Wellbeing and Health

From "No Shame, No Blame: Secrets of Living Well" produced by Vanderbilt Health and Wellness

Voting for Our Better Selves; and Rules to Flourish By

Mike Pesca, in one of his artful spiels on The Gist podcast, punctures the conventional wisdom that we Americans want folksy presidential candidates, that we yearn for a leader just like us, someone we can relate to, imagine having a beer with.  While we do like candidates to be down-to-earth (perhaps echoes of our anti-monarchical national origins), Pesca convincingly argues that what we really want is not a leader like us but one who is like our better selves -- not someone who plays to our fears and prejudices but someone who can embody our virtuous aspirations.

Indeed.  As I argue in The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing, we aspire to be certain sorts of people -- a key part of our identity is not just who we are, but who we want to be. Our aspirations reflect certain sorts of values, what matters most to us in the big scheme of things. These aspirations, and our better selves, can be undermined by short-term gains and hedonic pleasures. And so we need leaders to remind us of our better selves and guide us down the often more arduous path of long-term personal and collective fulfillment.

For these same reasons, we also need rules to hep us be our better selves.  A recent RadioLab episode (Nazi Summer Camp) looked at how the U.S. treated the 500,000 or so German and Japanese POWs in U.S. camps. It turns out we treated them exceedingly well, fully following the letter and spirit of the Geneva Convention, even when we saw that the Japanese and Germans were not so scrupulous in their adherence. Significantly, we treated the U.S. citizens of Japanese descent much worse at the internment camps. As U.S. citizens, paradoxically, there were no international rules to govern their treatment, and the country showed it worse side.  Similar examples of how rules can help us be the sort of people we say we want to be can be found in Lynn Stout's excellent book Cultivating Conscience and in my book The Good Life.  

Key Words for Understanding the Germany Economy

We often speak of "capitalism" or "the market" as if they are singular things. We are comfortable talking about how the economy is doing, if "it" is up or down today. And in this globalized world it would seem that it makes little difference if the "it" we refer to is in Berlin or London or New York or Shanghai.

Yet there are huge differences in the varieties of capitalism practiced in these places. Looking beyond the big boards, we find systems wrapped up in their own histories and politics and moral values.

For example,  The Economist recently had an analysis of the huge influence German's distinct system of "ordoliberalism" has had in defining the political economy of post-crisis Europe.

To understand the German form of capitalism, it is helpful to learn a few key words:

Sparpolitik: what we term "austerity," the Germans refer to in a much more positive light as "savings policy," invoking wise stewardship more than miserly witholding. So when the Germans are negotiating with the Greeks these days about getting out of debt, they see Sparpolitik as a value that should be desired as much as an austerity to be endured.

Ordoliberalism: it stumbles over the tongue the way a good German word should. It takes inspiration from the liberalism of the Austrian School in its heyday, with a value on personal liberty and a skepticism of central planning.  That the liberal part.  But the “ordo” part is, as you would suspect, an “ordered” (i.e. regulated) liberalism, largely based on the principles of Mitbestimmung.

Mitbestimmung: ("co-determination") is a system of labor relations that treats labor as stakeholders alongside capital and management; built around "works councils," tiered organizations of employee representatives (blue and white collar) elected by their peers; through works councils labor holds (by law) 50% of corporate supervisory board seats.

Mittelstand businesses, small to medium sized enterprises that are often family or otherwise privately owned, and comprise the export engine of the German economy. Many specialize in high value, high quality engineered products. The Mittlestand have a reputation for honoring a commitment to their employees, embracing the German system of stakeholding and co-determination.

Kurzarbeit ("short work") program provides government subsidies to companies to keep their employees on the payroll but reducing their working hours; in the financial crisis this allowed companies to keep workers, reducing their productivity but allowing them to keep the talent they have built up, to save it for better times.

Solidarität ("Solidarity") is is a value extolled by the political left and right in Germany; the civic virtue that we are all in this together, and that living in a society together requires certain sacrifices for the common good.

Schuld: debt -- and guilt. 

Haftung: liability -- and responsibility

Gratitude and Wellbeing

I heard psychologist Dacher Keltner, a founder of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, on the radio this morning calling for more gratitude as a counterweight to the materialism of the season.The work of Keltner and others has shown that gratitude is closely associated with health and overall wellbeing.
The value in gratitude for our sense of self is related to the sorts of positional consumption arms races that Bob Frank has written about.  (The value of "positional goods" owes more to their scarcity and social identity aspects than to their material properties: the real utility of that $3000 Birkin handbag (to carry stuff around) is about the same as a plastic shopping bag.)  We adapt to new material circumstances quickly and then aspire to more. When I started my career, my imagined dream position was where I am now; and yet, in arriving here, my dreams and aspirations have changed and expanded so that I still fell as if I am missing something in my life.

Such aspiration is important, gives meaning and direction and energy to our lives (as I argue in The Good Life). There is a lot of subjective value in anticipation, as an article in the Atlantic highlights. And yet it can also be a source of constant discontent if not combined with gratitude for what we have. This is a propitious time of the year to think not about what we lack but also what we have--and it is a useful exercise to do this while thinking about what we wanted ten or twenty or thirty years ago.

Research also shows that experiences matter more than things in overall wellbeing--we remember them better and they increase of overall sense of life satisfaction. Psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues have shown in a number of studies that money spent on experiences (rather than objects) provides more enduring happiness among subjects. As with positional goods, experiences are tightly linked to identity--in many ways our identities are built from experiences.

Stuff is certainly important, but as Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton note in Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, new-ness wears off quickly and is often followed by disappointment. We need things, but the meaning of things goes beyond their material properties--a thing, anything, also serves as a vessel for our ideas, a container for our hopes and dreams. And our aspirations often give more meaning to objects than they can handle, leading to disappointment.

So, while gratitude cannot replace aspiration, it is a necessary counterbalance for wellbeing.

Third Wave Coffees and Maya Farmers in Guatemala

$500 a pound coffee? Yes, the very best coffees these days are selling for astronomical prices. The $500/lb lot (from El Injerto in Guatemala) was a record, but the Wall Street Journal recently reported on the rising auction prices for so-called Third Wave coffees:

Commodity coffee prices are set by the New York C Price (which, today, is around $187 per hundredweight). But market demand is increasing for the highest quality coffees, those scoring in the upper 80s and above 90 on a 100 point cupping chart. And prices for these beans are rising fast.

Yet, The Guardian says of these new craft brews: "it's pricey, but farmers aren't getting rich." Guatemala is ground zero for the Third Wave coffee boom, and while it is true that farmers aren't getting rich, research Bart Victor and I are conducting shows that these mostly Maya small holding farmers have benefited from the market boom--and have high hopes for coffee. In my new book The Good Life, I look at the lives of these coffee farmers

Still the market is imperfect, and small farmers growing quality coffee often have a hard time selling it as such (rather than to middlemen, who mix it with undifferentiated lots). As The Guardian article reports, "those hoping to change these industries are betting on a mix of direct relationships between farmers and manufacturers, and new business models that help to distance specialty products from commodity prices."

The Good Life: Page 99 Test

The Page 99 Test blog takes its cue from Ford Madox Ford, who remarked "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."

I was asked to apply the Page 99 Test to my new book, The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing:
          In this era of globalization, of transnational corporations and ubiquitous internet access, it is easy to forget just how different national economies sometimes are—and what we might learn from different ways of organizing markets.

         Germany’s soziale Marktwirtschaft (“social market economy”), also known as Rhenish capitalism, places a greater emphasis on stakeholders . . .   CONTINUE READING at Page 99 Test: http://page99test.blogspot.com/2014/11/edward-f-fischers-good-life.html

Measures for the Good Life: Stated Preferences and the Greater Good

The goal of the economy, politics, and social institutions should be to promote wellbeing among people as broadly as possible. Yet, the questions remain: what exactly is wellbeing? and, How do we measure it for public policy purposes?

Economists privilege revealed preferences (what we actually do) as more true than stated preferences (what we say we want). Yet, as I argue in The Good Life, stated preferences often better reveal our long-term aspirations, desires, and vision of the sort of person we would like to be and the sort of world we would like to live in. Stated preferences often take longer time horizons and are more generous in their pro-social stance.  

An important new paper by Daniel J. Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles Kimball, and Nichole Szembrot (2014) "Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference" makes the case that while neoclassical economics focuses almost exclusively on revealed preferences, in the public policy domain this is impossible as individuals rarely make such choices. They constructed an instrument to measure stated preferences along with subjective wellbeing. By asking respondents to gauge stated satisfaction from alternative scenarios, they are able to measure marginal utility of aspects particular aspects of wellbeing.

It turns out that the eudaimonic aspects (being a good person, living according to certain personal values, having a life that is meaningful) rank among the highest.

Cash, Credit, or The Good Life

When shopping, we behave differently when we pay in cash versus when we use a card (credit, debit, or gift). This is one of those everyday anomalies that belie our economic rationality, and many theoretical expectations, and yet that make sense. The feel of having cash in hand, the deliberate act of handing over bills, the material loss of paying--the very physicality of the act focuses our attention sharply on price. Using a card is "one step removed from having green cash money leave [your] flesh-and-blood hands," and thus the pain of paying is made more distant, as Ron Lieber argues in the NY Times.

Studies have shown that customers are willing to pay significantly more for the same item when using a card, and that card paying consumers are more concerned with features and quality compared to price. Thus, Dave Ramsey and a host of self-help gurus advise us to use cash as a way of nudging us to be more rational and prudent. Paul Roberts argues in The Impulse Society that credit cards feed into our accelerating desires for instant gratification.

But perhaps there is an upside to being less price sensitive (within reason, of course). In my book The Good Life, I look at German shoppers, who still mostly use cash in their supermarket transactions. They often express a preference for products that carry positive social values (organic, fair trade, etc.) and for quality. Yet, when the cash actually changes hands, they often opt for lower priced alternatives. This suggests that paying in cash curbs our enthusiasm for doing the right thing. Perhaps, then, when one can afford it (a separate issue), we would be doing more for the greater good to be less price sensitive--willing to pay for quality and the job dignity and social values that go with it.

Downsides to Thrift: Germans Saving Too Much Water

Germans need to flush their toilets more often, says Hans-Jürgen Leist, a scientist at the Ecolog Institute in Hanover, as quoted in a Wall Street Journal article.

In my new book, The Good Life, I look at how Germans choose their eggs--and it turns out that their preference for organic and free-range are driven by the same values of thrift and social solidarity that stop them from flushing their toilets. Germans rightly pride themselves on their thrift, from tedious and obligatory recycling regimes to crazy ways of saving grey water, and on their sense of social and ecological obligation ("solidarity" is is a value extolled by the political left and right).

But too much thrift is a bad thing for a water system. With energy efficient washing machines and quest for personal thrift has led per person water consumption to drop by more than 15% over the last 20 years (to 32 gallons/person). At the same time, and based on the same values of thrift and long-term investment, German cities have built up infrastructure capacity.  And, as the WSJ reports, with low flow volumes, sewage systems develop all sorts of problems, from smells to corrosion.

Romance, Wellbeing, and the Work of Love

For a long time, historians thought that romantic love (as we understand it, in a Hallmark Valentine's kind of way) was a Western invention, constructed by the romantic troubadours in French courts of the thirteenth century (see this piece by Catherine Winter).

Recent years, and the rise of brain scanning technologies and evolutionary psychology, have seen the conventional wisdom shift. Most explanations of romantic love these days focus on serotonin and dopamine levels, blood flow and MRIs; and these biological mechanisms are postulated to have emerged early in human history to promote pair bonding and care of our especially helpless young.

But it does not have to be either social construction or evolutionary mandate. Social and psychological triggers can flip the switch on chemical processes in our brains. This is the argument I make on a new PRI show titled The Really Big Questions, hosted by Dean Olsher.  My bit starts at 38:00 into the episode.

In previous posts I have argued that wellbeing requires a lot of not always pleasurable work. Fulfillment is distinct from giddy happiness; and it derives from the hard work of becoming the sort of person you want to be. Likewise, as I claim in the Love episode of The Really Big Question, more than biochemical, and it requires a lot of hard work.

An Ethics of Possibility and a Positive Anthropology

Arjun Appadurai argues that our society struggles with a tension between “the ethics of possibility” (of hope, aspiration, desire) and the “ethics of probability” (of systematized rationalities, risk management, and cost/benefits). And the ethics of probability is currently crowding out the realm of possibility. In his timely new book (The Future as Cultural Fact), Appadurai calls for a renewed commitment to an ethics of possibility "grounded in the view that a genuinely democratic politics cannot be based on the avalanche of numbers—about population, poverty, profit, and predation—that threaten to kill all street-level optimism about life and the world. Rather it must build on an ethics of possibility, which can offer a more inclusive platform for improving the planetary quality of life and can accommodate a plurality of visions of the good life.” (299-300)

Indeed. Reading this book, I was both exhilarated and a bit crestfallen that Appadurai so eloquently makes a number of arguments that I thought were my own, and that feature in my forthcoming book The Good Life (Stanford U Press).  Appardurai calls for greater attention to the "capacity to aspire" and the politics of hope in understanding development, wellbeing, and the economy. As I also argue, wellbeing requires a sense of aspiration, hope for the future informed by ideas of the good life, and a commiserate degree of agency, a sense of control over one's own destiny.  Living up to the expectations of particular values is in many ways the stock and trade of human existence; and it is this forward-looking, aspirational quality that drives agency. The will is important, but there also has to be a way, and the effectiveness of aspiration and agency is often limited by available opportunities, the legal, social, and market structures.

Such a perspective opens the door onto a “positive anthropology.” Anthropology is more comfortable offering critiques than positive alternatives, but the possibility exists to combine our critical proclivities with non-prescriptive, ethnographically informed positive alternatives that engage public policy debates. If a society’s goal is to have folks live meaningful and fulfilled lives—and not just increase income and consumption at all costs—then we should look to ways to help folks realize their longer term goals, the moral projects of their lives, affluence (and its converse, poverty) as seen in all of its multiple dimensions. This is to advocate studies of economic behavior that work between the “is” and the “ought” of David Hume’s distinction, between how the world can be empirically shown to work (the “is”) and how the competing and diverse value systems that anthropological research documents can be linked to moral reflection about things might be different (the “ought”).  

In Appadurai's words: “we need to commit ourselves to a partisan position, at least in one regard and that is to be mediators, facilitators, and promoters of the ethics of possibility against the ethics of probability.”

Economics and Anthropology: Stated Preferences, Dignity, and Pleasure

Noted economist Daniel McFadden makes a radical call for his field to pay more attention to the insights of anthropology and other disciplines in his NBER Working Paper "The New Science of Pleasure."  Summing up lots of recent research, McFadden claims that economics needs to look other fields not just to explain irrational anomalies, but to consider that complex subjects are the norm.  As The Economist puts it, "Homo economicus, not his fallible counterpart, is the oddity."

McFadden is on comfortable disciplinary ground in arguing for the inclusion of insights from behavior economics and psychology--the endowment effect, hyperbolic discounting, and other such cognitive quirks have been well documented by Daniel Kahneman and others.

Where McFadden pushes the envelope is his call for incorporating anthropological and social science perspectives into economic modeling to understand the role of identity, social relations, and persuasion in decision making.

The manuscript I just finished (The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing) echoes a number of McFadden's observations, which I take to be an encouraging sign of the changing zeitgeist.  For example, while economists have long privileged revealed preferences (observable behavior) we need to take more seriously stated preferences (what folks say they want to do).  Revealed preferences are taken by economists to be more real: it is thought that when the rubber hits the road and the cash changes hands, one reveals one’s true preferences.  At the same time, a laser focus on revealed preferences discounts the importance of the cultural—the fact that choices are delimited, as in the all too common scenario we are faced with on the grocery store aisle and in the voting booth of choosing between the lesser of evils. Stated preferences, in not being bound to the immediate here-and-now, often take a longer-range view of overall preferences and ideals. Stated preferences are more likely to be concerned with non-material values; these are given more weight in the long term project of one’s life, one’s overall wellbeing. Often they are connected to identity.    

In my book, I also focus on the role of dignity and fairness, which The Economist also neatly highlights in their review of McFadden's paper: "Dignity is not something mainstream economics has much truck with.  But creating a sense of dignity turns out to be a powerful way of affecting decisions."  It is also a key element of wellbeing.