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Double your salary, twice as miserable
A studio apartment in New York can cost $4,400 a month, more than some people pay on a mortgage for a three- or four-bedroom house in the Atlanta suburbs. The trade is square footage for surface area touch points: friends who live in the city, job opportunities, and people to date. In your 20s that can mean squeezing into a three bedroom, one bath in Murray Hill at 23 and making it work, then going out every night and meeting so many interesting, ambitious people that you never know who will be at the club, the restaurant, or the bar.
How well a place fits depends on life stage and temperament. Tifton, a South Georgia town of about 20,000 people with deer hunting, high school football, and church on Sunday, is lovely for three or four days of seeing family and then boring. San Francisco is one of the prettiest parts of the country and felt monocultural and centered on tech venture capital. Someone more introverted may find New York overwhelming, and a couple with kids who can't afford a much larger place might move to New Jersey, upstate, Connecticut, or Long Island.
Why do people overrate how a new city will feel?
Psychologists David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman asked students in the Midwest and in California about their life satisfaction in a 1998 study. The two groups reported about the same satisfaction, but both groups predicted that Californians were happier. Kahneman called this the focusing illusion: when thinking about a place, people concentrate on a single feature such as climate and forget how little it figures in daily life.
Why do big cities pay workers more?
Economists call the effect agglomeration: workers and firms clustered together become more productive. Economist Edward Glaeser and David Mare found in a 2001 study that workers in large metropolitan areas earned more than similar workers elsewhere. They also found that the gap built up over time as workers stayed in the city, which fit the idea that workers learn from the people around them. Dense job markets also make it easier to find a better match for a given skill.
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