Do you punch him in the face?
Do you throw a snowball at him?
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven 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, dammit.
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, Philadelphia.
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 US 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 Glaser.
I know the paper of which you speak being a fan of Ed Glaser myself, Oren Zeeve and
Joshua Gottlieb or the other authors on this paper.
Unhappy cities, I believe it's called.
Yeah, great title, right?
And of course, I immediately turn the page thinking that it would just only be about
Philadelphia 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 hoarding 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, like, I'll just be 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.
Let's go from zero to ten.
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 nine point two.
Oh, I love that you used a decimal.
There's a false precision with that.
I was going to go nine point two five 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
workplace 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
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 was a table of like, here are some example cities
and their average happiness.
It's essentially an 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 asked 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, 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?
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 cetera, et cetera, differences.
I'm sure it is true that what goes into being satisfied, what matters to you, that's got a
very, 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 Glaser 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.
And these are 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 is in 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?
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 am 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. 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 was 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, oh, this place is worse?
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 you 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.
But when we talk about that paper, just so the main points are clear, this unhappy 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 glazer 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.
