Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Are all these things we call "needs" really needs? Does one really need a big screen TV the way one needs friends? I don't know. I know that the way people act, and the amount of their time they invest, in all the world's material things, certainly suggests a need, but I am not so sure.

If, instead of always making more money, successful people also cut down their hour of work/week, to say 20, would they truly wind up being less happy?

(That was my post.) Brad, you're way off in your seeming interpretation of my views of reasonable wants. I celebrate technology and modernity. I want an economy that offers a wide range of choices for different people, including those who are justly rewarded for being more innovative and productive. (Let's leave aside the obvious excesses of income inequality these days.)

It was great when technology that first was available to the wealthy eventually filtered down to everyone. It's great that everyone can have a TV now, or a reliable new car for a low price. Or lower priced better quality clothes, packaged foods, appliances and furnishings. But where is the new lower priced housing? Lower priced education? (Of course, leave aside the jobs problem for a moment here.)

But with the probable exception of biotech/medical advances, I believe that recently we've reached a point of diminishing returns now -- in the United States -- and people like Postrel are completely blind to it. For example, nobody is going to be better off (economically, let alone happier or more content or whatever) when the low income folks trade in their currently inexpensive 25-inch tube TV's for flat screens. And so on.

The cheerleading of the "Consumer Choice" crowd (Yes, Virginia, that's you) seems so quaint and stuck in the past. Or are miracle advances with spinoffs that will benefit *everyone* just around the corner?

What could they be? Cold fusion (which would probably facilitate more non-labor saving gadgets to distract people in their spare time)? Environmental cleanup miracles (which would probably open up new land for luxury housing) New computers so fast you can play 3 games, watch movies and do desktop publishing at the same time?

So ultimately Postrel and her ilk are celebrating meaningless luxury with minimal benefits other than pleasure. That's my point. Maybe I should have made it more clearly. But Brad, assuming that I and others who share my view are luddite pseudo-Marxists is a mistake.

I like choice. lots and lots of choice.

now go to a mall. lots of stores -- but very little real choice. Tulsa Oklahoma, Edina Minnesota, or wherever, there's the same lot full of SUVs disgorging the same suburban shoppers into the same mall in front of the same Cheesecake Factory.

now go to Paris, London or Manhattan. lots of different vendors selling very different things to very different people. there is pedestrian traffic and a subway and taxis as well as SUVs, there are suburbs and urbs and lots in between, and I have never seen a Cheesecake Factory there.

for what mysterious original sin are we in Middle America being so dreadfully punished with the almost complete absence of choice masquerading as a consumer paradise?

"But with the probable exception of biotech/medical advances, I believe that recently we've reached a point of diminishing returns now "

Many people belive the opposite, that we are about to see a great acceleration in the rate of advances.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0610.html

The kicker quote:

“The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 20 years of progress (again at today's rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see about a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.”

read the last sentence again...read the article and others on the site for the math and empirical observations leading to the conclusion

If this view turned out to be correct would you change your opinion?

Diminishing returns on preferences? Since when? Could you point a date when our needs ceased to be marginally valuable?

I'm sorry, but your description of a certain level of TV technology being right, while further advances are unnecessary, is just silly. I don't know how you can establish a objective limit on TV tech (or anything else), regarding preferences.

There's research, however, that indicates that too many choices lead the human mind to feel overwhelmed.

Also, there's pretty definitive research that shows that too many choices of mutual funds for 401(k) accounts leads to less optimal investment patterns.

German Charlie was enough of an Aristotelian to lay emphasis on meaningful and fulfilling activity as the prime criterion for a good life, rather than on an accumulation of material objects. It would be in the context of facilitating such activities, including such things as aesthetic satisfaction, that objects would take on their specific value. Also, there is a difference between a proliferation of arbitrary preference options- (there is a reason economists call it an indifference curve)- and choice in the sense of a meaningful exercise of agency. The former amounts to a dispersion of self among factitious material contingencies, while the latter is a creative synthesis of value, which is shareable with rather than exclusive of others. This is just for the sake of keeping concepts straight.

The endless multiplication of consumer choices is mainly a function of competition between marketers. Whether it results in a proliferation of meaningless differences or in innovations in creative living is an adventitious affair. It is certainly nothing that was intended to begin with.

Contrary to Brad´s consumer pollyannaism, the conclusions of empirical (i.e. non-economic) behavioral science are quite unequivocal. There is absolutely no trend for an increase in happiness in the developed world for the last several decades in which measurement of it has been feasible. The fact is apparently that the level of consumer choice the west had in, say, 1960 was as good as it ever gets. More consumer choice simply has no significant benefit for human wellbeing. (Actually there is recent psychological evidence that additional choices beyond the first few simply lead to stress and cognitive overload, decreasing wellbeing).

please tell me where i may purchase a life free from damaging environmental pollutants, an end to global warming, and freedom from the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Consumer choice is a side effect of general economic choice.

General economic choice is what allows progress; if you're trying to build something new, whether it's an improved dialysis machine, a better engine, or a hat full of flashing lights, it's necessary to be able to get parts and tools and services, or you can't do it.

(Jane Jacobs, "Cities and the Wealth of Nations", has a long chapter with examples about this.)

Moral arguments that consumer choice is excessive and should be controlled are equivalent to arguments that the general rate of economic innovation is too high. (and are nearly always funded by persons whose wealth and social status depend on some line of business whose utility is at risk due to innovation.)

If you want to reduce damaging environmental pollutants, you need innovation -- what better way is there to do that? how can we clean this up at a cost we can afford? -- rather than the resumption of some supposed superior former time.

The anthropogenic component of global warming, well, same answer, since that's really about pollution.

Threat of nuclear annihilation, well, two answers -- prosperity and lack of a sense of oppressive regulation are more likely to leave everybody feeling that it would be a bad thing than the oppressive regulation and slow economic degeneration will, for one, and for two, you didn't have to worry about your hut of sticks and leaves burning down back before our ancestors knew how to cook with fire, either.

Which is not to say that the profit-maximizing corporates aren't a bad thing; they are. One of the chiefest reasons that they're bad is that they want to abolish consumer (and with it, economic) choice, in favour of a system where you by from them, while having as little choice in the matter as they can possibly arrange.

One aspect that I don't see addressed here is that such proliferation of choices runs contrary to the principle of market efficiency.

One brand of tube socks = monopoly
Two brands = limited competition
50 brands = gross inefficiency because makers are forced to compete on marginal or non-existant differences in their products. Tremendous amounts of resources get wasted, the consumer experiences zero increase in marginal utility, zero decrease in price, and large increases in confusion that tends to nullify the "rational customer" model.

At what point does choice cease to be good and become, instead, just a waste of resources?

Derelict --

When the tube sock companies start going out of business.

No, it's not 'efficient' in the 'thermodynamic efficiency' sense, but it's also a pretty good -- efficient -- mechanism to tell when people want things.

Marketting is the process whereby you identify or create an insecurity and then announce that you have a product or service which address that insecurity.

There's no fundamental marketting difference between Viagra spam and selling ocean going yachts; they're both activities which conform to that basic process.

In the case of socks, well, feet are different. If the manufacturers are making socks for different feet, different cost/benefit tradeoffs, different activities (hikers want thick socks; runners want thin socks, equestrians want socks that go almost to their knees...), and with different materials (both a functional matter and a case of personal preference), I can easily see fifty manufacturers prospering while addressing a real choice space.

Neither you nor I need a couple hundred kinds of socks; we might individually need three. (Which three are for me socks for day-to-day, to go in the fancy shoes, and for going in boots in cold weather.)

The population as a whole, though, a couple hundred kinds is easy to imagine. (You bought any ankle socks with pink pom-poms over the heel recently? Going to argue that they shouldn't exist?)

There are better mechanisms to do this than pure markets, but they're not mechanisms that act to reduce the choice available; they're mechanisms that reduce the amount of guesswork involved in figuring out where the insecurities are, and how much they're worth to people.

Although post from the tin foil crowd: their hour of work/week, to say 20

Let me let everyone in on an ugly secret: Boredom is the source of a lot of crime. 20 hours a week may sound neat, but what are people going to do? Listen to the classics--I don't think so

I've wondered about Virginia Postrel, but her books have never made it to the top of the pile. So, perhaps someone here can enlighten me about her.
The reason I've never looked at her books is that titles like "The Future and Its Enemies" set off my bullshit detector. The implication of such a title seem to be that the author knows what the future will? should? might? be, how that will come about, and who is opposing it (why? how?).
What I've been told of the thesis, that there are two kinds of people (?!), those who support "dynamism" and those who oppose it, seem not only simplistic but violently couterintuitive. I'd expect individuals to support changes they benefit from and oppose those they suffer from, not to have a global attitude on "change."
On the other hand, her thesis (remembering again that I haven't read it) in "The Substance of Style" that, as the world grows wealthier, it will want to pay more attention to the aesthetic side of what it produces, taking raw functionality for granted, seems so uncontroversial as to be banal. (But don't forget the research on happiness noted in posts above; I suspect that the greatest gains in happiness would come from a world in which 1)people felt secure from disruption of the economic well-being, and 2)had more time to hang around with their friends, as opposed to a world where their choice is a high income and a long work week or no income and a zero work week.)
Given all the above, my conclusion would be that VP can safely be ignored, especially as I know of no evidence that she actually knows anything about anything, in contrast to, e.g., Paul Krugman and our host, all of whom write about economics.
However, our host, for whose judgement I have a high regard, does not ignore her. Maybe I'm wrong. Would anyone care to enlighten me?

Jonathan
p.s.
1)Sorry this was so wordy. Confused opinions lead to confused prose.

2)I can't resist commenting on this, posted above:
“The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 20 years of progress (again at today's rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see about a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.”

Things like this are why I find it impossible to take Kurzweiler seriously, despite his record to technical competence (or even brilliance).
For instance, what is a "paradigm shift rate?" How is it measured? For that matter, what is a paradigm shift? And to anyone who thinks they know, have you read Margret Masterman's article in "Criticism and the Growth of Knowlege," ed. Lakatose and Musgrave?
Does K. really think trends continue forever. I remember a prediction made back in the early sixties by John Campbell, the science fiction editor. According to him, by the nineties we'd all be using essentially an infinite amount of electricity per capita, among other things.
Does K. think the human mind can support rates of knowlege change like the above? Actually, he probably thinks that machines will do it, leaving humanity behind. He may be right. But I'm skeptical.

Brad's right about how important this was to Marx. Here's Marx on the conflict faced by the capitalist who wants to hold down wages but increase consumption:

"In spite of all the 'pious' speeches he therefore searches for means to spur them on to consumption, to give his wares new charms, to inspire them with new needs by constant chatter etc. It is precisely this side of the relation of capital and labour which is an essential civilizing moment, and on which the historic justification, but also the contemporary power of capital rests." (Grudrisse, Penguin 1973, p287, quoted here http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1080/1369801031000112996 )

If you justify capitalism by its increased productivity (as Marx did) you need stimulation of new needs, too. You might prefer education or art (publicly or privately funded) but you shouldn't sneer at advertising for no other reason than that it increases the motive to consume.

Speaking of shopping. Brad asked about getting espresso in a hotel room. There Bialetti makes a small portable espresso maker with its own heating element, it is easily packable and makes more than adequeate espresso, so long as you bring with you your own coffee.

Retails at Kitchen etc. and WS.

Jonathon Goldberg wants to find out about Virginia Postrel. She lives in Dallas, and has an interesting weblog at dynamist.com. Its not that difficult to check it out for yourself.

Consumerism distorts the human sphere by shifting our priority away from human interaction (what can be more rewarding than that?) to the realm of objects. Consumerism has enabled large corporations to enslave us as making money to purchase more things has become paramount in our lives. Consumerism creates pollution by the production of those things that we must have ever more of. Consumerism means our children are now in the hands of strangers for extended periods so mothers and fathers can both make money to purchase more things. Consumerism destroys health as the struggle to maintain maximally consumptive lifestyles becomes increasingly difficult, resulting in high levels of stress. Consumerism creates terrorism as the US puts its face in too many faces around the world in support of its self (highly consumptive) interests (shame on all of you who have gone out and bought the biggest gas guzzling SUV's you could afford *since 9-11*.) Consumerism makes us one dimensional bread winners. Moe Levine, already heavily conditioned by one dimensional thinking, sees only boredom (and crime) if we only worked twenty hours a week. How about community service or a creative avocation? These enriching activities stand in stark contrast to the soulessness of the purchase of objects as a meaningful pursuit in life. One thing that consumerism does not do is create happiness.

OK, I'll get off my soapbox now.

Marx would have understood you. But I don't think he would have agreed. The dichotomy you pose is a false one. No-one proposes such minimality as an alternative (well, maybe some unreconstructed Maoists--are there any left?). I think that Marx thought that English late-Victorian middle class material culture, though, was fairly close to the dialectical tipping point. They'd gone about as far as they could go. If I'm right, this was a failure of imagination on his part. But then prediction is hard, even for Virginia Postrel.

Still, I'm not sure that the twentieth century has actually taught us that our material needs are vastly greater than the English late-Victorian middle classes already possessed. Much of what has happened since has been catchup. And, apart from computers and air-conditioning, the innovations haven't been compelling.

2500 calories?

Jeez DeLong. Lose weight.

“please tell me where i may purchase a life free from damaging environmental pollutants, an end to global warming, and freedom from the threat of nuclear annihilation.”

You can’t, and you never could. But remember we have always had pollution. For example the air in London is a lot cleaner today than it was in 1950 or even 1850. Ditto for New York and most other cities in the Europe and North America. That cleaner air has been “purchased” by using new technologies. As for global warming, that theory is somewhat speculative at least as to how much warming will occur and what the effects will be. Current models don’t even predict the past very well, and there many data sets that pose severe problems for the General Circulation Modelers. However, nuclear annihilation is a more reasonable fear. We could not keep the genie in the bottle forever. If there had never been a Manhattan problem, we would still have both single-stage and two-stage nuclear weapons. The physics is there, and eventually someone would exploit it. Even if we could somehow negotiate a universal nuclear disarmament treaty, the danger would remain. In fact it could get worse because a cheater with a few weapons would have tremendous blackmail power over everyone else. But people have never been free from the danger of some kind of annihilation, be it Vesuvius or Genghis Khan.

People have been saying for centuries that technological progress is about to peter out. They have consistently been proven wrong. A prediction that technological progress is about to slow is totally contrary to historical trends, and you would need substantial evidence to convince me of that. The "this time it's different" mentality is almost always wrong.

Moe Levine: boredom and crime

You forgot important ingredients: insufficient standard of living and the perception of having no perspective to improve by honest work. The boredom supplies only the time to think about "solutions".

Many failings of individuals result from failings of society, or at least their social environment.

If I had 20+ more hours weekly at my hands at, above, or not too much below my current standard of living, I cannot see how I would become bored.

There are plenty of people who need stuff like food, clothing and shelter, and these people are driven by needs. But for the people who post here, the blessed of the land, it is hard for me to imagine a life so barren that buying something to make it better would seem like a solution.

For me, the stuff I have works just fine. When something breaks, or becomes ugly, I go buy something new, and I am constantly amazed by what is available, since I have not been out looking at stuff. But to formulate a desire based on an advertisement? You have to be really bored with yourself to do that.

http://www.thepledge04.com

Keep beating the Bushes!...

It seems as if in this discussion “needs” is being used for “wants”, which rather defers the emotional connection to sustainability and reliability. There are at least three issues. The first two are: (1) the sustainability of technical progess and change, and (2) the reliability of the market system for allowing innovation and substitution to make up for shrinking resources. The third issue--that collection and care of material wealth militates against expansion into higher being--has been devalued since the beginning of the Modern period, and is beneath the consideration of the sophisticates in attendance here...

We are all swept up in the technical acceleration of the last few hundred years. Many people easily assert that the institution of “continuous scientific discovery” GUARANTEES such progress endlessly into the future. But is this assertion provable? It is as easy to argue that the Industrial Revolution has become concretized into unavoidable structures, and, as Richard Feynmann believed, that the laws of nature are discoverably finite. There may be, at least in middle-runs, both material and intellectual path-dependence.

Indeed, you could interpret the archeological evidence as showing that technological change occurs in spurts, then levels off for hundreds, or thousands, of years. In this, it is probably like “punctuated equilibrium”--although I think the word ‘evolution” should be reserved for the Darwinian process, and is misleading when applied to personal learning or technical change, as for example Kurzweil uses it.

I can think of one good reason why we may have a way to go: in 1802 Romagnosi discovered that an electric current deflects a magnetic needle (a discovery ignored, until Orsted refound it in 1820). We quickly developed elctromagnetism for: (1) energy and motive force, (2) lighting, (3) communication, (4) heating and cooking, (5) splitting and fusion of matter, (6) subsequent sensing and analysis, (7) defense, and (8) even as a poetic metaphor for love, or the interior lifeforce (“zap”, “buzz”, “vibration”...). For two million years before this, ALL of these functions--including that of poetic metaphor--were performed by FIRE.

This changeover is so complete, yet its complexifying effects are so incalculable, that we might re-number the calendar by this discovery: so we are now in the year 202 E.M. (Electro-Magnetism).

That gives some idea of how early this all may be. We are simple cave apes before our computer-monitors, trembling and fascinated as in the presence of fire.

And like fire, some far-away day we will have used-up all the things we can do with it...

Now still, we need to consider the growth of our population number. The conservative market fundamentalists always fall back upon Julian Simon’s idea that more people means more creativity. This, I suspect, is nonsense. Give more people more chainsaws, and they just cut down more trees (exercising their “choice” all the way). Exactly what is the evidence that creativity is linear to population? There should be around eight Shakespeares walking around, three or four Beethovens, a couple of Einsteins...

But if the quantity of new ideas is numbered by a more “fractal”-looking dimension--highly likely, given everything else we know about organization in biology--then we may be screwed.

Indeed it could be that, like every other burgeoning ecological population, we humans can accelerate growth to a very high rate, and NEVER register the sub-threshold drop in life-support systems until it is too late--therefore, without enough time to bootstrap a big change. (That would also be another observation from evolutionary ecology.) “Market forces” might not be able to correct for this (let’s name the counter-proposition “Hayek’s fallacy”). So for now, we go on chasing Choice into many different paths--and almost every one could be a cul-de-sac.

OK, so "shopping is great" or at least consumer choice seems a very valuable thing economically speaking. Making stuff available to those who value them most has to be a good thing. But then again, making people like the stuff that's available has to be good as well.

So "advertising is great" too. Couldn't one easily imagine that preference manipulating advertising is even better that consumer choice? At least as long as the stuff people buy doesn't decrease their neighbour's utility by making their stuff look ugly and oldfashioned? At least as long as the successful advertising doesn't make less advertised products look ugly and oldfashioned?

I don't want to repeat too much, but I do think relative (keeping up with the Joneses) utility has a role here.

This conversation has unfolded on predictable lines, which is unfortunate, since Brad's original correspondent had an interesting point.

Graydon is on the right track when he says that consumer choice is a special case of general economic choice, but then he goes too far when he equates the two. Science and technology, and the economic growth that fund them, can provide some of the components of happiness -- food, medicine, knowledge -- but it cannot provide all of them. We can speculate what we need to make us happy, and we can try to organize society according to our best guesses, but someday science will allow us to _know_, and economic growth will allow us to do it.

But to identify consumer choice with happiness is on the face of it is absurd. There isn't a person alive today whose happiness is equivalent to their possessions. Even Virginia Postrel -- if possessions were enough, why isn't she out there buying more, instead of writing books about it? For the money? Or because book-writing is a form of meaningful work that contributes to her happiness?

As a consumer, I would like more choices in
voting for president.

Lee A.:

"new ideas"- Perhaps what is more relevant is the rate of generation of new contexts for ideas, which change and refunction the received stock of ideas. The growth in communications would be a driver here. And new ideas needn't be terribly good ones; small incremental changes can combine in an overall synergistic effect without such an outcome ever having been specifically intended. (I call this "millipede action".) So "evolution" is not so inappropriate a notion here, though not evolution by natural selection, (which itself is not finitely pre-specifiable, pace Feynmann). At least, it would serve to remind us of "power law" distributions of cascades of extinction and speciation. (And Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein, these are markers of epochal change. We all can not be blamed, if we have yet to witness such misfortune. But could we at all recognize it, were it upon us?)

We have already burgeoned many, many times, with deep effects in terms of altering environments/eco-systems, so much so that we now think we "own" the entire planet! What is new is the acceleration of rates and quantities. My guess is that we have probably already slipped over some trip-wires. I don't think the vaunted Western "life-style" can be generalized through out the human population of the planet, which is not the same thing as the generalization and wider distribution of real social wealth. The question is whether we can achieve "technological build-down", the refunctionning of technologies and organizations in the direction of increasingly efficient use of resources, rather than the maximalization of resource exploitation. I don't think that markets, left to their own devices, could or would achieve this, but I also think that, were it achievable, markets would play an important role in promulgating and propogating such achievements.

Walter Pohl:

Science will never allow us to know what happiness is. One of the conditions of happiness is that we don't know of it. Unhappiness is an equilibriating effect.

Lee A.: "Exactly what is the evidence that creativity is linear to population? There should be around eight Shakespeares walking around, three or four Beethovens, a couple of Einsteins..."

What are you complaining about? The Shakespeares, Beethovens, and Einsteins are here. Also note that out of these, only Einstein was celebrated during his lifetime. The other two were recognized only after their death, or, extrapolating, decades and centuries after they had their big achievements. With today's big achievers it will be similar.

There is also the element that with increasing state of the art, it becomes more difficult to deliver large qualitative deltas of progress, so a lot of Shakespeares etc. you may simply take for granted and not view as anything special. But maybe that's your point?

"Why does Brad keep boosting [Postrel]?"

Virginia is also one hot babe.

Virginia Postrel buys into MIT Professor Brynjolfsson's somewhat false dichotomy of the issue of Variety vs. Price on the internet.

I have to take issue with Brynjolfsson's somewhat false dichotomy of Variety vs. Price. Its not an either/or choice; You get to do both very, very easily on-line. The more cogent issues -- and more interesting challenges -- arise when we look at on-line versus off-line shopping.

Price and/or variety are just different aspects of the same unifying thread: More information about consumer items. Business purchases also, for that matter. (Just 'cause the B2B stocks cratered doesn't mean that B2B itself isnt alive and well.) . . .

At the risk of oversimplifying this interconnected 'net thingie, its all about the data: On line shopping is all price, selection, product information, relative comparisons, opinions/reviews, etc. -- all a click or two away. These are simply data points which merely reflect the internet as a massively relational data base. And Google just adds another interleaved layer underneath it all . . .

Graydon:

"Neither you nor I need a couple hundred kinds of socks; we might individually need three. (Which three are for me socks for day-to-day, to go in the fancy shoes, and for going in boots in cold weather.)"

I've got some ex-girlfriends who would vehemently
disagree with the idea that one needs only three
types of socks...

"The plot to make the whole world eat and watch the same things is going pretty well, don't you think?"
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
----------
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this essential fact, but non-Westerners never do." Samuel P. Huntington
----------

"Something wonderful is about to happen."
(movie "2001") Maybe Kubrick meant the black monoliths of World Trade Center coming down?
"Kubrick's '2001' as a Simile of 9/11 WTC"

Any nation that can cherish the hula hoop and make a millionaire out of a pet rock dealer committed the original sin of manufacturing consumption for the mere sake of consumption.
And now we reap the whirlwind. WWF Smackdown.

Hail America ... it is a chimera wrapped in an illusion shrouded in saran wrap and toilet paper.
And as swiftly discarded and forgotten.

Now back to reality.
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
http://www.moorishgirl.com/

If it's any consolation to those Luddites who whip themselves with birch branches in Brad's blog, all my multi-millionaire friends are miserable, both the root meaning of the word, and the intent. Money does not bring happiness, although you could make a slam-dunk argument that SPENDING money does! Hail to Mammon, the TRUE religion of Western civilization and the sheiks and martial economy tyrants of the East!!

-counter-

The greatest works of art in all of civilization were produced for ultra-rich elite's enjoyment.
Ask yourself then, what famous works of art or literature were produced by the Soviets or PRC? (Solzhenitzen doesn't count. He was a genius.)

-counter again-

Having said that, I changed out our old garbage disposal this weekend. If there was ever a more useless contrivance, wasteful of electricity and water, I don't know what it is. Europeans and Asians certainly can't. Imagine 200 years from now, an archeological excavation uncovering the hulk of that unrecyclable and now unrecognizable garbage disposal.

"Class, this is an early 21st Century fountain. The people of that era installed them in their tiled kitchens to spray delightful mists of fresh scented water into their faces after an evening of debauchery and feasting. See, here is the port where the water entered, and the plate that spun the water up and out in a spray."

Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha.

Why not? The next consumer marvel, the kitchen sink fountain, surrounded by flat stones and wheat grass, with a glass windchime above it, mood music and lighting playing on the glass!

Meditate to your sink fountain, while you stuff your face with the next agribusiness doggie bone.

>As for global warming, that theory is somewhat speculative at least as to how much warming will occur and what the effects will be.

This should set people's wingnut detector off.

Clean air hasn't been purchased, the production has merely been shifted out of sight.

See "externalization of costs"

cm--You better please name one of the walking Shakespeares, 'cause I'm missing out on something!

walt pohl: thank you for reiterating what I should have made more clear re: the false equation of consumer choice with happiness.

stirling: thank you for pointing out wingnut wackiness. They love to cite the improved air quality of places like LA -- ignoring the fact that the improvement has stopped, is not yet satisfactory for human health, and is headed in the opposite direction thanks to the burgeoning number of cars on the road. Game over for the deniers.

John Halasz: science won't tell us what happiness is. But Psychology and Buddhism give us much more help there. Attachment to material goods, or the imputing of value to non-living objects over that of the living (say, other people, whether that be strangers or intimate friends/relatives) all very consistently point in the opposite direction of happiness.

and for the Midwestern complainer about the paucity of consumer choice outside of cosmopolitan urban areas -- so true.

one more dig at Postrel. I remember she wrote this preposterous article about real estate in SF. She said what the freemarket fundamentalists always say: increase supply! Theoretically, Yes!

But ignores the reality on the ground: people don't want SF to become super-dense like Manhattan, and an unfettered market would undoubtedly lead it to densities comparable to Manahattan, thereby obliterating much of the city's attractiveness. Yet she couldn't seem to grasp this, just shaking her head condescendingly at the silly liberals who don't understand economics. Of course SF could add a number of units in some currently undeveloped areas, but that's besides the point. A free market fundie says let supply rise to demand, let all of the city become like 3rd Avenue in the 80s (NYC Upper East Side).

Radek --

See? Population demand for a choice space involving > 100 kinds of socks *is* well supported!

Walt --

Not quite what I said; consumer choice is not equivalent to general economic choice, consumer choice is *dependent* on general economic choice.

What I said was that attempts to arbitrarily or morally constrain consumer choice are equivalent to arguments that the rate of economic innovation is too high. (Not the same thing as pragmatic constraints, such as 'your manufacturing process releases clouds of gaseous radium; stop that'.)

So if someone is arguing that there is no 'need' for twenty kinds of shoes, they're arguing that the ability to make shoes is too good, since otherwise it wouldn't be possible to make that many kinds at a profit.

Certainly they can't legitimately argue that everyone who wants one of those kinds of shoes is stupid or insane; people will do that, and also go for 'immoral' and 'evil', but if someone cares enough to expend a chunk of their own choice space, you more or less have to take them seriously, at least in the statistical abstract.

So it does get back to insecurity management, and that, inevitably, gets back to relative social standing. (We're band-forming plains apes. It's been not less than ten million years since relative social standing could possibly not have been important to someone in our lineage.)

Now, if you want to argue that better insecurity management is possible or desirable, you can do that pretty easily, starting with Vimes' Boots, but that's not the same thing as saying 'consumption is bad'.

"The plot to make the whole world eat and watch the same things is going pretty well, don't you think?" -- http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
~~~~~

I dunno about that. When I was young the Beverly Hillbillies had 50% of the market ratings. Today people read blogs from Iraq.
~~~~~

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this essential fact, but non-Westerners never do." Samuel P. Huntington
~~~~~

Though, of course, what made the West vastly more effective at applying violence was the superior effectiveness of its ideas re scientific method, capital markets, communications, and the rule of law (at least internally) which coordinated it all, to create *power* no other society could match.

And judging by the visible historical record, if other societies had had such power I suspect they'd have been just as willing to use it as the West has been.

Stirling Newberry:

A. Zarkhov is not a wingnut, just a wing. Confusing the two does not help in fending off wingnut vitiations of the discussion.

Jacko2 writes:
>
> It was great when technology that first was available to
> the wealthy eventually filtered down to everyone. It's
> great that everyone can have a TV now, or a reliable new
> car for a low price. Or lower priced better quality
> clothes, packaged foods, appliances and furnishings. But
> where is the new lower priced housing? Lower priced
> education? (Of course, leave aside the jobs problem for a
> moment here.)

I see no smilies; I am baffled by this. New housing in most markets is priced at very close to the cost of construction plus a modest profit margin. Home ownership rates are now at near record high rates, despite the fact that the quality of the product (as judged by its ability to pass modern building codes) is waaay up. Sometimes, that improvement in quality also makes itself known in monthly costs; my 40-year-old house costs a heck of a lot more to heat and cool than any new house would.

That said, there is no cheap housing in places like San Diego or San Fransisco. This is annoying if you don't live there already, but has little to do with the pace of technological change in housing construction.

On the education front, I will allow that we have a more mixed experience. Again, the quality of today's science education, given that it mirrors gains in technology, is absolutely stunningly better than it used to be. And the students in today's Ivy Leagues really would mop the floor with the Harvard students of the 1950s. But costs are up, too, and there is a really odd pattern going on where many students are being forced to over-consume higher education just to get a credential that allows them to work in a job independent of whatever it was they studied. That said, I have a colleague who successfully taught an advanced seminar this semester across multiple campuses using the new Internet 2 infrastructure. I see some immense productivity gains in the near future of higher education; it will be interesting to see if prices come down as well.

You act as if all these wonderful choices had no consequences. If you ignore the fact that we are ultimately dependent upon the resources of just this planet, this eveything is fine. And yes, it is clear that all this stuff has not brought us more happiness.

“stirling: thank you for pointing out wingnut wackiness. They love to cite the improved air quality of places like LA -- ignoring the fact that the improvement has stopped, is not yet satisfactory for human health, and is headed in the opposite direction thanks to the burgeoning number of cars on the road. Game over for the deniers.”

But here is what the EPA says in their 1997 fact sheet:

“Since 1970, air quality has continued to improve for six major air pollutants, sometimes referred to as "criteria" pollutants. These include carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide. Air quality is determined by measuring pollutant concentration levels with air quality monitors placed in urban and some other areas.”

For something more recent look at Fig. 3.2 in the EPA 2003 AirTrends Report. Note the declining number of days (relative to 1992) where the AQI >100 for California. Yes there are places (called “pams” by EPA) that show no trend, so the improvement is not universal. Nevertheless considering that population and GDP have continue to increase and on the whole air quality continues do improve, a remarkable accomplishment.

http://www.epa.gov/air/aqtrnd03/pdfs/Chap3_MetroAreaTrends.pdf

So where is your data for your assertions? Or do you believe that simple insults are enough?

This argument is taking place on one blog out of thousands. With people spread across the world. Each using a computing devise connected by a network.powered by electricity.

You have all therefore revieled a preference for wanting access to a huge material infustructure and a desire for obscure items.

PH:

"The greatest works of art in all of civilization were produced for ultra-rich elite's enjoyment.
Ask yourself then, what famous works of art or literature were produced by the Soviets or PRC? (Solzhenitzen doesn't count. He was a genius.)"

Solzhenitsyn doesn't count because he wasn't
part of that culture but rebeling against it.
BUT, the Soviets did produce some genius level
literature. Shokolov's "Quiet Flows the Don"
(not sure if this is the English title) springs
to mind immiedietly. Also the other Tolstoy.
And as much as I hate to admit it some of
Mayakovsky's poems are really good.

Then you've got others (maybe
not so borderline after all) like Bulgakov,
Yevtushenko, Pasternak, Akhmatova (whom I haven't
read all that much), Yesenin, Mandelstam, Brodsky
Yerofeev, though they are probably in the same
category as Soltzhenitsyn - producing great works
despite, rather than because of.

In fact I would completely disagree with the
contention that "The greatest works of art in all of civilization were produced for ultra-rich elite's enjoyment". But then I've always thought
that Shakespeare was way way way way way overrated.

An altogether different issue is whether or not
this is the appropriate way to measure the well
being or status of any society.

Come to think of it, and as much as I enjoy
literature, I'm pretty sure that a better
measure of society's well being than the number
of *great* artists and poets it produces, is
the number of channels that an average person can
get on their cable tv box or the number of
different types of socks one can purchase.

All that art and foolosophy stuff satisfies the
needs of only a small fraction of the population -
the educated (in the deragatory sense of the word, that is educated in the humanities) elite,
which then makes the mistake of paternalistically extrapolating their preferences onto the general populace and assuming that if the general populace was "intelligent enough" it too would
hold the same preferences.

Jonathan Goldberg asked

"Things like this are why I find it impossible to take Kurzweiler seriously, despite his record to technical competence (or even brilliance).
For instance, what is a "paradigm shift rate?" How is it measured? For that matter, what is a paradigm shift?

From the article i linked...

“A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.

Each paradigm follows an "S-curve," which consists of slow growth (the early phase of exponential growth), followed by rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth), followed by a leveling off as the particular paradigm matures.

During this third or maturing phase in the life cycle of a paradigm, pressure builds for the next paradigm shift, and research dollars are invested to create the next paradigm. We can see this in the enormous investments being made today in the next computing paradigm – three-dimensional molecular computing – despite the fact that we still have at least a decade left for the paradigm of shrinking transistors on a flat integrated circuit using photolithography (Moore's Law). Generally, by the time a paradigm approaches its asymptote (limit) in price-performance, the next technical paradigm is already working in niche applications. For example, engineers were shrinking vacuum tubes in the 1950s to provide greater price-performance for computers, and reached a point where it was no longer feasible to shrink tubes and maintain a vacuum. At this point, around 1960, transistors had already achieved a strong niche market in portable radios.

When a paradigm shift occurs for a particular type of technology, the process begins a new S-curve. “

I dont think you should take his argument on athority, but hopefully his accomplishments are enough draw to look at his case.

“And to anyone who thinks they know, have you read Margret Masterman's article in "Criticism and the Growth of Knowlege," ed. Lakatose and Musgrave?”

I think Khun was talking about theoretical shifts where Ray is talking about shifting physical mechanisms i.e. vacuum tubes verses transistors. Ray doesn't make reference to Khun and I dont think his theories require Khun to be correct... they are just fond of the same word.

“Does K. really think trends continue forever. “

Forever is not necessary... only ~50 more years after that things get wierd :)

Dubblblind writes...

“Consumerism distorts the human sphere by shifting our priority away from human interaction (what can be more rewarding than that?) to the realm of objects. “

Consumerism is not required for humans to be interested in objects... observe any baby play.

“Consumerism means our children are now in the hands of strangers for extended periods so mothers and fathers can both make money to purchase more things.”

Public education did not originate in Consumerism.

“Consumerism destroys health as the struggle to maintain maximally consumptive lifestyles becomes increasingly difficult, resulting in high levels of stress. “

Life spans and health spans have been increasing.

“Consumerism creates terrorism as the US puts its face in too many faces around the world in support of its self (highly consumptive) interests (shame on all of you who have gone out and bought the biggest gas guzzling SUV's you could afford *since 9-11*.) “

And I thought it radical Islam had something to do with it but they fear the liberty we give our women and the expression of our music far more than our objects.

"OK, I'll get off my soapbox now."

even your metaphor undercuts your idea.

"But to identify consumer choice with happiness is on the face of it is absurd. There isn't a person alive today whose happiness is equivalent to their possessions."

There is also not a person alive who would be alive if it were not for the use of objects.

So maybe objects are at least part of happiness.

Experiment: Find a child to young to be influenced by advertising but still old enough to be aware when something is taken away. Observe the child playing with a favorite toy. Take the toy away in a quick manner, and walk out of the room.

Results: At least some children will cry some of the time.

There is some reality here, its not just ideology.

jonathan king: home quality is very, very far from uniformly high quality, especially at the lower end of the price spectrum, where I'm guessing you're not at. Look at a recent article in the NY Times about the Poconos for an example of how thousands of poor urban families got ripped.

And the statistical fact that homeownership is higher now than it was, say, 20 years ago does not address the affordability factor and commuting/time/quality of life issues for tens of millions of people. This debate is really about happiness. And living and commuting patterns are getting worse for most people, and much worse for many.

Rob Sperry: re: objects and happiness....you are being ridiculous. Of course many material objects are very important. But when people are about to die, do you think they reach out and say, "I'm going to miss my objects!" Come on. Stop trying to condescendingly win arguments with the most exacting literal interpretations of statements without asking questions of those with whom you're debating. For example, you could have asked us to define happiness. Or is that too unscientific for you?

jacko2 writes:
>
> jonathan king: home quality is very, very far from
> uniformly high quality, especially at the lower end of the
> price spectrum, where I'm guessing you're not at. Look
> at a recent article in the NY Times about the Poconos for
> an example of how thousands of poor urban families got
> ripped.

You have completely changed the topic now. You originally asked "But where is the new lower priced housing". My response was basically:

1) Most housing in most markets is sold at close to construction cost.
2) Quality improvements have been substantial due to minimum code improvements.
3) More widespread affordability is certainly not an argument for very high cost.

Nowhere did I say that housing was all of uniformly high quality, just better quality than it used to be. Having lived in places built between the teens and the 90s, I have confidence in this statement. I don't know what the Poconos appraisal/lending scandal has to do with this discussion. Without the illegal (and/or immoral) scam, the prices of those houses would have been *more* affordable.

As far as my place on the price spectrum is concerned, it is almost exactly at the median for my city, about the 30th percentile for my side of town, and works out to just about what the reconstruction cost would be. (Although the re-constructed house would meet higher code standards and be new construction, so I guess there is maybe $20K of value in this place over and above historical cost.)

> And the statistical fact that homeownership is higher now
> than it was, say, 20 years ago does not address the
> affordability factor and commuting/time/quality of life
> issues for tens of millions of people.

Of *course* it addresses the affordability factor; more people can afford housing now than could 20 years ago. I mean, unless you want to argue that people would really prefer to rent, I don't see any other interpretation.

Commuting time is a more interesting point, since those are up (or way up) in some places. Obviously, it's a trade-off that people make, but I would be very surprised if the availability of cheaper (near building cost) housing at a distance didn't have a dampening effect on prices closer in.

To the extent that "closer in" matters anymore, of course. Fewer people than ever commute all the way into large cities. And there was one big caveat about housing being more affordable and better: this is only true in markets where there is *not* a huge price premium for location. We left San Diego because the prices there were very high then (and even higher now). There are days I regret having done this. But the lack of cheap housing in SD isn't because they can't build it inexpensively, but because they won't sell it for less than what the market will bear.

> This debate is really about happiness. And living and
> commuting patterns are getting worse for most people,
> and much worse for many.

I'm not sure what a "living pattern" is. I did feel strongly about commuting patterns, though. Being a one-care family, we had to live close enough to work for me to ride my bike and/or take public transportation. That part of my life I'm pretty giddy about, actually.

“Rob Sperry: re: objects and happiness....you are being ridiculous”

I was being ridiculous in the face of absurdity!

“Of course many material objects are very important.“

That was my point! My opinion is that the most important value to life is other life(weather the value is positive or negative). The most important value to human life is other human life.

My experience of the positive value of other people is first and foremost though personal interaction. I do believe the greatest determiner of happiness is the people you interact with. But one of the other great benefits of people is they make all kinds of neat and helpful objects. I get annoyed when other folks try and get in the way of my trading with other people and claiming I am flawed or not fully human for waning to do so.

“But when people are about to die, do you think they reach out and say, "I'm going to miss my objects!"

I certainly hope not. Was anyone claiming this or something even vaguely close? This all started over an estimate the relative value of selection vs low price on amazon.com.

Let me give the rest of the quote i was responding to...

“Even Virginia Postrel -- if possessions were enough, why isn't she out there buying more, instead of writing books about it? For the money? Or because book-writing is a form of meaningful work that contributes to her happiness?”
This question and many other threads in this discussion are trying to imply that Virginia and some group of people who believe in Consumerism believe that it is only objects and consumer choice of objects that make people happy.
I don't think Virginia or anyone of these mythical Consumerism people believe such. I have never meet someone who described their philosophy as Consumerism, at the very best it is an aspect of a persons thinking. That wasn't getting acknowledged in the discussion.

“For example, you could have asked us to define happiness. Or is that too unscientific for you?”

I am happy to do meta-ethics but I didn't think that was where the discussion was headed. I don't think the question is primarily what happiness is, but several factual disputes about how to obtain it along with several claims about what the future is going to be like. I think the factual claims are proper questions for science.

When I see people making what to me are bizarre claims I have fun pointing it out, not for those people as much as for the other people that might be on the margin of being drawn in by the ideas and for those who will agree with me and be amused.

Best regards from Portugal:-)

Maybe this point is too obvious, here, but don't different people find happiness in different things? I bet there are plenty of people who WOULD be content with the 100 sq feet of apartment space, four identical pairs of overalls, bland food, etc. On the other hand, there are many people who are a lot happier when they have more stuff. I know I was far happier when I stopped using my P133 computer from the mid-1990s, and got a P500 from the late 1990s: there was less waiting, etc. I suspect I shall be happier still when I get a newer computer after this one.

Some people think getting a massage is very fun. I don't, I think. Some people want bigger breasts, and will surgically alter themselves to that end. Again, not my bag. Some people like cars, some don't.

This isn't to make some sort of revealed-preference claim that all consumerism is okay, because otherwise, people wouldn't be doing it: I realize sometimes people make decisions without knowing the consequences, getting a big house without thinking about how much trouble it'll be to keep it up, being forced into getting a car by workplace/residency patterns etc. I'm just saying, y'know, it seems like a rather grandiose project to find "what makes people happy," since we're not all the same. Well, happyness inducing drugs like opiates might make people happy, but as far as what EXTERNAL circumstances make people happy, that's pretty variable, both on the consumerism/other stuff scale and what type of consumerism/what type of other stuff.

Oh this is wrong in so many ways, but I'm late for work.

All you folks who decry the excess of consumerism. Who exactly is going to pick which choices are to be allowed and which not? I am a lefty but too many lefties have no sense of humor at all. I certainly dont want THEM choosing my choices. I too am often amazed, even disgusted, by what I see people doing at malls. But who am I to tell them not to? Or to pare down their priority lists? I dont want ANYONE doing it for me, so the golden rule says I shouldnt do it for them.

Prof. DeLong is apparently enjoying a "life-style."

Late in the thread here but:

If Brad wants to understand the impatience with Postrel, he might ask himself how much he would need in additional consumer goods to compensate him for

a) the loss of his wife and kids;
b) the loss of the ability to read/write/think about economics.

If he says, as I'm sure he would, "No amount!" then I think the minimal importance of consumer variety will become apparent.

Love of one's family, respect of one's peers, useful and interesting work are infinitely more important than any and all consumption goods, once the necessities of biological existence have been met.

Formally, the best way to model the role of consumption is a utility function wchich has the properties:

a. the marginal utility of consumption rises toward infinity as consumption falls;
b. the marginal utility of consumption falls toward 0 as consumption rises;
c. the total utility provided by consumption approaches a finite asymptote as consumption rises toward infinity.

There are conventional utility functions that have these properties -- one runs into them (I think) most often in development economics.

What this captures is that consumption is very important when you are poor -- if you are dying of thirst, there is no sacrifice you won't make to consume a drink of water. But as your income rises, there are an increasing number of sources of (dis)utility for which no amount of increased consumption can compensate.

The thread has gotten pretty long, but I don't think that anybody has yet pointed out a lacuna in Brad's post. Preferences are endogenous. They don't come completely out of the depths of our heart; many of them are manufactured. The manufacturing process is highly-path dependent, and more commercialized than it ever was before. Consumer sovereignty would be a great thing, except that it cannot exist. There are a lot more profits to be made from a taste in Britney Spears than a taste for home string quartets. Guess which tastes will flourish in a "consumer" culture?

Shopping, choice, and dynamism are all great things (although some of us prefer prix fixe to a la carte at the restaurant.) But what you want to shop for and what you want to choose are also important, as well as the drivers of dynamism.

Postrel's celebration of consumerism is not limited to just that, unfortunately. It feeds the argument that all will be well if taxes are cut, government is shrunk, and people get to spend all their money on all sorts of material goods; that will keep the economy in good shape.

But, Brad should point out, some of us want other things and will trade off consumerism for them: roads that don't suck because the government can't repair them; better mass transit; cleaner skies; adequately staffed national parks; better paid public school teachers and smaller classes, better wages for Walmart workers so they too can enjoy consumer choice rather than depend on government welfare . . . and so on. The "wonderful consumer choice" argument of Postrel's is there only to feed the radical right's simplistic economic program.

"the marginal utility of consumption rises toward infinity as consumption falls"

In the last few years, I have cut my consumption in half. I have noticed that I get more saisfaction from the fewer things that I consume. I also give more thought to the things I consume and consider not only their ability to immediately gratify but there are impacts on the planet. Therefore, consistent with the above postulate, within a certain range, less consumption tends to increase one's utility.
But is utility happiness?

I don't think the real issue here is whether choice and variety are good or bad.

The problem is that the variety of products (cheap, flimsy, rapidly obsolescent products whose variety consists, for the most part, of superficial cosmetic features) is not the result of the market. Products proliferate because the government's subsidies and cartelizing regulations promote production of a scale and capital intensiveness that wouldn't otherwise exist. The inefficiency costs of all this product variety are externalized on the taxpayer.

And if it weren't for such forms of government intervention, landlords and monopoly capitalists would not be drawing unearned income from our labor. We could be working the 20 hour weeks crayz writes about without any loss of real income. We work 40 hours or more because 20 hours of our labor product is feeding Donald Trump, Bill Gates, and David Rockefeller.

Kevin, where are your statistics? Last time I checked, the share of US income going to capital has been constant at about 30% for the past century.

A couple of points for everyone to remember:

1. Utility of consumption has to be measured against something else. Don't forget that utility functions are ordinal mappings, not cardinal properties.

2. That said, don't confuse utility or well-being with happiness. A lot of the discussion about this relationship has a bait-and-switch quality to it.

My $0.02.

"read the last sentence again...read the article and others on the site for the math and empirical observations leading to the conclusion

If this view turned out to be correct would you change your opinion?"

Well, I think the whole thing is consultant-gibberish. 2004 seems more like 1954 than 1954 seems like 1904. Technology may be accelarating, but its ability to transform our lives is not. (And I speak as a technologist.) The introduction of cellphones is less transformative than

I recall Brad giving an excellent talk on this in 1999 at Berkeley's Haas School of Business (on a panel with Shapiro and some dips**t from Wired). Perhaps he might reproduce his musings from that speech.

Perhaps considerations of aesthetics, equity and ethics need to be separated out in considering the value of consumption. In respect to equity, economics has us over a barrel. We would presumably want everyone to have a sufficiency of material and technological goods, so as to meet the basic needs of themselves and their dependents, and then something more so as to exercise the capacities and enjoyments of the good life, not the least of which, at least in my book, would be participation in a political community, so as to develop and exercise the capacity for reason in common with others, whether or not this is "necessary. But in order to meet this objective under current arrangements, the economy must be stimulated with excess demand to provide for an adequate, one hopes, distribution of employment and income. This, in turn, leads on to all sorts of heedless and needless consumption and to the proliferation of hucksterism. At the same time, we all want to plead sollipsistically for our own peculiar needs and the technological appendages that suit our preferred modes of activity. All this then leads further away from any possibility of arriving at some means of instituting the formation of public choices and feeding them back into the constraints and development of the economy.

2004 seems more like 1954 than 1954 seems like 1904.

Very good point. There is NO meaningful sense in which we live in a period of accelerated technological change. Quite the opposite: the second half of the 20th century probably saw fewer major innovations than any prior 50 years since at elast 1750-1800.

One very vivid illustration of this is to tkae a look at mortality statistics for 1900, 1950 and 2000. Many of the major causes of death for 1900 -- tuberculosis, gastrointestinal diseases, typhus, whooping cough, measles -- were essentailly eliminated by 1950. But the tables for 1950 and today are almost interchangeable....

I mean in the US and other first world countries, of course.

jw -

Good Lord man, have you never heard of Viagara????

;-)

Jeez, Brad, I've disagreed w/ you before, but now you're competing w/ me for my self proclaimed title of Radically Inept.

Choice of material goods and services equates to happiness?! What metric are you using? First of all, the choice of a hundred things I can not afford does not increase my happiness. Really. Knowing there's fifty different SUVs out there in the $30k+ range, does nothing to increase my happiness.

More importantly, I do not draw my happiness from things. Sorry, I really don't.

I'll add something at this point that I'm not going to take the time to research right now, but how many Americans, with all this choice available, are finding happiness their happiness in a Prozac/Zanex prescription. Or is that the choice you are referring to?

Choice of how to avoid reality? Computer games, TV programming, living my life through the exploits of others? If we are so happy, why is the diagnosis of clinical depression on the rise. Who is actually happy with their lives?

Damn. We're raising a generation of kids on ridalin (sp?). Do you think they will be happy consumers? Or maybe, we're just creating our Alphas, Betas and Gammas, ala Huxley.

I really think you've confused economic curves and purchasing patterns with happiness. I will grant you that it probably makes those with access to capital happy to see so many markets, but I look around and see very depressed consumers.

I hope your happy.

“Consumerism distorts the human sphere by shifting our priority away from human interaction (what can be more rewarding than that?) to the realm of objects. “--DB--

"Consumerism is not required for humans to be interested in objects... observe any baby play."
--RS--

My point was the shift in *priority* from people to objects. If the baby showed the same tendencies as adults it would prefer it's toy to its mother.

“Consumerism means our children are now in the hands of strangers for extended periods so mothers and fathers can both make money to purchase more things.”--DB--

"Public education did not originate in Consumerism."--RS--

To clarify: young children now spend their days in daycare while their mothers are at work.

“Consumerism destroys health as the struggle to maintain maximally consumptive lifestyles becomes increasingly difficult, resulting in high levels of stress. “--DB--

"Life spans and health spans have been increasing."--RS--

The negative impact of stress on health is well documented. Increased life spans are the result of improved technology and are not correlated with the quality of health.

“Consumerism creates terrorism as the US puts its face in too many faces around the world in support of its self (highly consumptive) interests (shame on all of you who have gone out and bought the biggest gas guzzling SUV's you could afford *since 9-11*.) “--DB--

"And I thought it radical Islam had something to do with it but they fear the liberty we give our women and the expression of our music far more than our objects."--RS--

There is something more direct at work here than ideology. They resent our presence on their soil and we are on their soil protecting our oil interests (in this specific example).

"Muslims burn with anger at America. For its own good, America should leave... There is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land ... The presence of the USA Crusader military forces on land, sea and air of the states of the Islamic Gulf is the greatest danger threatening the largest oil reserve in the world." --Osama Bin Ladin--

The idea that a simple increase in choice results in increased happiness is, along with the efficient markets hypothesis, one of the most serious and persistent errors in economic theory. As Ian posts, it it simply inconsistent with modern psychological and biological research. Human beings are made to engage in activities that increase our individual inclusive fitness. Sometimes more choice is a proximate mechanism that serves this ultimate goal, but sometimes too much choice leads to confusion, distress, and alienation, not to mention the negative spillover effects. Technology is of course a mixed blessing. Everyone who is not a theoretician knows this.

It was asked above:
cm--You better please name one of the walking Shakespeares, 'cause I'm missing out on something!

FWIW, this is from p326 of "Genius," James Gleick's biography of Feynman:
"Norman Mailer ... slowly sank into a thicket of hundreds of equally talanted, original, and hard-driving novelists, each just as likely to be tagged as a budding genius. In a world into which Amis, Beckett, Cheever, Drabble, Ellison, Fuentes, Grass, Heller, Ishiguro, Jones, Kazantzakis, Lessing, Nabokov, Oates, Pym, Queneau, Roth, Solzhenitsyn, Theroux, Updike, Vargas Llosa, Waugh, Xue, Yates, and Zoshchenko - or any other two dozen fiction writers - had never been born, Mailer and any other potential genius would have had a better chance of towering."

Or, as someone said, where there are a dozen Babe Ruths there are none.

Perhaps it's just my imagination, but most economists seem terribly trivial when addressing economic issues.

Brad (God bless him as those of us from the south would say) is no exception.

Posted by: Rob Sperry on April 25, 2004 10:18 PM

“the liberty we give our women”

--You make America sound worse than fundamentalist Muslims. Have you ever heard of feminism? Do you really think women did not contribute substantially to achieving those liberties for themselves?

Posted by: Rob Sperry on April 25, 2004 10:25 PM

“There is also not a person alive who would be alive if it were not for the use of objects”

in response to this quote:

"But to identify consumer choice with happiness is on the face of it is absurd. There isn't a person alive today whose happiness is equivalent to their possessions."

There is a difference between objects and "things that people possess"; I would say both epistemologically AND ontologically. The notion of "private property" is a relatively new notion.

And Graydon, it seems to me that advertising's manipulation of human insecurity (whether biological or a matter of human's development of language as psychoanalysis would have it) to create these "needs" is neither natural nor cast in stone.

Wow, the central tendency of these comments definitely falls on the anti-Postrel side. Too bad Brad doesn't poll his comments board as to what opinions he should hold....

Lee A.: walking Shakespeare

Jonathan Goldberg a few posts above beat me to it.

What he said actually illustrated my point quite well -- at his time, Shakespeare was one of few who could articulate the insights he put forward in a way that would survive times. Today, the bar has risen, and in fact (as I suspect without proof) many people are of Shakespeare's caliber, ditto for Beethoven and Einstein.

Having said that, standing out by brilliant insight or extraordinary achievement is always a matter of circumstance, and not every decade will produce an Einstein, so I wouldn't lament this. After all, he lived and worked just 1-2 generations ago!

In fact a world in which progress is being defined by Shakespeares would worry me a bit -- it would be a world of Shakespearian social environments. There is a plausible although not very likely (?) path from here to the dark ages when certain current trends continue. I hope it doesn't materialize.

tstreet: "In the last few years, I have cut my consumption in half. I have noticed that I get more saisfaction from the fewer things that I consume."

Are you sure you consume fewer things, if so, by which metric? How about the "thing" called time? Which is hopefully consumed by desired activities of yours instead of undesired activities on behalf of something that you don't really enjoy?

This leads me to the question of, if we postulate that the way to enjoy things is to spend time with/using them, how can an economy realistically grow if people are compelled to work more and have less leisure?

One way is to let others work for you, which is one aspect of the US/Asia trade, but US workers still work about 400-500 more annual hours than Europeans.

>R.S. “the liberty we give our women”SBA --You make America sound worse than fundamentalist Muslims. Have you ever heard of feminism? Do you really think women did not contribute substantially to achieving those liberties for themselves? R.S. “There is also not a person alive who would be alive if it were not for the use of objects”SBA- n response to this quote:
"But to identify consumer choice with happiness is on the face of it is absurd. There isn't a person alive today whose happiness is equivalent to their possessions."SBA-There is a difference between objects and "things that people possess"; I would say both epistemologically AND ontologically.
Well strictly speaking the basic definition of object is usually pretty broad.<

From Yahoo... 5. Philosophy: Something intelligible or perceptible by the mind.

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entries/81/o0008100.html

So “things that people possess” is just a small subset of objects. Heck people are objects in the basic ontological sense, but thats not the way people are using the word in this thread.

“Consumerism distorts the human sphere by shifting our priority away from human interaction (what can be more rewarding than that?) to the realm of objects. “--DB--
"Consumerism is not required for humans to be interested in objects... observe any baby play."
--RS--
>My point was the shift in *priority* from people to objects. If the baby showed the same >tendencies as adults it would prefer it's toy to its mother.
I guess we would have to establish a baseline in a non-consumer society and then make a comparison with our own. I am not familiar with any rigorous attempt to do so. So we are left with our intuitions. I am skeptical that there is some group of people advocating the belief that we should focus more on goods than on people, or that there has been a general shift in behavior. So who today or in the past is substantially less focused on objects?
Another split is I just don't see people as being that focused on their stuff, relative to the people in their life. But there could be large selection bias on my part there, I love objects, but I focus mostly on people and ideas. I use objects to improve my relations with people and ideas.

“Consumerism means our children are now in the hands of strangers for extended periods so mothers and fathers can both make money to purchase more things.”--DB--
"Public education did not originate in Consumerism."--RS--
>To clarify: young children now spend their days in daycare while their mothers are at ?>work.
I do find the tendency toward infant daycare to be worrying. For my family, my wife and I choose to have her at home with the baby. But I think that many working mothers, let alone the feminist movement, would be a bit taken aback by the claim that they are just out working to get more consumer goods.

“Consumerism destroys health as the struggle to maintain maximally consumptive lifestyles becomes increasingly difficult, resulting in high levels of stress. “--DB--
"Life spans and health spans have been increasing."--RS--
>The negative impact of stress on health is well documented.
I am against stress too... but is it well documented that we have more stress today than in the past? Every time I read about a time in the past it sounds a lot more stressful than today. What were the glory non-stress years?
>Increased life spans are the result of improved technology and are not correlated with the quality of health.
I don't understand what you mean here.

Anthropologists discovered early on that human beings almost never limit their activities to the satisfaction of basic physical needs for shelter, nutrition and biological continuity. Indeed, in most areas where humans live, the amount of labor required for survival has been shown to be minimal—just a few hours of effort per day. What humans do with the rest of their time is compete—for more desirable mates, for status (some argue that these two are indeed the same thing) and for recognition of self.

In instances where social structures suppressed the opportunities for certain members to compete with others—such as in peon- and serf-based societies, in slave-keeping societies, in communist dictatorships—the oppressed tended to lapse into lassitude at or even below the level required for their own subsistence. In order to stave off societal collapse, the ruling classes had or have to resort to constant, unpredictable applications of violence—otherwise the oppressed just mope.

In instances where competition between individuals was suppressed by mutual consent—such as seems to have been the case with the numerous tribes of pre-Columbian California—the resultant societies have been fragile, disintegrating into nothingness at first contact with more active and activist groups.

Consumerist capitalism has proven a least-coercive means to a robust society. Individuals compete within a framework of largely consensual rules with a minimum of self-deception. Status is affirmed not by a ruling authority but by the acquisition of status objects from society at large. Individuals strive against one another but the competition offers opportunities for others to acquire their own status objects. The resultant society is highly energetic, with individuals willing to expend tremendous amounts of energy not just secure their own status but to guard the society’s ability to reward them.

However, the promise of consumerism cannot be met. We all have to sleep and we all have to age, slow down and die, so we do not possess an infinite capacity to apply ourselves to further marginal increases in activity in order to acquire yet more status objects. Given the limits on our waking hours and our life spans, there comes a point where the energy expended to acquire a new status object subtracts from the pleasure one derives from previous acquisitions. After this barrier is breached, the relationship between the status object and the acquirer descends into fetishism—desire for the status object itself, irrespective of the personal or societal cost associated with its acquisition.

Michael Cusek:

Read Jared Diamond's article on Easter Island in the Mar. 25 NYRB. For the rest, your little disquisition amounts to itself a fetishization of status anxiety. For that, laughter is the best medicine, preferably the satirical kind.

Going through various responses/comments I dare to group then into two: first on definition and concept of utility and the second on theroy 0f choice in shaping our economy (demand pattern). I will like comment on the first and leave the reader to go through a recent publication on Paradox of Choice byBerry Schwartz.
Classical economics told us that marginal cost equals marginate utility at steady state of equilibrium. the point is: whose etility and how is it measured? Marginal utility is a concept which can never be measured as it is expressly the experience of the user, modified by her evaluation as an ego centre. Therefore, marginal cost plus ego satisfaction cost should equal marginal utility. The ego satisfaction cost execerbated though choice and comparision is the supplier's surplus. There is never a consumer's surplus as stated in classical economics. The supplier's surplus goes for creating barriers to competion, political manipulation and host of other things to the detriment of the human race.
therefore multiplr choice is ultimately harmful for society in the long run.

"The negative impact of stress on health is well documented."--DB--
"I am against stress too... but is it well documented that we have more stress today than in the past?"--RS--

"Time magazine's June 6, 1983 cover story called stress "The Epidemic of the Eighties" and referred to it as our leading health problem; there can be little doubt that the situation has progressively worsened since then. Numerous surveys confirm that adult Americans perceive they are under much more stress than a decade or two ago. A 1996 Prevention magazine survey found that almost 75% feel they have "great stress" one day a week with one out of three indicating they feel this way more than twice a week. In the same 1983 survey only 55% said they felt under great stress on a weekly basis. It has been estimated that 75 - 90 percent of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress related problems. Job Stress is far and away the leading source of stress for adults..."--stress.org--

"Increased life spans are the result of improved technology and are not correlated with the quality of health."--DB--
"I don't understand what you mean here."--RS--

Medical technology has been more successful in keeping people alive longer than it has been in contributing to the quality of health in later years.

" Paradoxically the Centre's work is beginning to suggest that people who might previously may have died at an earlier age live longer, but may do substantially worse in terms of their health. Earlier healthier environments thus appear to promote an increased quantity, but a decreased quality towards the end of life. Other arguments have previously suggested that longer life also means longer quality of life. However the Centre's research findings run counter to this 'compression of morbidity' hypothesis - that is the view that increased life expectancy results in a shorter, not a longer, period of serious morbidity before death."--Brunel University, UK--

Sometimes I think it's okay to be an elitist, because it helps to set goals and priorities.

"... no writer's living reputation can seriously compare with that of Shakespeare..." Encyclopedia Britannica 15th ed.

Great art demonstrates, in ascending order: (1) mastery of craft, which includes ability to invoke emotion in the audience, and is well-done by the Hollywood directors, (2) depth of emotional understanding, which only follows radical self-knowledge (here the list of candidates grows thinner), (3) command or ability to inform the intellectual trend of the period (here the air grows suddenly more rarified), and (4) separating out the greatest: creation of a new Audience Effect in their chosen medium. Here we see only the likes of Plato, Leonardo, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Bach, Beethoven, Picasso, Joyce, Fellini...

It would appear they sometimes only come at intervals of hundreds of years. But that's not to say you shouldn't keep tryin'.

A comparison list: copious and memorable pop songwriters: Schubert---> Tin Pan Alley---> Lennon/McCartney/Harrison. A forty to eighty-year gap.

Whether or not the Rate of Great Art can be significant to the rate of fundamental technological innovation, or good ol' rude mechanical Know-How, is probably another question... But it should be clear from looking around you that our numbers may burgeon inordinately, without much improvement in our productions.

Online Casino Directory

We provide a comprehensive list of e-pharmacies to help you get the best Levitra that is true Cialis Viagra deals. Cheap Levitra, in all clinical trials, has proven to be extremely successful.Each Levitra pill may work in as quickly as 16 minutes and may work for up to 24 hours, far surpassing the length of Viagra's effects which is an average of 4 hours. Buy Levitra http://www.one-levitra.com http://www.one-cialis.com http://www.one-levitra.com

Best Cialis and Online Cialis has been an eventual success in Europe since its introduction in Early 2003. Cialis will now be available in US soon. You may buy cialis through various registered pharmacies. cheap cialis  http://www.hot-cialis.com/