Paradoxical lifestyles
Just came across an interesting behavioural economics paper by Stutzer & Frey. Behavioural science is an extremely ‘hot’ field of academia at the moment, hitting the mainstream with books such as Freakonomics (Dubner & Levitt), Predictably Irrational (Ariely), Blink (Gladwell), Nudge (Thaler), etc), and with increasing influence in politics, notably within the Conservative Party here in the UK.
The key finding is this:
Our main result indicates [...] that people with long journeys to and from work are systematically worse off and report significantly lower subjective well-being
So you make yourself systematically worse off, and much unhappier, by buying a large suburban house (with long commute) with an extra bedroom for the rare occasions when your parents come to visit, instead of a short-haul townhouse - even though at the time of purchase, going for the larger suburban house seemed like a totally rational decision.
Same deal with getting a highly paid city job in Canary Wharf or on Wall Street or Madison Avenue even though it dramatically extends commute time - when we would lead a happier job working a ‘worse’ job locally.
The conclusion is not totally unexpected, but it’s an interesting example that makes you think about how irrational human existence can be - pretty depressing really. It highlights the importance of behavioural economics: we may be able to achieve a much happier society if it can succeed in revealing these paradoxical lifestyle choices and thus helping us to avoid them.
We don’t understand, long term, the relative contributions to our happiness and well-being of different factors in our lifestyle. Behavioural science in the 21st century could have a similar ‘enlightenment’ effect to nutritional/dietary science in the 20th.
I’d be interested to know what other examples there are, from your life, where you now think/suspect a decision you took at some point in life *thinking* it was totally rational has led to you being worse off overall?
Related:
- Can contests improve education?
- Quickie: the Freakonomics blog relates a story about a collaboration between the Association of Private Enterprise Education and the Market-Based Management Institute to create a $17,500 ($10k, 5k and 2.5k for 1st, 2nd and 3rd) prize fund for great teaching / communication of concepts in economics del.icio.us Tags: prizes,economics,contests,education...
- How feasibly can we actually drop our global CO2 production?
- I hate talking about global warming - its boring, cliche, and largely depressing, because any careful thinking about it invariably leads to the conclusion that the only true solution, if climate change models based on CO2 are correct, is a mass human extinction event, or exodus (to other planets); your child is a much greater environmental nightmare than your Hummer H2 is. If our primary objective as a species is a global reduction in happiness and development inequalities, allowing global population growth to continue apace is totally counterproductive. And that's a sad thought, and one that may motivate a global terrorism movement far worse than Al Qaeda. But take a look at this graph (source: McKinsey). It estimates the cost and effectiveness of the various proposed things society can do to bring emissions down. On the left, the negative y axis values show that we save a lot of money and abate CO2 emissions, with certain strategies like insulating our houses and offices. To the right, expensive strategies. It's clear from the graph that the real gains to be made (measured as progress along the x axis) are in this economically costly zone. The worst part: even with all known...
- Your thoughts are no longer private: scientists can already tell what you’ve seen just by scanning your brain
- I've never denied being a nerd. Just now, I was scanning down the Nature weekly, and saw this paper, by Kay et al. It's just been published, and it describes how they're using functional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) - fMRI - to 'read' your brain as you see an image - and to decifer from your brain activity, what it was you just saw (by seeing how your brain categorises it)! Here's the (gobsmacking) last line from the intro: Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Think through what that means. Your thoughts can be scanned. Further down this line of research, we will eventually get to a point where police could get accurate IdentiKit pictures of your assailant, by scanning you; great! But the government could scan your brain to see what you really think about certain religious or political symbols. Are you racist? A commie? A fascist? Do you not like your leader? The government could find out by scanning you. Advertisers (and politicians) could find out the exact effect a message has on a person - using this, they could...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Add New Comment
Viewing 2 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment
Trackbacks
(Trackback URL)