The Wall Street Journal has published a “misery index” that ranks Portland as the nation’s second-most miserable city after Phoenix. Or, at least, the second-most miserable of the 20 cities included in the ranking. The newspaper’s index is supposed to be based on changes in unemployment, housing prices, and gas prices in the last year.
As much as the Antiplanner likes to read articles bashing the city I love to hate, I have reservations about any such “indices” of misery or anything else. Here is a conundrum, for example: why is it that higher gas prices (meaning transportation is less affordable) are considered bad, but higher housing prices (meaning housing is less affordable) is considered good?
The Journal‘s answer, no doubt, is that housing is an asset while gasoline is a consumption good. This isn’t really true; housing is a consumable as well. But even if it were true, not everyone bought their home a year ago. Over the last five years, housing prices dropped 15 percent in Boston but rose in Dallas. Yet, because the index is based on an annual change, Boston is considered less miserable than Dallas.
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One thing not considered in the Journal‘s index is traffic congestion or the time required to get to work. The Texas Transportation Institute estimates changes in congestion. The Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey estimates the time required to get to work (see, for example, table GCT0801 in the 2009 survey). While neither of these measures is perfect, they are at least as good as some of the data used in the Journal‘s index.
Final question: Why was the Journal report limited to 20 cities, meaning Baltimore, Houston, Philadelphia, and St. Louis–all of whose urban areas are larger than Portland–were left off the list? (And if we are truly talking cities, not urban areas, then Austin, Charlotte, Columbus, El Paso, Ft. Worth, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Louisville, Memphis, Milwaukee, Nashville, San Antonio, and San Jose are all also larger than Portland, though St. Louis is not.) The answer is probably that the Journal used Case-Shiller housing data (the Journal credits “S&P”), which is based on a sampling of a limited number of cities and states. It should have used the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s home price index, which uses the Case-Shiller methodology but includes all 50 states and some 400 urban areas.
What items do you think should be included in a misery index? To be valid, any answers must have data available for most or all of the nation’s urban areas. Texas Transportation Institute data cover about 100 urban areas; Census Bureau data cover some 400 urban areas. I like the Business Week index, which counted per capita antidepressants sales, but I don’t know where to get those data.
I wonder if the fact that there are so many self-hating liberals in Portland has anything to do with the misery.
Like the Antiplanner, I agree that houses are consumables and not investments. However, falling house values do make the residents more miserable, so it’s a valid item to measure, in my opinion.
I think the interactions with the local governments should be included in these measurements. Those of us in Portland, for example, live under Soviet style leftist tyranny, while those who live in Boise, for example, probably don’t need $5000 of permits to build a vegetable garden or tool shed in their back yard.
The Antiplanner wrote:
One thing not considered in the Journal‘s index is traffic congestion or the time required to get to work.
You are correct – that is a serious omission (at least in my opinion).
The Antiplanner asked:
What items do you think should be included in a misery index?
Private-sector job gains or job losses at the county level, because the regional or statewide level is not fine enough – and some counties in a region or state can have anti-job policies, while neighboring counties can be much more committed to building up their base of private-sector jobs.
Misery index:
Unemployment
Local CPI relative to National CPI
Violent Crime Rates
Property Crime Rates
School achievement on standardized tests
Median commute time
Median commute distance
Combined state/local tax burden (note rates) per capita
Local median wages
I think that pretty much covers most of what people really care about and think about when considering a move.
“What items do you think should be included in a misery index?”
Percentage of the population that wears only vintage clothes and watches only indy films and hangs out at coffee shops all day and is seemingly unemployed but can afford to go to indy rock concerts and rides single speed cruiser bicycles to stores to buy vinyl records while shunning great microbrews for PBR in a can.
Frank,
Sounds like an excellent measure. Where can I download the data?
Most stories by popular publications that include an index which is used to rank cities, states or other convenient geographical units are pretty worthless. Thanks to the WSJ for providing yet another example.
To me, the matter is much simpler. Look at long-term out-migration trends. In the short term, residents are willing to tolerate a certain amount of “misery” to live in a particular location. In the long run though, it’s exit over voice every time. The data don’t lie.
Another thing not mentioned is health outcomes. For example, what are the cancer rates in the given cities? What is the survival rate of people with a particular kind of cancer compared to the national average? These are two very specific statistics, but the general idea of how healthy a population is should factor in somewhere in the “misery” index.
What about the percentage of people on antidepressants?
Misery, just like happiness, is incredibly difficult (impossible?) to quantify for a given population with the tools that we currently have. Any metric that is not horrendously convoluted will not produce any meaningful results, and any metric that is horrendously convoluted may simply be measuring the wrong things.
Another thing not mentioned is health outcomes.
Well, we don’t expect Murdoch’s outfits to point out anything that may tie to health care. Nonetheless, werdnagreb has an excellent point about what metrics and indicators we choose to depict what happens on the ground. We see this in the media every day.
DS
I’m a little confused…please explain to me the comment regarding housing as a consumable. It’s kind of confusing, I have to admit.
cincygrad,
When the WSJ says that a decline in gas prices is good but a rise in home prices is good, it is implying that gas is a consumable item while housing is an investment. In fact, in a normal housing market, housing is not an investment: it requires maintenance and upkeep to maintain its value. It is only in markets distorted by artificial shortages that housing appears to become something people would invest in rather than just live in.
In the long term, housing prices barely keep above inflation. As The Antiplanner has stated, when you add in other expenses, like taxes, insurance, and maintenance, housing is not an investment; it is an expense.
The only true real estate investment is a property purchased for the purpose of renting to tenants at a profit.
I’m glad Baltimore was not on the list.
Surprise! Planners never learned that cities might shrink.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/us/06detroit.html?src=me&ref=general
Though Andy, ghost towns have been around for quite a while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_town