Lack of Imagination

The following quotes are taken from an article, Hedonic Man   by Alan Wolfe in The New Republic (July 9, 2008). It’s a review of Bruno S. Frey’s book, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics  and Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.  Wolfe starts off with a review of the current theories of economics, then delves into Frey’s topic, happiness:

… Happiness, of course, is anything but a new idea in Western thought. It is, for one thing, the core principle of utilitarianism, the philosophical outlook associated with James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, according to which the most accurate description of human beings is that they seek pleasure and avoid pain. Dickens rather brutally satirized the utilitarians with the unforgettable character of Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, and ever since the notion of human beings as calculators of pain and pleasure has been subject to the withering criticism of philosophers, who have shown that utilitarianism pays inadequate attention to the full complexity of human decision-making, particularly in the moral sphere.

But the new economics proceeds in perfect indifference to Gradgrind and the philosophers. It is, in fact, a revival of utilitarianism.

Later, commenting on Frey’s assumption that happiness is everything, Wolfe says:

… But are democratic societies happy because they are composed of satisfied fools? Utilitarianism cannot answer that question. It can demand that societies ought to be evaluated for the happiness that they produce, but it cannot tell us, at least not without being tautological, why we ought to prefer happiness in the first place. For Frey it is simply self-evident that we should prefer happiness to unhappiness. But Mill, for one, was not convinced that this would always be the case. The remarkable chapter on the “Crisis In My Mental History” in his Autobiography hauntingly documents his disillusionment with the enshrining of happiness as the highest human goal. And in his brilliant and affecting essays on Bentham and Coleridge, he made his preference for the latter unmistakable. What was lacking in Bentham, Mill argued, was a full humanity, which must include a tragic sense of life. Poets, by contrast, when they peer deeply into the nature of things, do not reveal much that is pleasant; but for all their melancholy, they shed light on what it means to be human. In art, in philosophy, in religion, in all the inquiries into the meaning of human life, an unhappy consciousness may take us further toward understanding than a Bovary-like contentment.

On Ariely’s Predictably Irrational:

… Of all the Victorians, it is not Edgeworth or Mill who should have the last word on Ariely. That honor falls to the mathematician Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, “it means just what I choose it to mean, nothing more, nothing less.” The same is true of Ariely. Our shortcomings are “inherent,” but we can nonetheless overcome them. Our irrationalities are “predictable,” but they are also correctable. Our brains are “wired,” but we still have free will. We are “pawns” in a game of chess, but we can also act, if not like queens, then at least like bishops. By the time I finished Predictably Irrational I had pretty much the same view of human beings as when I began: imperfect creatures, but also quite capable of improving on their condition by learning from their mistakes. Some revolution.

Finally:

… Human beings are indeed charming and perverse and altogether fascinating creatures, and the study of ourselves is among the richest of intellectual endeavors. We ought to give ourselves a bit more credit than the revolutionists of the social sciences extend to us: we pursue many goals at the same time, and we do so in all kinds of predictable and unpredictable ways.

I’ve hacked these quotes out of a very good article. I hope you’ll read the full piece  to get it in coherent form.

Though it’s not directly the subject of Wolfe’s discussion, I frequently have problems with the experiments set up to demonstrate the point being made, the conclusions drawn – by economists, psychologists, philosophers and, lately, neurobiologists. They always seem to lack imagination both in the setup and the interpretation of the feedback they get.

For example, from Wolfe’s piece, his description of the chocolate kiss experiment:

Ariely and his colleagues set up a stand and offer Lindt truffles for 15 cents and Hershey’s Kisses for a penny: 73 percent of their customers choose the former, 27 percent the latter. Then they lower the price of the truffle to 14 cents and offer the Hershey Kiss for free, and now 69 percent choose the Kiss and only 31 percent the truffle. Calculating utility cannot explain this result. In both cases, the cost difference is identical. So it seems that we attach an almost mystical meaning to the idea of getting something for nothing. Zero is not just another number.

To me, it would not be about the money. Who cares about the 14 cents? Here’s how my mind would be working: if I have to pay to get either chocolate, I will always take the one I like better (some people like chocolate kisses better than truffles). Cost difference doesn’t matter; the aggravation of paying does. Because in order to pay whatever amount, I have to stand in a line, interact with a cashier, open my shoulder bag, get out my wallet, unzip the change purse, sort through the coinage and find whatever is required. If offered one that is free and one that is not, I will always take the free one because, not only do I not have to do any of the above (deal with the cashier and dig out the change), I don’t even have to come to a full stop. I can grab it on the fly.

To take it one step further, if they offered me a free chocolate kiss, or they would pay me 10 cents along with the same chocolate kiss, I would take the free one and skip the 10 cent payment just so I wouldn’t have to stand and wait in line. A dime is just a nuisance.

Not in the article, but a perennial favorite in multiple fields is the runaway trolley car.  Can someone please think up a better, at least remotely realistic scenario than this one? As if I, an average female, could hurl a massive fat man onto the tracks so that he was perfectly aligned to stop a train? The same train that I have seen, many times in the movies, push multiple full size automobiles without even slowing in the least?  Assuming the fat man doesn’t fail to fall, get justifiably pissed off, grab me and throw me onto the tracks, which has no effect at all on the train thereby killing six people instead of five? Where are the studies to show that throwing fat men onto tracks is ever capable of working? Why don’t I just throw some chocolate kisses onto the tracks thereby making them slippery so the train derails and everybody  is saved ?

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/