The Price of Civilization

by Jeffrey D. Sachs

  Just as Washington has abandoned any long-term economic steering, households have abandoned clear thinking regarding their personal budgets. They tend to be inconsistent about the federal budget as well, poorly informed and often contradictory in position. Voters regularly support middle-class tax cuts and government spending increases while simultaneously professing deep concern over the budget deficit. They also sometimes give the rich a free pass, such as by supporting cuts in the inheritance tax on the wealthy. Voters are easily enticed by promises of higher short-term income, seemingly without concern for the long-term consequences.

  To understand such behavior and attitudes, we need to plow more deeply into our psyches to get a grip on our behavior both as consumers and as citizens. To retake political power from the lobbies, to establish meaningful solutions for America, we will need to take the long view. Yet taking that long view is exceedingly difficult, especially when much of the economy is working overtime to encourage us to succumb to temptation. The purpose of this chapter is to understand our psychological fragilities as thinkers, planners, and decision makers. By getting our heads cleared of deceptions, we can help to rebuild the economy as well.

  The Psychology of Affluence

  When a society is poor, consumer behavior is relatively straightforward. Consumers know what they need: food, shelter, and clothing. Local producers strive to meet those needs. Impoverished households can’t save very much if anything, since they depend on their incomes to stay alive, but when poor households exceed the subsistence threshold, they start to save in order to guard against disasters in the leaner years.

  It’s when the society gets much richer and basic needs are met that consumer behavior becomes trickier. In high-income countries such as the United States, we can no longer properly speak of a consumer’s “needs” in the case of the middle class and the rich but only of a consumer’s “wants.” Economists pretend that those wants are real, stable, and based on deeply held preferences, almost a birthright. Brand managers and advertising executives know much better. A successful business not only manufactures products, it also manufactures wants. Businesses now spend an estimated $300 billion on advertising each year to create and manipulate consumers’ demands.1

  In real sweat-and-blood decision making, consumers buy things out of intense cravings, whims, addictions, confusions, come-ons, and quests for status. They may try to save, for example, but temptations often get the best of them. The problems of irrationality are actually multiplied by our affluence. The truly poor know what they need to stay alive: food, shelter, clothing, safe water, and health care. Affluent consumers may not have a clear idea ahead of time what will make them happy. Should they consume or save? Should they try to keep up with the Joneses across the street or with a work colleague or their favorite celebrity? Should they buy that new product just flashed across their TV or computer screen?

  A considerable amount of American consumption spending is not for the enjoyment of consumption per se, but to show off wealth, status, or sexual allure. In the famous phrase of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, this is “conspicuous consumption,” that is, consumption whose main purpose is to impress others rather than to be enjoyed by oneself.2 The phenomenon is very familiar from the animal world, where evolutionary competition leads males of a species to develop remarkable “ornaments” in order to rise in the pecking order and thereby attract the females. This so-called sexual selection has resulted in the male peacock’s brilliant plumage and the elk’s large antlers.

  Conspicuous consumption is therefore akin to an arms race between two rivals. Most or all of the investments end up wasted as useless arms (or antlers or yachts). The economic arms race ends up as the proverbial “rat race,” in which everybody works to the point of exhaustion merely to keep up with others. Herein lies at least one reason why the good Lord commanded that everybody take the Sabbath off. If we had to do so on our own, we’d have to worry whether our neighbor-competitor would also do the same. More likely than not, we’d both end up working through the weekend. It’s a similar reason why many European governments (but not yet that of the United States) prevent this kind of “self-exploitation” by mandating a minimum of four weeks’ paid vacation each year for all workers.

  A related but distinct kind of “social consumption” occurs when specific consumption goods are necessary for an individual to be part of a desired social group. An example might be the purchase of a Harley-Davidson to ride with the motorcycle gang; a smartphone to be part of a social network; or a house in the suburbs to have wealthy neighbors and excellent local public schools. The last kind of consumption, however, is not merely about signaling or status; having wealthy neighbors facilitates other crucial outcomes, such as sending one’s children to a good school.

  In America, the most important kind of social consumption by far is housing. The choice of a residence may have little to do with the house per se but quite a bit to do with the neighbors and neighborhood that come along with the house. America’s neighborhoods, as we have noted, are very strongly sorted by income, race, and ethnicity. Since public schools in America, unlike in many other parts of the world, are financed heavily by local property taxes, living in an affluent neighborhood is vital to being part of a good school system. Households are willing to spend extra on a given quality of land and house to buy into an expensive neighborhood in order to be able to send the kids to a high-quality school. The cycle is reinforcing: the affluent move into a neighborhood, bidding up prices; this induces other affluent households to move in, squeezing out the poor, who are left to fend in poor neighborhoods with poor schools and poor networks to the labor market.

  The end result of all this consumption is a society running furiously to stay in place. The overwork by each member of society puts a burden (a negative externality) on others, who must also run hard to keep up. Consumers also run because others are running, with everybody finding themselves in a race they’d rather do without.

  The Technologies of Mass Persuasion

  Mainstream economists are stuck with an entirely antiquated view of consumer behavior. Even though they know full well that the relentless quest for more consumer goods no longer brings major benefits of well-being, they still treat the quest for greater personal consumption as the be-all and end-all of human happiness. The rise of the gross national product, of which 80 percent is consumption spending, is still taken as the bellwether of economic efficiency. Though this focus on consumerism does not feel funny to economists, it comes as a shock to the psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers who are also observing American society in action.

  To understand this phenomenon, we must turn to the enticements of modern media, especially TV. For more than a century, incessant waves of commercial advertising, public relations campaigns, and official propaganda have remolded our psyches to want more and more consumption. The technologies of mass persuasion have become ever more encompassing. The first half of the twentieth century was first the age of newspapers and then of radio and movies. The second half was the great age of television. Now we are fully digital and wired, multimedia, spending hours each day in front of many different kinds of screens that are sending nonstop messages to buy, spend, borrow, and buy some more. These messages are driven by a highly professional and highly effective public relations, marketing, and advertising industry.

  The modern discoverer of our unconscious impulses, Sigmund Freud, was an uncle (actually a double uncle) of the founder of modern public relations, Edward Bernays. Bernays was a marketing genius who correctly foresaw how the basic processes of public manipulation (which he called “engineering consent”) could operate in similar ways across a wide range of social persuasion, whether promoting the sales of cigarettes, political candidates, or even a military coup (in Guatemala in 1953). The art was hidden manipulation of the public’s unconscious urges combined with the public’s tendency to run in herds.3

  The stark reality today is the vastly in
creased powers of the digital technologies that advertisers, politicians, campaign advisers, and lobbyists use to prey upon us. In the 1910s to 1930s, Bernays relied mainly on newspapers, publicity stunts, and word of mouth. His dark arts of manipulation depended heavily on getting black-and-white photos into the press.

  Then, beginning in the 1940s, came the exceptional powers of television, which atomized the population by sending it home from the town square. With unprecedented speed for a new technology, Americans reoriented their lives around the television set. In 1950, 9 percent of households had a television. By 1960, the number had already reached an astounding 87 percent, the fastest adoption of a major new technology in history.4 And from the start, Americans devoted a remarkable proportion of their discretionary hours to the TV screen, reaching three to four hours per person per day by the 1960s, of which around one-third was devoted to commercials. Now the opinion manipulators have readily at hand the combination of television, the Internet, video, billboards, newspapers, magazines, special events, and other traditional outlets. It has been estimated that the average two- to seven-year-old sees an average of 13,900 TV ads a year and an eight- to twelve-year-old sees 30,100.5

  We were, of course, forewarned early on about the manipulative power of the TV screen, by George Orwell in the 1940s, Vance Packard in the 1950s, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the media guru Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, and the linguist Noam Chomsky in the past two decades. Joe McGinniss told us in 1968 that the image makers were now “selling the president” through television-based election campaigns.6 Yet, despite those warnings, Americans have continued to “buy the president” and whatever other products are on sale on the tube.

  The amount of time now spent with electronic media is staggering. In a 2004 survey, eight- to eighteen-year-olds were in front of a TV screen roughly three hours per day; a DVD or movie, another hour; computers, video games, and handheld devices, another two hours; and audio consoles, another hour. That left twenty-three minutes per day for reading. Taking into account multitasking (using two or more media simultaneously), total media time averaged an astounding eight hours, thirty-three minutes per day.7 Our kids increasingly inhabit a virtual electronic world, much of it suffused with nonstop messaging and advertisements. Parents are only marginally less hooked, watching an average of three to four hours of television per day.

  Of course, not one of those ads or expensive multimedia campaigns is telling us to buy less and save more. None are warning us to look skeptically at the thirty-second campaign spots designed to capture our vote. No advertisement is warning us to be aware of our susceptibility to bright colors, nice slogans, beautiful faces, suggestive gestures, and emotion-laden slogans. None teaches the public to ignore the pseudoscience that pours forth daily from corporate-financed PR campaigns. And certainly no advertising spot tells us to turn off the TV and read a book, go for a walk, or volunteer at a soup kitchen. The reason is obvious: there is no money in such messages. The $300 billion in advertising is mobilized instead to elect a candidate or sell a product, paid for by somebody who expects a commercial return on investment.

  The effects of television go far beyond the direct message of the advertisements.

  TV also shifted the center of gravity of society from the public park and the bowling alley to the privacy of our own homes, as couch potatoes in front of the giant screen. Over time, the single screen in the living room migrated into separate TV screens in each bedroom. Families retreated from other families, and then family members eventually retreated from one another. The political scientist Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone, his magisterial account of the decline of civic engagement, found that time in front of the TV screen is the most powerful single characteristic accounting for the long-term decline in the time devoted to civic activities.

  The cross-national evidence is highly suggestive: TV watching is bad for your social health (and your personal health as well). TV eats away at the social capital. Countries whose citizens watch more television have lower levels of social trust and higher levels of political corruption. The inverse relationship between TV viewing and social trust, which is statistically significant, is shown in Figure 8.1(a), which shows the estimated hours of TV watched per adult, varying from around 167 minutes per day by the Swiss to an astounding 297 minutes (5 hours per day) by Americans. There is a group of relatively low-watching countries (Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands), a group of medium-watching countries (France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Italy), and then the United States. We see that hours of TV watching are strongly inversely correlated with the level of social trust (as measured in the World Values Survey). Similarly, a high measure of perceived corruption (as measured by Transparency International) is positively associated with heavy TV-viewing hours, as we see in Figure 8.1(b). Italy, for example, scores very high on both measures, a fair reflection of a country long governed by a media owner with a seemingly endless trail of corruption charges, while the citizens of Scandinavian countries are low TV viewers with very high levels of social trust. The United States, fortunately, lies a bit below the best-fit line in this case. Despite America’s remarkably heavy TV viewing, the corruption level is judged to be only moderate in comparison with the others. (Perhaps this is because much of America’s corruption is in effect legalized through corporate lobbying and campaign financing.)

  Figure 8.1(a): Relationship Between Television Viewing and Social Trust

  Source: Data from World Values Survey Databank and the RTL Group.

  Figure 8.1(b): Relationship Between Television Viewing and Corruption Perception

  Source: Data from Transparency International and the RTL Group.

  Heavy TV viewing also appears to be bad for one’s mental and physical health. We know from opinion surveys that heavy TV watchers report being less happy on average and indeed unsettled by their heavy TV viewing. Heavy TV viewing therefore seems to fit the pattern of psychological addiction rather than a healthy consumption behavior. There is also a not-surprising positive correlation between TV-viewing hours and obesity, shown in Figure 8.2. This correlation probably reflects, in part, a direct causal link from sedentary behavior (heavy TV watching) to obesity. It may also reflect a higher tendency of TV watchers to have the junk-food diets promoted in TV ads. Perhaps there is also a psychological linkage in play, in which overeating and excessive TV watching both reflect a loss of self-control.

  The correlations between heavy TV viewing and the adverse social and personal outcomes are, of course, very far from causal proofs. Heavy TV viewing would be only one of several factors determining complex social outcomes. Still, the relationships are suggestive and worrisome.

  Figure 8.2: Relationship between Television Viewing and Obesity

  Source: Data from the RTL Group and OECD.

  The relentless streams of images and media messages that confront us daily are professionally designed to distort our most important decision making processes. We are encouraged to act on impulse and fantasy instead of reason. And we need to understand that the difficulty of maintaining our balance in a media-rich economy is even greater than we might have supposed even ten or fifteen years ago. The advances in modern neurobiology and psychology have revealed a level of human vulnerability that would have surprised even Freud and Bernays.

  The problem is not just that we are a bundle of rational and irrational motives that operate without our conscious knowledge and therefore are vulnerable to unconscious manipulation. Uncle Freud and nephew Bernays knew that, and generations of research psychologists have since confirmed it time and again, by showing how our decisions are influenced by the slightest changes in mood, setting, or unconscious cues as manipulated by the experimenter. The newly understood fact is that we are also biological “works in progress,” even into our later years. Our brains, and hence personalities, decision making capacities, and values, are subject to extensive and continued neural rewiring over time. We are not just what we eat. We are also what
we see and hear, since these literally change our brains, minds, and future judgments.

  This constant reshaping of our brains, and our deep vulnerability to manipulation, require us to understand just how strange our advertising-laden economy really is. We’ve learned more and more that human beings are vulnerable to manipulation, yet we’ve also fostered a vast advertising and PR industry designed to prey on those weaknesses. The neuroscientists give us four reasons why advertising and mass consumerism should concern us even more than we might suppose.

  First, our brains are malleable. Scientists use the term “neuroplasticity” to describe the fact that our brains are continually being rewired depending on the kinds of stimuli that we receive and the ways that we choose to behave. Meditation can help us gain calm. TV watching can reduce that sense of calm, especially among young children. Second, animal behaviorists emphasize the importance of “super-normal stimuli,” meaning simple cues of color, sexual stimulation, or some other sensory information that can trigger highly complex behavior. Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett has convincingly extrapolated from the remarkable animal findings to argue that humans too are biologically configured to respond powerfully to particular cues.8 The food industry entices us with the fatty foods and refined sugars that we naturally crave. Marketers easily lure us into buying cars, beer, and cigarettes through the sexually provocative poses of models selling these products. These are well-known lures, of course, but we’ve opened the floodgates through the ubiquity of advertising. Third, our vulnerability to addiction makes it easy for the marketers to hook young children into a lifetime of consumption and overconsumption. We are a society of pushers, not the drug gangs, but many of the biggest names in advertising. Fourth, many of our decisions are unconsciously made. We are often not even aware of why we’ve made a purchase or latched on to a particular product. The brain is easily “primed” by sights, smells, and stimuli of which we are not even aware, inducing us to buy products for reasons that are even obscure to the purchaser.