Happiness Is A No-Rebuild Option
We were dithering outside Town Hall last night, trying to decide whether to attend the Science Lecture -- Harvard's Daniel Gilbert talking about our ability to predict what will make us happy -- or the convention of transportation nerds upstairs. Both were $5. Both started at 7:30pm.
In the end, we chose Gilbert. He was only going to be speaking the one night (true, he does have a blog), and we are fairly certain the epic Viaduct "conversation" will continue, ad nauseam. But more importantly, Gilbert's notion that people aren't tremendous at making decisions about future happiness struck us as relevant to the contentiousness of the Viaduct debate. (For those of you who think this was the wrong freaking choice, here's the Stranger's Erica C. Barnett's take, twice, plus this video of a similar lunchtime talk at City Hall.)
300 people eventually crammed into downstairs, with unlucky latecomers peering through the windows. The emcee said the talk had been promoted by upcoming.org and 43 Places (though a book talk seemed a better fit for plugging their new project All Consuming. We'd seen Daniel Spils come in earlier, but it just seemed like that kind of lecture). The talk was recorded for later broadcast on KUOW, by the way, though no one ever says when that will be or how you'd find out.
As a case in point in decision-making and the future, consider Mayor Greg Nickels, in 2006 a pronounced tunnel advocate. As the Stranger's Slog points out, in 2001, he was lambasting then-Mayor Paul Schell in these terms: "Talk of a huge new tunnel is another expensive, wasteful vision of the Mayor and we simply don’t have the time or resources to travel down this path. We need solutions immediately." Today, besides the $4.4 billion for the tunnel, Nickels is hoping to raise $1.8 billion for city transportation projects.
What gives? Luckily, Gilbert decided to avoid a gloss on his book, Stumbling on Happiness, and focused on this question: "How do we do the right thing at all possible times?" So maybe we can make sense of what looks like flip-floppery.
We've known for a long time what the formula for happiness is, Gilbert mentioned: Pascal and Fermat's theory of probabilities indicates that you simply multiply the odds that something will happen by the value it would bring. This is fairly easy to apply with gambling, since games of chance come with odds built-in and money represents the value. (Unless you're at the Washington State Lottery site trying to find the odds of winning at Lotto. You'd think that would be on the FAQ.) Yet Las Vegas still collects about $7 billion annually from games of chance where the house has the advantage.
As odds-makers, it appears, we suck. Most of us use a simple heuristic to assess odds -- we try to picture the situation and see how quickly instances come to mind. Are there more dogs on leashes than pigs on leashes in Seattle, asked Gilbert? We could all think of more dogs more quickly than pig sightings.
Yet this heuristic fails all the time. Because our brains register change best, and extreme change is registered more deeply, the improbable incident can come to mind faster than the more probable. Gilbert's example is being stuck in the slow line at the check-out. Every time we get slowed to a crawl, we give that much more attention than if we breezed through at an average rate.
With the lottery, many of us are fine with the astronomical odds so long as no one else has a better chance of winning. If someone named Ralph had bought 6 million tickets and we were only thinking about getting one, we'd probably not play that lottery. Yet Ralph is "everybody else." It's the same situation -- we just don't notice how bad the odds are until we can personalize it.
What's not easy to connect is ourselves with failure. We're not very good at developing worst-case scenarios that are actually the worst. In most cases, we've spent all our time visualizing how we will succeed, not analyzing the potential for failure, so we develop an optimistic bias. Depressive realism, in contrast, refers to the evidence that depressed people tend not to overstate the amount of personal control they have over a situation.
If this sounds troubling, there's no light at the end of the tunnel yet. As bad as we are with odds-making, we're worse at assessing something's value (according to behavioral economists). Theory tells us that value is determined by your present options, yet in practice we're always comparing with a price we think we saw last week. Or, to use an example Gilbert presented, try this scenario:
You're heading out to a show you've been wanting to see. You've got your ticket, which cost $20, and $20 in cash. On the way, you lose your ticket. Will you pay another $20 to see the show? Many people say No, $40 is too much. Yet if the situation is changed slightly, if you were carrying two $20s with the plan of buying the ticket at the door, and you lost a $20 bill, you'd probably be more inclined to think, Damn! and go ahead and purchase the ticket. Losing money is just unlucky, but losing a ticket means you're paying more than everyone else to see the same show.
This is a compelling interpretation that makes sense only inside your head.
Other issues with assigning value come from the fact that we judge value by contrast. Even with items in dollars, where it's easy to see the monetary value difference, we're prone to slip. We might drive across town to save $15 on a microwave, for instance, but with a big-ticket item, like a car, $15 in price appears utterly insignificant. We're so inconsistent, we might pay a few hundred dollars more for a car rather than inconvenience ourselves, and then use it to pick up the bargain microwave the next day.
We also react differently to value depending on whether we think we're acquiring something or giving something up. We hate when we seem to be losing what we had, which is why people have bad gambling experiences trying to "win back" their original amount. Also, we're affected by the perceived range of value -- every retailer knows to keep a high-priced "aspirational" item next to the regular version so that it appears a bargain in contrast.
Lastly, we overrate the value of variety. We enjoy our favorites more than variety. In a spin on this, too much variety causes decision-making gridlock, as does trying to choose between two relatively equal values. You'd think we'd just pick one randomly, but when we can't decide, we don't decide. We just walk away.
Gridlock, of course, brings us back to the Viaduct. The P-I just produced a feature about "the odds" that Seattle can simply do without a viaduct.
The idea, dismissed for years by many as impractical, is being more seriously considered in some circles as officials ponder the gigantic cost of replacing the aging, earthquake-damaged structure that has loomed above the city's waterfront for 53 years.... Why not simply tear the viaduct down, save years of construction hassle and simply disperse the 103,000 daily trips onto surface streets and into beefed-up bus service, some ask?
The argument process goes like this: A: It won't work. B: It's worked in other cities. A: Those other cities were different. B: Yes, but what is the same is that people said, "It won't work," because of an assumption -- that in any scenario car traffic is going to (in fact, must) increase -- while insisting on building infrastructure that encourages increased car traffic. A: You're a cheap hippie who's anti-business and wants us all to live in the Stone Age.
In truth, we're gambling on the future no matter what we do. The full mile-long tunnel includes betting the money will be there to finance it, at $850,000 per foot (and that glacial till will be impervious to that huge earthquake we're due for). A viaduct rebuild, at perhaps over $3 billion, is not inexpensive, either. The no-rebuild option, at $800 million seems positively chintzy (except that about a dozen Seattle schools are closing this year to save $4.8 million).
If Gilbert's findings raise any red flags, it's that we should be careful about a) predicting the future, and b) knowing that a particular option is going to make us happy. From that perspective, the tunnel option has a huge strike against it. It assumes that the future will provide what Nickels argued we didn't have in 2001 (i.e., a few billion dollars extra), while denying Seattle the chance to use the next six years to figure out how to reduce our dependency on cars. In no one's plan is there an extra $4.5 billion available for that.
Seattle has been talking around that issue, trying to take alternative transportation steps without interfering in any way with a car being the optimal way to get around. But the question of the Viaduct, the question of how to do the right thing at this moment in time, is a fork in the road. Inarguably, because of their expense, the tunnel or rebuild options lead to more cars and less of everything else.
