Personal Control and the Existential Salve

an autonomic perspective on the implications of purpose through purchase

Posted Thu Jan 21, 01:55 pm in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, religion, unanswered questions


We have moved far from the sort of ‘subsistence’ mental existence that our prehistoric ancestors may have experienced. To make a simple example, as a society, we’re tending to spend less time and energy thinking about where our next meal is coming from and more time worrying about whether we’re ‘accomplishing’ things and whether we are ‘optimizing’ our life experiences. I realize that this may seem like an odd point on my part; wouldn’t anyone rather worry about something relatively frivolous like their status than the fear of starvation? After all, the benefits and penalties are at extreme odds with each other. If you’re worrying about your status and your goal is to make more money than the guy next door, the worst that will happen if you fail is that you feel bad about yourself. If you’re worrying about whether you’re going to be able to eat and you fail at your goal, the worst that could happen is that you actually die of starvation. In this context, most rationalists would probably say that if you had the choice, it’s clearly better to have your fundamentals neatly secured and spend your energy focused on the non-fundamentals— the stuff that’s higher up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.1

However, there may be other dimensions of this choice whose repercussions perhaps aren’t so obvious, and perhaps touch on the very central tenets of life fulfillment, happiness, and transcendence. If you spend all your daily energies and time on searching for food, water, and shelter, these tasks will form the basis for meaning and fulfillment in your life; for example, note that ancient mythologies revolve around things like weather and harvests, while modern mythologies revolve around things like entertainers and populist worlds attained through consumer goods (for example, the keys to the Wild West lay in a pack of Marlboro cigarettes). If your daily energies and time are spent on building your company’s profits so you can have a nicer car or go on vacation or enjoy recreational activities, then these external fruits will form the basis of your goals and your meanings in life. The question is, which of these will ultimately prove more psychologically rewarding and meaningful in the long run?

Further, if your life is defined by the search for food and your reward is the food you find in your search, there is a relatively small chain between your actions and the consequences of your actions. The act (i.e. the search) leads directly to the outcome variable (i.e. food). This inherently implies a simplicity and control in daily life activities, and a greater attachment of meaning to fewer things. As the chain between your acts and the outcome variables becomes more convoluted and unclear, there becomes increased complexity in daily existence, and a more uncertain relationship between effort and results. What does this mean? At the very least, it almost certainly introduces a longer lag time between action and outcome, which means you have to spend more time and effort thinking about and preparing for the future. It also means that you are more likely to be reliant on others (as producers and consumers) to relay desired outcomes to you, since your actions do not directly lead to the outcomes (working in an office for 40 hours a week does not magically produce money that appears on your desk; your work goes into some action that leads to some other action and another, which eventually leads to your company getting paid by someone, and then a portion of that money is given to you). The chain is much longer, more uncertain, there are more things that could go wrong, and less of a direct causal relationship between action and outcome.

This has a lot of implications. If you are searching for food, the amount of time you spend searching will most likely be directly proportional to the amount of food you find. If you are working in an office, the amount of work you do may or may not be directly proportional to your pay; some secretaries do as much or more work than the head executive, but get paid way less. You might work 100 hours weeks to find that you are going to be promoted to a higher paying job— or, as many people are currently finding out, you may do the same only to find that your company is doing very poorly and you’re going to get laid off. You have little direct control over how your actions will manifest in an outcome; the ultimate goals of modern work situations are not typically the direct result of actions, but rather the result of multiple concurrent and mutually dependent processes.

The nature of the uncertainty is different because of the different number of linkages in the chain. The search for food has one link: the search for food leads to food. A job, on the other hand, has many links, and each link has many horizontal and vertical links associated with it, which amounts to a mess of related events of varying causation (e.g. single causation, multiple causation, conjunctural causation, mediated causation, and probabilistic causation). In other words, the relationship between the input and the output is much more complex, and depends on a lot more factors (each of which depends on a lot of other factors). This chain of events is inherently less predictable, and the actions you take have little direct relation to the goals you reach towards.

You might counter at this point that surely there’s a generally positive correlation between how hard you work and how well you are rewarded. Maybe, but note that this is not an unmediated chain of events. There are many linkages that depend on the successful occurrence of other events for the desired outcome of wealth to come to you after a lifetime of hard work. Wealthy people have a habit of saying that their hard work got them where they are, and it is perhaps true that if you looked at data regarding this, you would find some correlation between levels of effort and wealth among an already selectively chosen group (an example of the problematic survivorship bias). But looking over the entire population, it would also not be hard to find people who worked hard their whole lives and got nowhere due to, for example, always working for horrible companies, personal problems, and just bad luck. How would this exact same situation differ amongst individuals searching for food? Logically, it would be very hard to argue that with individuals starting in similar circumstances, the guy who spent less time searching for food over a longer period would end up in better circumstances. I would suggest that this is because the greater the number of linkages in the chain between action and ultimate goal, the less predictable or certain the outcome of the action; therefore, in a situation in which the action leads directly to the goal, the individual who works harder at that action is in greater control of the outcome.

Another point to consider: there are a lot of people involved in these longer chains, which means you (as an actor within the chain) have to spend much more energy considering what others think about you, because you have to engender their trust and respect to enhance the probability of your goals being met; this means you have to be more cognizant of social and power structures for your survival. Such concerns create a fertile soil for existential angst borne from the constant need for validation from others. I would also argue that it creates a disincentive to focus on securing only your fundamentals in favor of procuring such things as status and comfort since there is a greater importance placed on your position in a social structure— in network theory terms, one’s centrality. The stronger and more connections one has, the more central an individual is. The more connections you have with others who are central, the more power you have over the whole network and people in it. Network centrality means that you control resources and people; people look to you for instruction and they listen to you if you are central. Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet, for example, have high centrality. They can get things done because they know other powerful and central people in networks. They also have a lot of money, which also means power (money and centrality correlate heavily), even among people outside of their networks. I, on the other hand, have very low network centrality. I know no powerful people and have little control over any resources.

For better or for worse, people who are looking only for their next meal don’t have time (or need) to worry about such things as their network centrality. They just don’t want to die of starvation. And though they need to think about that, they don’t have an immediate need to think about how others in the network might think of them (though in the long run, they may want to consider that they may be able to leverage network connections for future security). Of course, people with near unlimited financial resources also don’t need to consider what others think of them either— unless a mass exodus of network connections could lead to that financial reservoir being unceremoniously drained. Then they do. But for the average person, we have to think about this a lot, because what others think about us dictates our network centrality. The more central we are, the easier it is for us to achieve the goals we seek, and the higher the likelihood that actions we take will actually achieve the goals we want them to— because, again, the long chain between action and outcome involves a lot of people, and if the people in this chain know that you’re trying to get something done and you’re a central figure, they’ll work harder to make it happen (because they themselves are trying to raise their network centrality, and repeatedly following the orders of someone who is more central than them is a good way of doing that). Therefore network centrality grants an individual control, because doing something and knowing it will have a certain effect is the very definition of control, and being able to command the obeisance of others is tantamount to being able to shorten the chain of events.

The entire world is built on our ability to get to this point of predictability and “no surprises” as often and as reliably as we possibly can. It is this foundation-level quality that we work constantly for and which we sell to others. Without this unyielding human desire to gain control, the world as we know it would cease turning. We earn money to gain control of our environment because we believe that having the money will buy us security. People hire us for jobs because they believe our skills can confer control onto their businesses. Pharmacies sell us medications to give us control over our health. Construction workers build roads to give us control over our transport. Television gives us control over our boredom. We pay deeply (at times in financial terms, at other times in other ways) to gain that control, and there is little that surrounds us, either physical, institutional, or conceptual, that did not arise in some way to present us in some way with the promise of control.

In my view, materialism is a by-product of the angst produced by a lack of control. Things can provide us a sense of stability. Things, we think, don’t go away or betray us. They ground us. When we feel insecure, we can cling to them and they will not abandon us. We feel secure in our homes, with our things. When we have jobs, we aren’t filled with fear about losing things we’re accustomed to, like our lifestyles. But it is not just this “negative” quality of materialism that is fueled by this apparent dark side of humanity. Altruism, too, is a response to the lack of control in the world, and an effort to counter it (see related: Just-world hypothesis).

Marketers know well that we are on a constant hunt to quell our existential anxieties. And yes, they do wish very much to exploit this of you, but it is not with malice that they do this, for they, as humans, are subject to it as well. They know that the search for transcendence is a universal human experience. And they know well, implicitly, that our society is on a search for transcendence— not through inward searching or contemplation as perhaps the people of the distant past have (and by virtue of the non-industrial nature of their societies, were forced to), but through material goods.

Without putting a judgment on it, it is hard to deny that our world increasingly looks to consumables to act as existential salves, if not vehicles to transcendence and meaning. It is a matter of conditioning; our economic and cultural systems increasingly push us in this direction (for example, the common definition of success has little to do with personal fulfillment and everything to do with financial and/or social capital, a definition that nearly everyone has blindly embossed on their roadmap to personal success). Our cultural values tell us that the houses we buy give us our sense of security and well-being. Our cars and vacations transport us to places we think will offer us moments of joy and escape. Our televisions and media will confer us with the sorts of meaning and realities that we cannot find alone. For better or for worse, our modern search for transcendence is one littered with consumer purchase and consumer desire; part of this is because of the increased availability of consumer goods. The other side of it is that there has been a mainstream psychological shift towards it as a by-product of industrialization and economic growth. More than being a deliberate shift of societal priorities, it is the result of a rapid change in technology, expansion in marketing communications, and an across-the-board raising of the bar of what constitutes the bare necessities of existence in the modern world.

I think most people walk towards this consumer salvation without the slightest conscious awareness of their fundamental underlying purposes; for many, this constant search for new things is simply a lifestyle that they were born into and have integrated into their psyches as the result of a process of reproduction of societal values— a concept referred to by Bourdieu as habitus. For these people, the search for the latest-and-the-greatest and for personal comfort is all there is, because in a climate where this ideology is the norm, they have never been challenged to think otherwise.

As with anything, there are good aspects and bad aspects of this. On the plus side, this mentality opens us to a breadth of experiences, and a wider mindset that can facilitate a deeper array of thoughts and understandings about our world. Because of the advent of advanced economic systems, complex experiences can be bought and sold, and there’s a wide range of experiences available to modern societies that we might not otherwise have been privy to. You wouldn’t expect, for example, tribal peoples of Papua New Guinea to pack their bags, board a plane, and vacation in the Virgin Islands, nor would you expect Australian Aborigines to go out on a Sunday evening to sip on a Tom Yum Gai soup at a Thai restaurant).

Certainly such experiences can be and often are valuable both in the developmental sense and in the sense that it opens our eyes to new opportunities and ways of thinking. As members of advanced societies, we are privy to such benefits, and we tend to think of them as normal experiences that are not all that remarkable or out-of-reach. In fact, we expect, within reason, to be able to purchase pretty much any experience we want provided we have the money for it, and usually there’s someone willing to make the exchange with us to make it happen. Knowing this, our brains develop the not unrealistic notion that we can externally procure any experience we may want to have; thus, we may be simultaneously, and unwittingly, developing an increasing reliance on salable external phenomena to confer meaning and substance onto our lives.

The question remains, however: can there be fulfillment in this? Is fulfillment in purchase any different than fulfillment in being a hunter-gatherer? This is a question that deserves serious inquiry.

1 A model that I find flawed in certain respects, but one that is instructive for the purposes of this discussion

Comment [3]




Incentivization and the Superfreakanomics Controversy

Why Levitt and Dubner’s take on climate change is too limited a view

Posted Sat Dec 26, 12:40 pm in book reviews, environment, human nature, politics


In 2005, a pop economics book called Freakanomics climbed the nation’s bestseller list. Written by University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, the book claimed to unlock mysteries surrounding many social phenomena. For example, chapters explained through the lens of statistics and economic theory, why drug dealers live with their parents and the reasons for the popularity of certain baby names to particular races of people. The explanations given in the book were interesting and thought-provoking, and earned a great deal of critical acclaim and popular press.1 Whatever the legitimacy of the claims made in the book, there was always a sense that Levitt was a sharp guy; he came from a respected academic institution, and was well-known in his field.

Earlier this year (2009), the highly-anticipated followup to their bestselling book, entitled Superfreakanomics, was released. But even before the book had hit shelves, a massive amount of public controversy had built up— much of it very negative. Many critics who had formerly been gushing about the authors suddenly had lost all respect, viewing the book as a compendium of contrarianism, arguments made to deliberately jostle one’s sense of intuition about things— in a bad way. For example, Levitt and Dubner argued that drunk-driving is safer than walking home drunk. Not only did this incense organizations that had made so many strides against this sort of behavior, but many found there to be surprisingly weak chains of logic in their methodological approaches.

But where the book really enraged the scientific community at large was in their highly controversial chapter on global warming. Climate change is already a hot-button topic; one that has generated a large level of heated public debate. Levitt and Dubner decided to throw gas on the flame by claiming that the only serious way to address the problem is to engage in geoengineering. We should, they argue, release large amounts of certain chemicals into the atmosphere; these chemicals will absorb the problems created by excess CO2 and begin a global cooling process. There’s a lot you could say about their “solution” in terms of the science (which they claim supports them, but which many strongly dispute); for starters, it’s dangerous to so offhandedly suggest a solution on this scale that could have serious downstream problems. Efforts in using human measures to balance biological processes have often had unforeseeable and difficult to correct consequences (one example being the recurring problems we have had with invasive species). But I’m not in the loop enough with that world to argue those points. What irks me is that they specifically downplayed the idea that change in human behavior was warranted or possible at all. In an interview, Levitt was quoted as saying:

If you look at the history of modern mankind, I think you will be hard pressed to find any particular problem that was serious that was solved by a behavioral change, as opposed to by a technological solution…

As a social scientist and economist, I find this assertion not only misguided, but ill-conceived as well. First, it is built on a false premise: that there are two types of change, behavioral and technological. This is untrue; often, behavioral change goes hand in hand with technological change. How is it fair to say that our society’s transition to motor vehicles, or our adoption of cellular telephones are solely the purview of technological change? Sure there are clear technological changes involved, but simple shifts in technological wizardry do not, by themselves, account for widespread shifts in adoption rates (for example, natural gas vehicles have been invented, but few people actually own a natural gas powered car). For any technological advance to take root, it has to be accompanied by behavioral changes.

The second reason, which dovetails perfectly with the aforementioned reason, is that because people do make behavioral changes that aren’t part of technological changes. It’s not clear what serious historical events Levitt is talking about when he says that he doesn’t have confidence in people changing behavior, but there’s tremendous, almost incontrovertible evidence that behavioral change can happen in the absence of technological change. Here’s one simple example: high gas prices in 2007 drastically reduced the amount of driving done by the average American. This might seem like a trivial rebuttal, but the reality is that external conditions force people to change behavior all the time. Here, the fact that prices went up disincentivized people from driving around needlessly. Technology played no part in this. Admittedly, it can be argued that this is not a “serious” situation on the scale that Levitt is referring to in that quote, but aside from climate change, what serious situations of global proportions that involved 6 billion— or even 50 million— atomized individual actors has plagued this planet in the past? I can’t think of one. Regardless, it’s not hard to see that many situations, particularly ones involving imminent crises, effect rapid changes in human behavior. For Levitt— an economist— to make an argument asserting the pre-eminence of technology as a force is a little surprising to me.2

I don’t mean to discount the role of technology at all. But just as often, it comes down to our governments and society to create the conditions necessary for behavioral change. Sometimes this happens on its own, sometimes it happens through deliberate processes. Regardless, my argument against Levitt’s assertion is one that I thought should have been obvious to someone of Levitt’s stature; as an economist, his entire field is about incentivization. Surely he, of all people, would know that you can change behavior— not simply by asking for change, which is the straw man he seems to be knocking down— but by changing incentives structures and changing the conditions that push individuals towards the choices they make (perhaps he should have taken some lessons from his fellow University of Chicago faculty member Richard Thaler, whose book Nudge discusses this idea at length).

Though I can’t make any arguments about geoengineering because I simply don’t know enough about it, I will say that saying that Levitt and Dubner’s attitude towards behavioral change is somewhat defeatist and cynical; I agree, it can be difficult to change behavior, but it’s important to realize how it can and can’t be done. Simply asking for it doesn’t typically work, as people have resistance to change; but creating conditions that encourage behavioral change is exactly how the world and our society was able to transform so dramatically over the past few millennia, and how we can expect it to be shaped in the future.

1 I can’t say that I cared much for the book myself (again making myself the oddball amongst my peer set), mostly because the title was misleading and the book had no applied value whatsoever. It was fairly interesting if viewed as a trivia book, however— putting aside any questions regarding its accuracy.

2 Surprising at least initially, until I realized that mainstream economic theory didn’t even introduce concepts about the behavioral irrationality of the consumer until just a few years back. This shocking and bewildering oversight will eventually lay waste to the entire field if it is not immediately adopted into the economic mainstream. The field is already getting a lot of heat because of the recent economic meltdown, which was due in large part to irrational consumer processes that were not even considered by the big names in economics!

Comment [1]




On Nuance and Intellectual Honesty

the importance of thinking in complex terms about subjects that are often denied it

Posted Tue Nov 10, 02:35 pm in consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, research, unanswered questions


It’s so hard to be nuanced these days. Every time you make an assertion that—wait— maybe Wal-Mart isn’t working hand in hand with Satan, or that materialism might not cause the downfall of civilization, you get dirty looks from people. It’s not that I believe that Wal-Mart is the greatest company ever or that I believe we should all be more materialistic. It’s that these are nuanced points of view that attempt to not be reductivist. By this I don’t mean to imply some wishy-washy sense of moral relativism that sidesteps taking hardlined stances on topics of public interest. It’s about being complete in an assessment before passing judgment. But in the modern world, we not only expect reductivist views that are partially based on political ideology, but we view non-reductivist views suspiciously, as if they are coming from someone with an ulterior and opposing motive.

Case in point: last night, I was engaged in conversation with some fellow graduate students, faculty, and area intellectuals. We were talking about Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, in preparation for his visit to this campus. The topic of conversation weaved a path around a number of subjects, but I found myself interjecting numerous times to offer a little bit of push-back towards unquestioned, ideologically driven assertions. I realize that doing this often makes me appear argumentative and contrarian, particularly in settings where I don’t know the people I’m talking to, but my goal is to elicit some level of thought in people who have strong, but largely unsupported, points of view.

Being nuanced means that people will interpret a political argument even where there isn’t one. Some topics are simply so ideologically loaded that you can’t talk about them in a complex and thoughtful way without people instinctively taking the side that most conforms to the talking points of their political ideology, and getting defensive when a statement impinges on it. Viewpoints that I often come in conflict with, and for which my rebuttals ruffle feathers, almost certainly cause people to form negative judgments about me (“obviously, this is a marketer talking” or “he’s clearly a member of such-and-such political party”); these impromptu acts of belief-formation on their parts are able to account for what otherwise may seem like— but aren’t!— needless and attention-seeking subversions of expectations on my part. The problem is that on hot-button issues, people assume that their conversation partners have political agendas that they want to push.

But in order to have a real dialogue, we have to abandon that way of thinking. We can no longer afford to have conversations that consist entirely of liberal/conservative/capitalist/socialist/pro-business/anti-corporation talking points. These talking points mean nothing because they are contextually bereft, and are selective ways of interpreting large amounts of complex information. But the real world is complicated. In my view, extreme points of view are common from people who haven’t done research on opposing views, and have not considered the aggregated knowledge in a meaningful way.

Perhaps you are wondering about the types of complex thoughts I’m talking about. Here are some points that I brought up last night, and which probably didn’t go over too well:

So, to the few of you who actually read this blog, I have one desperate plea: Question your own belief system rigorously, and be willing to think in complex terms, even if that means you arrive at conclusions that are unpopular among those in your peer set and social networks. It’s the only way to have honest dialogues these days.

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Corporate Social Responsibility Can't Happen By Itself

emphasis on short-term profitability stunts CSR’s ability to thrive in the market

Posted Thu Oct 1, 10:40 pm in business, business models, culture, economics, ethics, finance, improvements, marketing, sustainability, unfinished thoughts


Regulation is a pretty hot topic. And when I say “hot,” I mean that it has an uncanny ability to divide a crowd. Progressives seem to generally favor regulations as a means of limiting the damage caused by corporate recklessness, and they have been quite vocal in pushing for greater government oversight in what companies can do, and how much they can do it before incurring serious penalties. Meanwhile, proponents of the free market maintain that the only fair and effective way to handle regulation is to allow the market to do the work; they believe in an efficient economic system that automatically controls problems that really matter (i.e. the problems most people care about). I personally can sympathize to some degree with both sides of this debate, but am not convinced that either can be implemented as solutions to the problems we currently face. What follows is my logic.

Before we can go on though, we have to face facts: it’s been obvious to those paying attention that market forces have not been effective in curbing devastating environmental damage caused by companies who have ignored the social costs of their operations. It’s not limited to environmental damages, either. The recent financial meltdown almost certainly would have been prevented with more oversight.

The traditional progressive (read: “liberal”) line about all this is that these corporations are just greedy and soulless, and don’t care about anything but profit. But this views corporate activity within a vacuum, and denies the economic realities underlying their behavior. In the absence of proper incentives, no company will behave in a manner consistent with diffuse, idealized social goals. Companies by their very nature act in ways that are most beneficial to themselves in the marketplace; even companies that try to do social good still have financial and publicity incentives underlying their behavior. Why? Because if they don’t, they effectively get punished by Wall Street and the market; remember that when we’re talking about the stock market, the bottom line is that public companies (i.e. the biggest organizations on the planet, who control the most money) pretty much need to post higher-than-expected profits consistently— or else. On Wall Street, nobody gives a hoot about how socially responsible you are— unless you’re making money from it. And tragically, our system is structured in such a way that companies really cannot afford to piss off Wall Street, for a number of reasons that go beyond the scope of this commentary.

Nevertheless, that is an economic reality; to condemn a company for being socially irresponsible overlooks the conditions that encourage the sort of reckless behavior that we hear so much about. In my opinion, it’s more of an indictment of our social and financial structure than it is of a company to say that they act irresponsibly. Like I’ve said before, we should think of corporations like organisms. They do what it takes to survive now. They typically can’t afford to think too far in the future, because Wall Street does not reward thinking far into the future; Wall Street rewards thinking about next quarter. Whose fault is that? I’d argue that it’s all of our faults. In an environment of high competition and high risk of market punishment, it’s unfair to blame companies for playing the game by the rules we ourselves constructed. Of course, it doesn’t make what they do ethically right, but like in any evolutionary context, the concept of justice doesn’t play a large role in behavioral decision-making; surviving does.

So yes, public companies do operate by almost strictly by financial motives, just like many progressives indignantly charge. But I would argue that this financial motivation should not at all detract from the actions of, say, Wal-Mart, who has done more than almost any other company in the world to enact serious green initiatives. True, they’ve done it for themselves, their own bottom line, and Wall Street— but still, they’ve done it. And if that’s the motivation they need to do it, then perhaps we should encourage that. Besides, if they were supposed to adopt a sudden conscience about their activities and rectify them, whose social goals are they supposed to strive for, anyway? Lots of different social factions have lots of different goals, and many of them have incompatible or actively contradictory goals.

For this reason, it seems fair to place the decision-making process in the hands of the public, through market forces. That allows a sort of collective decision-making process that is free from being regulated by “some guys on a board,” and allows for us to ostensibly have a shared voice in determining the direction that we take as a planet. Unfortunately, however, there are some problems that such market forces don’t resolve. For example, the economically well-endowed have a disproportionately large voice and thus the ability to unilaterally have a strong negative impact with their choices. And there’s still no guarantee that the aforementioned group will pay attention to social well-being if they’re still being held hostage by Wall Street demands. Free market economics as a means of regulation is dependent on not only market efficiency, but ethical, rational, and well-informed decision-making on the part of consumers— many of which are corporate entities.

But as consumers we are neither rational nor omniscient. We are sometimes ethical. But we can’t know everything about all the downstream effects of all our purchases at the time of purchase. This makes it pretty hard to argue the point that the market will be able to curb environmentally damaging business practices through selective consumption.

That may seem like a slam dunk for regulation, and many on the political left would love to see this happen. But it’s not that easy. The problem of regulation is complex, and it is difficult to enact regulation in a way that appears fair to everyone. Here’s the main problem: if there are regulations, who gets to call the shots?

Some might argue that we should use science to guide our regulatory policy, at least with regards to environmental concerns. But what science? Even science can have an agenda. The more you look into scientific research, the more you see how there is a chain of funding. Funding is a political process. People conducting research are subject to biases. No matter what the science says, or the preponderance of evidence suggesting one thing or another, when it comes down to drafting law, there will almost always be some arbitrary component about implementation (e.g. exactly how many tons of CO2 a company can release per year; exactly what chemicals a company can and can’t produce). And those people whose economic interests are being impinged will no more welcome the validity of the science or the arbitrary lines being drawn than a liberal would welcome Sarah Palin’s views if she was placed in charge of preserving endangered wildlife. Ultimately, any laws will be seen as political tools with embedded agendas.

Though it is debatable how much this might change corporate attitudes towards CSR, I think part of the fix is to change the nature of Wall Street. It does not serve companies or society to have such a heavy focus on short-term profitability. This structure denies companies the opportunity to act in ways that favor their own long-term efficiency, the public’s best interest, and the well-being of the planet. If companies didn’t have to keep impressing Wall Street, they could better take actions that could, over the long term, make their operations more efficient, streamlined, and less wasteful. That would be good for their bottom line and for environmental concerns. But that takes time, and it might require a few consecutive quarters of what may appear to be subpar financial performance. Right now, this is a highly risky strategy that most companies wouldn’t consider because they will not be rewarded for it.

Weirdly, even amidst all the talk about reform in the financial industry, I have not heard any talk about this. Admittedly, I’m not sure if anyone has worked out the details about how a “new and improved” stock market system would work, or if anyone has suggested a better set of economic incentives for waste reduction, but perhaps it’s time we started a national dialogue about it. It seems rather important.

Comment [12]




The Trader Joe's Paradox Revisited

how the most progressive grocery store came in last for sustainability

Posted Tue Sep 22, 09:18 pm in consumerism, environment, experiences, marketing, sustainability


Trader Joe’s, the much celebrated “progressive” grocery store is a favorite of those consumers who favor such adjectives as “green” and “eco-friendly.” Unfortunately, as I described in a previous article, the reality is that Trader Joe’s is nothing of the sort. Amazingly, they manage to maintain that undeserved image without promoting it or even living up to the standards that these values would suggest. Case in point: this article in the New York Times places Trader Joe’s dead last in a national survey of grocery store seafood sustainability. It really takes some doing to lose out to guys like Safeway and Kroger. But then, Trader Joe’s never claimed to be eco-friendly and green in the first place, so maybe it’s not that surprising.

As I mentioned in my previous article about TJ’s (see the update at bottom), I talked to a Trader Joe’s manager about this very issue about their fish last November when I noticed that almost all the fish they sell there were on the “AVOID” column of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish). The manager told me that Trader Joe’s is a “democracy” and they stock things that people buy, and well, the people like unsustainable fish. I suppose he seemed somewhat apologetic about it, but at the same time he was able to take umbrage under this lofty ideology of populism.

Of course, by the same token we can view this democracy as a means by which we are able to use our buying power to promote our ideals through selective purchasing; that is, if we don’t believe a company is representing our values, we can avoid buying there. Being concerned about the state of our collapsing oceans, I did exactly that and stopped buying fish there. I also tried to share this information with friends, colleagues, and anyone who would listen. What I discovered about this is that it’s quite hard to gain credence with others regarding something when your statements directly contradict what others think they know; nearly everyone I told this to seemed to doubt my claims because of Trader Joe’s pervasive “progressive” reputation.

Earlier this year, I decided to write to Trader Joe’s headquarters about it. In my letter, I expressed that while I appreciated their apparent democratic ideals, Trader Joe’s could implement a “high road” approach on this, given the scientifically-validated reality that overfishing is destroying the world’s oceans. I attached a copy of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish. Much to my surprise, soon after I sent it, they updated their website to add something about how they are now sourcing their fish based on the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide. I’m not sure if it was my letter that elicited this, but the timing was pretty remarkable, and I was pleased that maybe one customer’s opinion did matter!

Well, it’s been several months or so since that update on their website. Since then, I’ve gone back numerous times and have not seen any change in their inventory of fish. I’m disappointed, especially since so many people are convinced that they are a company with “principles” and “ideals” relating to environmentalism, and thus do all their shopping there with the implicit understanding that their shopping list has already been filtered for eco-friendliness. Of course, to be fair, TJ’s never claimed that they serve this function.

But boy, they’ve shown that they can really cash in on this misconception.

Comment




Spectator Culture Goes Online

I was there, man, and I took a bunch of photos

Posted Wed Sep 9, 08:57 pm in


The other day I was biking down John Nolan Drive, a very nice lakefront path here in Madison, WI. As I approached an intersection, I saw a small crowd of people staring off into the water. As I got closer, I saw that there was a fellow sitting in a pickup truck, which isn’t that unusual. What was unusual was that the pickup truck was on a small but steep incline, and the back half of the truck (and then some) was completely underwater. A large SUV was trying without luck to pull the poor guy out of the water, but the rope kept breaking before he could do it. I observed this dramatic scene for a moment, and realized shortly that the crowd had gotten considerably bigger than when I first arrived. It was 5-6 people initially, but after a few moments, it turned to something more like 20.

To his credit, the driver of the underwater truck was in a remarkably chipper mood considering that his vehicle was quite likely going to be reeking of pondscum and fish for the remainder of the life of the truck, not to mention the fact that there was going to be a lot of water damage to the interior. And he seemed to ignore the fact that more than half of these bystanders appeared rather gleeful, and were taking out their digital cameras and cell phones, and snapping away. These amateur paparazzi made quite a show of it; they maneuvered around, taking shots from different angles and distances, apparently oblivious of the fact that this could be construed as rather rude and insensitive, not to mention somewhat embarrassing to the man.

From my perspective, all these people were apparently experiencing if not some form of schadenfreude at his expense, then some joy about the prospect of posting the resulting photos on the internet, sharing them with friends, or tossing them in a heap of digital files on their hard drives.

The simultaneous advent of digital photography and the rise of the internet as the primary means of sharing complex information has led to this interesting social-psych phenomena that I’ve observed in numerous contexts: concerts, natural disasters, accidents, when someone famous is nearby, etc. People have this strange compulsion to constantly capture such things. But I’ve noticed that it’s not necessarily meaningful events that people seem to want to capture; just as often, it’s events that can potentially offer some sort of social capital later.

I suspect that in the recesses of these paparazzis’ minds, these photos are like visual equivalents of secrets; they potentially give their owners status because they might be valuable or interesting to others later. They are proof that I was there, and that I am an interesting person. I can get a bunch of attention and rack up a bunch of hits on YouTube. This photo is going to make it to the top of Digg!

So important is this status conferral that some people are willing to endanger their lives to get these photos and videos. Head on over to your favorite video site and you’ll see people— clearly not professionals— who are just standing around filming with their cell phone cameras as devastating tornadoes come up right next to them. Why in the world would anyone risk their life for this? Maybe desperation to be the genius behind the next piece of viral media or to be the progenitor of the next big cultural meme is more valuable than being alive. After all, if you die without uploading a photo of you standing in the eye of an F5 tornado, you’re just dead; upload that bad boy onto the internet, and you’re immortal.

I’ve noticed that tourists do this obsessive picture-taking thing a lot too. It’s more understandable to me in their context, but the odd part is that I’ve seen many tourists spending a lot more effort and energy in taking photos than in being in the moment and enjoying the change of scenery and culture. I once met a middle-aged woman who spent her entire trip to Thailand fiddling with a camera to take photos to show to her relatives (who she even admitted later probably wouldn’t care about them). But still her compulsion to polish off dozens of rolls of film (this was the old days) was impossible to repress, so much so that I fear she didn’t even get the chance to appreciate the trip.

But the internet has amplified our worst spectatorial tendencies because it has made transmission easier and has broadened the potential audience. Which means that anyone with a camera is now looking for their 15 minutes of fame— and might get it. For better or for worse.

Comment [4]




When Things Go Wrong

Posted Wed Sep 2, 12:33 am in experiences, operations management


The several-hour GMail outage a couple of days ago left a lot of people (particularly those who use it as a proxy for their work email) incommunicado at a time when they really needed to be in touch with others. It was a gentle reminder to us of what happens when we become too dependent on one thing for an outcome. The more reliant on it we are, the more difficult it is to deal with when something goes wrong, which it inevitably does.

Comment




Just Follow the Script!

why we do what we don’t want to because we’re supposed to

Posted Wed Aug 5, 04:04 pm in culture, hyperreality, postmodernism, semiotics


I’ve taken a recent interest in how we’re driven by life scripts to behave in certain ways that we normally wouldn’t, simply because we’re “supposed to.” Take for example this story that my friend Liz was telling me (some details have been changed because to protect identities and also because I was kind of sloshed when she told me):

Liz had some friends who were getting married. As is the ritual in the United States, the groom attended a bachelor party held in his honor. Often these take place in seedy topless joints or private rooms where a stripper titillates the bachelor and his friends. The part that was odd is that none of the participants of this bachelor party had ever been to a strip joint, and none was particularly comfortable with the idea of doing this. But they did it anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. It was a bachelor party, after all.

Perhaps here, this bachelor party script, even taken as a semi-comical trope that has been the subject of many bad (but highly profitable) “buddy” movies, is rather revealing about our latent attitudes as a society. Viewed on an symbolic level, this would suggest that Americans— particularly men— perceive marriage vows (perhaps humorously, perhaps not) as a set of shackles and chains that essentially prevent them from engaging in philandering, sex romps, and various other fun sexual indiscretions. This is while simultaneously enjoining and celebrating the view of marriage as a sacrosanct state that we should all cherish and take enormous comfort in.

But I found the behavior of these bachelor party participants exceedingly curious. Why would a large leaderless group of individuals engage in behavior that none of them really wanted to (apparently not even the groom, who the party was being held for)? Why would they not just design an event that would be more meaningful and entertaining to them on the level they thought more appropriate given their values and states of mind?

Perhaps it is because this situational life script (more charitably described as a “custom”) told them that if they didn’t do this strip joint thing, they weren’t having a “real” bachelor party. This script promised an authentic bachelor party experience (the kind seen in the movies!)— an experience that apparently none of them particularly wanted or felt comfortable with, but also didn’t want to feel like they were robbed of later, perhaps because saying they’d been to one could offer some social currency or sensation of a life well-lived in the future.

I’ve noticed these recurring scripts as well:

Scripts seem to be part of the social contract we sign when we join this earth, or more accurately, join certain groups. We are supposed to act a certain way and do certain things that conform to certain expectations at certain times. Even if you don’t want to do it, even if no one wants to do it. Don’t rock the boat. Just follow the script.

Comment [3]




The Symbolic Value of a Beer

how much meaning is embedded in a single beverage?

Posted Fri Jul 31, 11:03 am in branding, culture, marketing, politics, postmodernism


The so-called “Beer Summit” occurred today. The premise of this meeting between Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, and James Crowley— a Cambridge police officer— was the culmination of a lot of recent speculation about latent racist attitudes, profiling, and the state of race relations in America. The event hinged on an incident in which Gates was trying to get back into his house after apparently being locked out, and being challenged by a white police officer for appearing to be breaking-and-entering. Allegations about police making assumptions about black men committing crimes were made and it soon turned into the subject of a national debate.

But Obama, ever the diplomat, invited the parties over to the White House garden for some beers (one each) and a bit of mano-a-mano discussion. A lot could be said about the political nature of this event, but what I’m interested in is what apparently the media made a big fuss about: the beer that each individual was going to choose to drink at this event.

It’s fascinating that a single beer could be so embedded with symbolic meaning. This is the nature of the post-modern world, in which many brands are reservoirs of symbolism and fit so prominently into the public’s schemas about social groups. As I mentioned in a previous post, David Foster Wallace once commented that he’d read books in which a character’s personality could be succinctly conveyed simply by naming the brand of T-shirt the character wore. That’s how much meaning we associate with certain brands. Thus, it was a matter of apparent great symbolic import what beer these gentlemen were having on this momentous occasion.

Gates, a Harvard professor, chose a Samuel Adams Light, while Crowley chose a Blue Moon (with an orange slice). Obama, ever the epicurean (what with his much-ridiculed taste for arugula), chose Bud Light. This invites the question of why, if you were the ostensible leader of the free world, you would ever choose a Bud Light. Maybe I’m more of a beer snob than I realize, but of all the world’s beers I could choose, Bud Light would be somewhat at the bottom of my list. Perhaps I am being a bit presumptuous here, but it seems highly unlikely that a man of Obama’s stature and taste would voluntarily choose a Bud Light if given unrestricted choice.

But of course, we have to think about the symbolic value of his choice. Bud Light is the best-selling beer in America, and has been since 2001; apparently it accounts for a massive 22% of case sales in the United States! It carries with it so many symbolic, populist overtones. It’s what any blue collar American would drink. Not like that elitist, hoity-toity microbrew stuff, and especially not one of those foreign beers that wasn’t brewed on our shores.

According to a Republican strategist quoted in an article from Bloomberg, Obama is “trying to send a message that he’s an average American… [He could] complicate that by making an exotic choice, or an import, or too expensive.” Indeed, imagine what the news sources would say if he drank, say, a Heineken, a Sapporo, or a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He was already skewered by Fox News’ Sean Hannity for asking for Grey Poupon at a diner several months ago.

There is a rather unexpected complication to Obama’s choice, however. Budweiser was sold to the Belgian company InBev back in July 2008, making Bud Light not quite an American beer. Sure it’s brewed here and it’s a traditionally American brand, but it’s no longer owned by an American company, so perhaps it can’t be viewed as wholly American as say, Coors.* Nevertheless, I think most Americans probably still view Budweiser as a culturally American beer and don’t really know much or care much about the location of the headquarters of the huge international beverage conglomerate that owns it.

Bud Light, viewed strictly on symbolic terms and with the intent of being an uncontroversial choice for a nation who, during the 2004 presidential election was inexplicably obsessed with choosing the candidate who one would most like to have a beer with, was a good selection. It’s a best-seller, has no particular subculture attached to it, and is sold pretty much everywhere. It’s hard to beat that. As Al Ries, an Atlanta-based marketer told Bloomberg, “Leading brands tend to be a very safe choice for a politician because, in a sense, they’re saying to the public, ‘You picked it, not me. I’m just reflecting your choice.’”

Interestingly, little commentary has been made on Crowley’s choice. The police officer was easily the most blue-collar fellow at the table, and chose what is probably the most “elitist” beer (if such a concept can be meaningfully applied) in terms of popular conception. Most people likely have not even heard of Blue Moon as it is the type of beer that is typically served in “uppity” and yuppy-type hangouts, not roadside dive bars. In reality, however, Blue Moon is rather surreptitiously brewed by Coors, though they do not advertise this and do not have the Coors name listed anywhere on any Blue Moon products. The company (rightly) assumes that the Coors name will reduce the brand equity of this macrobrew masquerading as a microbrew.

Gates’ choice was a sensible one; he lives in Cambridge, just outside of Boston, and he chose a beer that is brewed in Boston, perhaps a symbolic nod to his affection for the area despite his recent conflicts.

All in all, somewhat interesting choices made by all three gentlemen. I would, however, have loved to hear what kind of public commentary would have been made had Obama chosen the ultimate in a confounding beer with multiplex meanings: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Is he kowtowing to rednecks? Bikers? Hipsters? Cheapskates? In a perfect world, he would have chosen it, and it would have been a wonderful and puzzling mystery to unravel.

* You could tell that around the time of the sale of Anheuser-Busch to InBev that the company got kind of nervous about how its customers might perceive this traitorous act of selling out a quintessentially American brand to Europeans; they responded by creating and heavily advertising something called Budweiser American Ale, repeating the world “American” many times in the ads to reinforce the idea that this was a American drink.

Further reading:
1. The Bloomberg Article
2. “How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding” by Douglas Holt

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The Youthful Search for Authenticity

in which we borrow images to ‘forge’ ourselves

Posted Thu Jul 16, 11:57 am in consumerism, culture, experiences, human nature, postmodernism, semiotics, unfinished thoughts


People of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it.” – Chuck Klosterman, “Killing Yourself to Live”

The above passage is from a chapter of a book called “Killing Yourself to Live” in which music writer Chuck Klosterman discusses the Great White nightclub fire in Rhode Island a couple years ago, in which 100 people died due to a pyrotechnic mishap. Being that this was in a small, lower-middle-class town, the crowd was made up of blue-collar types who were actually (perhaps unbelievably) fans of the band. Klosterman was contrasting this audience profile with those of the many big city shows he’d been to where washed-up bands like Great White would play long after their primes to crowds half full of hipsters who were just there “ironically” so they could mock the music and scoff at those who were genuinely into it. Klosterman suggests that these hipsters scoff at these true-blue fans because they want to express being above liking things, because they can’t stand to be genuine.

The sentiment expressed in the quote is an interesting one, but I’d make a slight, but significant alteration; the word “despise” should really be “crave.” This, of course, renders the phrase a considerably more obvious one. Yet, for the most part, Klosterman’s observations resonate with me; I’ve noticed that people of our generation often have weirdly amorphous personalities and images, shifting wildly based on social circumstances and how those circumstances can be manipulated for social capital. Our generation seems fixated on self-awareness as its own virtue, and is highly obsessed with carefully controlling and crafting our images in the eyes of others through symbols whose meanings likely did not carry so much symbolic weight in identity construction just a few generations ago (clothes, vehicles, online personalities, musical taste, etc.).

Anyway, as I see it through Klosterman’s lens, the reason the indie kids of this generation can’t stand to be genuine is because they grew up entitled, in sheltered environments in which they never had to endure hardships. Their entire personas were cobbled together by borrowing images they liked, never borne organically from their own experiences. These images they adopt are never their own; they are fashion objects, constantly subject to the winds of change and shifting public opinion.

Because of the postmodern focus on image and its central import in identity, choosing images and consumer goods to be associated with are critically important decisions; no one wants to be associated with images that may turn out unfashionable or appear to suggest that a person is, in fact, a loser. Therefore, it’s easier to just reject them all (at least publicly), or to simply adopt them “ironically.” But clearly, we can’t be free of symbols entirely. The ubiquity of symbolism in nearly all consumer goods is an unavoidable byproduct of a post-modern era; everything we see forces us to think about “what kind of person would own that” and form schemas about these individuals.

Therefore, such individuals bitterly resent those whose life experiences are more “authentic” (read: difficult and uncomfortable) than their own, because such trying experiences are never unfashionable, and those who have endured them are never subjected to the plaguing self-aware scrutiny that everyone else has to deal with. Living through hardship engenders respect, never mockery. Thus, these entitled kids want nothing more than to have had some hardships— “grit” as Klosterman puts it— to confer them authenticity. There is nothing authentic, as these people see it, in their comfortable upbringings. Their lack of unmolded identity is a source of inner conflict because it forces them to constantly question their symbolic choices.

The ubiquity of multiplicities of divergent images, tropes, and cultures has given us license to treat our personalities like clothing that can be switched at will. On one hand, this allows a sense of psychological freedom to be whatever we want to be; but on the other hand, I think many people born into this postmodern world feel like they don’t have a “baseline” self that is grounded in anything that wasn’t calculatingly copied from something else they perceived as authentic or identity-conferring in a categorical sense (e.g. “punk”, “skater”, etc.).

There are some people who lead the way in cultural transformation, but they account only for a small fraction of individuals. Most of the rest are what academic and sociologist Doug Holt describes as “feeders”— basically, people who crave brushes with authenticity, and who just copy what the innovators are doing, often without the understanding of where those ideas came from. Since they can’t lay claim to the authenticity, having been deprived of the experiences that created them, they settle for the next best thing: adopting the symbols of it. And since the symbols are the easiest way for outsiders to categorize people (e.g. torn jeans and a mohawk means ‘punk’), that works out just fine for feeders.

This generation’s youth craves authenticity, but rarely one that they can have (that is, one they are genuinely entitled to through experience); it’s always someone else’s authenticity that they wish they could have.

But perhaps it’s not limited to youth; we engage in such activities largely as a means of arriving at a manufactured authenticity that constitutes our ‘image’ at any given point in time; the bevy of images we’ve been presented with for all our lives through media have, ironically, taught us not to want the real authentic with respect to ourselves, but instead to want something we can’t have, but which we can fake well enough to convince others. Our true self, it seems, can be manufactured through symbols.

Comment [10]




"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair, "The Jungle"

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