How much is an hour-long commute worth?

This article is a couple of years old, but still interesting and relevant, and it involves something that many of you have probably run into at some point in your lives. How much is a short commute worth? Or, looked at another way, how much should you be compensated for a long commute? As you might have guessed by this point, economists have looked into this:

How much would we need to be compensated to make up for the hellish experience of a long commute? Two economists at the University of Zurich, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, actually went about quantifying it, in a now famous 2004 paper entitled “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.” They found that for an extra hour of commuting time, you would need to be compensated with a massive 40 percent increase in salary to make it worthwhile.

Long commutes are the worst, aren’t they? There are some more interesting facts in the same article:

This week, researchers at Umea University in Sweden released a startling finding: Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.

And:

Robert Putnam, the famed Harvard political scientist and author of Bowling Alone, names long commuting times as one of the most robust predictors of social isolation. He posits that every 10 minutes spent commuting results in 10 percent fewer “social connections.” Those social connections tend to make us feel happy and fulfilled.

And:

According to research from Thomas James Christian of Brown University, each minute you commute is associated with “a 0.0257 minute exercise time reduction, a 0.0387 minute food preparation time reduction, and a 0.2205 minute sleep time reduction.”

Given my fascination with people at the tail end of the bell curve, I have to point this out: in 2006, Midas sponsored a contest for the nation’s longest commute. The winner: 7 hours round-trip every single day. That’s 372 miles total. (H/T: Priceonomics)

TRACK YOUR CREDIT CARDS: Via Mommy Points, here’s a site called Card Watchdog that’ll help you track annual fees, minimum spend requirements, and so forth.

NATE TOBIK MAKES BOOK VALUE INTERESTING: For those of you into stock valuation, an interesting point over at Oddball Stocks:

I have a friend who runs a factoring business, he sent me an email recently discussing how many client receivables are hopelessly overstated and will most likely never be collected.  He brought up a good point, a point that Graham discussed in Security Analysis.  In all companies liabilities are real, whomever a liability is owed will ask for it to be settled at some point, but assets are never sure, cash is sure, but the value of receivables, inventory and property is often a best guess.  While inventory might be overstated, a debt on the balance sheet is never wrong.  I have yet to read a financial statement with the note “We borrowed $10m, but the lender decided they only wanted $9.5m back.”

The whole article is a pretty good discussion of book value for those of you who are interested.

COLLEGE JOB-HUNTING ADVICE FOLLOW-UP: Last week, I advised college students not to worry about grades and to focus instead on making friends. You know who else has similar sentiments? Google’s head of HR, that’s who:

One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

The whole article is actually pretty interesting and confirms my suspicions nobody really knows how to hire very well. It’s not an easy task.