Commuting and well-being

The Sun's Ian McGarry mocks William Gallas:

It is a long way from Cobham to Colney — just ask Ashley Cole — and Gallas has admitted he suffers the same daily drudgery as thousands of other commuters when he leaves his Surrey home for his new training ground in Hertfordshire.
The Frenchman said: “I haven’t moved house yet so, at the moment, I have to tackle the M25 every morning to get to training.
“It takes 90 minutes just to drive to training. It’s very difficult and I have to get up early every morning just so I can be ready to leave by eight o’clock.
“Every morning it’s like ‘Oh no, I’ve got to take the M25 again’....
Makes you want to cry doesn’t it?

McGarry shows a good grasp of economic theory, but a poor knowledge of recent research.
In theory, commuters should have nothing to complain about. They should only take jobs with long commutes if they are compensated for doing so in other ways - with higher wages, a better job or a nicer house. So their complaints should be mocked.
However, this paper by Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer shows that theory is wrong. Commuters report significantly lower well-being than  non-commuters - so much so that it would take a 19% pay rise to compensate someone for a 23 minute commute.
This, they say, might be because people fail to anticipate their future tastes - they fail to foresee that they'll get used to higher pay and better jobs, but not get used to the hassle of commuting.
Choices, then, can be ill-informed.
Whilst this is true of many people, it's not true, of course, for King William, whose move from the money-launderers was a good one (via).

Comments

[Alex]

Again, though, this assumes effectively perfect substitution - you could just change jobs and not commute. And a pony. If the cost of avoidance is high enough, you cross the bar from choice to duress.

[James]

Someone might not choose to commute e.g. the Peugeot site in Coventry closes and someone who was working there now finds that the nearest place they can find a job in the car manufacturing industry is Oxford. Ideally they would move to where the job is but they have kids in school and their significant other works locally so they end up commuting.

[james]

...This, they say, might be because people fail to anticipate their future tastes - they fail to foresee that they'll get used to higher pay and better jobs, but not get used to the hassle of commuting...

Part of the want-to-have-the-cake-and-to-eat it as well syndrome. It's also part of the reverse-gucci syndrome when long after the quality is forgotten, the cost remains.

By the way, I think there's someone masquerading as me calling himself James.

[james]

...This, they say, might be because people fail to anticipate their future tastes - they fail to foresee that they'll get used to higher pay and better jobs, but not get used to the hassle of commuting...

Part of the want-to-have-the-cake-and-to-eat it as well syndrome. It's also part of the reverse-gucci syndrome when long after the quality is forgotten, the cost remains.

By the way, I think there's someone masquerading as me calling himself James.

[James]

Or alternatively someone else whose first name is James.

[Pete in Dunbar]

But one of you is James, the other is james. Unless you're a windows pc these are quite different.

I used to spend on average two hours a day driving to and from work (including the horrors of the Edinburgh City Bypass and the Forth Road Bridge). In my case this was through imperfect market knowledge - having accepted the job and handed in my notice, it turned out to be a) a lot harder to sell my house in England and b) because of that hard to find anywhere that I could afford in Scotland where I would want to live.

Moving nearer to work certainly improved my well-being. Actually, since I save on 18,000 miles of driving and the bridge toll, I'm actually about £2,000 a year better off.