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Why is it so hard to keep the house clean?
The simplest hypothesis is that we like to complain about a dirty or messy house but in fact we are observing an optimum. We just don't want to put more time in.
The behavioral economist believes we are making the same mistake over and over again. What might that mistake be?
1. We clear away papers, books, and dirt, but we do not develop new systems for preventing their future accumulation. In other words, we reduce the immediate stress but discount the future stress of future dirtiness at too high a rate.
2. A free-rider problem, combined with ill-defined property rights, means that piles accumulate repeatedly. Cleaning is like removing a few cars from one lane of a two-lane highway. New cars (piles) step in quickly to fill the temporary gap. In a multi-person household, cleaning just shifts the traffic into different lanes rather than pricing the road.
A real solution might involve the random destruction or taxation of the property of other household members, so as to limit accumulation in the first place. Bonuses for savings could help as well, since savings are a relatively liquid and low storage cost means of carrying wealth.
3. We overrate the liquidity value of inventories. We want many things at hand which are of little or no use, perhaps because of an endowment effect. Most people should throw away anything they have not touched for the last three years.
4. Framing effects mean that we can get used to many kinds of messes. The real problems come from the people who keep their homes clean. Tax them and their cleanliness, for the same reasons that Bob Frank wishes to tax status goods.
Here is my previous post Tyler Cowen, Ramist. Here is my idea of how to clean up the house. Here is my post on the tennis ball problem.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 11, 2006 at 06:12 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
When I saw the headline in my RSS feed, I thought this was about the series of House of Representatives scandals that erupt once or twice every generation. The first sentence, at least, applies...
Posted by: John Jenkins at Oct 11, 2006 6:57:50 AM
This is a very interesting post, partly because the problem seems so mundane.
1. Too high a discount rate? Since there is no market between clean houses and dirty ones, the concept of a discount rate does not useful.
2. Free-rider? Even in a two person household with the appropriate chore list, one or both have too much stuff.
3. The liquidity value of storage? Yes, I like this observation. (My wife likes it more, preferring to toss all of my "valuable" papers out.) Households should not adopt a long tail distribution of non-digital goods?
4. Framing? Hmm, framing effects are most powerful when two analytically equivalent choices treated differently, in a systemic fashion. I don't see a use for the concept here.
What about Schelling's notion of commitment? How can we into a compelling bargain with our future self to clean up. By putting a vidicam of our messy home on youtube? Oh, I forgot Danny Gilbert says that we will always be disappointed by the deals that our past self made with us.
Posted by: michael webster at Oct 11, 2006 7:36:17 AM
Some of this applies to offices as well. However, I have had
this unpleasant experience on quite a few occasions of "finally"
throwing something away and then the very next day suddenly
discovering that I need it. Does to stimulate the old loss
aversion tendency, which is also involved here.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Oct 11, 2006 8:45:44 AM
Wow.... never thought i would be able to talk about cleaning. It is the truth to
stay on top of your cleaning. Speaking from a neat and clean person i will say that
staying on top of the dust and keeping up with what is going on in the world today
you will have less stress. Keeping up with new products will help you throw away
the old and keep a cycle going. Keeeping clean will also benefit your health and
leave you with more time to focus on other things. Its basically simple.....pick up
after yourself as soon as your done with whatever you are doing.
Posted by: renee at Oct 11, 2006 9:00:38 AM
Maybe a market failure coordination problem?
Me and my wife sorted our endless hatred of cleaning and agreed to hire a cleaner. The results is pretty outstanding. Coming home to a completely clean house, and to get the most return for our money we have to keep it tidy by not leaving piles of stuff around.
Posted by: Glenn Athey at Oct 11, 2006 9:03:18 AM
So what you're saying is that people should have garage sales? Seriously, a garage sale essentially tackles 2, 3, and 4, with number 1 being handled somewhat tangentially (the threat of having to sell your stuff at 1/10th the value sometime in the immediate future of you keep buying more stuff).
Posted by: Rob Stevens at Oct 11, 2006 10:17:22 AM
"The real problems come from the people who keep their homes clean. Tax them and their cleanliness, for the same reasons that Bob Frank wishes to tax status goods."
Is Tyler suggesting we make messes at our friends houses if they keep them to clean?
Posted by: Brent at Oct 11, 2006 10:26:30 AM
I once again fit into the pants which were too tight for me four years ago. Since I wear basic jeans and khakis the once I had lost no value during the interim, and their continued presence served as an incentive.
Posted by: triticale at Oct 11, 2006 10:42:20 AM
There's also a long-term ordering effect in piles of stuff-- things you don't use sink to the bottom of the stack. So, cleaning up the piles of stuff on your desk (or on your floor) actually increases entropy because you lose the information about what you don't use.
Posted by: MattF at Oct 11, 2006 10:50:12 AM
The biggest "free rider" problem in my case is the literally pounds of unsolicited mail and crap I get on a weekly basis. Some of the stuff can be pitched immediately but some can't, if for no other reason, because of my paranoid fears about identiy theft.
Then there's my employer: people seeking an endorsement from him sent him lots of stuff, more than 90 percent of which, as Sturgeon predicted, is crap. The stuff is sent to my home (I work out of my home), where I have to at least pretend to look at it.
The result is a depressing office.
Posted by: Roberto Rivera at Oct 11, 2006 11:21:31 AM
5. Not enough people doing FlyLady http://www.flylady.net/
Posted by: Jacqueline at Oct 11, 2006 11:57:03 AM
A 20mo old and a 6 y/o.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti at Oct 11, 2006 12:00:06 PM
Not #2 (free rider problem). I am clean when I live with others. Messy when I live alone.
I am messy, but once I start cleaning, I tend to persist until the place is absolutely spotless. I maintain it for a while. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, I let the place go. Evidently there is some cost to getting into the cleaning mood, so that the place must be quite a mess before I am prompted to get into the cleaning mood. But once I am in that groove, I stay in the groove until the place is spotless. And beyond. I might start rearranging the furniture or buy new furniture. Once the place is clean, I keep it clean for a while, but at some point I do not. And then the "broken window" phenomenon apparently takes hold (not Bastiat's broken window; Giuliani's broken window). The shift from cleanliness to first level messiness is painful, costly, but the shift from first level messiness to second level messiness is much less costly - I perceive much less of a difference. Thus, once the initial hump is crossed, the mess accumulates.
Having stuff you don't need is perhaps a distinct problem from having what you have neat and organized, or piled up all over the place.
Posted by: Constant at Oct 11, 2006 12:03:11 PM
If the level of tidiness represents an optimum, why assume underinvestment in mess-prevention or an unreasonably low present value of future cleaning effort? The revenues of Container Store, California Closets et al seem to falsify this premise.
Posted by: mkl at Oct 11, 2006 2:07:32 PM
A real solution might involve the random destruction...of the property of other household members
Are you suggesting that I get a cat?
Posted by: neil at Oct 11, 2006 2:10:46 PM
12 is way, way too many balls, unless one of you is just beginning to learn to play. If that's the case, it will get to be a lot more fun once you get just a little bit better, so why not get lessons (of course this assumes you are not spending a lot of time at the net kissing or something)?
I'm curious, from the schedule you keep I'd guess you actually run after the balls when it is time to get them, am I right?
Posted by: Dave Meleney at Oct 11, 2006 2:48:26 PM
I second Constant's comment on the free-rider explanation. I avoid creating messes in common spaces out of a sense of obligation, but it's very difficult for me to keep a room clean when I'm the only one who uses it.
Posted by: Brandon Berg at Oct 11, 2006 2:49:13 PM
Per mkl's comments, one of the reasons for the success of the Container Store, etc. is we have more stuff and more house per person than in the past. So you have both the free-rider problem and more goods per person: more of us live alone or with only a few others reducing tidiness incentives and we have more possessions than previously. Think of every member having an entertainment system, rather than one tv and stereo for the household. Maybe messiness is just the downside of the consumer revolution. (The upside is more of us own stocks and houses, but then have to keep all the attendant paperwork showing ownership, etc.)
Posted by: Georgiana at Oct 11, 2006 3:44:45 PM
Discriminate when choosing a partner.
Find one who does not leave an unwashed bowl of ice cream at her backside for two hours at a time, an empty water jug in the same place for two days at a time, who is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of trying, just once, to put something back where she found it and who does not seem to prefer living in chaos to living in order.
Posted by: Martin at Oct 11, 2006 3:59:01 PM
If I was a woman, I would discriminate against Martin.
Posted by: Will Wilkinson at Oct 11, 2006 4:21:00 PM
Georgiana - fewer people per house is not necessarily correlated with more mess per house. We've now got 4 small free riders, er, kids, and the place usually looks like a tornado hit a Toys R Us.
Posted by: mkl at Oct 11, 2006 5:49:06 PM
[..] in fact we are observing an optimum. We just don't want to put more time in.
That assumes that you can trade cleanliness for time. You can't, any more than a man in a leaky boat can trade bailing time for boat dryness. It doesn't matter how much you bail at a time, and it doesn't matter how high the water is before you start bailing or how low it is before you stop bailing. In the long run, if water is coming in at one bucket per minute you have to bail at an average rate of one bucket per minute for as long as you are in the boat.
There's constraints, of course. Once the boat is empty, you have to stop bailing. Once the boat is full, you have to buy a new boat. So if you're prepared to eventually buy a new house and abandon the one you've got, then sure, you can save time by avoiding chores.
Otherwise, it's a false economy. The work required to prevent a mess from becoming completely unusable (i.e. cleaning up at least a little bit once you can no longer sit at your desk, put something in the fridge, reach the sink, walk across the floor, open the garage, etc.) is no less than the work required to prevent a tidy environment from becoming a mess. Moreover, that work can be done much more efficiently at the tidy end of the curve than at the messy end: the benefits of batching are small, and the increased clutter makes all operations inefficient - which raises the cost of not only cleaning but also of merely living. Thus, the time and effort spent maintaining an orderly environment is dramatically less than the effort spent maintaining a functional but untidy environment.
Just ask Toyota.
In other words, hypothesis #1 is correct.
Posted by: eddie at Oct 11, 2006 8:05:31 PM
Most people should throw away anything they have not touched for the last three years.
What about books?
Posted by: Hei Lun Chan at Oct 11, 2006 8:23:23 PM
I am not a cleanliness freak. Nor am I a very dirty person physically, mentally or practically. I try to not creating a “mess” simply because it calls for a “cleaning schedule”.
This concept of “EXTERNALITIES” is absolutely fresh to me. If I were to own a house and just maintain it “not dirty”, then I‘d just wish that my neighbors are all cleanliness freaks. Because I would still be benefited. Their time, effort and money spent on maintaining their house would indubitably increase the worth of my house.
People can soon choose localities where others have set up homes and its surroundings aesthetically, and try to invest on real estate in such areas. Then, such people certainly are going to be victims of “positive externalities”.
Posted by: jananiram at Oct 11, 2006 8:39:38 PM
Hypothesis Two is also correct. In a multi-person household with common areas, the work necessary to bail will be done by whoever has the least tolerance for high water levels in the boat. This isn't really a problem, though: whoever wants to maintain a higher level of cleanliness can offer payments to the slobs to get them to help with the work that the neat freak would otherwise do on his own. This is simply part of the cost of living with people who are willing to live with more mess than you.
Hypothesis Three is irrelevant to mess. Things you want to keep can be stored efficiently without contributing to a messy environment. The keep-versus-discard decision should reflect storage costs, not the cost of living with mess or the cost of cleaning up.
Hypothesis Four: good one. :)
You'll make more efficient use of your Ramism if you expand your physical memory space from a handful of horizontal surfaces to a large number of locations separated in three-dimensional space and enclosing volume, not just consuming surface area. Your memory space can expand beyond your office and encompass your entire house - or even further. Some people call such things "filing cabinets", "storage boxes", and "landfills"; pay no attention to them. They simply aren't sophisticated enough to recognize a Memory Theater when they see it.
Posted by: eddie at Oct 11, 2006 8:41:30 PM
