Ferraris for all

Miller-McCune magazine, a publication from the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy in California, has a useful review essay by David Villano on the “more-is-less” thesis. In other words it examines (sympathetically) the argument that it is possible to be more prosperous while consuming less.

Many of the points it makes are familiar – Americans consume far more per head than most of the rest of the world, the threat of climate change is imminent, the need to change lifestyles etc – but it includes many useful references. Among them are Confronting Consumption, (MIT Press) a 2002 book on America’s consumer society co-edited by Michael Maniates. Others include the California-based Global Footprint Network, the Voluntary Simplicity Movement, Redefining Progress and Mean Genes, a book on how our desire to consume is embedded in our DNA.

Labels: affluenza, America, book, climate, consumption, environment, footprint, inequality, progress, review, sustainability

Rob Williams, a freelance journalist and former assistant to a Labour MP, echoes David Lammy’s call for delayed gratification (see 14 August 2008 post) in an article in the Guardian Comment is free blog today:

“if there is a common theme running through the last decade, indeed, the last 30 years, it is one of instant gratification for businesses, governments and for individuals. There has been a total unwillingness to plan, wait for something, to save or to look more than five minutes ahead.”

He hopes the credit crunch will bring delayed gratification back into fashion again:

“For a start deferred gratification (remember your sociology classes?) needs to become acceptable again. The right amount of money to have is actually not quite enough, so that you have to save for a treat, and even, shock, horror, go without another luxury to get what you want. If you really want that holiday, or car, then save up for it.”

His conclusion:

“plastic is no longer fantastic, and our flexible friends are now cracking the whip. Hopefully the lesson of the next couple of years will be ‘how I learned to stop worrying and love the downturn.’ “

It is amazing how creative New Labour and its supporters are when it comes to trying to get the rest of us to make do with less.

Sadly I expect this to be a common reaction to the economic downturn. If anything green trends are likely to be strengthened rather than weakened.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, economics, finance

David Lammy, New Labour’s skills minister, makes a crass link between growing affluence and youth violence in the latest New Statesman (14 August). Some excerpts:

* “In society, the fetishisation of money and the growth of consumerism add new pressures. In a "bling" culture, criminality easily becomes a short cut to symbols of wealth and power that will otherwise take years of hard work to achieve.”

* “the crucial point is this: a resilient economy cannot substitute for a good society.”

“An inability to delay gratification - whether with food, alcohol, money or sex - is becoming a hallmark of our age, reinforced by advertising and media (by the age of ten, the average British child recognises nearly 400 brand names).”

Some questions for Lammy:

- Why is it that richer societies are generally less violent than poorer ones (see posts of 20 July 2006, 30 July 2006 and 31 December 2007)?

- Why is it that only a tiny minority are involved in youth violence despite the mass of society becoming more affluent?

- How does he square his argument with the fact that, according to official figures, violent crime is not increasing in Britain (see Mick Hume’s recent article in spiked on this theme)?

Labels: affluenza, consumption, spiked

BBC online decided to lead its news coverage of Britain’s latest Social Trends report (PDF) with Easterlin’s paradox: that beyond a certain point happiness does not rise with incomes. Given that Richard Easterlin formulated the paradox in the early 1970s, and it has been repeated many times since, it is hard to see how it qualifies as news. However, there is lots of useful empirical material in the full report.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, progress

Spiked has published a review essay by me on books which see affluence and consumerism as leading to mental illness.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, review, spiked

The backlash against an obsessive attachment to happiness seems to be gaining ground. An article in the December 2007 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science evidently argues that moderate happiness is better than maximising happiness. A press release from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign quotes Ed Diener, one of the authors of the study, explaining:

“Happy people are more likely (than unhappy people) to get married, are more likely to stay married, are more likely to think their marriage is good,” Diener said. “They’re more likely to volunteer. They’re more likely to be rated highly by their supervisor and they’re more likely to make more money.”

Happy people are also, on average, healthier than unhappy people and they live longer, Diener said. And, he said, some research indicates that happiness is a cause of these sources of good fortune, not just a result.

“But there is a caveat, and that is to say: Do you then have to be happier and happier" How happy is happy enough"”

The research team began with the prediction that mildly happy people (those who classify themselves as eights and nines on the 10-point life satisfaction scale) may be more successful in some realms than those who consider themselves 10s. This prediction was based on the idea that profoundly happy people may be less inclined to alter their behavior or adjust to external changes even when such flexibility offers an advantage.

Their analysis of World Values Survey data affirmed that prediction.

“The highest levels of income, education and political participation were reported not by the most satisfied individuals (10 on the 10-point scale),” the authors wrote, “but by moderately satisfied individuals (8 or 9 on the 10-point scale).”

The 10s earned significantly less money than the eights and nines. Their educational achievements and political engagement were also significantly lower than their moderately happy and happy-but-not-blissful counterparts.

In the more social realms, however, the 10s were the most successful, engaging more often in volunteer activities and maintaining more stable relationships.

Labels: affluenza, happiness

Newsweek has a particularly interesting article on the backlash against the obsession with happiness (2 February). This blog has already mentioned some of the key references but it adds more as well as some illuminating details:

* Allan V Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (see 22 December 2007 post). In the foreword Robert Spitzer of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the psychiatrist who oversaw the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, expresses doubts about the medicalising of sadness: "To be human means to naturally react with feelings of sadness to negative events in one's life".

* Eric Wilson Against Happiness (see 17 January post).

* Also Ed Diener, a veteran happiness researcher, has evidently co-written a book with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, called Rethinking Happiness. It is due for publication later this year.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness

The latest annual Family Expenditure Survey from Britain’s National Statistics gives some idea of how living standards have increased over the past 50 years.

For example, according to the official release: “In 2006 most homes had central heating (95 per cent), a washing machine (96 per cent), a microwave (91 per cent) and a telephone or mobile phone (99 per cent).”

Even the bottom decline (poorest 10th) of the population is benefitting. According to a BBC report on the survey 31% of the bottom decline have computers, 21% an internet connection and 56% a mobile phone.

From a 50 year perspective the trends are also revealing. For instance, in 1957 food and non-alcoholic drinks took up 33% of the household budget compared with 15% in 2006.

In contrast, food and travel costs have risen from 8% to 16%. This suggests more people have cars and they travel more.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, inequality, progress

Eric G Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, has written a wonderful essay on the value of melancholy as opposed to happiness in the Chronicle Review (18 January). It is adapted from his book Against Happiness which is about to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in America (and is also reviewed in the issue of the Economist that is about to be published).

He starts with the observation that, in recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, almost 85 percent of Americans said they were very happy or at least pretty happy. Then he goes on to argue:

“Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe — not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren't we suspicious of this statistic? Aren't we further troubled by our culture's overemphasis on happiness? Don't we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?”

He later goes on:

“Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence. Without melancholia, the earth would likely freeze over into a fixed state, as predictable as metal. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.”

At the end of the article also reproduces the “Ode on Melancholy” (1919) by John Keats.

Labels: affluenza, apocalyptic, book, happiness

Brendan O’Neill has an article on the BBC online website on Oliver James’s The Selfish Capitalist. After letting James explain his argument it quotes myself and Simon Wessely, professor of epidemiological and liaison psychiatry at King's College, London, giving a contrary view.

I will leave readers to look up my remarks if they want to but Wessely is worth quoting at length:

‘[He] believes that cultural factors, not capitalism itself, have created a situation where more people define themselves as mentally ill.

‘"In this country, rates of actual mental illness are not increasing," he says. "Studies by the Office for National Statistics, repeated over a decade, do not show an increase in all neurotic disorders, depressive disorders or depression."

‘"It is true that rates of self-reported symptoms are on the rise," says Wessely, but that has to be seen in a context where "more human experiences" are seen as illnesses nowadays.

‘"In my trade, for example, states of sadness are now seen as 'depression', shyness has become 'social phobia', and all sorts of variations in childhood temperament, personality, emotions and behaviour have become characterised as diseases that need treatment, be it Asperger's autism or ADHD."

‘Mr Wessely believes that this "therapy culture" means that people now regard as abnormal things that "previous generations regarded as part and parcel of normal variations in personality and emotion". So what earlier generations saw as an everyday struggle to make ends meet might now be referred to as stress or workaholism.

‘"I would lay the blame less at the door of Margaret Thatcher's selfish capitalism, and more at the door of Richard and Judy or Oprah," says Mr Wessely.’

Labels: affluenza, happiness, inequality

A new spin on growth scepticism from John Naish, a health journalist, in an extract from his book Enough in today’s Times (London). He takes two of the usual charges from the growth sceptic litany – humanity is destroying the environment and making it unhappy – and blames them on our primitive human brains.

The opening passage of the extract argues that: “Over the past decade, two facts have become increasingly obvious – that our ever-increasing consumption is wrecking the planet, and that continually chasing more stuff, more food and more entertainment no longer makes us any happier. Instead, levels of stress, obesity and dissatisfaction are spiralling.” Of course these may appear to be obvious “facts” to Naish but they are far from straightforward or beyond dispute.

However, Naish does not waste any time. The next passage gives his explanation for what he sees as our terrible social maladies: “So why is our culture still chasing, consuming, striving ever harder, even though we know in our sophisticated minds that it’s an unrewarding route to eco-geddon? New scientific studies are helping to reveal why. It’s our primitive brains. These marvellous machines got us down from the trees and around the world, through ice ages, famines, plagues and disasters, into our unprecedented era of abundance. But they never had to evolve an instinct that said, ‘enough’.”

By a few paragraphs down it is becoming pretty silly: “The desire-driven wiring of our primitive brains evolved in the Pleistocene era, between 130,000 and 200,000 years ago. It was moulded by half-starved hunter-gatherers and farmers whose crops frequently failed. Those who kept going survived to give us their yearning genes. That wanting instinct gets fixated on material goods. We evolved to desire possessions as no other creature does. Neolithic cave sites may partly explain why. Many contain millions of hand-axes – far more than cave-dwellers ever needed. Anthropologists believe that the best axes were not just prized tools, but precursors of Ferraris and Jimmy Choos. Owning Stone Age bling displayed your high reproductive value.”

So whereas the likes of Oliver James blame “selfish capitalism” for our alleged plight John Naish points to the primitive human brain as the culprit.

Labels: affluenza, book, consumption, environment, happiness

A feature in the January / February issue of Foreign Policy magazine suggests the idea of “affluenza” is pervasive in France rather than confined to America and Britain. Stefan Theil, Newsweek’s European economics editor, bases this claim on a study of official French textbooks:

‘ “Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities." ‘

Labels: affluenza, Europe, happiness

The awful Oliver James has a new book out. The Selfish Capitalist (published by Vermilion) evidently argues that the model of capitalism in the Anglo-American countries has led to an explosion of mental illness. I have already reviewed James’s previous book (see menu bar on left) and will read his new one as soon as I get a chance.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness

By coincidence a review by Helene Guldberg on spiked echoes the points made in my 22 December post. She reviews Shyness by Christopher Lane, a Chicago-based research professor, which evidently shows how the definition of mental illness has widened considerably. Once again this broadening definition is reflected in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. According to Guldberg:

“His [Lane’s] painstaking research shows how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of the psychiatric profession worldwide, has been transformed – by a handful of psychiatrists behind closed doors – from the thin handbook it was up until the 1980s into the hefty tome it is today, with hundreds of new, poorly specified and poorly researched syndromes being added.”

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, spiked

Will Wilkinson has reviewed a useful-sounding book in the December issue of Reason which rejects the view that material abundance is causing higher levels of depression. Allan V Horwitz and Jerome C Wakefield’s The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press) is a polemic against the arguments on depression put forward by the likes of Ed Diener and Martin Seligman. (Oliver James and Richard Layard have proposed similar arguments in Britain).

According to the review what has really happened is that the definition of depression has widened enormously to include many who are simply unhappy:

“According to Horwitz and Wakefield, ‘There are no obvious circumstances that would explain a recent upsurge in depressive disorder.’ The ranks of the depressed are bulging, they argue, because the clinical category fails to make the elementary distinction between normal, functional sadness and true mental disorder. The depression data are littered with false positives—jilted lovers, white-collar workers who missed out on a promotion, and kids nobody asked to the prom. People who are suffering but aren’t sick.”

This broadening definition of depression is reflected in the standard reference book on the subject:

“Since its third edition was published in 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the standard handbook used by clinicians to classify mental problems, has defined major depressive disorder with a complex checklist of symptoms. In order to meet the exigencies of 15-minute doctor’s visits and the needs of public health surveys, the few diagnostic qualifications calling for expert judgment were stripped away to produce a simple rule of categorization that family doctors, mental health epidemiologists, and even—or especially—computers can apply. To simplify only slightly, if you meet five of nine mundane requirements over the course of two weeks, you qualify as suffering from major depression. The checklist: a persistently low mood, a diminished interest or pleasure in almost everything, an increase or decrease in appetite leading to a gain or loss in weight, too much or too little sleep, fatigue or low energy, fidgetiness or listlessness, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, difficulty concentrating or indecisiveness, and thoughts of death, suicide, or an attempt of suicide.”

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness

On Monday I will be introducing a discussion of The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz at Nico Madonald’s Innovation Reading Circle. Details along with further readings and links are available at Nico’s website.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, happiness

Helene Guldberg writing in the latest spiked review of books reviews several works arguing, among other things, that affluence is damaging children’s lives. Guldberg counters that the problems are exaggerated and on balance children have benefited immensely from greater affluence.

A particularly interesting passage looks at how the idea of childhood can be seen as relatively new. She discusses the work of Philippe Aries, a French historian, who she describes as arguing: “In the seventeenth century the modern view of childhood first emerged, but it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the advent and extension of compulsory schooling and a corresponding decline in child labour, that childhood really existed in the modern sense.”

Labels: affluenza, book, health, progress, spiked

I have come across so much on happiness in the last few days that I will have to resort to relaying it in bullet point form:

* Happiness debate in the Financial Times. Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, had a belated review of Richard Layard’s 2005 book on happiness published in Wednesday (“Why progressive taxation is not the route to happiness” 6 June). A particularly interesting point he made was that the attack on happiness can be seen as a challenge to modernity itself. Developments such as improvement in life expectancy, the liberation of women from household drudgery or easier divorce do not increase reported happiness.

Two book hitters in the happiness debate replied to Wolf with letters. Layard says that there are some aspects of modernity that should be ameliorated. He gives levels of trust as an example. Meanwhile, Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick and well-known happiness advocate, makes the familiar point that reported happiness has not increased over time in the rich countries over the last few decades. He goes on to state: “That graph could usefully be pinned up in every minister’s and president’s office”. Why he thinks it should be such a decisive argument is not clear.

* Debating Andrew Oswald at Debating Matters. Talking of Oswald, I will be debating him at the national final of the Debating Matters competition in London on June 29. We will both be “expert witnesses” debating whether happiness should be a goal of national policy. Later on the same motion will be debated by the high school students who are taking part in the competition. In conjunction with the discussion the Debating Matters team has produced a useful topic guide for the debate. (Last year I debated John Hilary of War on Want on globalisation at the same event).

* Quoted in Financieele Dagblad. Yesterday I was also quoted on the happiness debate in a substantial feature in the leading Dutch financial daily newspaper by Esther van Rijswijk. I am hoping to get it translated.

* Paradox of Prosperity essay republished. My spiked essay on the “paradox of prosperity” is to be republished by the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India. The organisation is publishing a book in its professional reference series which is provisionally entitled: Prosperity Index: Assessing Growth Anew. It is due out in November.

* Happiness expert website. Ruud Veenhoven, one of the world’s leading experts on happiness, has a website: here. Evidently he also argues that a “paradox of prosperity” does not exist.

* Parenting-happiness link. A parenting expert made the point to me yesterday that the debates on happiness and parenting are linked. The likes of Oliver James argue there is a clear link between women not looking after children and the outbreak of “affluenza” in society.

Labels: affluenza, growth, happiness, india, media appearances, modernity, speeches, spiked

The debate I took part in on the “Battle for Affluence” at the Battle of Ideas conference on 28 October 2006 can now be viewed on video. It fears me along with Avner Offer of Oxford University, Mark Easton on the BBC, Nicholas Crafts of Warwick University and Jenny Davey of the Sunday Times. More details can be seen at my post of 5 November 2006.

Labels: affluenza, growth, happiness, speeches

Spiked has published my review of Affluenza by Oliver James. It argues that it is more likely that Oliver James is mentally disturbed rather than, as he implies, the rest of us.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, inequality, review, spiked

Yesterday went to a meeting organised by Compass, which describes itself as a “democratic left pressure group”, on the politics of well-being. The main luminaries were Oliver James, the author of Affluenza and Professor Richard Layard. What struck me was the ease with which they moved from the existence of mass affluence to the assumption that it is to blame for widespread mental illness. Little argument was needed to convince the audience of this point. I will be writing more on the subject in the next few days. The Guardian has also carried a series of related articles on the comment is free section of its website.

Labels: affluenza, happiness

This morning I debated Oliver James, the author of a new book on “affluenza” on the Radio 4 Today programme (programme available on its website for the next seven days). His argument is that affluence is increasingly making us sick. Nico Macdonald has produced a summary of our debate which is available here. James has not put forward an original thesis - his book is the third with “affluenza” as a title - but two things were notable about what he said:

* His thesis takes the form of an attack on the rich. However, it is the poor who suffer as a result of attacks on affluence.

* He claimed that over the long-term working hours in America and Britain have lengthened. This is simply wrong. Long-term statistics on his this trend are tricky to interpret - for example, because of the rise of the number of women in the labour force - but there is no doubt the trend is for working hours to fall. Even apart from the working week people are spending more time in education and more time in retirement. The amount of back-breaking manual labour people have to do has fallen dramatically. Also, according to the latest figures from National Statistics, the average working week in Britain has fallen by one hour over the past 15 years. I intend to do more work on the subject of working hours in my book.

At lunchtime I had a rematch against Oliver James on the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2. A summary of the debate can be read here. James made much of the fact he was talking about mental illness rather than unhappiness. He did not see the bigger picture of how his arguments relate to growth scepticism.

Labels: affluenza, America, happiness, media appearances, radio, work

Last weekend I debated the Battle for Affluence at the Battle of Ideas festival. The thrust of my argument was that affluence has proved enormously beneficial for humanity and will continue to do so. In contrast others, such as Professor Avner Offer of Oxford university and Mark Easton of the BBC, argued that our preoccupation with prosperity has gone too far. In their view other factors, such as well-being, should be the main focus of government policy. Others on the panel included Professor Nicholas Crafts of Warwick university and Jenny Davey of the Times (London). Later that evening I also debated Professor Offer on BBC Radio Five Live.

At the conference I also chaired a session in which Damned by Debt Relief, a film made by Worldwrite, had its world premiere. The film showed how the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative imposes new conditions on the poor but does not offer any new money. A trailer for the film can be viewed here.

Other sessions at the weekend included a debate on the “happiness trap” and a series on the Battle over Nature.

Labels: affluenza, film, happiness, media appearances, radio, speeches, Worldwrite