of mind.

What kind of attention do we deserve from those around us, or owe to them in return? What kind of attention do we ourselves deserve, or need, if we are to be ‘us’ in the fullest possible sense? These aren’t questions that even the most finely tuned popularity contest can resolve. Yet, if contentment and a sense of control are partial measures of success, many of us are selling ourselves far too cheap.

Nicholas Carr wrote a really interesting article on the dangers of computer automation. In All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines he weaves together stories about airline crashes and Inuit hunters to make salient points like this:

Psychologists have found that when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments — complacency and bias — that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift. We become disengaged from our work, and our awareness of what’s going on around us fades. Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears. When a computer provides incorrect or insufficient data, we remain oblivious to the error.

Carr goes to great lengths to make the argument that the automation of tasks is slowly robbing us of the ability to learn new skills. It is, in some ways, a more nuanced argument than his famous 2008 article Is Google Making Us Stupid? It’s well worth reading — even if you’re skeptical of this argument, it will definitely make you think.

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A big thanks to Igloo for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week. Check them out!

Stop waiting for your IT department to move off SharePoint and start using an intranet you’ll actually like. Igloo is free to use with your team, it’s built around easy to use apps like blogging and file sharing, and it has social tools built right in to help you get work done.

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I love the phrase “getting caught in the melancholy of the infinite scroll.” That’s just one gem from Alexis Madrigal’s The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can’t Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook. He explores this strange dark side of “flow”, where we get stuck in an online activity and can’t stop doing it, even though there’s no tangible benefit:

What is the machine zone? It’s a rhythm. It’s a response to a fine-tuned feedback loop. It’s a powerful space-time distortion. You hit a button. Something happens. You hit it again. Something similar, but not exactly the same happens. Maybe you win, maybe you don’t. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It’s the pleasure of the repeat, the security of the loop.

We certainly do seem to treat “pull to refresh” like a slot machine in a casino. And the chances of winning something valuable are about the same, too.

In Idle minds L.M. Frank writes about what happens inside our brains when we’re not actively working on or thinking about something:

Some researchers now think that resting-state networks may prime the brain to respond to stimuli. “The system is not sitting there doing nothing and waiting,” says [Andreas Kleinschmidt, director of research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research’s Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit]. Cycling activity in these networks may be helping the brain to use past experiences to inform its decisions. “It’s incredibly computationally demanding to calculate everything on the fly,” says Maurizio Corbetta at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “If I have ongoing patterns that are guessing what’s going to happen next in my life, then I don’t have to compute everything.” He likens the activity to the idling of a vehicle. “If your car is ready to go, you can leave faster than if you have to turn on the engine.”

It makes intuitive sense that we can’t just continue to create and consume information — our brains need time to process it all. And yet we still so often celebrate 80-hour weeks and shun “downtime” because we’re so afraid of not being productive. It seems like we’re doing ourselves more harm than good if we don’t give our brains time to be idle.

Ainsley Wagoner shares a story from architecture school in How We Measure Success. She describes a lecture in which their architecture professor first painted a picture of what it’s like to chase the best internships straight out of school, and work oneself to death. And then the professor contrasted that option with this one:

Or you can stop right now and ask yourself what kind of life you want to have. Look around you and figure out where you can make a real impact as designers and architects. Become developers, change the zoning laws, get involved in your communities to affect real change, you can do so many things besides being a cog in the starchitecture mega-firm machine. But whatever you do, you need to ask yourself what your priorities are. What do you want your life to look like in ten years? And allow the answers to that question influence your picture of success.

I don’t think this is a question you ever stop asking yourself…

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