Making deals with oneself (9 Jan 2008)

In a few essays in Choice and Consequence, economist Thomas Schelling investigates problems of self-command, which in his view is central to the vicissitudes of a consumer society:

I propose that people concerned about consumer ignorance, about the inability of consumers to budget, the inability of shoppers, especially poor people, to spend money wisely, and about the consequences of misleading advertising -- including the advertising that convinces people they feel bad or smell bad and need something that comes out of a spray can or a medicine bottle -- all together add up to no more than the inadequacies of consumer self-management. In other words, if people could reliably do, or abstain from, the things that in their serious mode they resolved to do and to abstain from (or would resolve if they didn't give it up as hopeless), it would make as much difference in the aggregate as if all those other familiar problems of consumer ignorance and budget management could be dissolved away.

This verges on the tautological: If consumers weren't tempted by ads, they would be able to not do the irrational things that ads tempt them to do. But I think Schelling's point is that consumers are not the rational, unitary individuals we for convenience sometimes assume they are; that instead we are made up of multiple selves with competing agendas, and the problem rests there rather than with the evil intentions of those companies seeking to exploit that fact.

And since we are made up of multiple selves -- the self that wants to eat at Carl's Jr. vs. the self that wants miso and wakame; the self that wants to read Hegel vs. the self that wants to play River Raid on an Atari emulator -- Schelling laments the fact that we can't enforce the contracts one of our selves make with another.

The law has grasped the paradox that freedom should include the freedom to enter into enforceable contracts; it seems to overlook the need that people often have, and perhaps the right that they should have, to constrain their own behavior for their own good.

The problem is that no one has an interested in enforcing our contracts with ourselves. As Schelling explains, no one else cares whether he actually gets up and does 20 push ups every morning. There's only you, and who knows which you will be deciding whether your excuses for not keeping your word to yourself are sufficient. Contacts need to be reciprocal, Schelling notes, and we can't have reciprocity with ourselves.

One solution is to make your pacts for self-improvement with a wrathful god, whose punishment you expect if you stray and whose church you can enlist for "social and institutional support," Schelling points out. Perhaps religion is mainly a means of enforcing otherwise unenforceable contracts; it gives a slightly different wrinkle to Pascal's wager -- it's to our own benefit to believe in God because then we can then use our belief as leverage against our recalcitrant selves. If we choose not to believe in God, not only do we risk God's wrath and potentially miss out on infinite reward, but we subject ourselves to unlimited responsibility for ourselves.

Other solutions for the self-management problem involve various forms of voluntary paternalism, in which people consent in advance to have restrictions imposed upon them later by some outside force -- friends, neighbors, the state. In other words, we would enlist the government to help us make irrevocable decisions. A cursory reading of 18th and 19th century novels quickly reveals how society used to work much more strongly in this regard, perhaps because there were fewer people, less social and geographical mobility, and a more widely shared moral code. People couldn't as easily evade the reputation that they developed, and society was organized around promulgating the known reputation of others and generating consequences for ethical lapses. English novels are full of women worrying about being lady-like, men being gentlemanly; this upheld a specifically patriarchal system of gender relations, but the sexist system perhaps managed to entrench itself because it fulfilled a necessary social function of constraining behavior to a predictable range. And one thing that's especially palpable in all the Trollope novels I've read recently is that his characters love restrictive mores, as a source of gossip and regimentation and, maybe most important, self-ordering. They have an easy time convincing themselves that the contracts they've enacted with themselves are backed by the force of society's contempt. They seem to enjoy taking dishonor seriously, because it allows them to truly feel honorable.

Schelling also worries about how to determine which of our multiple selves is the authentic one. Which self would have the right to have the upper hand in contract negotiations? (Postmodernist theory seems to suggest either all or none of them.) When external codes of conduct limit what one can feasibly conceive of doing, certain selves become unthinkable, disqualified, inauthentic automatically. From this stems the joys of conformity.

But consumerism relies on the joys of individuality, which ironically calls for giving our multiple selves free play, and subjecting ourselves to continually reversing on ourselves or revising our desires. All the potentially negative traits that derive from a disunified self -- impulsivity, indecision, behavioral incoherence, unpredictability, unreliability, inability to plan or follow through, irrationality, inefficiency -- seem to be exacerbated intentionally in consumer societies, precisely because these states of mind are conducive to shopping. We express individuality through the freedom to do whatever -- to be inconsistent -- rather than by having a clearly defined and consistent self.

Fictions of musical taste (17 April 2007)

Sociologist Duncan Watts writes up his study on how music becomes popular through network effects for the NYT Magazine. The upshot of his results are this: When we are deciding how much we like a pop song, intrinsic qualities of the music are far less important than our perception of how many others like it.

The common-sense view [of music's popularity], however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

This conforms with the sociological view that musical taste is predominantly a matter of signaling which social groups you'd like to belong to -- that taste is a proxy for class (this notion is elaborated at great length in Bordieu's Distinction.) Yet we typically believe that our musical taste reflects something unique to us, is an outlet for some inner truth about ourselves that can't otherwise be expressed. Perhaps both these propositions can be true, that musical taste is both produced by our desire to merge socially and by our own unique methods for performing the merge. But it remains absurd to assert the superiority of one's taste in pop music; if this study's findings are right, than such assertions are sheer tribalism --a rallying tool to uphold boundaries and exclusions.

In "Listening to Popular Music" (in the often derided 1957 anthology Mass Culture) David Reisman argued that "the functions of music our social -- the music gives them something to talk or kid about with friends; an opportunity for competitiveness in judging which tunes will become hits, coupled with a lack of concern for how hits are made; an opportunity for identification with star singers or band leaders as 'personalities', with little interest in or understanding of the technologies of performance or of the radio medium itself." He suggests that discrete hits allow mass participation in culture and the illusion of equality (we all share the same songs) while at the same time reiterating the atomized nature of society -- everybody is isolated and in competition with everyone else. This all seems about right to me -- pop music carries water for organizing society into recognizable groups, usually ones required to maintain the status quo -- yet music nerds masquerade as connoisseurs. I guess I harp on this frequently because I regret all the time I've already wasted arguing that some band sucked or trying to convince people (or myself) that it was imperative to be into a certain album or band. I think of the stupidly smug sense of superiority I've derived from having "good taste in music," as though I knew something others didn't, when in fact I was the ignorant one -- I hadn't considered or couldn't accept the reality of the extra-musical influences shaping my opinions. Accepting the reality of those influences seems now to be an integral step toward really hearing what you are listening to.

In his essay, Watts calls our attention to how a few key influencers early in the process of disseminating a piece of culture can have a massive, unpredictable effect on the success of that work, and the future success of all other works by that artist.

if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.

A small shift in relative popularity at a key time and place could explode into a massive difference. This seems to justify advertising and payola efforts, targeted at those key places (could they be determined), which can make a thing seem already popular as its popularity is being built. But it's probably the case that such efforts need to corroborated by a trusted source, by the überinfluencers for instance that Gladwell writes about in The Tipping Point, for the public as a whole to buy into something -- word of mouth must confirm the impressions created by media and marketing. This all creates the context in which we hear something, and that context is obviously all important -- pop music is more evocative of other things (friends, feelings, places we've been, experiences) than it is intrinsically compelling.

Watts emphasizes the unpredictability of what will eventually be popular, hoping to discredit the impression that the market vindicates preexisting preferences rather than contributing to shaping them -- in other words the market is not transparent and neutral as a medium; it compounds the rewards it gives and affects the exchanges which take place within it. This is a useful lesson to be reminded of over and over because as Watts points out, we tend to ascribe logic retrospectively where there was none:

sudden shifts in consumer demand can still arise, persist and then shift again. These shifts often come as surprises but are soon explained away as mere reflections of changing public sentiments. Yet while in some sense these markets do reflect what people want, that is true only of what they want right now. If markets not only reveal our preferences but also modify them, then the relation between what we want now and what we wanted before — or what we will want in the future — becomes deeply ambiguous.
Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with our intuitions. Because it is always possible, after the fact, to come up with a story about why things worked out the way they did — that the first “Harry Potter” really was a brilliant book, even if the eight publishers who rejected it didn’t know that at the time — our belief in determinism is rarely shaken, no matter how often we are surprised. But just because we now know that something happened doesn’t imply that we could have known it was going to happen at the time, even in principle, because at the time, it wasn’t necessarily going to happen at all.

It's a repeat of the lesson Thomas Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehavior hammers home -- that the dynamic nature of events alters our preferences over time, so that the choices others make shape our choices and the contribution our behavior makes to a system alters the desirability for everyone, ourselves included.

Mediating variables and other depressing economic metaphors (20 March 2007)

Economist Thomas Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehavior is the sort of book that changes the way you think about social situations for as long as you are under its spell; it forces you to consider how your own preferences affect the equilibrium of any particular scenario, making it obvious how the balances struck in society aren't static or stable. He starts with an example of seating preferences in an empty auditorium and illustrates how individual preferences (not next to anyone; not in the front row; etc.) aggregate to produce strange outcomes, undesired outcomes. He piles on examples of how various unwanted outcomes -- empty classes, intemperate rooms, segregated neighborhoods, etc. -- nonetheless achieve equilibrium after we factor in the way each individual's preferences yields behavior that's affected by everyone else's, and the way we tend to overshoot our preferred situation. This is a useful corrective to the view, derived from free-market dogma, that whatever equilibrium a situation finds is inherently justified, and it makes clear how dialectic much of our behavior is -- it often doesn't stem so much from conviction (from who we think we are, from our notion of our transcendent, unique self) but from the reactions of those we find ourselves mixing with. We end up having preferences and principles but find they are often frustrated by the presence of other people -- this is partly why "convenience" so often means removing the other people or accommodating them so rotely that it is as if they have been disappeared.

Not only does Schelling shed skeptical light on our notions of transcendent, permanent selfhood, and our ability to act in accordance to our preferences, the book makes us question what really drives our friendships and invites us to consider how much of friendship is an arrangement of convenience rather than a true meeting of souls. At the end of a chapter on the sorts of dynamics that lead to segregation by age and income, he offers this passage, which I found equally stunning and dismal:

People who like privacy will associate with people who like privacy, not necessarily because they like the people but because they like the privacy. People who dislike dogs are happier among people who dislike dogs, not because they like the people but because there are no dogs. People who like crowds will be crowded with people who like crowds, without necessarily liking the people who like crowds. People who want to participate in a life-annuity scheme want to participate with short-lived people, without particularly preferring to have friends who are not long for this world.

A pretty devastating judgment on how we live, it seems. If this is true, then we form personal preferences about things and these become a set of dealbreakers, dictating who we can know, and ultimately our petty grievances will keep us in convenient company rather than that which might challenge and stimulate us.

Reading about economics brings up lots of concepts that can be seen as metaphors with ultra-depresssing ramifications. Consider, for instance, the Markov chain in which each state "is conditionally independent of the past states (the path of the process) given the present state." In other words, what happens next in no way reflects what has happened in the past, and cause and effect no longer seems to apply -- it's the scientific term for the random walk behavior of stocks on Wall Street, but I've known people whose behavior has exhibited the Markov property, and have been accused of it myself. And then there's the Sorities paradox, otherwise known as the problem of the heap -- at what point does a pile of sand become a heap if you are piling it one grain at a time? You may be so fixated on the process that you never notice how it has grown up all around you. This seems an apt metaphor for all sorts of things in life, not merely combovers. When do you know you are in or out of love, for instance? How do you know when you've wasted too much time in a job or researching a topic? How do you know when to give up when life piles frustrations on you one grain at a time?