This is why I've suggested economic measuring well-being with the metric "discretionary income per hour lost to work" (DIPHLoW).
discretionary income: income minus taxes and base housing costs
hour lost to work: time at work plus time commuting or otherwise stuff you wouldn't otherwise have to do
That metric captures dynamics like "yeah there are jobs, but with much higher cost of living, so it cancels out the DIPHLoW" and "yeah you can live where it's cheaper but you have to commute an extra 90 minutes, which eliminates the impact on DIPHLow".
Thinking some more about, it would also make sense to look at some isotonic function of disposable income and disposable hours left (after work, commute, etc).
This is to capture that increasing working hours from 8h to 24h a day even when pay would be more than tripled, would leave you with a very sad life.
(Shadow) price of time would be a good one, too? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_price) In some sense, that's the same as marginal cost of your time, expressed in dollars or some `utils' or `hedons'.
Then you can say, eg taking a longer commute for a cheaper house would value my time at 30 hedons per hour---but spending time with my daughter is worth at least 50 hedons per hour. So it would be bad trade-off.
Heh, that's the best I can come up with; just aimed for it being pronounceable (diff-flow). No pun intended, except maybe that it's the "difference" you keep that "flows" to stuff you can actually enjoy?
Edit: Also thought of "discretionary income per UnFree hour" (DIPUPH) ... not sexy either though.
(DIPHLoW). sounds like Diplo, one of the most popular musical artists on the global top 50 (https://twitter.com/diplo)....
so I think the abbreviation already 'fits' into popular cultures vocabulary of pronunciation, it just has to now tie in a new meaning to the word instead of 'Hugely Successful DJ'
discretionary income: income minus taxes and base housing costs
hour lost to work: time at work plus time commuting or otherwise stuff you wouldn't otherwise have to do
That metric captures dynamics like "yeah there are jobs, but with much higher cost of living, so it cancels out the DIPHLoW" and "yeah you can live where it's cheaper but you have to commute an extra 90 minutes, which eliminates the impact on DIPHLow".