As much as I love Edmonton, for a few months in the winter it does become a very unpleasant place. It’s cold every day for months and the sun is up after I leave for school in the morning and down before I go home at night. I usually kind of spend these few months as a grumpy hermit with the only upside being grumpy hermits seem to get a ton of work done and I need to get said ton of work done! I was thinking yesterday as the sun ended it’s daily trek across the sky at shortly before 5 o’clock and the days were showing signs of not returning to warm for another 4 months, “This is really a very marginal climate”.
In economics there is a concept that when some sort of business is operating in a “marginal” environment, the profit it is able to make is what determines the profit of businesses in more prime environments. Let me do a simple quick glossy explanation. Say there are two Starbucks stores, one at the exit to a busy LRT stop where people are getting off for work wanting coffee and one on a quiet street corner where the occasional patron stops in on their way to whatever they might be doing. If the quiet street corner is the worst location a Starbucks can operate and make a reasonable profit then this is the marginal location. Now if the costs of operating the Starbucks in the train station are low enough that it makes more money than the Starbucks on the quiet corner it would make sense for the owner of the Starbucks on the corner to try and acquire the more profitable location hence driving up property/rent/other costs at the more profitable location until it is once again on par with the less profitable. Obviously not all Starbucks are equally as profitable, but the concept is still valid, economies just aren’t perfectly fluid.
This made me think about whether there was some such similar concept with regards to where we live and the happiness we derive from that location. If people in Los Angeles, where they don’t have as ludicrously short days or cold winters as Edmonton, were happier in general than Edmontonians then it would make sense for Edmontonians to leave Edmonton for Los Angeles. Is there some mechanism whereby the influx of people to the happier locations causes more pollution/crime etc. so that on a generational level the happiness of humans in all locations is determined by the happiness of the humans on the margin? Is there perhaps on the other hand some restrictive force causing human relocation and happiness to not be a fluid enough economic system for the balancing to occur? I can see that the latter might be the case if you were a starving farmer living day to day in a third world country, but on a generational level I can’t imagine a similar mechanism preventing relocation between countries of at least medium wealth? Immigration laws?? Hard to say. Interesting to think about though.