No Stupid Questions - 111. Would You Be Happier if You Lived Someplace Else?
Episode Date: August 21, 2022Will Angela finally break up with Philadelphia? Is New York really the unhappiest city in the U.S.? And are there trash tornadoes in the metaverse? ...
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Do you punch him in the face? Do you throw a snowball at him?
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Stephen Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, why do people stay in places that make them unhappy?
We are number one, including unhappiness, damn it.
Angela, I know you to not be a big complainer, but there is something I hear you complain about quite often, which is the place you live, Philadelphia, or as you more commonly call it, Phil-tadelphia.
So my question is, if you're so darn unhappy with the place you live why don't you just leave i'll tell you what i think about philadelphia philadelphia to me is like a trash
tornado you put out your trash in philadelphia it's generally collected once a week whatever
the day is for your block it's supposed to get picked up on that day but there are definitely
long stretches of time in recent history that it doesn't get picked up for days.
Am I wrong to remember that Philadelphia, thanks to Ben Franklin, was the first city in America with public trash pickup?
Oh, my God. Is that another Ben Franklin first?
I don't know. I could very well be making that up. Bifocals, lightning, trash.
Yeah, I think that might be made up. But Philadelphia was first for a lot of things in a moment in history.
It also implies that you had a lot of trash even back then.
Yes, well, you can then start to worry about the direction of causality or whatever. But it's blowing around. I mean, literally blowing around in these little circles around my house.
So number one Duckworth complaint about Philadelphia, trash tornadoes. What's next?
I think people are leaving the city. Philadelphia feels empty to me. You walk around on a Friday or
Saturday night and you're like, wait, where are the other people who should be walking around on a Friday or Saturday night? I am looking at population losses of big U.S. cities over the
COVID era. We must be in decline, right? It looks like the total population of 2021 was almost 1.6
million and you lost 25,000, call it. New York is a much bigger city, 8.5 million, roughly. We lost 305,000.
I will caution people, though. I think we may have even discussed on this show before. A lot of the
data about who was leaving was based on cell phone records. Well, cell phone records are not
the most permanent way to look at real migration because people travel with their cell phones and they might leave for a week or a year, but then come back.
I will say this, whether you're losing more or equal in your fair share of people, the fact is that Philadelphia is not what would be considered by most demographers a growing and thriving city.
Yes, I think we can rule out flourishing.
How about happy?
This, I actually have to say, wasn't just informed by my personal experience, but it caught my eye, this academic paper by Ed Glazer.
I know the paper of which you speak, being a fan of Ed Glazer myself myself, Oren Ziv and Joshua Gottlieb are the
other authors on this paper. Unhappy Cities, I believe it's called. Yeah, great title, right?
And of course, I immediately turned the page thinking that it would just only be about
Philadelphia. I was like, what's the other unhappy city? It's plural. But actually,
it's a survey of well-being data. So well-being, something that now economists study.
She says somewhat unenthusiastically. Do you feel like economists are horning in a little
bit on the happiness racket? No, I just want to say that sometimes they
discover something like well-being and it's rocking their world. Like, oh, my gosh,
people want to be happy. Oh, my gosh, you can actually measure happiness. Yes, psychologists
have been doing that before.
But no, I don't want to cast any shade on these three great economists.
What they did was they looked at well-being data. There's a particular question that's very useful to ask,
which is some version of overall, how satisfied are you with your life?
And so let's do it right now, Stephen.
Okay.
Let's go from zero to 10.
Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?
Having nothing to do with where I live and so on.
Just overall.
Just asking you.
I hate to say it.
I'm a most happy fella.
I'm probably like 9.2.
Oh, I love that you used a decimal.
There's a false precision with that.
I was going to go 9.25 and I thought that was maybe a little bit prissy.
Regardless, you're above nine. I was going to go 9.25, and I thought that was maybe a little bit prissy.
Regardless, you're above nine.
I'll tell you that even on bad days, I'm a nine too, Stephen.
Wait a minute.
I'm no mathematician, but I'm thinking, how can Angie Duckworth be a nine or above in overall satisfaction or happiness when she lives in Philadelphia, which she thinks is
the worst place on earth?
What would you be if you lived in Paris?
I don't know.
Maybe an 11.
Even though I like to complain about how the trash doesn't get picked up in Philadelphia
and there aren't as many people on the streets on a Friday night or a Saturday night as I
think there should be.
And also problems with our infrastructure and our schools and so forth.
You've got some crime down there.
Oh my gosh, we have so much crime.
You've got a lot of drug abuse out in the open there,
including this big open-air drug dealing zone.
In Kensington, you mean?
There you go.
That's an area of Philadelphia.
Philadelphia is actually huge.
I think there's also really high measures of racial discrimination in Philadelphia, if I
recall my reading from years ago. I would certainly not argue about that. You know, in this unhappy
cities paper, the big analysis they do is actually comparing cities to one another. And they make the
conclusion that cities, first of all, are more or less happy. They're not all the same level of happiness. And right there,
you have a mystery. Like, what are all the people doing in these unhappy cities? Why don't they just
move to the happy cities? What you're describing has been happening over the past 20 years. Because
if you look at a map of the happy cities versus the unhappy, the unhappy cities are clustered
quite conveniently in the Northeast. So it includes places like New York
and Philadelphia and then getting into the Rust Belt. And then there's a couple patches of deep
unhappiness in Northern California. And then like the entire Southeast of the United States
and parts of the West and Midwest are just happy, happy, happy. And that is exactly how
actual migration has been happening these past
15, 20 years. A lot of people have been leaving the Northeast and the Rust Belt in parts of
California for places like Texas and Florida and Arizona and so on. So we shouldn't be shocked by
these data because it's been reflected in the reality.
I think what this analysis says is both that people are migrating to happier places,
but not all of them are migrating. And I think that's the mystery that an economist would ask,
like, how come not every single unhappy person has left? Right. If they're so unhappy,
why are they staying? Why is anybody left in an unhappy city like Philadelphia? And, you know,
I looked up, there's a table of like, here are some example cities and their average happiness.
It's essentially a aggregated score of that one question.
Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?
Philadelphia is pretty low down on the list for happiness.
But at the very bottom is where you live, Stephen.
The most unhappy city in the United States is New York City.
We are number one in everything, of course, including unhappiness.
Damn it.
There's a phrase in the paper that I think is just so economist that I have to share it.
They write, while historical data on happiness are limited, the available facts suggest that cities that are now declining were also unhappy in their more
prosperous past, which connotes that there is a certain culture to different kinds of cities.
Almost like a personality, right?
Exactly. But you ask this question I find very compelling, not just on the macro level,
which is what we're talking about now with this Glazer et al paper, but on the Duckworth level
of you, right? You say you're so unhappy in Philadelphia, and yet you're there. And these
economists are writing about these big cities that rank very high on the unhappiness scale.
And yet many, many people still live there. And many, many people still move there. It's not
saying people aren't moving away, but these big cities are remaining big. So you could say,
aren't moving away, but these big cities are remaining big. So you could say, well, how can that be? How can those two things be true? Let's talk about that seeming paradox. I can think of a
couple of reasons. One explanation could be that people are just wrong about their happiness.
What do you mean they're wrong about their happiness?
If you ask me the question, run the question by me again that these guys built their data around.
Overall, how satisfied are you with your life? ask me the question, run the question by me again, that these guys built their data around.
Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?
Let's imagine me, a New Yorker, and let's imagine me, an Arizonan, if that's indeed what I'd be called if I lived in Arizona. If you ask me that question in New York, my first internal response
might be, what do you mean, how satisfied am I with my life? What kind of question is that?
What are you trying to get at? So seven,
get lost, as opposed to the Arizonan. Interesting question. Yeah, sure. Nine.
The denizen of Phoenix is answering effectively a different question because culturally it's
a completely different place. I don't know the answer to that question,
but I think it's a factor worth considering
in that if you're trying to apply a single metric across a massively diverse geographical
area like the United States, it's quite possible that the same question could draw some different
data in different places because those places have cultural, social, political, economic,
racial, ethnic, religious, et, racial, ethnic, religious, etc., etc. differences.
I'm sure it is true that what goes into being satisfied, what matters to you, that's got to
vary by zip code, by city block. When Ed Diener first started studying subjective well-being
decades ago, really a pioneer in the field, He was discouraged by his elders of studying this loosey-goosey,
impossible-to-measure thing. They said it couldn't be pinned down empirically. Can't be done. It
depends on what you think. It's a philosophical question. And when he defined what he meant by
life satisfaction, by subjective well-being, he said it is inherently a subjective idea. In other
words, the fact that what goes into your judgment is different from what goes into my judgment
has no damage to the very idea itself. It's supposed to be subjective.
It's supposed to be subjective unless you interview 100 people from
Area A and 100 from Area B and then compare them.
But you can still compare on what they think of their lives.
It may include things that are different from A to B.
But the point is that it's still defensible to say that that person is less happy.
The question, by the way, has been asked around the world.
It's a very intuitive question. People don't take a long time to answer that question. It correlates very
reliably with things like household income and physical health. So these are all reasons, I think,
that even though you could argue, and it has been argued, by the way, by economists, by philosophers,
by some psychologists, that the very notion of trying to do an apples to apples comparison of something which is inherently a subjective apple is not something we should do.
I'm not saying you don't have company in arguing that, but I'm in Camp Diener.
So you're not buying the speculative argument that maybe people are kind of wrong about their happiness or that it's too subjective to be useful in this way. Or that New Yorkers are answering different questions
effectively than people in other places that are happier. So give me an argument from your side
now. We can trade off what you think explains this paradox. I think Ed Glazer and his colleagues
conclusion is that there must be reasons that people make the choices that they make, live where they're
going to live, that are separate from happiness or what economists sometimes call utility.
And they say, for example, that a reasonably low rent city, you can literally afford to live
in a one-bedroom apartment that you couldn't afford to live in, in these more expensive but
potentially happier cities.
Of course, New York is both really expensive and unhappy, but it's a bit anomalous.
They say that would be one reason.
Maybe it's not that the living expenses are lower, but that the wages were higher.
You were kind of compensated in a way.
So happiness isn't everything would be one way to explain the fact that there's anybody
left in an unhappy city.
I can buy that argument that cities afford opportunities for, like you said, income,
but also maybe for status and maybe for mating and other things that different places may not.
So you may stay even though you're unhappy, which could explain the paradox.
But something else you said reminds me of you a little bit, which is, again, if one doesn't like the place where they live, or at least one is constantly saying that they don't like the place where they live to their friends.
Is it possible that we're just talking about sunk costs here, that it's hard to leave a place because you get entrenched?
And sunk cost fallacy, right? That we're making an error.
get entrenched. And sunk cost fallacy, right? That we're making an error. Well, that's the question.
In your case, is it a sunk cost fallacy? In other words, do you believe that you have too much invested in Philadelphia, that you have too many what sociologists call weak ties and strong ties,
that if you were to pick up and move someplace that might have fewer trash tornadoes,
that you would lose out by not having those networks, connections, and so on?
The sunk cost fallacy, of course, is I'm not going to live anywhere other than Philadelphia
because, oh my gosh, look, I've just spent two decades building a life here. And you can make
a mistake in saying that, or you can make a rational decision saying that, oh, the transition
costs are too high. And it's all about whether you're properly making predictions about the future. Let me just describe my situation, then we can figure out
which of these diagnoses you want to label it. I'm in Philadelphia in part because my
now 87-year-old mother lives 45 minutes away. That's one reason it would be hard for me to
leave. Also, my job, right? I did actually go so far as to think
hard about if I could get a job at another university and what that would be like. And by
the way, I don't think it's a given that I could get. Oh, come on now. Anyway, let's assume that I
could. And I played it out. I was like, OK, who has a great behavioral science program? And then
also, who has Katie Milkman?
My dear friend and collaborator, Katie,
we co-run Behavior Change for Good.
We talk nearly every day.
She lives a few blocks from me.
She's one of my best friends.
I love her.
That's one reason to say,
I mean, that would be enough, right?
I can see living in a city that had trash tornadoes and declining population and increasing poverty and crime
only because you
live a few blocks away from your BFF. That's a calculus a lot of people would accept. And then
a big part of this is my husband. Jason, as you know, is a real estate developer.
What does a real estate developer do? They literally buy ground and then they develop it. It's about as impossible to be a
remote worker as you can imagine. Now, theoretically, if you all picked up and moved, you could do your
teaching and research elsewhere. He could theoretically, it might take some cost and time,
but he could relocate. It sounds to me, however, that you have such a forward-leaning momentum in your life, personal life and professional life, that sometimes you feel a little bit guilty about being so enthusiastic and happy.
And you think it makes you sound a little bit more mortal and relatable to the rest of us if you can complain about something.
And I think Philadelphia is just an easy victim. It's like my hair shirt. Also, it's interesting you talk about the appeal of Katie
Milkman. Katie Milkman created or popularized this phrase temptation bundling, which is a way of
bundling something you don't want to do with something you do want to do. So an easy example
is like, I need to go to the gym, but I don't want to. I do want to watch the TV show, but I don't really need to.
So I will only let myself watch that TV show when I go to the gym.
Yeah, I'll bundle the temptation of succession with the Stairmaster.
So it sounds to me like you've got a little temptation bundling going with
Katie Milkman is the thing you need. And Philadelphia
is the thing that you have to put up with. But you're willing to put up with Philadelphia to
have Katie Milkman, essentially, and your husband. Still to come on No Stupid Questions,
does moving to a new place affect your motivation and creativity?
What are you talking about when I'm moving? Philly is in my blood.
Now, back to Stephen and Angela's conversation
about why people stay in unhappy cities.
Do you think that the things that you dislike so much about Philadelphia are indeed
unique in any way to Philadelphia? I mean, when I think of Philadelphia, I think of a famous
incident at a Philadelphia Eagles. They're the football team game back many years ago. It was
right around Christmas. I don't remember the details. Maybe the Eagles stank. They usually
did stink. And there was a Santa Claus at the game and the fans in the stands were throwing snowballs at Santa Claus. So for many people,
that is an enduring image of Philadelphia. It's the place where Santa Claus gets snowballs thrown
at him. That said, do you really think that you couldn't find things that would distress you
if you lived in just about any other place.
They might have a totally different character. Maybe they wouldn't be urban things. But if you
lived in the suburbs, would you get maybe so bored of getting in your car to go everywhere
that you would say, ah, this place is the worst? If you lived in the country, would you say,
oh my gosh, those animals outside every night and those birds every morning,
they're waking me up. This is the worst. All I want to be is in the city. Do you think,
in other words, that you, as psychologically astute as you are, are simply another human
like the rest of us who's got a little bit of the grass is greener syndrome?
I think there must be some grass is greener because you can't even see the grass.
But like I haven't lived anywhere for the last two decades in Philadelphia.
So I don't know whether the grass is greener or there's no grass or it's brown or whatever. Cities paper where they took this survey data that had been given across something like 300 plus
metropolitan areas across the country, and they averaged the answers to that simple question,
overall, how satisfied are you with your life? Philadelphia comes down close to the bottom.
So just saying that when you survey citizens of different cities, the citizens of my city
tend to say they're unhappy. Also on objective measures
that are also in that Glaser paper, population decline, shrinking tax base, increases in crime.
So there are both reliable subjective indicators, but not just my personal experience,
and objective indicators that suggest that Philadelphia ain't utopia. But I do think I
still have to answer the question, like, how can I still be a nine while I'm here if it's so bad?
It is strange.
I think what to me this says is that there's your environment and then there's your micro
environment. There is the city of Philadelphia and then there's just my little tiny life inside
this great metropolis.
You've built an oasis inside of a big hole is what you're saying.
I think we all do.
Let's take college.
Remember college?
Yeah, got it.
When I went to college, I thought, how happy are the people in this place?
And in fact, my life didn't depend on the average happiness of the entire campus. It just depended on these micro moments, these little interactions that I have with like four people that I saw that day or who happened to sit next to me during class and who happened to be my roommate. when you're a teenager or younger person, just because, you know, you're more susceptible to
emotions of the moment versus the long term because your long term trend hasn't been so
established. You don't have family yet. You don't have your career yet.
Maybe there's some difference, but I think this has got to be somewhat universal. Say,
for example, I'm walking down Spruce Street. That is what affects my
happiness at the moment, not what's happening six blocks away or on average arithmetically
throughout the city. So I'm not saying that I've built a little utopia where the trash doesn't fly
around or like there's no crime, but I'm just saying that when I think about the micro moments
of my day, I wake up, I have breakfast, see Jason, I go to my laptop. I'm sort of
influenced for positive or for negative. My mood goes up and down. My life satisfaction goes up
and down for lots of things that are not what we were talking about that are true about Philadelphia.
I'm not saying these things don't bother me at all. I'm just saying that there must be a lot
that's going into my nine out of 10 that are not those things.
It is interesting to note that over the past few decades, Americans have become less mobile.
The typical American adult lives only 18 miles from his or her mother, which describes you quite well.
You grew up right up the street, really, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, right?
According to Google Maps, it's less than 10 miles away. Correct. And I was born in Philadelphia, too.
So maybe the reason you won't leave Philadelphia is not just for the concrete strong ties you've
already established, but maybe just you have an orientation, you have a comfort.
I'm a Philly girl.
You're a Philly girl.
Oh, God.
And maybe you know that a lot of other people think of Philadelphia as filthadelphia.
And you just kind of want to self-deprecate that part of yourself, even though you really
don't have a big problem with living there.
You just think it kind of suits your self-identity to complain about it. Now, that
sounds a little critical, and I don't mean to sound critical, because you know I love you,
and I would never say anything to your face critical. It's okay. I am culturally very
Philadelphia. When I met Jason, we were both studying in Oxford, England. He also grew up
in the suburbs of Philadelphia, slightly nicer. But we're both from the Philly area.
And there was such a comfort when we were talking.
And it really was cultural.
You're not wrong about that.
Also, I could be making a mistake.
I was at a graduation ceremony once.
And Johnny Maeda, who I don't know well, but I think he advocates for STEAM, science, technology, engineering, art, and math.
And I remember we were lining up and we're all in our robes.
And he asked me, like, where are you from?
I was like, I'm from here because we were at a graduation ceremony in Philadelphia.
And then he said, well, when are you moving?
And I was like, wait, did I say I'm moving?
I'm not moving.
Do you punch him in the face?
Do you throw a snowball at him? Because I'm a Philly girl. No, I did like, wait, did I say I'm moving? I'm not moving. Do you punch him in the face? Do you throw a snowball at him?
Because I'm a Philly girl?
No, I did not, Stephen.
What are you talking about when I'm moving?
Philly is in my blood.
What are you talking about?
What are you talking about?
And he elaborated by saying that in his life, he's made an intentional move every so many years because that's the way to keep yourself creative and young and non-stale.
And I remember thinking as the rest of this graduation ceremony dragged on,
does Johnny Mata have a point? So maybe I'm just making a mistake. Maybe I'm wrong and I should
have moved. Do you have a target list of three places that in your mind you'd prefer to live?
I've thought about New York. You're welcome here. Which is the most unhappy city and also one of the most expensive.
We'd love to have you. We're miserable, so we want everyone to wallow in our misery with us.
New York, I lived in for two years in my 20s. And then I thought about San Francisco,
which I also lived in, by the way. And I also thought about Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I've lived there actually for two years. It is interesting that they are all the three places where, I mean, you didn't mention Oxford.
You could live in Oxford or maybe London or something like that.
Right.
But it sounds as though there's a strong pull of comfort and there's obviously a very strong
pull of comfort in Philadelphia. Do you find that at odds with you as a thinker? Do you feel like
you might really jumpstart your intellect by going to a place that's totally different? Westgate, and somebody else. And it made a striking claim, which is that when people think
about the good life, like what they want in life, there's some element of that, which is happiness,
like feelings of joy and pride and comfort, the absence of negative feelings. People probably
think of their relationships and how they have meaning and purpose. But they also think about
the rich life, which they defined as essentially the curious life, the life of stimulation and of learning. And I'm not saying this is why I'm in
Philadelphia, but I think it's more stimulating to be in the center of the city. It does make me
think we talk so casually and cavalierly now about the opportunities to go live in a different place.
But then when you think about actual immigration,
there are millions, probably hundreds of millions,
maybe billions of people who would rather live in a better place.
The US is a target destination for many, many, many people
who are not allowed to come here,
sometimes not allowed to leave their own countries.
It really does make me think of the bravery it takes and
has always taken to emigrate like so many do today, but especially in this country, so many of
our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, you know, my own family,
I know their story better than others. What generation was it that immigrated?
For me, it was my grandparents. All four grandparents were immigrants, and it was really hard. They had
no money. They had tenuous connections. They were leaving behind families. And in the case of a
family like mine, where everybody was Jewish, the vast majority of those who got left behind would
be murdered by Nazis a few decades later. So it's interesting to me even that we're having this
conversation, just realizing how much the world has changed for us, for people who have the means to even think about moving as a kind of option.
The way you think about what am I going to have for lunch today?
That just reinforces, I think, the point actually of the Glazer paper, the Unhappy Cities paper.
It's not just about happiness that we make these decisions. When my parents immigrated from China because
of the communist revolution, my wild guess is that being totally isolated, never truly mastering the
language, honestly, repeatedly being outsiders to the culture, having their kids feel embarrassed
about them because they were so clumsy about American norms and traditions. I think that for them,
I mean, I know for my dad, because he just said it, I'm not here because I'm happy. I'm here for
you. But this question of like, hey, why are you still in Philadelphia? Or why is anybody in
Philadelphia if their life satisfaction isn't very high? Like, it does suggest that people
make choices in life about where to live and what to do
for reasons that are not just like, oh, because it makes me happy.
Let me just say this, Angela Duckworth.
If you decide to leave behind the wonderful town that you call Philadelphia, and if you
move somewhere other than New York City, then we have a problem.
Unless you just decide maybe you'll move to the
metaverse. Maybe you'll be one of my first friends to just depart the concrete world.
That would be acceptable. But otherwise, I expect you to die in Philadelphia
if you don't move to New York. I don't know. Maybe there are trash tornadoes in the metaverse too.
No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now,
here's a fact check of today's conversation. In the first half of the show, Angela says she
doesn't believe that Ben Franklin was the founding father of public trash collection programs.
But this is actually true. In 1762, Franklin proposed an act which required the city of Philadelphia
to prioritize garbage removal as well as street cleaning and paving.
This initially helped with the city's sanitation issues,
but the program regressed after the chaos of the American Revolution.
To learn more about Philadelphia's unique relationship with trash,
listen to episode 48 of No Stupid Questions,
where Angela breaks down her husband's mission
to save his community from being buried in dog poop.
Outside of garbage collection,
Angela says that Philadelphia has been the first
for quite a few things throughout history,
but she doesn't give details.
For those who are curious,
Philadelphia is the home
of the country's first stock exchange, its first bank, its first medical school, Perlman School of Medicine,
now at the University of Pennsylvania, and America's first magazine, aptly named American
Magazine. Finally, Stephen can't remember what exactly led to Philadelphia's notorious attack on Santa Claus. On December 15,
1968, the Eagles lost to the Minnesota Vikings. There had been a blizzard and the stadium was
covered in snow. Frank Olivo, a local fan dressed as Santa Claus, walked across the field while a
band played Here Comes Santa Claus. Fans reportedly responded by booing Olivo and pelting him not just with
snowballs, but also beer bottles and hoagie sandwiches. Former Philadelphia mayor and
Pennsylvania governor Ed Brendel told the story on episode 46 of Freakonomics Radio.
It was the last game of the year. It was right before Christmas. It was in Franklin Field,
our old stadium. The Eagles had won two games that year, so the fans were just pissed off in general. And then the regular Santa
Claus they were going to use for this halftime show got sick. So they went into the stands to
find guys in Santa Claus suits and see if they'd volunteer. And the only guy they found was this
scrawny-looking, dirty suit guy. He was the worst-looking Santa Claus I ever saw.
And they put him up on the sled, I guess they must have paid him something, and carted him around,
and everyone, myself included, threw snowballs at Santa. That's it for the Fact Check.
Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, why do Americans love lowbrow culture?
You are esteemed professors at renowned universities, and yet you can embrace vampire novels without shame?
Not a molecule of shame.
That's next week on No Stupid Questions.
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I wonder where that expression comes from, crushed it.
So violent.
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