"Consider the following thought experiment: you are driving on a road"

[phantom power]

Consider the following thought experiment: you are driving on a road — let’s arbitrarily call it Interstate 91 — and must choose a lane. Traffic is so heavy that you can’t really change lanes thereafter. But there are many bad patches along the road; half of the distance can be covered at 60 miles an hour, but the other half only at 15.

You might imagine that your average speed is halfway between 15 and 60, but a little thought shows that this isn’t true: your average speed is only 24 miles an hour. Also, the lanes aren’t perfectly correlated: sometimes your lane is going 60 while the next is going 15, sometimes it’s the reverse. Again, you might think that this means you spend equal amounts of time watching the other lane whiz by and whizzing by yourself, but not so: you spend four times as much time watching the other guys race past.

And this creates intense frustration and anger, a sense that it’s grossly unfair that you are in the wrong lane. This sense persists even though (a) you have worked out the analysis above, and realize that in principle the lanes are equally good or bad and (b) you have in fact been playing leapfrog with the same Boltbus the whole way, so that you know that in fact neither lane is better. No matter; you are angry, frazzled, and late for your family event. (Which you make up for by having a good time, and drinking enough wine that it’s past 9 when you realize that you didn’t post Friday Night Music).

But it’s a good thing I didn’t ride the train (which for complicated reasons wasn’t an option); after all, that would have diminished my individualism.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/friday-night-music-sprawl-again/

[GeorgeGist]

1. I need ...

to take a whiz.