The New Republic August 2008 - Traffic and the Meaning of Life

The New Republic is an American magazine focused on domestic politics, news, culture, and the arts. In this blog post, we examine the August 13, 2008 edition which advertised on the cover "TRAFFIC and the MEANING OF LIFE," by Edward L. Glaeser.

Upon opening the magazine and scanning the table of contents, we quickly saw that there was no mention of the "meaning of life." So, going to the article by Glaeser, we found that the name of the piece was actually, "Auto-Emancipation," which naturally would not sell as well as what was emphasized on the cover. "Auto-Emancipation" is actually a review of the book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt.

Unfortunately, the article, at least in the philosophical sense, is pretty shallow. Sure, there are some insights into our nature and how we live, and how those things are changing with our ability to more efficiently travel, e.g., living further and further away from city centers and spending increasing greater portions of our incoming on gasoline as prices rise.

Ironically, as car get safer, we take more risks and hence increase the chance of ending up in an accident; as vehicles provide more anonymity, we also get more aggressive—road rage becomes more prevalent. Although there is significant environmental impact, more and more people take to the roads driving on their own, rather than using mass transport. Glaeser ends the piece stating that cars are here to stay, and policy should try to make driving faster, safer, and less environmentally harmful.

This is a classic case of a magazine using the phrase "meaning of life" for advertising purposes. It is unlikely Glaeser had any control over the phrase being used on the cover, and it is clear that the correlation between the phrase and the article are pretty much non-existent.