Stoicism and warrior resilience training Jules Evans
There is a danger that we have become not just trapped in the ‘prison of GDP’, but trapped in the prison of statistics. We have become trapped in the idea that something can only be a serious goal if we can quantify it, measure it, and track our progress towards it on a neat Power Point graph. And we want to use this approach to find well-being. We want a technocratic solution to a spiritual question.
The argument often put forward as to why governments should start to measure well-being is that it will free us from what one British minister calls “the prison of GDP”. We have become ‘trapped’, it is said, in narrow and overly-reductive economic measurements, which don’t capture what truly matters to us. The solution to this, we are told, is to measure what does matter to us: positive emotion, social relations, well-being. But can one really measure well-being? First of all, you need to define it.
Charles Seaford, co-head of the Centre for Well-Being at the new economics foundation in London, said recently that the high-level British policy debate over how to define well-being divided into two camps: the Benthamites and the Aristotelians. The Benthamites, followers of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, define well-being as ‘feeling good’, and want to measure it by asking the nation how they feel. The Aristotelians, followers of the 4th century Greek philosopher, define well-being as ‘optimal human functioning’, or what Aristotle called eudaimonia. They want to measure it by asking the nation how autonomous they feel, how socially engaged, how fulfilled, and so on.
The Benthamite approach
I have several problems with the Benthamite or Hedonic approach, of defining well-being as merely ‘feeling good’. Briefly, because others have made these criticisms at greater length and in better prose:
It is overly-simplistic. The Benthamite approach suggests that happiness is one single, homogeneous experience, and that instances of it differ only in intensity and duration. Only statisticians could believe this. This belief displays, in the words of John Stuart Mill, “the empiricism of one who has not experienced very much”. It tries to take the many multi-faceted, multi-cultural, nuanced and subtle experiences of well-being and reduce them to one experience, that can be measured in one question – ‘how happy are you on a ten-point scale?’ Because it’s a bounded scale, people will typically reply ‘about a seven’. Their general levels of well-being may rise over time, but they will still typically reply ‘about a seven’, because they will adapt to their higher levels of well-being. That’s why happiness levels have not risen in the last 30 years – not because our society is broken, but because the method of measuring happiness is limited and cannot reflect absolute rises.
It is vulgar. Bentham, Mill said, suffered from a “deficiency of imagination”. So do his followers. Bentham insisted that only things that make us feel pleasant are worthwhile, therefore ‘pushpin is better than poetry’, because pushpin, a trivial parlour game, creates more pleasant feelings in the masses than poetry. He had no sense that some types of happiness are higher and better than others, and so we should be educated to appreciate them. He also didn’t appreciate that some worthwhile experiences – like watching a tragedy – will actually make us feel sad. The best arts – Shakespeare, Sophocles, The Sopranos – connect us to the full range of human experience, the dark as well as the light. Utilitarianism, by contrast, tries to turn everything into a moronic happy face. Imagine a TV show or a novel where everyone was happy all the time. It would be unbearably boring.
It fails to recognize the appropriateness of negative emotions. Nature gave us a range of emotional experiences for a reason. Sometimes, it is appropriate to be sad, or angry, or disappointed, or restless. Deifying one feeling is counter-productive, and reduces the rich complexity of life.
It is ignoble. If the goal of life, and the goal of society, is simply ‘pleasant feelings’, then why shouldn’t the government give every citizen a ration of MDMA or Prozac, to lift the general level of good feelings? The reason we dislike that idea, is because we recognize there is more to life than ‘bovine contentment’. We don’t want just to feel good. We want lives of genuinely rich activity, engagement, striving, achievement and fulfillment. Feeling good is the bonus to those experiences – it shouldn’t be the goal itself. In fact, an important part of the striving life is moments of dissatisfaction and restlessness. Those emotions have their place in human experience.
It is self-absorbed and anti-civic. Utilitarians think that, if ‘feeling good’ is made the goal of society, everyone will naturally work for other people’s happiness. But why should they? ‘Because it will make them feel good’. But what if it doesn’t? What if visiting my sick mother in hospital actually makes me feel bad? What argument can a Utilitarian make in that instance? Our own pleasant feelings are not a strong and lasting enough guide for sustained moral and civic behaviour.
What about the Aristotelian approach?
I have more respect for the Aristotelian approach. It captures the fact that human well-being is (in my opinion) about more than simply feeling good. Rather, the ‘feeling good’ is a consequence of fulfilling certain human drives or needs: the need for social engagement, for meaning and purpose, for autonomy, for creativity, and so on. But can we empirically measure this more nuanced and multi-faceted idea of eudaimonia?
Yes, say the Neo-Aristotelians. They include the economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who have come up with a ‘capabilities approach’ to human flourishing, which defines ten core human capabilities. Sen and Nussbaum claim that statisticians can measure the extent to which a society enables a person to fulfill those capabilities.
Another, related approach uses the Self-Determination Theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Deci and Ryan say that humans have three core needs or drives: the need for autonomy, social connectedness, and mastery. And again, they insist that statisticians can measure the extent to which an individual or a group has achieved fulfillment in these areas. Their approach has been very influential for the new economics foundation (nef), which describes it as “a modernised, empirically-based version of Aristotle’s theory of eudaimonia.”
And finally, Martin Seligman, inventor of Positive Psychology, also insists that well-being is a multi-faceted experience, which he separates into four domains: hedonic happiness, engaged happiness, achieving happiness and meaningful happiness, each of which can be empirically measured, he insists.
Measuring eudaimonia
So the Neo-Aristotelians insist that eudaimonia can be measured, just like the Benthamites’ more simplistic idea of happiness. But are they right? Let’s start with Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, which has been taken up by the new economics foundation (nef). There’s a lot to like about the theory. It has defined eudaimonia as the fulfillment of three core needs: autonomy, mastery, and social connectedness. But SDT leaves out something pretty fundamental to Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia: virtue. Aristotle said that happiness is “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue”. But there’s no mention of virtue in SDT, or in nef’s approach.
One can imagine a person who feels a deep sense of autonomy, mastery and social connectedness, but who is nevertheless morally rotten. A Nazi party functionary in 1930s Germany might feel autonomy, mastery and social connectedness, but we might still insist there was something lacking in their well-being, namely, sound morality. But you can’t measure the soundness of a person’s moral beliefs empirically or scientifically.
Nussbaum and Sen try to introduce some moral capacity into their ten core capabilities. The capabilities include the capacity for emotion – feeling appropriate emotions and attachments – and also the capacity for ‘practical reasoning about the Good’. But can you really scientifically measure the extent to which a person feels appropriate emotion? That involves a subjective moral judgement about what emotions are appropriate, and an Aristotelian would give a different answer to, say, a Stoic, or a Buddhist, or a Freudian, or a Methodist. Again, you can’t measure this empirically and scientifically, because it’s a question of moral belief.
Likewise, you might be able to test a person’s capacity for practical reasoning about the Good, in a philosophy exam for example. But I really don’t see how such a test could be applied to an entire country without being utterly simplistic. And, to really test a person’s level of eudaimonia, you’d need to see not just how well they can reason about the Good, but how well they actually follow their reasoning and translate it into their lives. How could you test that empirically for an individual, let alone for a nation?
Martin Seligman, finally, insists that science can empirically measure both hedonic happiness, and engaged happiness (or ‘flow’) and meaningful happiness. Perhaps science can measure how good someone feels at a particular moment, but to rely just on hedonic measurements is “morally and politically imprisoning”, he says. I agree. But can science measure engaged happiness and meaningful happiness?
You can measure the extent to which a person is absorbed in an activity. But it is easy to imagine instances where a person is completely absorbed in an activity that is nonetheless unhealthy and toxic – a heroin addict is utterly absorbed in their addiction, for example, as is a video game addict. We have to make some moral judgement about the worth of the activity one is engaged in. A person might dedicate their lives to a novel for example. But is that a worthwhile activity, if they are working on a very bad novel? And one can also easily imagine many instances where a person’s obsession makes their life very unbalanced and myopic. Isn’t an important part of well-being having a balanced life of various different pursuits and fulfillments?
Secondly, Seligman defines meaningful happiness as ‘the feeling of working together with others to serve a higher cause’. But doesn’t a great deal depend on the moral worth of the cause you are serving? You could be marching for the civil rights of minorities, or you could be marching against them with the Ku Klux Klan. Both marchers would feel a sense of meaning, purpose and social engagement -but to decide which of these people is experiencing genuine well-being, we’d need to move beyond empirical measurements of their feelings and make moral judgements about the cause they are serving.
Seligman thinks we can assess how ‘meaningful’ a life is by empirically assessing a person’s own judgement, their friends’ judgements, and ‘some objective societal measure’. But assessing all the tangible and intangible impacts of a person’s life would take a God, not a statistician. To truly weigh up the meaning of a person’s life, you’d have to look centuries into the future after their death…and you’d have to have some idea of what, if anything, awaits humans in the afterlife. Science and statistics can’t tell us anything about our fate after death, which means there is a vast area of uncertainty at the heart of the ‘science of well-being’.
For most humans around the world, personal assessments of our life’s meaning involves beliefs about God and the after-life. Aristotle, Socrates,Plato, the Stoics – they all thought that the ‘purpose’ of man was to contemplate God and serve God. But the Neo-Aristotelian science of functioning tries to cut out this idea of man’s divine purpose, because statistics can’t measure the existence of God. So man, in modern functioning theory, doesn’t really have a function. ‘Man’s function is to fulfill human needs’. But what is the point of that?
The limits of empiricism
There is a danger that we have become not just trapped in the ‘prison of GDP’, but trapped in the prison of statistics. Statistics are the foundation of modern government. They are the cornerstone of the modern faith in the power of technocrats and bureaucrats to control nature, mitigate risk, and make life better. We are realizing now that one can become trapped in statistics, that they can distort and mislead. But our panacea for this sickness is….more statistics.
We have become trapped in the idea that something can only be a serious goal if we can quantify it, measure it, and track our progress towards it on a neat Power Point graph. This is the sacred belief at the heart of our technocratic societies. And we want to use this approach to cure our spiritual malaise. We want a technocratic solution to a spiritual problem.
But it’s just not that simple, sadly. We can’t just clear up the uncertainty and suffering of life with a Power Point presentation, rapturously as such a presentation would be received at TED talks and in the halls of power. There can never be a science of well-being because science can never prove what the purpose of life is, or if it has a purpose, partly because it can never prove what happens after death. Science can measure the quantifiable, but not everything can be reduced to a number. Could you put a number on how much you love your child?
Of course, no one wants a world of rampant moral relativism. I also would like to believe that there is such a thing as a good life, that some lives are better-lived than others. And I recognize that science can help us a great deal in our search for good lives. But, in the words of Aristotle, we should look for precision in such matters “only so far as the subject admits”.
The dangerous unintended consequence of this search for a perfect ‘science of happiness’, this search for ‘facts’ about well-being as opposed to ‘beliefs’, is that the ‘happiness science’ becomes a dogma – with governments telling their citizens ‘this is the way to happiness, and you should follow it’. Governments can of course make moral arguments to their citizens. But I don’t think they can say they have scientifically proven that their model of life is the best – because there is a limit to what can be measured and tested scientifically. And insisting that there is a ‘science of happiness’ takes the search for happiness out of the hands of the individual and puts it in the hands of ‘happiness experts’. Part of the Good Life is finding the Good Life for myself, not simply following some instant happiness recipe handed out by the ministry of happiness.
The constant repetition of the phrase ‘science of happiness’ is in danger of giving the public the impression that science has, or ever could, clear up the question of the meaning of life once and for all. Such is the eagerness of psychologists, economists and policy-makers to affect public policy and win funding, that exalted and inflated claims for this young field are being made in the media, conferences and policy meetings.
But if the politics of well-being is going to be more than a passing fad, if it is going to be legitimate in the eyes of the public and of posterity, then we need to be more humble and more honest, and to admit the limits of our certainty and empirical ability. Socrates suggested that wisdom consists in admitting the limits of our knowledge. Let’s admit what we don’t know and can’t measure.
March 2, 2011 at 3:51 pm | More on Influence and networks | 1 CommentAccording to the FT, the “most talked-about non-fiction book of the year” is the economist Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, more of a long essay really, which you can only get in e-book format. It’s worth reading, particularly for what it says about the politics of well-being.
Cowen suggests that we in the West are in the midst of a great economic stagnation, because all the “low-hanging fruit” of technological innovation, which drove the economic boom of the last two centuries, have already been picked. Life in 1800 was, for the average westerner, markedly different to life in 1960. Scientific advances in transport, energy, hygiene and medicine, housing, education and government made the material conditions of life significantly better for someone born in 1950 than for someone born in 1800. But the pace of technological advance slowed significantly in the last few decades, Cowen says, so that “life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953…The wonders portrayed in The Jetsons have not come to pass. You don’t have a jet pack.”
Tyler Cowen? Tyler Durden more like! Kind of reminds me of that other Tyler, snarling: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
Just to consider T’other Tyler’s main point – how does Cowen know how high or low the ‘fruit’ of future technological advances are? The whole point about future inventions is we don’t see the fruit at all until they fall on some genius’s head, like Newton’s apple. We can’t tell how low or high the remaining fruit is.
And Cowen doesn’t provide enough evidence that innovation has slowed. I’m not a scientist, but in the last 30 years others have decoded the human genome, come up with a totally new hypothesis about how organisms interact to preserve life on Earth, started to analyse the climate and realized we’re in danger of destroying it, begun to map the universe, made advances in analysing dark matter with the Hadron collider, invented brain scanning and made major advances in neuroscience, brought new empirical rigour to the study of wellbeing, and, um, invented the personal computer, the Internet, the kindle, the smart phone, the smart home, the smart car and all the other gadgetry of the Digital Age. To me, the present is like the Jetsons.
Despite the fact that government spending on education, health and welfare continues to rise, Cowen argues that performance in these areas is not necessarily rising and may, in fact, be getting slowly worse. This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault, says Cowen. The low-hanging fruit have been picked, and we’re now in an ‘ideas slow-down’. We must simply get used to annual GDP growth of 1% a year, rather than 3% – unlike the emerging markets, who can attain 6-8% growth simply by copying and disseminating ideas invented in the past by western scientists, like the car.
The Credit Crunch was really part of a broader phenomenon of over-optimism, Cowen argues. This over-optimism wasn’t just confined to investment bankers. We all thought everything would simply carry on getting better, median income would continue to grow and GDP would continue to rise – so we all bet on future growth through personal, corporate and government borrowing. But this was a mistake, based on a failure to recognize what Daniel Pink describes as “a period of truly staggering underachievement in business, technology and social progress”.
A lot of the social unrest and personal suffering of our times comes, Cowen argues, from a frustration that material progress is not continuing at its past rate, and that governments are struggling to meet spending commitments made in times of faster economic growth. He writes: “Low-hanging fruit means there are lots of material goodies to hand out, and lots of fairly easy ways to make people happier, namely by giving them more stuff. That’s not the case now, as we are struggling fiscally to make good on previous promises to Medicare and Social Security recipients, as well as bondholders.”
That’s why the politics of stagnation can be pretty acrimonious. On the Right, it can lead to the voodoo economics of tax cuts supposedly leading to greater economic growth, which Cowen thinks is one of the great delusions of our age. On the Left, it can lead to demands for greater redistribution through programmes like Medicare. But Cowen warns: “Like unfunded tax cuts, the remedy cannot be applied forever. Taxpayers in the top 5% of income already pay for more than 43% of the US government, and taxpayers in the top 1% pay for more than 27%; at some point, taking more resources from the wealthy yields diminishing returns.”
At its worst, the politics of stagnation becomes a “dysfunctional politics”, as the public coffers grow emptier, populist politicians and special interest groups attack each other, and an indignant populace used to higher government spending takes to the streets. Cowen worries about the “honest middle” of politics becoming drowned out by angry, irrational and shrill political voices (ie Glenn Beck).
And yet, all is not entirely bleak.
What about the internet? It’s the big exception to Cowen’s gloomy vision, and he acknowledges that, and devotes a chapter to it. Cowen is a big fan of the internet – he writes a blog, and he did bring out an e-book after all. He agrees with the likes of Clay Shirky that PCs and the internet have radically changed our lives, and on the whole made our lives better informed, more engaging and more fun.
But here’s the rub: contrary to the euphoria of the 1990s, the digital age hasn’t led to big economic growth. The breakthrough internet companies don’t provide many jobs. Twitter only has around 300 employees. Even the iPod, one of the great inventions of the last few years, has only created around 20,000 jobs worldwide. Nothing compared to, say, the aeroplane or the telephone.
And Cowen notes, as Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink have also noted, that “the funny thing about the internet, from an economic point of view, is that so many of the products are free. In a typical day, I might write two tweets, read twenty blogs, track down a few movie reviews, browse on eBay, and watch Clarence White play guitar on YouTube. None of this costs me a penny.”
The internet is good fun, and open-source projects like Wikipedia are encouraging in what they say about human generosity, but they’re not great news from the perspective of government revenues, job creation and private consumption. “Web 2.0 is not filling government coffers or supporting many families, even though it’s been great for users.”
Cowen is not, in fact, a pessimist, despite the pessimistic title of his book. He says:
the new low-hanging fruit is in our minds and in our laptops and not so much in the revenue-generating sector of the economy. There is low-hanging fruit; it’s just not of the traditional kind. Another way of putting this is, you can be an optimist when it comes to our happiness and personal growth, yet still be a pessimist when it comes to generating economic revenue or paying back our financial debts. [my italics]
So, wait a second, Cowen is optimistic that our personal lives are perhaps becoming happier and more fulfilled? Why doesn’t he call his essay ‘the great fulfillment’ then? After all, why should we put ‘generating economic revenue’ ahead of our wellbeing. We’ll pay our debts – personal and national – and then we will probably shift to a new normal of being much less-leveraged, on the new expectation of lower economic growth in the future. And that, perhaps, will be a good thing, both for us personally, and for the planet.
On that last point – Cowen fails to mention climate change once in his essay, but surely it is pertinent. The great technological advances of the last two centuries generated high GDP growth and great advances in our material well-being. But those advances were fired by fossil fuels, the emissions from which are now threatening the balance of our climate. So even if the pace of technological advance hadn’t slowed, we’d still be facing natural speed-bumps in terms of the capacity of our climate to absorb more CO2.
Another way to put it is, the last era of great technological change led to huge economic growth but ended up threatening our existence on the planet. Perhaps the next great technological breakthroughs will help clean up the mess left by the last era, not necessarily leading to another boom in GDP, but to something more important – a sustainable existence on the planet.
I think Cowen is trying to measure and describe a new world in old world terms. He is saying ‘the world now is not what it was, it’s worse’. It’s not worse, it’s something different, something new. Cowen looks at all the time people spend doing things and making things for free on the internet, and thinks this perhaps “made the downturn a lot more bearable”. In other words, the internet is a nice way to kill time, but doesn’t really boost GDP.
But that is using an old world measurement for the new world. People are less motivated by profit than economists used to think. We are now not so much “profit maximizers” as “purpose maximizers”, as Daniel Pink puts it. People spend so much time and effort on the internet because it gives them a sense of engagement and purpose. We’re not just killing time. We’re making meaning. GDP does not adequately measure this new world.
Cowen writes: “Even if we can, at the personal level, manage to feel fulfilled under slower economic growth, it is not compatible with how modern politics is structured, namely as a ravenous beast”. He’s right, of course, that we face the challenge of how we will continue to pay for public services if the public coffers are shrinking, and how to keep multicultural society afloat when there are no longer so many “goodies to hand out”.
This is not easy, as David Cameron is already finding out.We can’t expect public spending to simply carry on rising. We have to work out how we can do better with the resources we’ve got, and perhaps how we can tap into the ‘cognitive surplus’ of citizens to get them engaged in the improvement of local services, rather than sitting back and expecting a big government to take care of everything for us. That, I guess, is the thinking behind the much-mocked concept of the Big Society. I also think that, in an era of slower economic growth and public spending cuts, people become more aggravated by any perceived ‘free riders’ on public welfare, so there should be a more concerted effort to catch tax and welfare dodgers at the top and bottom of society. People don’t like paying taxes because they don’t think they are getting their money’s worth, because they know how easy it is to defraud large and unwieldy public institutions.
One reason for tentative optimism is that I don’t think the politics of stagnation has become anything like as acrimonious here as in the US. In fact, there is quite a cross-party consensus about the need for a new politics of well-being. It has support from everyone from David Willetts, Oliver Letwin, David Cameron and Phillip Blond on the right, to Lord Layard, Geoff Mulgan, Matthew Taylor, Richard Reeves, the New Economics Foundation, Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman on the left.
The UK has been ahead of the curve in the politics of wellbeing, recognizing, for example, that if progress in this era is more in intrinsic goods like wellbeing and meaning, as opposed to extrinsic goods like higher income, then we need to adapt our measurements of progress, so that we can begin to measure the gains in wellbeing, meaning, engagement, autonomy and fun which Cowen thinks the digital age has brought.
If we are in a ‘great stagnation’, then it may be good for the planet, and it may even be good for our society. A period of stagnation by one measurement, but perhaps a period of flourishing by another.
If you like this and are interested in the politics of well-being, you might enjoy my blog, www.politicsofwellbeing.com
February 19, 2011 at 9:08 am | More on Economics and development, Influence and networks | 3 CommentsDaniel Batson, the social psychologist, has recently brought out what is probably his defining work on the topic he has studied for 30 years, Altruism In Humans. I bought it after hearing Martha Nussbaum rave about it when she spoke at the RSA in December. She says on the dust jacket that it’s “simply one of the most important books in our time for anyone who wants to ponder the problems and prospects of our species”. Casting my eye around Google, I think this might actually be the first review of the book. Woohoo, first!
The theory that Batson has spent his life experimentally testing is what he calls the ‘empathy-altruism hypothesis’ (or EA for short). The EA theory is that, firstly, humans are capable of ‘empathic concern’ – which Batson defines as ‘noticing someone is in need, and caring about it’. And, secondly, this empathic concern leads to altruism, which he defines as a ‘motivated state with the ultimate goal of increasing another person’s welfare’.
For much of Batson’s career, this theory has been marginal to western psychology. The Buddhist monk Mattieu Ricard (pictured below with Batson), writes: “[The EA theory] is certainly not part of mainstream western psychology, in which the dominant view is that of universal egoism. According to the latter view, any seemingly altruistic behavior must have been driven by some kind of selfish motivation: ‘Scratch an altruist, and watch the hypocrite bleed.’” But Batson’s work “can be credited with proving that genuine altruism does exist”, according to Ricard. Quite an achievement.
In the new book, Batson spends the first two chapters carefully defining what he means by empathy and altrusim, and distinguishing it from other people’s use of the term. This is slow reading, but important, if you think about how many ways philosophers and psychologists have used those terms over the last 2,000 years. Indeed, Nussbaum says: “Unlike some work in psychology, Batson’s work is very rigorous in how it defines terms.” (Think, for example, of how psychologists spray the term ‘happiness’ around without really defining it.)
He distinguishes his definition of empathy (‘noticing someone is in need, and caring about it’) from other definitions of empathy, such as ‘reading another’s feelings’, ‘mirroring their responses’, ‘putting yourself in another’s shoes’ etc. Some of these, like the last definition, might help give rise to empathic concern, but they are not ‘necessary or sufficient’ – you can feel empathic concern for someone without necessarily putting yourself in their shoes. I could feel empathy for my wife giving birth without imagining myself doing it.
Likewise, some have defined altruism as ‘helping behaviour’ or, more broadly, as ‘acting morally’. But one might help for egoistic reasons. And altruism might not be moral – we might help someone because we care for them, even if it’s against the common good, as Batson later examines.
Having defined his terms well, Batson briefly suggests an origin for empathic concern in parental care and nurture, making reference to work in this area by the pioneering social psychologist William McDougall. But Batson doesn’t spend long exploring the roots of empathy – the work of primatologist Frans De Waal on empathy in primates might supplant this absence in those interested. The two were actually brought together to speak at a conference in 2007 by Martha Nussbaum.
Batson is more interested in whether empathy really leads to altruistic behaviour in humans. He writes: “Many, especially within religious traditions, have said that we humans ought to be altruistic. I shall not engage this issue, at least not directly. As a scientist, my concern is with what is, not what ought to be. Philosophers would say my goal is descriptive, not normative. Of course, ‘ought’ and ‘is’ are not totally unrelated. We can only be expected to do what is within our capacity.”
Testing out altruism experimentally
How do you experimentally test out the EA hypothesis? Batson distinguishes two different approaches, which he calls Aristotelian and Galilean. Aristotle’s experimental approach is to define an organism by all the different characteristics it exhibits. You catalogue the perceived phenomena. So, if you want to see if humans are altruistic, you might catalogue all the examples where humans have behaved with apparent altruism – heroic stories of rescues, self-sacrifice, volunteering and so on. This approach is interesting to read (the only time I personally felt ‘empathic concern’ while reading his book is when he actually describes some of these real-life examples of altruism). But it is not always scientifically effective – particularly if the phenomenon being explored is one of internal motivation rather than external behaviour.
The Galilean approach, by contrast, begins with a theory of the underlying law or process that gives rise to phenomena. It then makes predictions of how phenomena will happen based on this theory, and sees if things do in fact happen as predicted, or not. Batson uses this approach, which he says is better-suited to studies of motivation, because you can change variables under controlled experiment conditions, to rule out different explanations for internal phenomena.
He gives the example of a situation: Frank has two tickets for a gig. Jessica, the sexy girl in the office, hears of this and is unusually friendly towards Frank. The question is, what is motivating Jessica? Frank wonders if she is motivated by (A) the concert tickets or (B) a genuine romantic interest in Frank. Then, a variable is introduced – someone else announces they also have a spare ticket to the concert. Suddenly, Jessica is less friendly towards Frank, suggesting that theory A best explains her motivation.
Batson took this approach to try and test the EA hypothesis against rival egoistic explanations for helping behaviour, such as that we help others to feel good about ourselves, or to gain social rewards, or to avoid social censure, or to reduce our own pain at seeing another suffering. You create a controlled experimental situation, and then you change variables to see how they affect a person’s behaviour, seeing if the changes fit with your theory of their motivation.
He and his colleagues at Kansas University conducted several experiments over the course of three decades, which typically followed this sort of format: undergraduate volunteers would arrive at the lab, and be told they were taking part in an experiment to test their attention or task-solving abilities. They weren’t told the experiment was testing their altruism, as this would immediately affect their behaviour. They were then shown a video of someone (‘Katie’) who they were told was another student taking part in a parallel study, which they were asked to pay attention to. The person in the other study was failing the task she was set, and was receiving small electric shocks, which she obviously found very distressing (this was actually an actress, pretending to be electrocuted). ‘Katie’ explained she had a particular past trauma related to electric shocks, which is why she was so upset. The volunteers were then offered the apparently spontaneous suggestion to swap places with the person being electric-shocked – ‘Katie’ would do the attention test and the volunteer would do the electric-shock-memory test.
The other main technique was to play volunteers a fake radio story about a girl struggling to bring up her children while completing a degree, and then suddenly give them the opportunity to give their time to help this girl.
Batson would manipulate various factors in this controlled experiment to test out different hypotheses for why the volunteers might help ‘Katie’. For example, one experiment tested out two rival theories – the EA hypothesis and the negative arousal hypothesis, which suggests that we help others in order to stop feeling empathic pain at the sight of their suffering.
Batson manipulated two variables – the level of empathy participants felt, and the ease of escape from the situation. Level of empathy was manipulated by showing the volunteers a questionnaire that suggested Katie was very similar to them, which apparently led to higher feelings of empathy; or by showing them a questionnaire that showed Katie was very different, which led to lower feelings of empathy. Ease of escape was manipulated by giving the participants the opportunity to leave the study after two electric shocks were given to Katie (easy escape) or making them watch her be electrocuted for around 15 minutes (hard escape).
So Batson created a grid of four situations: (1) Easy escape-low empathy. (2) Easy escape – high empathy. (3) Difficult escape – low empathy. (4) Difficult escape – high empathy. The Empathy-Altruism hypothesis predicts that volunteers would offer to help ‘Katie’ when empathy is high, even when escape from the situation is easy. The Negative Arousal hypothesis predicts participants will choose to leave the lab when escape is easy, even when feeling high empathy. Leaving the lab would be the quickest and easiest way to reduce their suffering at seeing Katie being electrocuted. It turned out that participants chose to swap places with ‘Katie’ even when offered an easy escape from the situation.
This gives the basic format, which was then repeated around 30 times by various psychologists to test out different hypotheses: the EA hypothesis versus the social praise-altruism hypothesis, for example. Do participants help ‘Katie’ less if their help is anonymous? Do they help less if they are given a good justification why they shouldn’t feel bad for not helping her? Do they help a person in need less if other people have offered help? And so on.
Batson reviews the results from around 30 experiments from 1978 to 2008. In experiment after experiment, participants’ behaviour fit the EA hypothesis rather than any of the rival egoistic explanations for their behaviour. He writes: “The idea that empathy produced altruistic motivation may seem improbable given the dominance in Western thought by the doctrine of universal egoism. Yet, in the words of Sherlock Holmes, ‘When we have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’.
The benefits and liabilities of empathy-altruism
This is all extremely worthwhile and important research, but can be rather technical reading for the layman. What I personally found more interesting was the last third of the book, on the benefits and liabilities of altruism, and on other possible prosocial motives for helping others.
Batson notes the many benefits of empathy-induced altruism as a motive of human behaviour. It has a strong emotional base, which stimulates us to really care about a person’s welfare. It makes us give more help to others, and more sensitive help. When we feel empathic concern for others, we are less aggressive, we cooperate and negotiate with others better, we are less prone to intergroup conflict, and are more sympathetic to marginalized or stigmatized ‘out groups’. We’re also better at friendships and relationships.
All of this is a powerful argument in defence of the humanities, as Nussbaum suggested in her new book, because the arts and literature teach us to take others’ perspective, including the perspective of marginalized ‘out groups’, which cultivates empathic concern in us. The humanities help to ‘humanize’ outgroups in our eyes – and to humanize us by broadening our sympathies.
Feeling empathy and helping others also apparently leads to greater positive feelings in ourselves, less depression, and better health. These findings have been seized on by Positive Psychologists as evidence for their social and civic focus: ‘Focusing on happiness isn’t selfish or self-absorbed’, we often hear. ‘In fact, the surest way to personal happiness is to help others.’ But Batson gives two reasons why this is not always true. First, “too much selfless concern for others may lead to ‘caregiver burn-out’”.
And secondly, Batson suggests that
those who turn to altruism as an antidote for depression, meaninglessness , and tension will find it does not work. To use altruism as yet another self-help cure – providing a means to the ultimately self-serving ends of gaining more meaning and better health – involves a logical and psychological contradiction. As soon as benefit to the other becomes an instrumental means to gain those self-benefits, the motivation shifts from altruistic to egoistic. So if it is empathy-induced altruistic motivation – rather than simply helping behaviour – that produces the health benefits noted, intentional pursuits of these benefits may be doomed to failure.
Batson also notes the costs to empathy-altruist behaviour. Firstly, it can be demeaning to those receiving help. After all, Batson suggests the roots of altruism are in parental care. So when we feel sorry for someone and want to help them, we are pitying them, and perhaps suggesting that they are not capable of taking care of themselves, like a child. That is why Stoicism, for example, has been called an ‘anti-pity philosophy’ by Martha Nussbaum. It is the epitome of tough love, suggesting that it is through struggling with and mastering adversity that we grow into autonomous adults. But empathy-altruism tries to shield us from adversity, like a mother, so it denies us the experience of learning to stand on our own feet.
Secondly, empathy-altruism tends to be motivated by individual cases, rather than situations affecting large numbers. That’s why charities, when appealing for donations, present individual stories rather than impersonal statistics. It is also apparently more stimulated when we feel the person in need is ‘like us’. It has a strong emotional base, but the feeling of empathic concern diminishes over time, so “may not be able to sustain the kind of long-term helping effort often required of, for example, community-action volunteers”. And it does not always lead to the common good. Batson notes that many people who do things that are against the common good might be motivated by empathic-altruistic concerns to provide for their families. The bankers who destroyed our economy may have been prompted as much by empathy as by greed.
Egoism, altruism, collectivism, principalism
Therefore, in the final chapter, Batson suggests we should explore the ‘pluralism of prosocial motives’. We’re motivated to prosocial behaviour by four main motives, Batson argues. (1) Egoism. This has the advantage of being powerful, emotional, and enduring. But it only does altruistic good for indirect reasons. (2) Empathy-altruism, with all the benefits and liabilities described. (3) Collectivism – we do good to protect our group, tribe or society. This is a powerful and emotional motive (think of British volunterring during WWII for example), although it can lead to marginalizing or attacking of ‘out groups’. And finally (4) Principalism, which helps others out of duty to an impersonal principal, like ‘Do no harm’ or ‘help thy neighbour’.
Principalism is probably closest to the Stoic motive for helping others. You don’t help others because you feel sorry for them. You do it out of duty to the impersonal law of the Logos. The benefit of this motive is it’s enduring, it’s not fickle or reliant on passing emotional states. It is perhaps more rational and clear-eyed, looking at what genuinely helps others rather than what ‘feels right’. And yet its lack of a strong emotional base means that, perhaps, it is not a very ubiquitous motive, and also that it lacks human warmth.
Take, for example, the figure of the judge in Hans Fallada’s excellent novel about Nazi Germany, Alone In Berlin. In the novel, a judge takes in a Jewish lady, and hides her in his flat, thereby risking his own life. He says to her he does this out of obedience to ‘Justice’. He is undoubtedly a noble figure. And yet the Jewish lady feels, perhaps rightly, that “his goodness is cold…For all his goodness, human beings don’t mean anything to him, the only thing that has meaning for him is his justice”.
And there’s something a bit priggish, inflexible and self-regarding about Principalism, as I have noticed with some modern Stoics. Those who are mainly motivated by Principalism are often rather cut-off, emotionally tone-deaf, individualist. They often seem concerned more with adhering to their own code of ethics, their own idea of themselves, rather than allowing themselves to recognize and feel the pain of another. It’s not always prosocial – Principalists are never happier than when haughtily declaring their independence from the tribe in the name of their lofty principals.
Still, Batson suggests that, if we want to inspire prosocial behaviour in ourselves and our society, we should look to “strategies that combine appeals to either altruism or collectivism with appeals to principal”. Much to think about, then, as we try to work out how to galvanize more volunteering, more activism, and more effective public responses to challenges like climate change.
And the book is, it seems to me a gauntlet thrown to philosophers, demanding that they try harder, work harder. Stephen Stich of Rutgers University says on the back of the book that “Batson and his associates have made more progress [on the issue of altruism] in the last three decades that philosophers have made in the previous two millennia.” Hyperbole, perhaps, but there’s some truth in what Stich says. Batson has taken one issue – a very important one – and carefully probed it with experiments for over 30 years. That seems worth so much more to me than the rambling post-prandial pronouncements of armchair philosophers.
February 17, 2011 at 12:29 pm | More on Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development | Comments OffNice to see Keith Olbermann reads Global Dashboard. In January, shortly before MSNBC fired him, Olbermann did a story on the US Army’s ambitious resilience training programme, which I reported on back in October 2009. Olbermann reports that some atheist soldiers are objecting to the ‘spiritual fitness’ aspect of the programme, which rates to what extent soldiers feel ‘connected to humanity’ and guided by ‘a sense of meaning’ etc. Olbermann then quotes my interview with the programme’s director, Rhonda Cornum, where she says ‘every time you say the S-P-I-R word you’re going to get sued’. If you look really carefully under the photo of Cornum, you can see ‘Source: globaldashboard.org’.
To be fair to Cornum and the programme’s designer, Martin Seligman of Penn University, I would not say the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme is ‘religious’, or ‘Christian’. Martin Seligman is Jewish, for one thing. But he does believe, and has evidence to show, that part of being a resilient person is having a sense of meaning in one’s life. That’s not the same as religion. I would have thought atheists could see that…
But I thought that the politics of wellbeing would get into these problems. As soon as a liberal government backs one version of the Good Life, it’s going to be accused of violating the freedom of conscience and religious belief. That’s the challenge facing pluralist, multicultural societies – how to create a sense of unity, cohesion and common values in our society (including in our armies) without being accused of forcing your beliefs onto other people. Still, this seems a pretty unbalanced news story to me.
February 7, 2011 at 12:14 pm | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Influence and networks | Comments Off
Here’s a brief video of an event I attended yesterday, held by the Franco-British Council, about new French and British government initiatives to measure well-being.
February 3, 2011 at 1:02 pm | More on Economics and development, Global system, Influence and networks | Comments Off
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell thinks so. I interviewed Dr Mitchell about how the ‘big picture effect’ transformed many astronauts, including him. For best results, make it big screen, plug in your headphones, and enjoy the trip! 
So last week, I sent off an application for a provisional driver’s license (I know, I know – 33 and still can’t drive). At the bottom of the DVLA application was a box asking if I agreed to donate my organs in the event of an accident. An easy way to feel noble, I thought, and ticked the box.
Now, I discover I’ve been nudged! The Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight team, run by David Halpern, released its first report last week. The team is advised by behavioural economist Richard Thaler, who wrote the book Nudge, and it tries to find ways to ‘nudge‘ British citizens towards socially desirable behaviour. The unit ‘draws on insights from behavioural economics and shows ways in which health improvements can be made without resorting to legislation or costly programmes.’ So, for example, Thaler found that men could be ‘nudged’ to pee in urinals, rather than on the floor, by putting little toy goalposts in the urinals. Brilliant – although I feel a bit sorry for the poor behavioural economists who had to hold the goalposts in place. I just hope they had lab goggles.
Anyway, the report reveals how the Behavioural Insight unit has been quietly nudging us Brits over the last few weeks. It highlights two new initiatives:
- A smoking cessation pilot beginning in early 2011. This will encourage participants to make commitments to quit smoking (for example, by signing a contract) and will reward those who pass regular smoking tests. The pilot will be run by Boots, with the support of the Behavioural Insights team and the Department of Health.
- A system of ‘prompted choice’ on organ donor registration will be introduced to the DVLA application form for renewing and applying for driving licenses. This will require applicants to state whether or not they wish to become an organ donor. Where this has been introduced in other countries, it has significantly increased the number of organ donors. If the DVLA scheme proves successful, it will be rolled out to other areas.
So! My decision to donate my organs to humanity was not as noble as I thought. I was nudged, m’lud. Good idea though. I’d be interested to see the results, and wouldn’t be surprised to see a big rise in organ donations. If they get enough donations, maybe they can flog some spare organs to other countries, reduce the deficit eh?
January 6, 2011 at 7:23 am | More on Economics and development, Influence and networks | 8 CommentsFirst there was BRICs. Then came CIVETS. Then we were presented with BASIC, CRIM, BRICK, CEMENT, BEM, N11 and the 7% Club. Now barely a week goes by before someone tries to float another ‘useful’ investment acronym.
Behind the dense forest of exotic acronyms is a simple fact: the catch-all classification ‘emerging markets’ has lost much of its usefulness. It was invented in the 1980s, by World Bank economist Antoine van Agtmael, to replace the now-defunct acronym LEDCs (or ‘less economically developed countries’) by which the West had until then blithely referred to the rest of the world. The term ‘emerging markets’ served as a useful way to refer to fast-growing although crisis-prone markets like Russia, China and Mexico.
Within the term ‘emerging markets’ was quite a 1980s-assumption: these markets would follow the development route laid down by ‘developed’ economies, until they arrived in the neo-liberal end point reached by the US, the UK and other western countries. And the phrase also came to have strong associations with the currency and debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s.
But things have changed. The bigger emerging market countries have now overtaken the weaker developed markets, not just in total GDP, but also in the pricing they pay on their sovereign debt. Emerging market countries like China and Russia have accumulated trillions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves, and are now the main creditors of western sovereigns. In the 1980s, emerging markets depended on the west for capital inflows. Now the situation is reversed, and the US and EU depend on China to buy their sovereign debt.
It was partly to recognize this shift in economic power to emerging markets that Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill introduced the now-famous acronym BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) in 2001. It was a runaway success. A decade on, and MSCI has launched a BRIC index, there are several BRIC-focused funds, BRIC-focused blogs, BRIC conferences, and the leaders of the BRIC countries even held their own BRIC summit in 2009.
However, the success of the acronym, and the increase in capital flows to BRIC markets that followed, quickly led to questions and criticisms of the BRIC tag. In 2008, for example, when Russia’s economy slid into recession following the war with Georgia and the Credit Crunch, some analysts suggested Russia should be dropped from the grouping. This suggestion was sufficiently alarming to Russia that it organized not one but two BRIC summits in Russia in 2009. .
Beyond BRICs
Some analysts and economists have pointed out that the BRIC grouping misses out as much as it includes. Jerome Booth of emerging market fund manager Ashmore Investment says: “I came up with CEMENT: Countries in Emerging Markets Excluded by New Terminology.” What, for example, about Indonesia, which has a bigger population than Russia, greater political stability than India, and an economy set to grow by 7% in 2011? Both Morgan Stanley and emerging market fund manager Templeton have suggested turning the BRICs into BRIICs.
What about Turkey, which emerged from the Credit Crunch in remarkably robust health? Its stock market is up 12% year-to-date, while the MSCI BRIC index is down 2%. Turkish president Abdullah Gul told the Financial Times it “wouldn’t be surprising we start talking about BRIC plus T” – although that acronym hardly rolls off the tongue.
Other investment banks, perhaps jealous of the kudos Goldman won with its BRIC creation, have tried to make their own acronyms go viral. HSBC’s ex-CEO Michael Geoghegan tried to float CIVETS: Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa. He said: “Each has large, young, growing population. Each has a diverse and dynamic economy. And each, in relative terms, is politically stable.”
But investors did not take CIVETS to heart (one says: “BRIC sounds big and serious. Isn’t a civet some kind of animal hormone gland?), and the acronym lasted little longer than Geoghegan, who is departing from HSBC.
Rival firm Standard Chartered has tried this year to introduce the ‘7% Club’, which would include any market whose economy is growing at rates of 7% a year or more. Standard Chartered says: “Focusing too much on BRICs has its limitations. One is that there are several other countries that are not far behind and could plausibly be in the top four within a decade or two, most likely displacing Russia or possibly Brazil.”
Having an acronym with a fluid membership allows for any outperformers to join and underperformers to drop out. But the 7% membership rule makes for some strange members in the club: China, India, Vietnam, but also Turkmenistan, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Chad. Anyone for Sudanese debt?
Goldman Sachs’s Jim O’Neill has sought to create a new acronym to acknowledge the rising stars coming after the BRICs in emerging markets: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam. He has dubbed these countries the ‘Next 11’, which is probably catchier than, say, SKIVE PIMP BNT.
The NEXT 11 tag has already had some success – Castlestone Management launched a Next 11 fund in August 2010, and BNP Paribas launched a Next 11 ETF. Jeffrey Sacks, emerging market debt portfolio manager at Principal Global Investors in New York, says: “The Next 11 tag is interesting because it catches the middle tier of rising stars, and all the markets in it share quite similar economic fundamentals.”
Its the PIIGS, STUPID
Meanwhile, a sign of the times of how bad things have got for developed markets is analysts have started to invent acronyms to group them together in ‘bad groups’. The main example of this is the PIGS acronym, for the weaker Eurozone economies of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, although some analysts prefer to include Ireland to make it PIIGS.
No one has owned up to inventing PIGS, indeed, Barclays Capital analysts have been banned from using it, as it has led to fury among PIGS policy-makers, with one Portuguese politician calling it a racist plot fried up by the British media to deflect attention away from the weak UK economy. The British press responded by inventing its own acronym, STUPID, to include the high deficit economies of Spain, Turkey, UK, Portugal, Italy and Dubai.
But some investors warn that such acronyms, droll as they are, can make the markets less safe. Gerard Fitzpatrick, senior portfolio manager at Russell Investments in London, says: “These acronyms can spread systemic risk. They create herd behaviour, with investors mindlessly running from anything tarred with the PIGS brush.” Jerome Booth agrees: “The problem with all these acronyms is they’re short-cuts. They save you the effort of thinking. Thinking is hard work.”
But these sorts of neural shortcuts are not confined to acronyms. There are many types of classifications and groupings that have a big influence on investor behaviour, but which can be arbitrary or misleading if followed too religiously. Perhaps the most influential classification is how sovereigns are treated by big index providers like MSCI and S&P’s.
For example, investors and analysts have been expecting MSCI to upgrade Taiwan and South Korea, both of which are investment grade, to ‘developed market status’. However, it has yet to do so, despite other indices like S&P and FTSE graduating these countries.
Bankers in the GCC have also long been waiting for MSCI to upgrade GCC markets like the UAE from ‘frontier’ to ‘emerging’, which would instantly lead to large capital inflows from index-tracker funds. But so far they’ve waited in vain.
Another huge driver of investor behaviour is the stamp given sovereigns by rating agencies. Indeed, whole economic policies are designed with a view to preserving ratings, as the British government’s anxiety about the UK losing its AAA sovereign rating show this year. Much of Russian finance minister’s economic policy from 2001-2003 was designed to win Russia an investment grade credit rating, which it finally did in 2003 – although financial reforms notably dropped off following that achievement.
The loss of investment grade, meanwhile, can be a traumatic event – take Standard & Poor’s downgrade of Greece to junk status in April 2010, which was enough to cause the EU to call for rating agencies to act in a “responsible and rigorous way”, during “this very difficult and sensitive period”. The other rating agencies then followed suit, leading to Greece falling out of the MSCI investment grade index.
The rating a sovereign is given has a huge impact, then, on its market perception and on its domestic economic policy – on government spending on schools, hospitals and other critical public services. And yet, if the Credit Crunch has shown anything, it is that rating agencies are over-worked and under-qualified organizations manned by analysts who would often far rather be working at an investment bank. They are just as prone to inaccuracy and fallibility as other areas of the market.
One investor says: “There are all sorts of classifications and generalizations that get slavishly followed and which prevent people from looking at fundamentals. And the media is responsible for a lot of it. It’s journalists who are most obsessed with coming up with catchphrases, or awards, or lists of ‘who’s hot’. Too many investors outsource their thinking to analysts or hacks. People need to think for themselves.” Think for ourselves? PIIGS might fly.
Enjoy this? There’s more by me on psychology and philosophy at my blog, The Politics of Wellbeing.
December 6, 2010 at 11:30 am | More on Economics and development, Global system | 8 CommentsThe ECB yesterday slightly increased its bond purchasing programme, but did not push the nuclear button and announce some huge new programme of QE or bank re-capitalizations, as some in the bond markets were screaming for.
The editor of Euroweek, one of the finance mags I write for, reckons the ECB played it well:
There has been no shortage of thundering demands from bankers and investors for a vast wave of quantitative easing from the European Central Bank. Speaking to people in the market this week has at times felt like hosting the sort of talk radio show that attracts prophet of doom taxi drivers and the more outspoken members of the National Rifle Association. Amid the talk of meltdown and default, immediate “shock and awe” spending by the ECB was prescribed as the only thing that could save the world from a terrible peril.
The response from the ECB was predictably less aggressive, more nuanced and, for now, more appropriate. Trichet is not a politician: he does not do shock and awe, he never has and nor should any central banker. Central banks are there to keep things stable and boring. Further, this would be the wrong time to let slip the dogs of QE war. Yields on peripheral sovereign debt have made back some or all of the ground lost earlier in the week. A lot of firms are about to shut their books for the year. Borrowers do not have a whole lot more borrowing to do, if any at all.
So why, pending any reckless statements from a European politician, with volumes about to lighten, would the ECB worry about doing anything before Christmas? Next year is sure to provide plenty of problems. Now is not the moment to go nuclear.
I agree. I’ve noticed this pattern over the last decade, whenever financial crises occur: the markets shriek ever louder that governments ABSOLUTELY MUST come to the rescue or ALL HELL will break loose. This generates such a general sense of panic and catastrophe that terrified politicians cave in and open the tax purses, and then bankers get bailed out, close their positions, and hail a cab to the gentlemen’s club for whiskies and cigars.
Private banks are, really, the perfect parasite: if you look at financial news, almost all the ‘expert opinions’ come from bankers, from bank economists, from bank analysts, from bank traders. There are hardly any alternate views given in the media. The taxpayer doesn’t really have a representative to put forward our views on CNBC. So the financial sector has captured information transmission, and it makes sure the only message that gets through is: it is imperative that the market gets supported and the banks and boldholders get bailed out. The perfect parasite.
So has the ECB stood firm against the histrionic Gillian McKeith-esque fainting of the bond markets? Well…sort of. It also emerged this week that the Irish government will protect all senior bank bondholders from any hair cut in the restructuring of Anglo Irish Bank, and probably of other bailed out banks too. This taxpayer largesse towards senior bank bondholders came at the insistence of the ECB, according to the Irish government. And that pattern is likely to be followed in other bank bail-out regimes across the periphery of Europe.
So don’t worry, oh hysterical bondholders. The gallant ECB will hold your hand after all. Quick, fetch the smelling salts!
December 3, 2010 at 10:55 am | More on Economics and development | 2 CommentsThe European sovereign bond markets are a bit calmer today, after ECB central bank governor Jean-Claude Trichet said the ECB might continue with its bond purchasing programme, and Portugal managed to auction €500mn in T-bills. But this may only be a temporary respite.
What strikes me about this latest crisis is how incredibly slow the EU and Eurogroup is to react to bond market crises. They come out with an emergency loan package for Ireland, but the package still has to be approved at an EU Summit in a few weeks and by a Eurogroup meeting of Eurozone finance ministers. It then comes out with plans for a new bail-out mechanism called the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), to replace the existing European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in 2013. The ESM will differ from the EFSF in that private creditors would be forced to take haircuts if a country is declared insolvent. Great…but who’s thinking as far ahead as 2013?
At the moment, the EFSF’s bail-out loans are pari passu with private creditors, so private creditors are treated the same in any eventual restructuring. That means private creditors could get a free ride on the EFSF’s largesse, much to chancellor Merkel’s disgust. So if investors think Portugal, Spain, Italy, Belgium or anyone else is going to default, best get them to do it now, before the ESM is introduced and investors might face a restructuring.
But when would a restructuring happen under the ESM? Investors would apparently be ‘encouraged’ to extend debt maturities after an ESM loan was released, but would only face an automatic restructuring if a country was officially pronounced insolvent. And that, it appears, would happen after a unanimous vote by the Eurogroup. Sort of a geo-economic version of the Eurovision Song Contest, if you will. Ireland…null points!
So how is this mess likely to play out? Reuters’ Luke Baker sketches five possible solutions:
1) A massive programme of European sovereign debt purchasing by the ECB, perhaps to the tune of €1-2 trillion. Baker suggests from his interviews that this is the most likely solution. That will likely lead to inflation in the Eurozone, and a weakening euro.
2) The Eurogroup makes the European Financial Stability Facility bigger. It still has €650bn in it, enough perhaps to cope with Spain defaulting, though not if Spain, Italy and others default within a short amount of time. EU policy-makers are apparently considering doubling it in size.
3) The Eurozone issues Eurozone bonds, thus pooling the credit strength of the Eurozone and hiding weaker members under the umbrella of the Union. The EFSF is, in fact, preparing to issue its first bonds in January, to finance the Ireland rescue package. This could be the first step towards a wider programme of Eurozone bond issuance.
4) Beg China for help. One EU policy-maker tells Baker: ‘Think about who’s got the money to handle this. The only country is China. We need China to step up and buy EU debt.” Hu – let the dogs out!
5) Eurozone moves to fiscal union. Trichet himself said recently: “We have got a monetary federation. We need quasi-budget federation as well. Yes, we could achieve that if there is strong monitoring and supervision of what there is. Because what exists doesn’t converge with the actual situation we are facing. It is a situation where we need quasi-federation of the budget.”
Some analysts think this is where the crisis is moving the Eurozone project. When bond markets attack, the Eurozone has to move to a higher level of complexity to defend itself. But just imagine a situation where Eurozone budget checkers are sent, like Hans Blix, to Italy or Greece to check how honest their accounting is. Hiding any secret debt in underground bunkers, Silvio?
December 1, 2010 at 1:43 pm | More on Economics and development | Comments OffI’m excited about going to see Alasdair MacIntyre talk today. I think he’s the most influential living philosopher, and it’s a rare chance to see him speak in London (he moved to the US 40 years ago). The influence of his 1981 book. After Virtue, is still growing. More and more thinkers are following him in embracing Aristotle and a Neo-Aristotelian virtue politics as a way beyond the ethical relativism of liberal, pluralist capitalism.
That includes communitarians on the right, like Phillip Blond, the architect of the Tory party’s Big Society concept, who called for a ‘new communitarian settlement’, and communitarians on the left, like the MP John Cruddas, who writes in the New Statesman today that Labour should embrace a “politics of virtue, rooted in Aristotle, which resists commodification and nurtures community”.
It also includes the literary critic Terry Eagleton, who I see has left behind post-modernism and the relativism of literary theorists like Derrida and Baudrillard to embrace a Neo-Aristotelian / MacIntyrean virtue politics.
MacIntyre, and Aristotle, are obviously back in vogue. But I wonder what he thinks of the contemporary fusion of Aristotle with empiricism and utilitarian happiness measurements? Does he think we can discover a ‘science of flourishing’? Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to ask him this evening.
October 28, 2010 at 11:24 am | More on Influence and networks | 1 Comment
I’ve been looking into a curriculum subject introduced by New Labour in 2003, called Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL). It began as a voluntary primary school subject, and in 2007 was also made a voluntary secondary school subject. Over 90% of primary schools and over 60% of secondary schools now teach it.
SEAL teaches five emotional competencies: self-awareness, managing feelings, motivation, empathy and social skills. It’s the biggest example of the new ‘politics of wellbeing’, and of the new confidence governments have in managing their citizens’ emotional development.
What I’ve discovered, to my surprise, is that this new national subject was almost entirely based on one book – Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (EI).
Goleman, then a journalist at the New York Times, wrote EI in 1996. The book was a huge hit and spent a year and a half in the New York Times best-seller list. It captured the 1990s fascination with the emotions, the role they play, and how we can manage them.
Cut to Southampton, in 1997, and Peter Sharp, the local authority’s chief educational psychologist, read EI and was so “inspired” by it that he and Southampton’s chief schools inspector decided that “emotional literacy should be an equal priority with literacy and numeracy for all children in Southampton”. The book must have made quite an impression.
Sharp drew up an EI educational programme, based almost entirely around Goleman’s book, with the aim of teaching children to become more “emotionally intelligent”, better-behaved, and therefore less likely to be thrown out of schools.
This programme was then implemented, and evaluated by the University of Southampton’s Katharine Weare, another Southampton psychologist and friend of Sharp’s. She decided it worked, because it reduced exclusions.
The fact that exclusions in Southampton schools went down following the introduction of EI courses doesn’t actually prove that pupils became more ‘emotionally intelligent’, of course, only that Southampton schools decided not to exclude so many children. Indeed, Weare admits that problem behaviour in schools had become “so widespread that exclusion is no longer an option.” And yet the lower rate of exclusions was also used by Weare as the main evidence that the EI course really ‘worked’.
Meanwhile, other local education authorities (LEAs) got the EI bug and started to follow Southampton’s example. New Labour, newly installed on on a manifesto of ‘education, education, education’, and buzzed up to the sounds of M People’s ‘Things can only get better’, started to look at introducing the EI approach into the national curriculum.
In 2002, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) hired Weare to write a report to examine “how children’s emotional and social competence and wellbeing could most effectively be developed at national and local level”. The report, unsurprisingly, warmly endorsed Goleman’s “seminal work”, and trumpeted the evidence base for it.
The evidence included “strong impressionistic evidence” from the LEAs themselves who were providing emotional literacy courses – though of course, they would say it worked, wouldn’t they. The report also uncritically passed on Goleman’s own bold claim that EI is “more influential than cognitive abilities for personal, career and scholastic success”.
DfES embraced Weare’s proposals, and SEAL was introduced in 2003, and rolled out to secondary schools in 2007. So now, children will be taught Goleman’s ideas from the ages of 3 to 18. What an incredible feat for a pop psychology book, to become enshrined in the education of an entire nation.
Now, as it happens, I am a supporter of the idea of educating children to manage their own emotions. That was a cornerstone of ancient Greek philosophical education – and indeed, Goleman begins and ends EI by citing Aristotle, who was “so concerned with emotional skilfulness”.
Nonetheless, I find the story of how Goleman’s book became a staple of national education slightly chilling.
First of all, this was a book of popular psychology, by a journalist, who threw together research from all kinds of different psychological approaches – the multiple intelligence school, the neurological approach, CBT, Positive Psychology, psychoanalysis, the emotional intelligence school of Mayer and Salovey – without recognizing that often these schools directly disagree with each other in their theories of emotion and their ideas of how to manage them.
Goleman’s main debt is to the work on emotional intelligence by Jack Mayer and Peter Salovey. However, he made claims based on their research that were far wilder than they ever made. His central claim, that EI is a better predictor of career success than IQ, is “nothing that you will ever find in anything we wrote”, says Mayer. And Goleman included so many different ideas, theories and approaches into the catch-all term of EI that “the concept loses its power when it’s anything and everything”, in the words of Salovey.
In fact, for a book about emotional intelligence, EI is remarkably confused about what emotions are and how they arise. Goleman passes on several therapeutic techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which is a form of therapy based around the cognitive theory of emotions. This theory, pioneered by the Stoics, suggests that our emotions follow our thoughts, beliefs and appraisals. By changing our automatic thoughts and beliefs, we change our emotions. So the Stoics rejected the distinction between ‘head’ and ‘heart’ – in fact, one’s heart follows one’s head. As you habitually think, so you habitually feel.
So Goleman draws on CBT heavily for his ideas of how we can manage our feelings. And yet he also explicitly rejects CBT’s cognitive theory of emotions.
He says that the cognitive approach “leaves unexplored the rich sea of emotions that makes the inner life and relationship so complex”. Cognitive scientists, he writes, have too computational a model of the human mind, and have forgotten that, in reality, “the brain’s wetware is awash in a messy, pulsating puddle of neurochemicals”, and that it is “the wash of feeling that gives life its flavour”.
As it happens, CBT doesn’t deny that our minds are “awash” with neurochemicals. But it says we can manage the neurochemical wash by focusing on what is in our control – our thoughts, our beliefs, our body, our behaviour, how we view and frame reality.
You don’t have to accept the Stoic / CBT model of emotions. But then don’t use their techniques. It suggests an incoherence in your theoretical foundations.
Despite the looseness of Goleman’s definition of EI, despite the fact that the scientists whose research he popularized explicitly disagree with his conclusions, New Labour seized on his book and made it a new subject in the national curriculum. I find that amazing.
And hardly anyone has made a fuss. Hardly anyone has even noticed. One of the few exceptions is the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being in Glasgow, who wrote a report in 2007 warning that:
Daniel Goleman was a journalist and his book has been seriously, and extensively, critiqued by a large number of psychologists. His claims for the importance of emotional intelligence have been discredited. Goleman now tacitly accepts some of these criticisms. What’s more, the way that Goleman defines emotional intelligence has also been undermined. Critics claim that his notion of emotional intelligence is a ragbag which includes any positive human characteristic other than IQ. They also point out that many of the characteristics he cites are at odds with one another or largely emanate from personality. Yet Secondary SEAL has at its core Goleman’s ideas as they base this whole programme on Goleman’s ‘five domains’.
In short, Goleman cannot be used as the intellectual foundation, and justification of large- scale work of this type in school, but this is exactly what is happening in SEAL.
The rapid embrace and dissemination of Goleman’s ideas is an amazing example of the expansion of the therapeutic state – an expansion that we’re often hardly aware of, that has happened with minimal publicity, because after all, our children aren’t being force-fed moral beliefs, like children in fundamentalist Islamic madrasahs. No, this is science. There is ‘a clear evidence base’. And therefore we don’t need to debate the ethics of making ‘emotional intelligence’ as important a priority as numeracy and literacy.
We may like the idea of teaching young people how to govern themselves. But the confusion and sloppiness of Goleman’s own work shows that, while many of us may agree that education should teach young people how to manage their emotions, it gets much harder when one gets down to specifics. What do you mean by emotion? What is your core theory of how emotions arise, and therefore how we can manage them? What is your model of a ‘good life’ or a ‘good character’, and what ethical assumptions does it involve?
The lack of consensus on these issues, and the weakness or lack of the evidence base to definitively answer these questions, means governments at the very least should be cautious before diving into children’s minds.
But the expansion of SEAL shows that they are being far too hasty. And they typically seek ‘objective evaluations’ of the effectiveness of such programmes by psychologists or sociologists from those institutions which promoted the programme in the first place, and who now profit from them – it’s like asking Price Waterhouse Coopers to evaluate the effectiveness of PPP programmes.
In a few years, we have allowed a whole caste of priest-like psychologists operating at local and national level to tell our children how to think, how to feel, what is normal and healthy, and what is aberrant and pathological. And we accept their diktats unquestioningly, because ‘the evidence is clear’ – even though it is often extremely shaky or, in the case of Goleman, plain wrong. No one voted for these priests. No one debated their claims. No one even noticed their takeover of power.
It reminds me of Plato’s Protagoras, in which the celebrity-sophist Protagoras arrives in Athens on a wave of hype, promising to teach any one who pays him the ‘skills’ of virtue and rhetoric. Socrates warns his fellow Athenians:
August 27, 2010 at 5:14 pm | More on Influence and networks | 3 Commentsare you aware of the danger which you are incurring? If you were going to commit your body to someone, and there was a risk of your getting good or harm from him, would you not carefully consider and ask the opinion of your friends and kindred, and deliberate many days as to whether you should give him the care of your body?
But when the soul is in question, which you hold to be of far more value than the body, and upon the well or ill-being of which depends your all, – about this you never consulted either with your father or with your brother or with any one of us who are your companions. But no sooner does this foreigner appear, than you instantly commit your soul to his keeping. In the evening, as you say, you hear of him, and in the morning you go to him, never deliberating, or taking the opinion of any one as to whether you ought to intrust yourself to him or not.
News here that David Cameron has approved the establishment of a ‘behavioural insight’ unit, led by policy advisor David Halpern, to find ways to implement the ideas of behavioural psychologist Richard Thaler, who is also apparently working with the unit.
Thaler is, together with Cass Sunstein, the author of Nudge, a study of humans’ poor and often irrational decision-making processes (such as preferring books with easy-to-remember one-word titles) and how governments can manipulate or ‘nudge’ these processes towards more enlightened choices.
Putting a picture of a fly on a urinal, for example, nudges people to pee more in the urinal, and less on the floor. Creating bins that make a funny noise when you drop things into them encourages people to put more rubbish into them. And so on!
There are other, more far-reaching ways you can use behavioural psychology to affect public decision-making. For example, if you present a policy decision to citizens, you could either offer them a box to tick to sign up to it, or a box to tick if they want to opt out of it. Making people tick a box to opt out makes us more likely to opt in.
Why? Because we’re lazy, bored, distracted, inert and irrational creatures. We’re monkeys, so the government needs to present our choices in such a way as to make us pick the right banana.
Thaler and Sunstein call this sort of social manipulation ‘libertarian paternalism’. People are still free to choose how to live. But, knowing that homo dufus often makes bad decisions, governments and companies should structure the choices they prresent so they pick the more enlightened option.
There are two ripostes to this approach.
1) It has only been proved useful on minor interventions. Musical rubbish bins are fun, but not profoundly transformative.
2) Governments should try to appeal to and develop their citizens’ conscious, rational decision-making processes, not manipulate their limbic systems, even if it is for ‘good’ aims. Who is to say the aims are good?
The same sort of manipulation techniques could just as easily be used by corporations for their own short-term profit – just as tobacco companies used the psychological manipulation techniques of Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud and the grand-daddy of Nudge, to sell their cigarettes. They could also be used by a militaristic government to nudge the people to war (see the video below).
The alternative approach to Nudge has been called Think. It’s a bit more old-fashioned – you try to explain things to people to allow them to make a more free, informed and rational decision. Ridiculous idea, I know…
And a middle ground between Nudge and Think has been suggested by the RSA, called Steer. You nudge people towards decisions, and then explain to them how you did it. The Penn and Teller approach to nudge politics.
I propose an alternative psycho-manipulative approach. I call it Bore: you bang on about policy choices in such a dry, tedious and obfuscating way that the public lose interest, turn on the TV, and leave you to rule the country.
Jules Evans is a freelance journalist and writer, who covers two main areas: philosophy and psychology (for publications including The Times, Psychologies, New Statesman and his website, Philosophy for Life), and emerging markets (for publications including The Spectator, Economist, Times, Euromoney and Financial News).
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