Me Want More Square Footage!

Take commuting, for example. You would think that people would only put up with a long commute if that pain was balanced out by, say, the pleasure of living in a finer home. This behaviour would agree with the golden rule of economics that stipulates humans make rational choices to maximize utility. However, a landmark study of German commuters found that those who suffer long drives to work and back are not maximizing utility at all. In fact, the longer their commutes, the less happy they are with life in general. Rayo says this is because while we become dulled to the wonders of our new houses over time, we never get used to ongoing irritations, like tailgaters, or gridlock, or missing dinner with the family. And there is plenty of irritation to be had: the average Canadian now spends nearly twelve full days a year travelling between work and home.

I’ve been tempted by the suburbs myself. With their wide lawns and cul-de-sacs, they seem to offer a rough approximation of the pastoral landscapes that made our ancestors feel safe. This is an illusion. In the US, at least, people who live in low-density sprawl are more likely to die violently than their inner-city cousins — thanks mostly to car accidents. Meanwhile, a Columbia University study found that suburban kids are far more likely to get hooked on drugs and booze. Why? Not enough chill-out time with their parents, for one thing. And where are suburban parents in those crucial after-school hours? Drumming their dashboards on marathon commutes home from distant offices. We are fooled by the suburbs’ verdant disguise, even as they lock us into more dangerous lives.

Not that it’s hard to fool us. The happiness economists have come to believe that people are almost always wrong when predicting how content today’s choices will make them in the future.

Even though my new house sits well inside the commuter’s divide, this revelation has been cause for some anxiety these past months. The contractors lifted our old house off its crumbling foundations in June. They poured concrete, built new walls, and lowered the thing in July. Windows arrived in August. In September, we were convinced we needed a new roof and vaulted ceilings over the kitchen. We wrote more cheques, and I fretted into October. Was this house going to be an expensive machine for unhappiness? Was it even on the right street? This last question, I soon found out, is just as important as the shape of the house, and the answer is tied to how we feel about the Joneses.

During twenty years of research among baboons in the Serengeti, woolly Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky found that low-ranking baboons got stressed out under the constant, threatening frowns of alpha males. Their bodies responded by pumping out hormones that were terrific for powering short sprints away from aggressors but terrible for long-term health. Sapolsky pointed out to me that humans are just as affected by status as other primates. For example, a study of thousands of British civil servants found that bureaucrats with lower social ranking died younger than their superiors. In the US, the poor are sickest in cities where income disparity is widest, suggesting that merely feeling poor can hurt us.

Sapolsky believes his baboons might have something to teach us about how to deal with status anxiety. Average baboons mitigate the stress of subordination by hanging out, picking and eating parasites from one another’s fur—in other words, by spending quality time with friends. It’s the same with humans. We have evolved to be social. Think again of our hunter-gatherer ancestors: when they worked together, they fared much better against enemies and toothy beasts. Our bodies still reward us for playing well with others. When we co-operate or have trusting interactions, our brains pump out oxytocin, a neurotransmitter that makes us feel good. The best part about this is that we never get used to these positive interactions the way we get used to money or more stuff.

Trust, then, offers a fast track to happiness, but what does it have to do with real estate? Tons, as it turns out. Economists at the University of British Columbia mashed up Canadian survey and census data and found that the happiest neighbourhoods in big cities tend to be those where trust is highest.

Here in Vancouver, feelings of trust flow most freely in wealthy neighbourhoods. In other words, folks in spiffy West Vancouver are unlikely to panic if they drop their wallet while walking the dog. They know a neighbour will return it. Folks in the city’s beleaguered Downtown Eastside don’t share the same confidence.

Given the importance of trust, maybe I’d be better off owning the humblest shack on the best street in West Vancouver. Chris Barrington-Leigh, one of the ubc study authors, admitted that a superficial reading of his work might support that conclusion. Along with the high trust apparently swirling around wealthy neighbourhoods, the data reveals a twist on the status equation: while we do keep tabs on how the Joneses are faring, we actually absorb their successes. If Mrs. Jones buys a Ferrari, I may feel comparatively impoverished, but if she parks it out front I will also feel a certain ownership of her status. “You end up caring about your neighbours,” Barrington-Leigh told me. “I’m not just talking about empathy. I’m talking about considering your neighbours as part of your identity, and then comparing your neighbourhood to others.” We don’t just measure our success against our neighbours’ success, we measure it against that of everyone else in the city.

However, Barrington-Leigh urges caution about using the wealth/trust matrix as a reference guide for home buying. Sure, living among rich neighbours might crank up my sense of status more than it would corrode it. But buying a more expensive house in a fancier neighbourhood would also commit me to an even heftier mortgage, which would lock me into working harder, which means I’d have less time to hang out and scratch my friends’ backs. This back-scratching, or potlucking, or poker-nighting, or block-watching is the most efficient way of all to increase long-term well-being. “A slight boost in neighbourly trust has a greater effect on happiness than doubling your income,” Barrington-Leigh assured me. And here’s the clincher: it’s the trust we feel in our friends and neighbours that makes us happy, not the trust they happen to feel for one another. It’s easier to cultivate trust among the pals we’ve got than to try to catch a free ride by moving into a trusting neighbourhood.