Convenience of Streaming Services (5 Aug 2011)

An article at the AV Club by Sam Adams looks at the implications of Netflix's streaming service and the growing popularity of Spotify, a music-streaming company. He begins with an observation that seems unassailable to me -- "Convenience and choice are the watchwords of the digital era, in which content must be instantly accessible and as quickly digested, lest consumers flit off to some more welcoming destination" -- but I was confused by the analysis that follows, which didn't really explain why consumers are so susceptible to novelty and what he calls the "convenience trap," the willingness to consume what's available as opposed to what is presumably good for you. Adams fears we may be "unconsciously downgrading anything that isn’t so ready at hand."

But what does that mean? Why does everything have to be graded? And does an unconscious grade have any meaning? If you can't bother to make the effort to make your tastes conscious, then what difference does it make to you what you watch? And why should anyone else care? Adams is concerned that the great works may be lost to history if streaming services don't assimilate them to their streaming libraries: "Spotify’s great, unless you want to listen to anything Hüsker Dü recorded before its major-label debut. Would you trade New Day Rising for the Black Eyed Peas catalogue?" This doesn't strike me as a serious question. If you badly want to hear New Day Rising, try this. If you care about music, you probably won't let Spotify dictate what you can or can't hear, and digital reproduction has made it fairly likely that digital copies of everything will survive and proliferate. (Our real archival concern should be with the survival of analog artifacts that have yet to be digitized -- even though digitization may lead to a not entirely representative version of a work surviving.) The people who have a lot invested in their entertainment choices will supplement streaming services with ready alternatives. The people who don't diversify their supply basically don't really care, and why should they? Because certain art is good for them, and they should be made to consume it through clever institutionalized market nudges?

Adams's implicit concern seems to be that the tasteless masses will be left to languish in their cultural ignorance because the streaming services they thoughtlessly adopt don't force more redeeming content on them. And he also seems to think that if you are not cleaver enough to make redemptive consumer quests for the great works, you will be too dim or disinterested to understand them: "If you’re not inclined to put forth the effort to get yourself in close proximity to a given artwork, will you be willing to expend the mental energy necessary to understand it?" Apparently if one lives next door to the Prado, Goya's works there become more or less indistinguishable for you from Hagar the Horrible comics.

Working hard to gain access to a work has nothing intrinsic to do with being willing or able to interpret it. Adams offers an S&M take on art appreciation, that art should dominate and master us while we subserviently mold ourselves to its masterful lessons: "the viewer—not, please, the consumer—is fundamentally subservient to a work of art, in which it is our responsibility, and often our pleasure, to come to the work rather than expecting it to come to us. After all, shouldn’t art be inconvenient, if not in the sense of being difficult to access, then because it forces us out of our comfort zones, requiring us to reckon with its way of understanding the world?" I am pretty sympathetic to this, but I don't think my attitude needs to be generalized. It's not the only way to engage with art. And though I may try harder to get something out of a show I have to travel far to see, that doesn't mean I necessarily cruise through a nearby show on autopilot.

The idea that difficulty is necessary to have a "real" art experience is similar to the idea that something more real happens when the art encounter is "spontaneous" -- being surprised by the beauty of a sunset, etc. It is always tempting to extrapolate a dogma out of such experiences when they are profoundly affecting, but that would be a mistake. I don't think there is a prescription for assuring edifying aesthetic moments. Instead, when people try to push some recipe for the aesthetic onto someone else, they are imposing an encapsulated version of a status hierarchy that favors them. Ultimately, whatever they are pushing now (no matter how universal the principles are presented to be) will be repudiated later in pursuit of some fresh form of distinction. Isn't this an extremely elitist question: "How much more likely are you to bail on, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, when with a few clicks of your remote you can be watching a favorite episode of Friday Night Lights?" This seems to mean: You dummies should be watching the hard stuff (like me) but instead you are weak and let the technology trick you into watching what is mere middlebrow entertainment. You're trapped in your own lazy tastes.

Adams points out that "we carry around unspoken assumptions about what’s long and what’s short, what’s easy and what’s hard, and when those assumptions calcify, we may no longer be aware they’re there." Yes, this is how ideology typically works, and it extends far beyond how we choose to entertain ourselves. Making ourselves aware of our unthinking assumptions about what is common sense is probably always a good and worthy practice. But we don't encourage people to join in that project when we imply that the reason it is necessary is so that they can conform to some other dogma about what cultural product is correct and appropriate. That replaces one politicized mystification with another. Yes, Netflix -- like may consumer goods manufacturers -- would probably love it if we consumed simplistic mind candy as quickly and as often as possible; that's good business for them. And that incentive contributes to their trying to shape and promulgate a certain ideology about what it is fun to do. Their pay structure contributes to a materialization of that ideology. Convenience almost always serves an agenda of accelerated consumption, which is passed off as maximized happiness or efficiency. (You've consumed more, so you are better off!) But implying that people need to consume the "right" things instead of the convenient things seems to substitute an elitist ideology for a consumerist one, and may trigger reactionary retrenchment among the consumerists one may be trying to rescue with screenings of Bela Tarr films and copies of Metal Circus.

In 2007 I made the argument that subscription services "almost make the idea of having selective musical taste superfluous. Not there is anything wrong with that; musical taste's centrality to identity seems a peculiar quirk. Nonetheless, taste in commercial music comes down to what music you are willing to pay for specifically. If you are paying to have it all, you effectively have no taste." That is, in a consumer society we have this sense that you have to put your money where your mouth is to "prove" your taste. The idea that you need to suffer to acquire access to "real" art in order to appreciate it has a similar inflection to it -- that art needs to be scarce to have an aura of significance, which derives from people earning/paying for the privilege to consume it. But it seems more interesting to break out of the idea that scarcity imposes some mystical meaning on things to see what they might mean beyond that.

Optimistic ways to be negative (26 Jan 2010)

Going through the archive of this blog, I came across this post, about negativity. There I confess to having a knee-jerk skepticism about things billed as optimistic or positive, particularly when those terms are being used as synonyms for "feel-good" in the midst of a recommendation. I haven't changed much: My first instinct is still to read "optimistic" as actually meaning "short-sighted" or "blinkered," and to see positive spin as ideologically motivated hoodwinking. The role that blithe confidence and animal spirits played in the economic crisis has probably only made me more skeptical -- it's no good if too many people are persuaded to ignore their natural human tendency toward risk aversion. And the incentives are all in place for the financial sector and the media to collude in puffing up confidence, which I am taking to be broader than a mere willingness to spend or invest. This is obviously speculation, but complacency with one's culture would seem to reinforce a blind confidence in the general economic situation, and vice versa. And a habit of resistance and skepticism about culture seems good practice for a similar skepticism towards salespeople, investment schemes, and peddlers of financial products. After the events of the past few years, could one possibly err on the side of being too cynical? Haven't the bailouts and the events leading up to them proven once and for all that most of us lack the imagination to be cynical enough?

Frederic Jameson's gloss on Marcuse, which prompted my earlier post, seems worth quoting again: "Thus it is that the happier we are, the more surely we are given over, without even being aware of it, into the power of the socio-economic system itself." But "happiness" must be understood in a particular way, as a specific kind of narcissism endemic to consumer culture. The kind of happiness Marcuse and Jameson are talking about -- in my interpretation, anyway -- is the special satisfaction of self-fashioning with the tools afforded us by consumerism. It is a matter of experiencing a moment of cool because one is doing the approved things, or doing new things in the approved way, or is generally adding new flourishes and wrinkles to the carnival of public consumption. It is the happiness of online "sharing," of participation in pseudoevents, of what Marcuse called repressive desublimation -- the removal of moral and intellectual engagement from pleasure, and its transformation into a kind of compulsion or addiction. Jameson: "It is only when individual happiness, subjective contentment, is not positive (in the sense of ultimate satiation by the consumer society), but rather negative, as a symbolic refusal of everything which that society has to offer, that happiness can recover its right to be thought of as a measure and an enlargement of human possibilities."

Back in 2005, I endorsed the idea of resistance for its own sake.

What matters are acts of resistance, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—not laughing when the laugh track cues you, not saying “have a nice day” when you don’t mean it, adopting a stubborn literalism in the face of “witty” ads trying to win you to their snarky side, etc. One can help but be implicated in the consumerist system—one can’t simply stop shopping unless one has survival resources that extend beyond what the typical American habitus equips one for. But one can begin to seek out the sorts of tactics Michel de Certeau writes about in The Practice of Everyday Life, the subversive moves wherein the producer’s intentions are subverted by the consumers in an effort to manifest a sense of life outside of the market hegemony. Debord advocated cultural detournement, taking cultural artifacts and parodying them, using them in ways opposite to how they are intended. Sontag called it camp, approaching culture with an incisive irony that turned the consumer society’s soporifics and stupefiers against it. All of these are semi-idealistic, optimistic ways to be negative.

I'm less salient about those approaches now; cultural resistance seems to have been absorbed into what it attempts to resist. The problem with consumer culture is not its content but its form; when we express our resistance with the tools supplied to us to publicize it, our acts of local refusal become general endorsements of the larger system of cultural mediation. (Whatever we complain about on Twitter may be bad; Twitter itself is okay.) It is imperative to resist when we can, but what we end up having to resist the most is the petty vanities of celebrating our own resistance.

Where Nobody Knows Your Name and They Never Know You Came (2 Nov 2009)

I have a post up about the end of anonymity over at Generation Bubble. As I was writing it, half of it got deleted in a Word Press malfunction, so I'm afraid it became a little disjointed as I struggled to reconstruct what I had had before. My overarching point is that Web 2.0 innovations encourage us to eschew online anonymity and stay logged on as our actual selves -- fusing more completely our online and offline social lives. More important, when we conduct various transactions online, whether they are purchases or pleas for attention, they are associated permanently with that integrated identity, enriching the data that can be mined from it. Consequently, we begin to believe that we deepen our identity by contributing more data to the online archive, despite the fact that it is being exploited by the corporate interests who control the archives. We become more of person, with a more compelling identity, the more through our online presence mirrors our offline existence.

I argue that this is the completion of a trend away from the impersonal markets that once signaled freedom from sumptuary laws and class-based discrimination in the world of consumption, and toward the idea that what we consume should be precisely associated with who we are. An anonymous purchase is a pointless purchase.This begins as a nostalgic movement to restore communal meaning to a world made atomistic and alienating, to make social relations more relevant in a world that has been structured to isolate us (a complaint I've made a lot over the years here). But what happens when markets become non-anonymous is that we become reliant on consumption more than ever to mediate our relations with others, so that friendships happen only within the context of brand communities and branded social networks and shared affinities for the same products. (What economists Wolfers and Stevenson call hedonic marriage: "what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption.") The more transactions we make in the markets in which we can't hide our identity, can't pay cash, the more articulated our identities become. We "share" more and more in order to be.

An example of this process takes on a positive spin can be gleaned from this Amanda Marcotte post about karaoke and halloween. She argues that "Americans are increasingly putting a premium on fantasy and performance as valuable things" and that the popularity of karaoke, Halloween, performative video games like Guitar Hero, etc. are all manifestations of this. She notes that technology has helped usher in this change as well: "Social networking, blogging, etc. have created a huge incentive for people to put themselves on display, when previously they may have just kept their opinions mostly to themselves." It is that incentivizing that worries me; that is what masks the joys of anonymity, the concordant satisfaction with more local and unmediated forms of attention and affirmation. Marcotte is not worried about the mediation of social recognition, its conflation with commercialized self-display and personal branding, regarding instead the right to public performance as merely a more rewarding form of recognition.

Performing for others has almost completely lost its stigma, and thank god. The performer enjoys it, and the audience enjoys it (even if they’re waiting their turn). It’s a lot like sex---once the taboo comes off for you, you wonder what you were so worried about for so long.

If only everyone were so intent on enjoying the performances of everyone else and reciprocating attention. Marcotte makes it sounds like recognition never shades into passing judgment ("Performing gives you a place to figure out what your strengths are, instead of focusing on the shame of having weaknesses"); built in to her analysis is the assumption that these spaces of costume parties and karaoke parlors are nonjudgmental. But the less stigmatized this look-at-me behavior is, the more necesary judgment passing becomes. Online, ceaseless judgment is implicit, as the fantasy of broadening one's reach brings one into contact with strangers, whose affirmation takes on a greater value (i.e. "How refreshing it is to have strangers applaud blog posts than friends, who sort of have to say nice things").

That kind of nonjudgmental mutuality Marcotte posits seems less likely the further we move from face-to-face interactions toward mediated online interactions. Social networks and so on keep score of attention in measurable ways, heightening the stakes, and our physical isolation erodes the traditional mitigating forces of courtesy (which is where the stigma against performing, of hogging attention, arose from in the first place). The danger is that performance as a gift, a carefree act of self-forgetting, instead becomes an ongoing requisite act of self-definition. We perform ourselves all the time, then, and make it act of striving -- these performances I tend to equate with the identity-building rituals of consumerism.

Once we surrender anonymity, our consumption inevitably plays in various social hierarchies; we can't avoid being judged for it, can't avoid trying to use our transactions to enhance our social or cultural capital. The effort to escape the blank rational choice of impersonal markets, the sterile individualism, ends up making our economic behavior even more instrumental, as "economic behavior" now encompasses all our efforts at self-fashioning, which now happen in public, in real-time, in our online gambits for status. The best hope is that there are enough social hierarchies to play in that we can find one which matches our emerging predilections, validates us as winners. But ultimately the hierarchies themselves are made into metahierarchies to delineate the underlying class structure (inherited from the past, the same haves and have nots) once again.

I am wondering if it's best to strive for an anonymity at the expense of social participation and concretized selfhood, or whether there is some balance to be struck between the implied atomization of impersonal markets and voluntaristic social relations that are not ultimately reducible to identity posturing. Can we separate consumption and identity by having some alternative way to make sociality robust? Does this question even make any sense? Can we refuse to have an identity, in the branded-lifestyle sense, but still have a stable set of social relations? Can social identity be divorced from status competitions? As Marcotte warns, "Once you get a taste for performance and self-expression, it’s hard to give it up."

UPDATE: More from me on this subject here.

Smooth-jazzed into submission (27 Oct 2009)

Having spent the weekend in a Hilton hotel in Hartford, Connecticut, this essay from Travel & Leisure by Peter Jon Lindberg, about "bad" music in corporate spaces open to the public, resonated with me (via NYT Ideas). The Hilton was particularly aggressive with the piped-in smooth jazz, which blared in the lobby and the coffee shop and the bar and the elevators and the indoor pool and the fitness center and possibly even the business center, which incidentally was basically an extortion scheme for those poor businesspeople who break their laptops during their stay. (The center offers you the opportunity to rent an old computer at the rate of 99 cents a minute. And don't think you get internet access included with that, or with anything having to do with your stay with Hilton. In fact, the Hilton was out to nickel-and-dime patrons at virtually every level of service. Parking for $18 a night? $15 for the internet? This is not at all how the resort is portrayed on Mad Men.)

Lindberg's essay is an intermittently amusing exercise in fussy snobbery:

Some people are irked by bad lighting, excessive AC, the reek of European men’s cologne. I’m hopelessly particular about music. Background sound tracks can make or break my impression of a place—and these days every place has one, from wine bars to Williams-Sonoma. Too often it’s employed with alarming incompetence.... I’ve walked out of otherwise appealing shops that elect to blare Maroon 5. I’ve hung up on reservations lines that put me on hold to “Groovy Kind of Love.” I bring earplugs on planes to block out not the roar of the engines but the insipid pabulum of the boarding music.

You get the idea. His taxonomy of Muzak is spot-on, though -- Bebel Gilberto, Gypsy Kings, Amadou & Mariam. The idea is to evoke thoughtless, non-intrusive cosmopolitanism, the fantasy that global homogeneity is just one slick programmed beat away. Lindberg reserves special opprobrium for Sade, whose 1984 release Diamond Life was one of the first non-rock cassettes I ever owned. Like Hiltons across America, I believed it would make me seem sophisticated.

Lindberg ends up focusing on Muzak as professionalized aural branding for corporations trying to negotiate the diverse tastes of their clientele, and he even celebrates it, as long as it is "hip" -- that is, suits his indie-rock tastes. That seems like a cop-out, but after all, the piece was published in Travel & Leisure, not Adbusters or something. But along the way, he cites an academic paper by business professors Alan Bradshaw and Morris B. Holbrook, “Must We Have Muzak Wherever We Go?: A critical consideration of the consumer culture,” which argues that the copious deployment of background music "support concerns that culture is degraded by marketers as a means of social control."

By methodically testing the effectiveness of certain types of music to elicit certain behaviors in commercial spaces, canned-music suppliers instrumentalize music, make it "deployable" instead of listenable. Simply schematizing our emotional responsiveness to music may ruin it -- giving credence to the frequent complaint that music criticism kills what it anatomizes. Music is "de-aestheticized": The songs remain the same, but the uses to which they are put (as "retail atmospherics," in the marketing jargon) irreparably alter how we can hear them. We can't pay attention to it with the goal of immersing ourselves in it. It becomes background music everywhere -- it gets iPodded, etc. Further, when music is deployed in this way, we no longer have the option of simply listening to it, of having an unmediated response to it. Music retains its emotional efficacy, but that efficacy is co-opted and used to achieve the ends of those deploying it. When we choose to hear something, we are giving our consent to be moved by it, but when it's foisted on us, we are vulnerable to those properties in music that slip by our conscious defenses. We are moved against our will, to purposes that aren't our own. These include efforts to make us buy more and buy specific things, but more surprising is the suggestion that "less pleasant music" affects our perception of time and theoretically makes waiting in line seem to pass more quickly. Bradshaw and Holbrook, pictures of academic neutrality, put it this way:

Apparently, more distasteful music will make the queue appear to move more quickly. Really loathsome stuff should make the wait breeze by in a jiffy. So can it be that the onslaught of diabolically annoying sounds that typically assaults the unwilling victim on such occasions – the most offensive canned drivel imaginable, epitomized by garden-variety vanilla-flavored squeaky-clean middle-of-the-road bland-as-blazes Muzak – actually makes the time seem to fly?

This speaks to Bradshaw and Holbrook's more general point: Background music is meant to manage us, not entertain us. Whether people "like" it doesn't figure in to the decision to pipe it in. They cite Adorno's lament over our loss of the right not to hear music. (This puts a different spin on Keats's verse: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.")

If background music can be so effectively instrumentalized, is its ultimate purpose not any particular local effect but a general conditioning of consumer-citizens? Is it subliminal orientation to our role in the totally administered society, or some such? "As we have demonstrated, music plays a complicit role in creating this conveyor-belt style of organized consumption, coaxing customers to travel at suitable speeds through a retail setting dependent on the manager’s manipulation," Bradshaw and Holbrook write. They critique "consumer-culture theory" -- that version of cultural studies that regards consumerism as a form of expression and rejects ideas that social control could be implemented top-down through cultural products. Consumers, to that view, are "more than capable of defending themselves against the onslaughts of commercially-entrenched brain washing." But the efficacy and ubiquity of background music suggests otherwise. Consumers don't transform it; they tolerate or ignore it while it works semi-subliminally. Music helps regulate our internal rhythms and synch them with the necessary flow demanded by capital. Often, we ignore background music, which suggests it's working as it should and we are in that flow. When we notice it, when it galls us, we have become sand in the gears of postindustrial society.

I used to think this meant we should complain loudly and often about piped-in music, to prove that we are still alive. The melodrama helped me regard a gesture that cost me very little effort as something truly revolutionary -- that is where I would take my last stand, against Natalie Imbruglia in the supermarket. But is this a matter of my performing my discontent, which gives me a stake in the persistence of background music, to give me my rebel identity? Bradshaw and Holbrook note how resistance is typically co-opted, and perhaps only registers when it is available for co-optation:

despite the tendency toward market resistance, the ultimate performed resistance is ironically market-mediated (Kozinets 2002) so that resisting one market discourse of power merely generates another (Thompson 2004). The phenomenon of a countercultural brand community entails a basic paradox.

The problem with resisting Muzak is that it plays immediately into self-presentation, how we use our tastes to market ourselves. The critique of background music is always already defused by the fact that the credibility and motives of the complainers can always be questioned. Many things in consumer society seem to work this way. The idea that we are all "brands" engaged in our ongoing identity projects, just like the corporations, levels the moral playing field and preempts resistance.

Work harder at consumption (3 March 2009)

Commenting on British reality-TV contest shows, Chris Dillow makes a great point about what he labels "consumption deskilling":

The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing also reflect the fact that once-basic skills such as singing and dancing have become specialist tasks performed by professionals and merely passively consumed by the rest of us. What’s going on here is a form of deskilling. But it’s a different from the one brilliantly described by Harry Braverman, who showed how workers were robbed by capitalists of their production skills. What we’re seeing here is the decline of consumption skills. Which raises a question. How can capitalism have achieved this? After all, the capitalist might have control over production - and is thus well-placed to deprive workers of productive skills - but he doesn’t have control over what we do in our own homes. So what’s going on? ...Scarce time... needn’t displace consumption skills. I suspect something else is going on. That something is the spread of purely instrumental rationality - the idea that utility maximization consists solely in maximizing consumption for minimal expenditure of time and money. Many of us take it for granted that it’s rational to spend as little time cooking as possible, and that music should only be a consumption good. What this ignores is that many things are worth doing for their own sake.

Exactly. Consumerism tends to encourage us to think of "doing things" as work and touts vicariousness as superior to actual participation. Watching and imagining become the convenient short-cuts to mastery -- "rational" ways to save time and maximize consumption, which we have limited time for, after all, in this era of free content and attention deficits.

What makes instrumental rationality spread is advertising discourse, which conveys that ideology regardless of what specific product it touts. Consumer-goods manufacturers obviously have a vested interest in promoting vicariousness: If we find little meaning in our work and prefer consumption to concentration and collecting things to hobbies, they obviously benefit to a far greater degree than they do if they are merely outfitting us for activities other than shopping.With marketing to remind us of all the goods we are missing out on, the pressure to conserve time is always growing; and consuming instead of doing lets us save time while working through our leisure to-do list. (It's apropos here to cite my favorite Minutemen song, "Shit From an Old Notebook": "Let the products sell themselves; fuck advertising, commercial psychology, psychological methods to sell should be destroyed because of their own blind involvement in their own conditioned minds.")

Vicariousness lets us evade that supposedly dismal slough of practice necessary before the "rewards" begin to come in -- before our guitar playing or cooking or whatever is professional grade. That is what Dillow is talking about with "instrumental rationality" -- the idea that only the ends justify the means, which must be kept minimized. The end result of anything we do is reified, in the sense that it becomes a kind of object we add to our collection of accomplishments. That feat of collecting such end results outweighs, or even obfuscates, the pleasures of having experiences themselves. (This is also why the "buying experiences" idea bothers me.) Dillow notes that happiness research suggests this is actually happening -- people are finding it hard to identify what will make them happy and make systematic mistakes.

Losing touch with the desire to pursue pleasure through doing things, the pleasure of the sheer fact of being alive and humanly productive, is a fundamental sort of alienation, and, as Dillow notes, Marx's critique of capitalism pivoted on this idea. "Marx’s gripe with capitalism was that it transformed work from a means of expressing one’s nature into a force for oppressing and demeaning people. So great has been capitalism’s triumph that many of us don’t even appreciate the possibility that Marx could have been right. It’s just taken for granted that work must be alienated drudgery."

So it is vis-a-vis consumption deskilling: Consumption should take work; it is not work's opposite. We must be actively engaged for consumption to be meaningful, or life-affirming or some such slop. If we instead look for short cuts to accelerate our processing of leisure goods, we, ironically enough, succeed in making consumption more work-like -- at least in terms of how work is falsely conceived under capitalism, as disutility.

Blaming the weather (4 Nov 2008)

It's hard to write about anything serious while waiting for the election to be over. My hope is that Obama wins convincingly, the Republican party becomes even more reactionary and Palinesque, and the sensible conservatives form their own third party, so that there can be grownup debate in this country again about issues. It seems like U.S. politics in general, perversely enough, would be well-served by a real far-right party (just like they have in such countries as Austria and Germany and France) where wackos can gather, lodge their petulant protest against reality, and stay out of the arena of meaningful politics. As it is, they are muddling the picture when there is a great deal to do. America needs serious policy debates about the economic intervention and foreign policy, and we can't afford to waste time with nitwit nationalism, xenophobia, religious bigotry, and race hatred.

Anyway, more of that later, I'm sure. In the meantime, I thought this post from the PsyBlog, about the way weather doesn't actually affect mood, interesting. The post cites two studies that suggest the correlation between mood and the weather is almost negligible, which raises the far more interesting question of why we believe the weather is so significant.

Denissen et al. (2008) suggest that we may be responding to a culturally transmitted idea that weather affects mood. Effectively we think the weather has significant effects on our mood because everyone else thinks and says it does.
We may also pay a disproportionate amount of attention to a very small number of people who really do have what has become known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). These people report that their moods are very strongly associated with the weather. While it might be assumed that this connection is the same for everyone: winter = sad, summer = happy, the data collected by Denissen et al. (2008) doesn't support this. Instead it suggests there are just as many people with SAD who become sadder in the summer and cheer up in the winter. But for the vast majority of us there is no effect.

This pattern of mutual social reinforcement probably has something to do with it -- a consequence of people ceaselessly and needlessly talking about the weather -- though it certainly doesn't feel this way when we are in a good mood, and we want to ascribe it to something. We want the weather to be for us alone, to reflect our tremendous significance to the world. We never feel so important, perhaps then when our mood and our milieu seem to magically coincide, as if the climate has been specially contrived just for us.

As someone who dislikes sunny days and enjoys a good mist, these findings are reassuring, though perhaps I should be upset that something special and contrarian in me has had its basis in fact threatened. There's nothing special in being inured to the sun.

It's probably more convenient to blame the weather rather than what is really causing a down mood, since you can't expect to do anything about the weather, so you can remain passive, thereby reinforcing one of the primary traits of down moods. Possibly, weather-mood connections are established not in response to actual behavioral changes but ahead of time as a kind of moral imperative -- it's sunny so you should want to go outside and enjoy it. You should feel glad you have this opportunity to get more done in the world. My aversion to sunshine actually has more to do with weather bullies than the sun itself, though the UV rays are no good for me either.

The pleasure of multiple selves (2 Nov 2008)

In the Atlantic, Paul Bloom has an article about the ways in which having multiple personalities is not a disorder so much as it is a natural part of our psychological apparatus. (The disorder comes when our multiple selves grow unruly.) Bloom is interested in how this proliferation of identities relates to the sorts of questions that often come up in behavioral economics, the conflict between short-term gratification and long-term rational prudence.

We used to think that the hard part of the question “How can I be happy?” had to do with nailing down the definition of happy. But it may have more to do with the definition of I. Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might explain certain puzzles of everyday life, such as why addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off, and why we insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds­—like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist.

The latter part is what caught my attention, because I've had an interest in the concept of vicarious pleasure from when I studied 18th century novels. Bloom notes the ubiquity of vicarious pleasure and it's centrality to modern life:

The population of a single head is not fixed; we can add more selves. In fact, the capacity to spawn multiple selves is central to pleasure. After all, the most common leisure activity is not sex, eating, drinking, drug use, socializing, sports, or being with the ones we love. It is, by a long shot, participating in experiences we know are not real—reading novels, watching movies and TV, daydreaming, and so forth.
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.

I always figured the roots of that primacy of vicarious pleasure were in the development of the novel, since the novel, the printed book, was the first reified form of that elusive pleasure that comes with being able to escape into fantasy, to become another self for the sake of entertainment. For the first time, the kind of self-fashioning became a product that could sit dormant on a shelf instead of an elaborate experience that required social engagement. Typically this pleasure that novels reliably supplied on demand was condemned as "escapism" -- and it is an undeniably antisocial pleasure to withdrawal from company into a guided tour of your own imagination.

Novels were also condemned for setting bad examples, for divorcing experience from moral responsibility; as Bloom points out, fictions allow us to experience as pleasure the sadistic doings of a Tony Soprano. Lots of early novels, especially during the "age of sensibility" in the second half of the 18th century, made this their explicit subject -- they investigated our ability to sympathize with others and in a way become them, and they encouraged readers to experience vicariously such dignifying scenarios as giving alms to the poor and protecting innocent virgins and so on. Adam Smith founded his moral philosophy on this notion of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

But the special pleasure of fiction is that you can imaginatively experience both the side of the hero and the villain simultaneously and vicariously derive pleasure from both, nullifying the presumed moral edification that was supposed to be involved. Fiction doesn't yield just one new self, but multiple selves simultaneously. This proliferation is rightly recognized as a subversive form of pleasure, though early entrepreneurs quickly seized upon it, and used it as the foundation of marketing, which in turn spawned the profitable market for mass-manufactured consumer goods. In trying to sell these goods, the entrepreneurs, proto-Barnums all of them, took their cues from how novels worked on their readers; they presented the goods as opportunities for buyers to imagine new selves for themselves, not mere opportunities to simply acquire useful household items. Goods were transformed into implements of a fantasy lifestyle, less useful in and of themselves than as prompts for deeply imagined fantasies. (Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch offers an extreme illustration of this. In the novel, workers who are marooned on a inhospitable planet are supplied with miniature, doll-house versions of the comforts they have been forced to surrender and a drug that lets them project themselves into the universe of the doll house, and imagine a whole luxury-filled life based those miniatures. The drug proves irresistible and highly addictive.) The early middle class's experience with fiction, with the forced fantasy of moral sympathy and sensibility, prepared them for the pleasures of lifestyle marketing, whose efficacy helped grow the consumer goods market. From our handling of fictional narratives, perhaps, grows our facility with maintaining multiple selves in a way that is pleasurable rather than psychotic. But do we become addicted to the procuring of new selves rather than developing and integrating the ones appropriate to our situation in society?

Typically, critics of vicarious pleasure (me included) argue that it robs us of the opportunity to experience some true, authentic pleasure, that would presumably reflect our true natures. But if the research that Bloom highlights is correct, it substantiates what postmodern theorists have also suggested, namely that there is no one authentic self whose pleasures and desires need to discovered and privileged -- no master self whose integrity is threatened by the simulacrums offered through vicarious experience. Instead we are by nature a plurality of possibilities, anchoring our sense of self in contextual clues, in the exigencies of the moment, and delighting in the freedom of being whatever we can imagine in the circumstances that present themselves, whether it prompted by prepackaged entertainment or by the sort of situations we manage to blunder into in our lives.

In fact, the fantasy of a master self whose authenticity is sacrosanct and unalterable, is one of the appealing fictions that marketing most masterfully exploits. It is always promising us what we "really" want, encouraging us to find and gratify our true desires, to become who we really are, to get in touch with our nature. This "true self" may in fact be the best fictive creation of advertisers, their most pleasing fantasy on offer -- the "real" you" that knows no contradiction or insecurity or indecisiveness about what it wants. Perhaps it is no accident that shopping has become the primary forum in which we seek to discover the authentic self; that may be the only habitat in which such a creature exists.

Happy nations (23 August 2008)

Earlier this week, Yves Smith linked to this FT editorial by Roberto Foa, in which he argues, citing this recent study, that the world has become happier as it has become freer.

How is it that the world is getting happier? In the words of Thucydides, the secret of happiness is freedom. In each survey respondents were also asked to rate their sense of free choice in life. In all but three countries where perceived freedom rose, subjective well-being rose also. A chart, produced by the authors, shows how these increases in free choice and subjective well-being are strikingly related.
The world in which we live today is unquestionably a free one. For the first time in history, most of the world is governed democratically, the rights of women and minorities are widely acknowledged, and people, ideas and investment can cross borders. Since the study began in 1981, dozens of middle-income countries have democratised, relieving many from fear of repression: every country making a transition from authoritarian rule to democracy shows a rising sense of free choice. In addition, there has been a sharp rise in the acceptance of gender equality and alternative lifestyles. Countries where this revolution has been most pronounced, such as Canada and Sweden, continue to show rising well-being.

It would be easy to mistakenly conflate this with the view that "economic freedom" -- the freedom of choice in a consumer economy -- is sufficient to engender a happy populace, particularly since the people of former Soviet bloc countries have become so much happier since 1991.

In the space of two decades, several countries that were members of the Soviet bloc have become members of the European Union, with new freedoms to travel, work and live as never before imaginable. Not only has the proportion claiming to be “very happy” risen in every country except Serbia and Belarus, but this trend has been wholly driven by the younger generation. Among eastern Europeans aged 15-24, the proportion saying they were “very happy” was 9 per cent at the start of the 1990s, roughly the same as in other age groups. By 2006, this proportion had more than doubled, and steady rises were also evident among those in their 30s and 40s. Country after country in the study – Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine – exhibits this trend. Belarus stands out as an exception in changes in happiness by age (the young are still as miserable as in 1990, and the elderly only a little better off).

But as Foa stresses, the happiness the study detects is not a matter of purchasing power -- it's not merely that people are able to buy things, but they are now able to do things: "The link from free choice to rising happiness suggests that the appropriate benchmark of development is not income per capita, but individual freedoms and capabilities. This is the human development perspective associated with Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate. While income and well-being are closely correlated at early stages of development, once the threat of starvation recedes, social and political freedom appears to be as important."
Smith notes the rising surveillance in Western society now threatens that social and political freedom. The problem is that the "economic freedom" can breed a kind of complacency while commercial interests busily promote a misunderstanding of the true source of happiness, urging us to see it in goods rather actions. These trends can conspire to blind us to how our "capabilities" become circumscribed. When the government forbids certain actions, it's unmistakable; when actions are instead made de facto impossible by the culture industry, which schematizes for us our experience and renders it hard to conceive of alternatives, we might not be so quick to notice. This is not because things are forbidden, they just seem "unrealistic" and irreconcilable with the narratives and lifestyles mediated by our culture. It's not that we are forbidden from an "alternative lifestyle" -- it's just that it is draining to attempt to pursue one, perpetually sapping the energy to resist other soft cultural commands about what to value, what to shun, what success means, how we should interpret our emotional reactions, and so on. We might end up mistaking complacency for a kind of happiness, even while nagged by feelings of dread and insecurity, of not not knowing who we really are since our identities are displaced to the things we own.

Don't worry, be happy (5 August 2008)

This forthcoming paper on inequality by economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson (summarized in the NYT by Eduardo Porter) is attracting much econoblogosphere attention because it argues, as Wolfers explains at Freakonomics, that happiness is becoming more equally distributed even as income is becoming less so. An excited Tyler Cowen suggests that these findings indicate why "moral arguments from the Left fall on deaf ears when it comes to most Americans. Of course happiness inequality is more fundamental than either income or wealth inequality because we care about outputs, not inputs." From this point of view, the Democrats should not futilely practice what the right likes to dub the "politics of envy" when it comes to the wealthiest 1% becoming much wealthier while income has stagnated in lower brackets. Regular Americans don't begrudge the rich get richer, because they are just so happy themselves with what they have, in both material possessions and opportunities.

Likewise, Stevenson and Wolfers's findings might give rhetorical ammunition to those who want to argue that income and happiness aren't linked, and therefore growth policies shouldn't be pursued aggressively at the expense of policies that prioritize other goals -- namely, environmental protection, though any number of moral values may be cited as preferable to economic expansion, which is arguably a centrifugal force atomizing members of communities and leading to social disintegration.

But before one can give full credence to arguments developed from the paper's findings, one has to sort of the methodological concerns about how happiness is measured -- can it be defined in such a way that it measures the same thing for all people? What makes me happy certainly doesn't make my neighbors happy; it doesn't even make my parents or siblings happy. So what's really being compared when the happiness of different social groups are set against one another? Also, are subjective reports about happiness relevant, policymaking-wise, given how adaptable people are and how volatile moods tend to be? And since happiness can often tend to be relative, a matter of looking at yourself in relation to acquaintances, it can vary depending on context.

In his post (and paper), Wolfers talks about the statistical distribution of those responding to this General Social Survey question: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are: very happy; pretty happy; or not too happy?” But there's a temptation to see in his charts a distribution of happiness, as though it were a resource in limited supply. Income, if you think of it as GDP, is a limited sum whose distribution is determined economically. Happiness is an emotion that can't really be quantified, except as a span of time -- it is really a ratio of hours spent in a positive mood over all waking hours. So I find it hard to understand what Wolfers means when he writes, "These changes yield some pretty striking changes in the distribution of happiness." Isn't this a matter of more people claiming to be happy in general? There hasn't been any sort of redistribution, which the wording might imply to non-economists like me. And "happiness inequality" seems like a weird way to describe all this; it seems a coinage meant specifically to supplant or trivialize income inequality. "Equality" makes no sense as a description of the comparison of different people's subjective, emotional states. It's only being evoked here to distract us from or negate the impact of the unequal distribution of things that can actually be counted -- money, well-paying jobs, vacation homes, etc.

It seems to me that measuring happiness through surveys tells us very little while putting a cudgel in the hands who want to be back a more substantive egalitarianism.

Kids as consumer goods (3 March 2008)

From Reason's site comes this essay by Ron Bailey, which argues that couples are having fewer kids for the simple reason that many couples don't actually like them.

So, modernity essentially transforms children from capital goods that produce family income into consumption items to be enjoyed for their own sakes, more akin to sculptures, paintings, or theatre. But that's just the problem—according to happiness researchers, people don't really enjoy rearing children.

This makes intuitive sense to me. Since society has changed and women are no longer forced to be mothers, children have become voluntary, they represent choices, and the atmosphere that we are conditioned to associate with choice, the place where our choices matter, is the marketplace. Choices are less deliberative, evaluative acts than opportunities for consumption. A choice is a moment in which we can bask in all the privileges and pleasures of consumerism.

Surely, some would be appalled at the selfishness implied by viewing children as toys manufactured for the parents' amusement, but would such an attitude be so incongruent with the values generally promulgated in commercial society? In the abstract -- to the prechild couple perhaps -- children are seen as precious objects to add to a collection of quirky, self-defining things -- it's perhaps the ultimate identity good, as it's literally a piece of yourself made into something else. And children can function as lifestyle accoutrements that announce a certain set of priorities, that you subscribe in some way to "family values" and take a pride in nurturing. And children allow parents to show off a host of attendant status-signaling goods, like strollers and elite preschools.

Bailey cites happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert, who says people claim to say children make them happy because that is what they are expected to say, and because a form of the sunk-costs effect kicks in:

Gilbert observes that the more people pay for an item, the more highly they tend to value it and children are expensive, even if you don't throw in piano lessons, soccer camps, orthodonture, and college tuitions.

That's a rather benign explanation; those with a more conspiratorial bent might attribute the cheerleading for a childcentric culture to a wish among reactionaries and conservatives to preserve the old order of gender roles: the impositions and imperatives of child care tend to lead to women doing a bunch of domestic work, rendering them less fit to compete with men in the non-domestic sphere. If women aren't staying at home altogether, they are instead working the "second shift" of managing family life and attending to its emotional and physical needs. As Tim Harford points out in The Logic of Life (citing Gary Becker), the comparative advantage women often have in performing domestic labor encourages families ("rationally") to organize the division of labor in a household so that women do most of the housework. "There is no reason to believe that men were breadwinners because they were any good at it," Harford explains. "They might simply have been breadwinners because getting them to help around the house would have been even worse." In this argument, domestic work is regarded as primary, and comparative advantage is adjusted in accordance to who best performs that fundamental labor for reproducing society. Ironic, then, that such primary work is poorly compensated and inadequately recognized socially -- in fact, society seems organized around sentimental principles that invalidate the notion that domestic work is work at all. Worshipping children is one way of negating the work of rearing them.

Happiness as nodal point (12 May 2007)

The following thoughts were occasioned by reading two wildly dissimilar works in conjunction: Will Wilkinson's recent Cato Institute policy paper about happiness research and Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. First of all, they couldn't be further apart on the readability scale. Wilkinson writes clean, compelling prose sprinkled with wit and pointed, impassioned polemic, while Laclau and Mouffe evince the distinct aversion to active verbs and discernible grammatical subjects that you often find in works of nebulous social theory. And they initially seem to be coming from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Wilkinson, a libertarian, argues for as little governmental intervention as possible into the lives of sovereign individuals; Laclau and Mouffe are socialists trying to conceive of a method to bring about "radical democratic politics" to forward Leftist interests, arguing essentially that the individual has no identity outside of political struggle. Laclau and Mouffe are trying to find ways to build political blocs, to develop ad hoc unity among a disparate group so it can then effect social change. Wilkinson seems to be arguing against the social usefulness of collective will.

Nevertheless, maybe because I am misinterpreting them both, but I found a surprising potential for synthesis between the two works, mainly because Wilkinson's eagerness to discount happiness research leads him to take some rather nuanced, relativistic stances at various points about they way people comprehend their own interests, just as Laclau and Mouffe, eager to dispatch essentialist, given notions of what it means to be working class, systematically undermine all appeals to universal notions. There's no one determinant of class identity, any more than there is one definition of what happiness is, as experienced. (Whether an objective notion of well-being that we are not actively conscious of can be considered happiness is another question.)

Wilkinson cites approvingly a passage by philosopher Nicolas White, who argue that "As we develop a picture of what life is to be like, we don't start from a 'framework' concept of happiness (an idea of what the picture on the puzzle will be), to which to tailor our particular aims so that they'll fit into it.... For the most part we build up a conception of what happiness would be out of the aims that we have." Compare that with this passage from Laclau and Mouffe: "The fixity of every social element in the first theorizations of hegemony proceeded, as we saw, from the indissoluable link between the hegemonized task and the class that was supposed to be its natural agent.... But, insofar as the task has ceased to have any necessary link with a class, its identity is given to it solely by its articulation within a hegemonic formulation. Its identity, then, has become purely relational. And as this system of relations has itself ceased to be fixed and stable -- thereby making hegemonic practices possible -- the sens of every social identity appears constantly deferred." In other words happiness is contingent on aims, and aims are contingent on given social formations, and what values can become dominant (hegemonic) through the way they are articulated and their appeal broadened or made constitutive of identity for those swayed by them. The inefficacy of happiness research to pin down a consistent definition opens up the space in which hegemony can be constructed. Political work consists of defining happiness in such a way that suits a particular bloc while conveying a sense of individual empowerment (a sense of concrete identity and fulfillment of that identity's potential) to those throwing support behind the bloc.

Happiness research, then, is discourse attempting to perform this work, constructing happiness in a politically useful way and presenting that definition as natural and inevitable. Individual happiness and the collective good administered politically thereby merge into a single conception, albeit one that is always contested and is ever-shifting, no matter how much it insists it is objective and transcendent and eternally true. To gloss White, not only is the picture on the puzzle indeterminable until you start to work at putting it together, but the pieces themselves are always shifting, as is the logic of the rules for solving the puzzle.

In short, happiness may be what L&M (not the cigarette) call "nodal points," semi-fixed notions in the field of relations that seem universal and transcendent but are actually up for grabs. Despite their tendency to shift, we still rely on them to orient ourselves in construing our own goals and in conceiving how to relate to peers and how to structure who the enemies are.

Income inquality creates political inequality (31 January 2007)

Often when income inequality is debated, the focus is fixed on individual happiness -- one's income is conceived primarily as a proxy for one's personal pleasure. Thus if you are happy with what you make, it should make no difference to you if your boss makes in a day what it takes you all year to make. If you were troubled by such comparisons, you will have fallen prey to the insidious politics of envy. This TNR piece by Brad Plumer does a good job refuting that notion. Income inequality is not a problem merely because it invites invidious comparisons and provokes questions about society's basic fairness; the overriding problem is that it undermines the way democracy functions, allowing the rich to fashion a stealth oligarchy. Plumer notes how most legislators are rich (as you'd expect in the absence of publicly financed elections) and they listen primarily to rich constituents (who they can relate to and who generally support their campaigns and who are far more likely to vote than the poor). The consequences? The government's power is used to accelerate the redistribution of wealth upward -- Plumer directs us to CEPR economist Dean Baker's highly readable book The Conservative Nanny State (available free here) for an explanation of the various tools used for this -- bankruptcy laws, protectionism for white-collar professionals, tort reform, subsidies, tax loopholes, etc. And thus a feedback loop is fashioned and the wealthy get wealthier and more politically powerful -- the recent income data seems to bear this out.

So what do we do? Despair? As Scott Lemieux explains, "The most important means of redressing the problem (given current First Amendment law) is robust public financing of campaigns--but the pre-existing structural inequalities essentially make this virtually impossible." Julian Sanchez notes that he has argued that "the best response was to have a government too limited in its economic power to merit buying, though there's surely something of a chicken-and-egg problem there." He wonders also if income isn't a proxy for education. It may be that highly educated people (like the not-so-wealthy writers working for political journals, perhaps) influence politics disproportionately. It seems to me that at a certain point political involvement becomes a sociological question, a matter of having the accumulated influence, connections, and know how to participate and truly affect the process in a way that goes beyond voting -- having cash to contribute to a campaign or hire lobbyists is just the most obvious way of acquiring political capital; belonging to a union that serves as a counterveiling power representing your interests might be the most feasible alternative for those with less cash flow. Of course then the union itself becomes subject to questions about whose interests its leadership really represents as well.

"Mellow out or you will pay" (24 January 2007)

"Pathologies of Hope," Barbara Ehrenreich's editorial in the most recent Harper's, seeks to throw some cold water on the budding positive psychology movement (detailed in this NYT magazine piece), which she argues is basically a call to narcissistic selfishness, if not more useless self-blaming advice along the lines of Who Moved My Cheese? The "insight" of that slim pernicious volume is that change in business is inevitable and unstoppable (the dumbed-down version of what Schumpeter called "creative destruction") and it is incumbent upon you not to ask why things are changing as they are but to meekly adapt to whatever they happen to be. Essentially you are powerless, the book reminds you, just a rat in a maze, so you should accept the fact that your betters are experimenting on you rather than seek an end to the cruelty. If you accept the inevitability of the situation, you might just be happy within it.

It's no accident that Martin Seligman, the guru of the positive psychology movement, is also credited with formulating the theory of learned helplessness, wherein subjects internalize conditions in which they are deprived of agency and come to feel they are incapable of doing anything meaningful. They blame themselves for things out of their control and think any action they will take will compound failure. This is basically the flip side of positive psychology, which also encourages you to see personal agency where you have none, but rather than developing negative momentum by assuming false responsibility for bad things, you try to develop positive momentum by spuriously assuming unwarranted responsibility for good things. Some of the same misattributions that cause depression can also cause inexplicable baseless happiness (i.e. optimism); basically, emotional cause and effect are presumed to be reversible -- we feel depressed or happy, and derive rationalizations for this afterward.

Of course, that is not how positive psychology is sold to its practitioners. Telling someone to simply pretend to be happy no matter what the circumstances is unlikely to be convincing. Instead happiness gurus emphasize doing good deeds (sending letters of gratitude, aggressively smiling at people) as these promote a feeling of positive agency -- they give the fundamental attribution error something to work with. And you should discover what you are good at and shape your personality around that, to enhance the likelihood of flow experiences, of being "in the zone" and experiencing "mindfulness."

Ehrenrich, a cancer survivor who was infuriated at the constant injunction that she needed to have a positive attitude about her situation to get better, is having none of this. Pretending that positive thinking can magically make miracles happen and remove all obstacles from life seems to her a dangerous illusion, not merely because it detaches a person from reality ("should I assume, positively, that no one is going to cut in front of me or, more negatively, be prepared to brake?") but because "it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people's suffering.... If no one will listen to my problems, I won't listen to theirs: 'no whining' as the popular bumper stickers and wall plaques warn." In other words, positive psychology undermines the effects of sympathy that Adam Smith, et al., found so fundamental to the healthy functioning of a society otherwise fixated on self-interest. If Ehrenreich is right, positive psychology instructs people to ignore the impulse to understand another's feelings and instead impose on them your positive mood by force -- like Rousseau suggested, you will force them to be free. As a more-contemporary philosopher bitterly noted, "Mellow out or you will pay."

Against happiness (11 January 2007)

In debates about income inequality, this dilemma often arises: Should we divide the GDP pie more equally among society even if that means making the pie smaller? This question is complicated by another observation, that increased income doesn't seem to make individuals any happier in the long run (when, as Keynes noted, we're all dead). If more won't make you happier, then what difference does it make how national wealth is divided? And if growth is all-important, how do we square increasing returns to scale with a meritocratic ideal, which holds that earnings are actually earned? Those who question growth's correlation to happiness often seem to demand more equitable distribution of income, and those who say unfair distributions of income don't matter often seem to argue that personal prosperity is significant and shouldn't be neglected.

For example, at Spiked online, Daniel Ben-Ami has an essay arguing that we shouldn't worry about whether prosperity is correlated to happiness, basically because happiness, in his opinion, isn't particularly important. It's a classic piece of teleological triumphalism (life is always improving) that fetishizes technology (it will magically remedy everything), but I admit, the curmudgeon in me appreciates his position -- yeah, screw happiness. Who needs it? As a wise man once said, "Look at me, I'm making people happy! I'm the magical man from Happyland in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane. Oh, by the way, I was being sarcastic." Trying to make people happy is fruitless, since what they think they want is always shifting. Better to make them live longer and give them more technological process (which according to Ben-Ami will also solve global warming, so don't stop wasting energy, no matter what those whiners say). And if the poor are striving to emulate the rich, so much the better. A little envy is good for them; it keeps them in line and keeps them striving, which helps propel social progress. Writes Ben-Ami:

Coveting what the rich have should not be dismissed as unhealthy envy. On the contrary, the fact people are dissatisfied with their lot can be seen as a healthy motive for change. Humanity has historically progressed by constantly trying to improve its position. As a result people are better off than ever before. In this sense unhappiness should be welcomed. It is a sign of ambition and a drive to progress rather than one of inherent misery. In contrast, the essentially conservative message of the happiness gurus is that people should be happy with their lot.

Progress? It's always positive. Ambition? It's the fire that tempers the steel in your soul, never let it die. Disappointment? It's really a reward since it should encourage you to try harder. If you are discouraged by failure or depressed by relative stasis after all your struggle, then you are obviously a weak person who is opposed to human progress and perhaps a traitor to your species. People who tell you that you can be "happy" are also secret enemies who think there is something valuable in nature as it is and in being present in the moment. Don't be seduced! If you forget that you always need more than you have, you might stop paying attention to what society expects from you: more hard work, more desultory consumption. You are not here to "feel" "good" -- you are here to struggle and suffer for the heroes of posterity (just like Soviet citizens in the 1930s). Without these things living standards -- measured in income and technological dominance over our environment, not foolish trifles as your insignificant "feelings" -- will slip and your children will hate you.

The rise of mass affluence is an incredibly positive development. It has bolstered the quality of people’s lives enormously. But there never was any guarantee that such progress would bring happiness. One of the most positive qualities of human beings is that they often want more than they have got. They typically want the lives of their children and grandchildren to be better than their own. The growth sceptics would have us stay where we are or even retreat to living a life of lower living standards.

You must be dissatisfied so that your children can be too. Happiness is obviously just another word for surrender.

Anyway, I agree with Ben-Ami that the government has no business trying to make people happy, not if we want to respect individuals' right to determine what happiness is for themselves. But the income inequality problem and controversies about growth aren't about happiness; they are about fairness, justice. That's perhaps no easier to define than happiness (is it equal opportunity or equal outcome?) but we shouldn't let the nebulousness of happiness distract us from its importance. It's not like we'd ever declare prosperity is more important than justice, would we?

Perverse financial incentives (16 September 2006)

Apart from being an unconvincing defense of Benthamite utilitarianism, economist Richard Layard's Happiness is little more than a compendium of hedonics studies and some general conclusions about their implications -- it is useful as a bibliography if nothing else. One group of studies he cites has to do with performance-related pay, which he is anxious to reveal as a source of stress and hedonic ineffiency. (He also optimistically suggests we should celebrate the income tax as a wonderful way of encouraging a healthy work-life balance.)

But what I found most interesting was this: "Economists and politicians have tended to assume that when financial motives for performance are increased, other motives remain the same. In fact, these motives can change." Layard then cites studies that demonstrate that financial motives tend to compromise pre-existing motivations; it erodes what impulses we might have had to perform an action for its own sake: one found that people paid to solve puzzles will work at them less than those encouraged them to solve them merely for the satisfaction of solving them. Apparently once we are paid to do something, we begin to believe that the pay compels us to do it, and the activity takes on the qualities of disutility economists associate with jobs in general -- that we must be compensated financially to waste our time working rather than enjoying leisure. It seems that being paid is good way to destroy whatever pleasure we take in something; so strong is the alienating tendency of money and profit-tallying that when it intervenes we begin to separate from our involvement in what we are doing in the moment and revert to position of calculation -- thinking about the future, thinking about theoretical maximization rather than actualizing any of that potential in the present moment. This would seem to have the effect of keeping work and leisure unfortunately opposed to each other, a separation that seems to begin with the compulsion to sell one's labor on the open market for wages.

So as long as we remain dilettantish about our hobbies, we can enjoy them; when we professionalize, we turn them into chores. This explains part of my failure to pivot from researching a dissertation to defending one -- I enjoyed learning as long as it was a hobby of mine to understand trends in 18th century cultural production, but when it became a matter of packaging and selling that knowledge, I balked. This is what makes me something of a loser as far as our economy goes; I lack the willpower to be able to stomach the loss in pleasure that comes with professionalization -- another word for that ability to power through that hedonic loss? Ambition, which may be a description of the internal quality of finding pleasure in professionalization rather than tumult and combat and compromise and self-reification. I feel the same way about making music: As long as I have no ambition other than to get together with my friends and make music, I enjoy the pleasures of creation; but if we begin to try to market our band as cultural producers, we're likely to enjoy it less and see it as yet another job, a set of imposed responsibilities from without. But I still perceive these feelings as a kind of failure in myself, balking at the moment when "reality" requires me to summon up ambition and confront the world as it is and integrate the product of my creativity with it in the only apparent way possible: commercially. This is probably why I resent certain bands who are on the brink -- because their music suddenly seems about making those compromises and finding the wellspring of ambition to be more than dilettantes, to be content with more than just their own pleasure.

The anxiety of property (23 August 2006)

Every so often, despite devoting almost every inch of column space to the pursuit of money, the business press feels the need to run a concessionary piece about how money can't buy you happiness. This article about money and happiness, from last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, seemed to touch a nerve with libertarians and economists around the blogosphere. The article draws on happiness research conducted by behavioral economists and hedonic psychologists and the like to make the usual points about money only providing additional happiness up to the level of material security, at which point the hedonic treadmill (our rapid adaptation to improvements) and comparative dissatisfaction (our inability to keep up with a ever-receding-and-improving cast of Joneses) set in. That's all familiar stuff, but what seemed to grab everyone's attention, though (me included), was this quote from professor Daniel Gilbert (whose recent book Stumbling on Happiness collects and elaborates these findings, and had already spurred a similar article in New York magazine a few months ago): "Money itself doesn't make you happy. What can make you happy is what you do with it. There's a lot of data that suggests experiences are better than durable goods." In other words, buying memories, which become more valuable as they get older, is better than buying things, which deterioriate over time, causing their owners great anxiety. That is why it is better to travel or to contrive ways to get together and do things with friends. Owning stuff just gives us the pleasure of watching it decay.

This makes perfect sense to me: I think of all the grief my old laptop has given me over the years -- protecting it from viruses, installing software, making network cards work with it, replacing its battery which rapidly lost interest in holding a charge. Now it's so feeble as to be utterly worthless and it sits in a bag in my closet unused, waiting to be junked. I needed the computer (sort of) for various reasons, but it don't think of it as having generated a "flow of experiences" for me, as economist Bryan Caplan suggests. If anything it generated the fear he admits to: "whenever I worry about being robbed over vacation, my first thought is the sorrow of seeing my CD shelves empty." That which is useful isn't necessarily that which gives pleasurable memories, plus the repetition of experience from goods one owns destroys the singularity of the memories created. Also ownership seems to give us the feeling of having potential experience held in abeyance, which seems to nullify any prior experiences with the thing owned. When I think of the laptop, I think of what must still be done with it, not what great things it let me do in the past; and I think of those future tasks as duties, owed to myself and requiring my effort. I take whatever experience an owned good gives me for granted even before I make that experience happen. In some ways, this is why owning a film on DVD tends to ruin it for me; I never end up watching it even though the idea in acquiring it was that I could watch it over and over again. What pleasure I get from owning the DVD is knowing that I could watch it over and over again but don't actually have to. Ownership becomes an acceptable substitute for actual experience. (Maybe this is why I'm waiting to get Gilbert's book out from the library to read it.)

Will Wilkinson offers this defense of experiences over goods:

Two points. (1) Market egalitarianism. Qualitiative differences between cheap and expensive consumer goods is almost nil. There is almost no experiential difference between a cheap TV and a “nice” TV. If Deadwood is good on a $2,000 plasma screen on HBO, it’s 98% as good on your sister’s giveaway used 19-inch, a $35 DVD player, and Netflix. The extra expenditure buys almost nothing in terms of the quality of experience. Same with the music. For $4.95 a month, I can get I’m guessing 75% of of Bryan’s CD collection on Yahoo. Capitalism makes money worth much less when it comes to manufactured non-positional goods. (2) Adaptation. The mind is a novelty whore — a change detector. Consciousness loses its grip on the added quality of a premium picture, sound system, etc., very fast. The cheap, almost perfect substitute for an expensive stereo is a cheap stereo. The cheap substitute for an exquisite meal at the best restaurant in Paris is… what? IHOP in Arlington? A great memory and a great story is an ongoing flow of positive experience.

The term market egalitarianism smuggles some dubious associations into the argument (I don't think the fact that we can all possibly buy comparable TVs makes us all equal in any meaningful way -- purchasing power isn't quite synonymous with political power) but the rest seems right. If we are looking to buy status or novelty, consumer goods are likely to disappoint us. As Megan McArdle at Asymmetrical Information writes, "Status-hunting via material goods is a zero-sum game, and unless you're Bill Gates, the odds are you're going to lose. With a little mental discipline (okay, a lot) you can stop playing that game, and force yourself to concentrate on the things that really give you joy, rather than simply creating a transitory gleam of envy in someone else's eye." And If we are looking for utility, we can find generally it on the cheap. But perhaps most important, utility is not necessary equivalent to happiness -- maximizing utility seems like defensive behavior, an anxious protection of certain standards one has adapted to, whereas happiness is something else, an absence of self-consciousness in the midst of experience, and the subsequent ability to remember later how that felt.