The always-interesting Gretchen Rubin offers up this one-minute movie. I take the point to be that we under-appreciate the routine time we spend with our family and friends. Cherishing this time would give us better lives, it would seem. But why is this time so hard to cherish properly? Don’t we want better lives? Are we passing up a free lunch?
In the movie the little girl says that she loved that time with her mother, namely doing the routines of taking the bus. The routines are an investment in later good memories.
Are our memories determined by the value of the average bus trip, or by the value of the marginal bus trip? (Of course to some extent it is a weighted average of both.) I suspect the fun of the marginal trip weighs fairly heavily in our backward-looking assessment of our routines. Most of the bus trips don’t get noticed or perhaps they are even a drag. But whenever the pressures of the day occasionally slacked off, and the mother had more time with her daughter, that time seemed so wonderful.
So if you want good memories, should you make sure you don’t spend too much time with your kids? If I ate chicken in mole sauce every day my memories of it wouldn’t be so special. (Perhaps we measure peaks rather than computing the area under the integral?) But now the making and tasting of the mole stands as an occasion to remember. High total value equals low marginal value and perhaps poor memories. Low total value equals high marginal value and better memories. Of course if your total time with your kids is truly low, they will hate you and your marginal time with your kids will be crummy as well.
Mr Cowen, you should blog about this(http://www.nypost.com/seven/02052008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_real_scandal_243911.htm?page=1). Bad lending regulations were probably a cause of the subprime crisis.
Regards,
Carlos
This talk about producing good memories reminds me a bit too much of people who always go on busy, interesting holidays that lead to good memories and fine boasting afterwards, but who are too busy and tired during the holiday to really enjoy it.
While this makes a bit of sense for holidays, where the time spend remembering is much more than the holiday itself, it seems like a horrible way to plan your life. You spend many years with your kids, why not spend in the way that is most pleasant at the moment itself, instead of leading to the most pleasant memories afterwards?
I think it’s been demonstrated pretty effectively that we remember the end of an experience and how it felt at the peaks. Kahneman talks in the Nobel Prize acceptance talk about a study of colonoscopies where they actually added a less-painful, but needless, few seconds on the end of the process and patients reported it as a less painful process overall than when they didn’t add those few seconds.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahnemann-lecture.pdf
GreatZamfir – are you suggesting I should do heroin with my children?
If you think you and your children will enjoy that the most, and that it won’t screw up your or their lives in the future, please go ahead… But seriously, of course you should have a ‘sustainable’ lifestyle that makes sure life is still good in the future, and having good memories is probably some part of a pleasant future. I just don’t think it’s a very major part of it, nor do I believe that planning your life around ‘memorable events’ will really make you happy in the short or long run.
It seems to me that most of these sentimentally satisfying activities can only be recognized ex-post. I thus find the bus story dubious–did the parent *really* start thinking ‘thank goodness, another day on the bus?’The story strains my credulity since it was evidently made after the bus rides ended.
Furthermore, it wasn’t the bus ride itself, but rather the sighting of a dog that was the true cherished memory. Talking about the bus ride seems to miss the point–if I found a hundred bucks on the bus on day it would certainly be a cherished memory, but I’d only cherish the thought of future bus rides insofar as I expected future finacial luck.
So if you want good memories, should you make sure you don’t spend too much time with your kids?
This would make sense, perhaps, if creating good memories was the only goal in raising your children, or maybe the dominant goal.
But there are many other things and many other things more important.
I wonder how important happy memories are in creating present happiness. I wonder if people with generally happy dispositions tend to keep/recall/manufacture happy memories from their past, no matter what it is. And maybe less so with sad sacks. Perhaps the mind creates a set of memories consistent with its nature.
Tom, I think for the sake of our waistlines it is very important we do not let the poutine become routine.
Hi Tyler,
This may not be the best place to pose a question like this. After all, more than 15 comments have already been made. So, I suppose I run the risk of diluting the quality of the comments. However I will take that risk.
For those non-economically minded of us who read your blog religiously, where can we find a good understanding of the basic economic principles? I realized as I read this post that I had no idea what Marginal Revolution even meant. Hence, I had no idea what “the value of the marginal bus trip” meant.
Please advise!
Your loyal reader,
Deron Bauman
Deron:
Very brief overview is at wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics
Most of what is discussed here is micro (basically why do people make the choices they make), but there is a healthy dose of macro (what is the state of the economy and how is it changing).
For a more detailed explaination find an old edition of Landsburg’s Micro text and Mankiw’s Macro texts.
One problem with this analysis is that the word “routine” is meant to describe many things.
Some routines are ceremonies. We enjoy doing it in the same way every day/year. Like the comment above on the peanut butter. They bring a sense of continuity, anticipation, etc.
Some routines are cherished memories because are the indicator of a prior happiness circumstance that has nothing to do with the routine itself. I remember walking home with my wife after work. I did not like the walk then, but now it is a salient memory of the years we spent in London, and I cherish the memory of that.
Some other routines are just boring and monotonous. They are fogotten and then they fall out of the dataset.
I hope this comment is good. If it isn’t, I hope we are already at the place in the comment thread where low quality comments are acceptable.
So if you want good memories, should you make sure you don’t spend too much time with your kids?
No, the opposite. As the film shows, you have no way of knowing what small incident will spark a good memory. Therefore, you have to invest a great deal of time to garner those few memories.
It’s like the complete works of Bach you recommend. He wrote hundreds of pieces to get the few dozen ones that really stand out. Could he have sat down and said “I’m only going to write a few dozen pieces, but they shall be outstanding”? Of course not. Are the few dozen worth the effort? Of course. Do the hundreds of lesser pieces also have their own merits? Obviously, or you wouldn’t recommend spending a few hundred dollars on them.
I get a http 404 error when I try to access the “one-minute film”. Any alternative sources?
Tyler, you are overthinking this.
There is no quality time. There is just time spent with your children. You cannot reasonably predict what memories you and your children will share, and it’s probably not worth the effort to try.
If you spend enough time, there will be enough memories.
[Like any advice, this can be carried to extremes. I don't think watching TV together is particularly likely to create family closeness, unless you are watching shows with a teenager and both making wisecracks. That's great fun. Or watching Michigan beat Ohio State, but I barely remember than happening lately.]
freakonomics goes freakofreud…these high end memories most likely have nothing to do with the marketplace or even reality. As economists surely know, one day all parents will pass from this mammal existence and what’s left will be fleeting memories, conjured largely in our grieving imagination. Spend time with your kids now because you and they will appreciate it now.
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