How self-actualization can produce all-or-nothing marriages

This is an interesting article in the NYT about the evolution of marriage. It argues marriage has changed in the last two hundred years as western societies have moved up Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Our central claim is that Americans today have elevated their expectations of marriage and can in fact achieve an unprecedentedly high level of marital quality — but only if they are able to invest a great deal of time and energy in their partnership. If they are not able to do so, their marriage will likely fall short of these new expectations. Indeed, it will fall further short of people’s expectations than at any time in the past.

There have been three stages in marriage, according to author Eli Finkel. "Institutional" marriage, until about 1850, was largely a matter of mutual survival - food, shelter, and protection from violence. "Companionate" marriage, from 1850 to 1965, was more about love and companionship and intimacy, once the more basic needs were secure. And then,

Since around 1965, we have been living in the era of the self-expressive marriage. Americans now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth. Fueled by the countercultural currents of the 1960s, they have come to view marriage less as an essential institution and more as an elective means of achieving personal fulfillment.

But this has led to an all-or-nothing phenomenon.

HERE lie both the great successes and great disappointments of modern marriage. Those individuals who can invest enough time and energy in their partnership are seeing unprecedented benefits. The sociologists Jeffrey Dew and W. Bradford Wilcox have demonstrated that spouses who spent “time alone with each other, talking, or sharing an activity” at least once per week were 3.5 times more likely to be very happy in their marriage than spouses who did so less frequently. ...But on average Americans are investing less in their marriages — to the detriment of those relationships.

And so this leads to two very interesting points. At the higher levels of the hierarchy of needs, time and personal energy are much more important than before. And when it comes to self-actualization and self-expression, people's expectations matter more as well - perhaps especially when they become unrealistic or foolish. What can people do to improve theie marriages?

First and foremost, couples can choose to invest more time and energy in their marriage, perhaps by altering how they use whatever shared leisure time is available. But if couples lack the time and energy, they might consider adjusting their expectations, perhaps by focusing on cultivating an affectionate bond without trying to facilitate each other’s self-actualization.

There's perhaps wider lessons to be drawn from this. G remarked the other day that one problem with the Millenials is they have extremely high expectations of life, and then feel all the more crushed or resentful when they encounter resistance.

On one level, that story is as old as time. But it is almost a general truth that improvement often leads to turbulence and conflict and even violence because expectations have a tendency to rise faster than realization - which then produces frustration and anger. A rising Germany produced carnage in 19th and 20th century Europe. American cities burnt in riots mostly after the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. Many developing countries like Egypt have increasingly educated youth but few jobs or positions for them.

Improvement very often produces accelerated expectations. So it means we ought to pay very close attention to how expectations change over time, rather than simply immediate income levels or distribution of income. So far as I know, there is very little data that tracks those kind of assumptions or expectations, beyond very basic things like whether people expect to earn more than their parents. It isn't a matter just of expected income, or short-term economic confidence. What kind of opportunities do people think they will have? How much security do they think they will enjoy? It must be as related to education as to current economic circumstances. It also must come from medi models How quickly and why do people scale back expectations?

This also relates to the evolution of ideas about the good life - something which I will come back to. But one clear conclusion here is, once again, the diminishing marginal utility of money at higher levels of needs. It is mainly time that needs to be invested in pursuit of happiness here, not dollars. In fact, earning more dollars actually takes away from time spent together.

This is the root of the deeper problems with the modern economy, which I've talked about a great deal before. Markets are extremely efficient at producing excludable rivalrous nonpositional goods, like croissants or cars. But if the things we increasingly want are not subject to definable property rights or depend largely on other people's behavior, like honor or reputation, then the goods we want increasingly lie outside the market sphere. That's not a criticism of markets, any more than you actively criticize a Ferrari because it can't fly. It's just a fact you can't really define a contractual tradable right to a happy marriage.

The article also represents a much more binary vision of outcomes, although it's not entirely clear why this should be seen as inevitable. As society rises up the levels of Maslow's hierarchy, does it mean that this all-or-nothing phenomenon will become more typical in other areas too? Or does it simply mean we need a rethink of use of time and it how it is related to happiness? To what extent to do people who fail to onvest enough time or energy in a relationship do so out of choice? There are certainly plenty of anecdotal stories of people who spend more time at the office to avoid spending time at home, or those who are compelled to stay in the office to keep their job.

Overall, it's a very interesting illustration of how core structures in our society, like marriage, are affected by the evolution of what people want and need as basic survival needs are taken care of.

 

Achieved and ascribed identities

Here's an interesting piece in the Guardian, in the wake of the first recorded bar brawl over Kantian philosophy: two men in Russia got into a pub brawl over Kant, and one shot the other.

Kant cropped up again earlier this week while I was having coffee at my house with David Goodhart, the director of Demos, a thinktank that describes its mission as "to bring politics closer to people". We were recording a programme about community for Radio 4, in the course of which he said something extremely interesting: that the problem with the political class, and the reason they are often so emotionally and politically distant from many ordinary people, especially in settled working-class areas, is that their identities are often achieved, not ascribed.

What he means is that politicians, like many "successful" people, have achieved success by finding a route beyond the limitations of their background. They have come to define themselves not by where they are from, their community, but through what they have achieved in terms of education, qualifications, career and personal aspiration. Community is thus often a nostalgic background hum for many successful people, but not something they are completely embedded within. And if they find a new community, it is one they have chosen, not one ascribed to them by birth.

This, in a sense, is the Kantian ideal. "How recognisable, how familiar to us is the man so beautifully portrayed [by Kant]," wrote Iris Murdoch. "Free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy.For Kant, the human being is at his or her best when they have successfully self-authored. It's all about self-determination. For such as these, freedom is about breaking free of allegiance, of the restrictions of the local and the particular. In such a world, loyalties are simply a temporary convenience.

Autonomy is not the whole of ethics.

 

People forget how to engage attention

Here's an interesting take in the New Yorker on how and why Facebook makes people unhappy.

What causes us to feel bored and, as a result, unhappy? Attention. When our attention is actively engaged, we aren’t bored; when we fail to engage, boredom sets in. As Eastwood’s work, along with recent research on media multitasking, have illustrated, the greater the number of things we have pulling at our attention, the less we are able to meaningfully engage, and the more discontented we become.

[...] Demands on our attention lead us to use Facebook more passively than actively, and passive experiences, no matter the medium, translate to feelings of disconnection and boredom.

In ongoing research, the psychologist Timothy Wilson has learned, as he put it to me, that college students start going “crazy” after just a few minutes in a room without their phones or a computer. “One would think we could spend the time mentally entertaining ourselves,” he said. “But we can’t. We’ve forgotten how.” Whenever we have downtime, the Internet is an enticing, quick solution that immediately fills the gap. We get bored, look at Facebook or Twitter, and become more bored. Getting rid of Facebook wouldn’t change the fact that our attention is, more and more frequently, forgetting the path to proper, fulfilling engagement. And in that sense, Facebook isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom.

In a broader sense, of course, the Internet offers much more opportunity for active engagement than staring at the television. And I'm not sure the point holds more generally. I'm typing this at my usual coffee shop in New York, a city which is a huge blaring multicolored kaleidoscope of things competing for attention - which is what makes it so stimulating. So why does big city buzz inspire, but online multiple pulls of attention enervate?

It must be something to do with energy and depth and unexpectedness. Any amount of shallow celebrity gossip and trivia must depress people after a while.

It must also have something to do with the right amount of stimulus. I'm reminded of Cziksentmihalyi's idea of flow, that the right amount of challenge, at the edge of our capabilities, puts us into a state where time just seems to pass almost without noticing because you are so absorbed in what you are doing.

Still, it's such a common experience now that people pay more attention to their devices than the person right in front of them that it must point to a deeper problem beyond Facebook.

I asked G about it. She says it's like a hunter-gatherer thing. You see something shiny or interesting, and the instinct is to grab it.

 

"Stop saying robots are killing jobs"

An article in MIT Technology Review disputes that technology is destroying jobs, especially arguments from Brynjolfsson and McAfee which we've seen before.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s mistake comes from considering only first order effects of automation where the machine replaces the worker. But when a machine replaces a worker, there is a second order effect: the organization using the machine saves money and that money it flows back into to the economy either through lower prices, higher wages for the remaining workers, or higher profits. In all three cases that money gets spent which stimulates demand that other companies respond to by hiring more workers.

It's the traditional argument that demand simply shifts to new goods and services. But it relies on the traditional assumption that new needs are similar in economic terms to the old ones. In the example above, what of the higher wages for the remaining workers induce them to take more leisure, so total wages remain the same or even fall? That has not happened much to date, but it is a matter of taste rather than economic law.

The fundamental issue is how and when things fall outside the monetary economy, so the flow above springs a leak. I keep arguing that more and more of the things we value as we rise up the hierarchy of needs are harder to package in monetary terms, because they are not excludable nor rival goods. As the underlying nature of the economy changes, our institutions have to adapt too.

 

Who will prosper in the New world?

Tyler Cowen asks in the NYT:

Who will do well? THE CONSCIENTIOUS Within five years we will are likely to have the world’s best education, or close to it, online and free. But not everyone will sit down and go through the material without a professor pushing them to do the work. Those who are motivated to use online resources will do much, much better in the generations to come.

Motivation - those who have it, those who can inspire it - is one of the main themes. It's an interesting take. I agree motivation - including incentivizing behavior - is the key issue for the emerging new economy. That's why I've been so interested in some of the classic psychology on motivation, like Maslow.

 

The Prevalence of Loneliness

This, from an article in the New Republic, is an indicator that things are not going well in society. How truly amazing and sad.

... even among the not-so-old, loneliness is pervasive. In a survey published by the AARP in 2010, slightly more than one out of three adults 45 and over reported being chronically lonely (meaning they’ve been lonely for a long time). A decade earlier, only one out of five said that. With baby-boomers reaching retirement age at a rate of 10,000 a day, the number of lonely Americans will surely spike.

I've talked before how we overlook the importance of connection and the experience of the texture of daily lived life, as if we need a "gross national loneliness" to set against GDP.

 

Work is a human right

A great essay by Walter Russell Mead, here. I disagree with his confidence about personal services sometimes, but this is good stuff, worth reading in full.

There is a horrible snobbery lurking beneath the idea that most people will not be able to find meaningful work when the age of scarcity ends. Once the working classes aren’t needed to dig coal anymore, in this view, there is nothing to be done for the mass of mankind than to sit them in front of the TV on a comfy couch with a big bag of chips. They are good for nothing else.

This is a premise which any serious theist or humanist must reject. If we believe that every human being has a unique real worth, we must also believe that every human being has a contribution to make. Keynes rather snidely remarks that few people have the talent to live creative lives; writing about the difficulty many will have adjusting to lives without toil he warns of the intense boredom that most will suffer. “Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing!”

Actually, a good many more of us can sing than Keynes thought; it’s just that life in the coal mines and the factories means that many people haven’t had the same chances to develop their talents that a son of privilege like Keynes did.

 

The end of entitlement

Robert Samuelson writes that the public is going through a downshift in expectations that is having deeper political consequences.

Weighed down by these contradictions, entitlement has been slowly crumbling for decades. The Great Recession merely applied the decisive blow. We're not entitled to many things: not to a dynamic economy; not to secure jobs; not to homeownership; not to ever-more protective government; not to fixed tax burdens; not to a college education. Sooner or later, the programs called "entitlements," including Social Security, will be trimmed because they're expensive and some recipients are less deserving than others.

The collision between present realities and past expectations helps explain the public's extraordinary moodiness. The pandering to the middle class by both parties (and much of the media) represents one crude attempt to muffle the disappointment, a false reassurance that the pleasing past can be reclaimed. It can't.

I don't think this is true. We still have the paradox that we have more productive capacity and underlying abundance than ever before. The problem is we have less and less clarity on how to distribute it, or what we value, or what incentives are or ought to be.

What it does mean is we need a deeper rethink of economic institutions to cope with a world in which many of the things we value most are not easily traded. Government cannot deliver what people want if we have no shared vision of what people ought to want, in their own different ways. Instead, our general discourse on rights and universal rules tends to evade the question.

"..some recipients are less deserving than others" says Samuelson. That is the heart of the problem. It is a matter of ethics, not economics. The left wants universal (unearned) rights. The right wants a changing mix of pure market allocation and tradition.

Abundance and Self-Realization

I'm looking at Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, starting here.

Distribution of income matters less than distributiion of "spiritual resources", he says. That means there is a tendency in the "Fourth Awakening" to refocus on the individual again, rather than material conditions in society as a whole.

I have often talked about abundance on this blog, such as here and here. Fogel also emphasizes the saturation of material goods.

Our society is so well saturated with consumer durables, in fact, that even the poorest fifth of households are well-endowed with them. Consequently, the era of the household accumulation of consumer durables, which sparked the growth of many manufacturing industries in the many decades following World War II, is largely over in the United States. p189

So where are things going? Meaning becomes more important as survival challenges recede.

Today, people are increasingly concerned with what life is all about. That was not an issue for the ordinary individual in 1880, when nearly the whole day was devoted to earning the food, clothing and shelter needed to sustain life. A half century from now, perhaps even sooner, when increases in productivity make it possible to provide goods in abundance with half today's labor, the issue of life's meaning, and other matters of self-realization, will take up the bulk of discretionary time. p 191-192

Health and leisure time will be the focus of the future economy, although, he says, it is difficult to foresee the details.

The point is that leisure-time activities (including lifelong learning) - volwork - and health care are the growth industries of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-firsty. They will spark economic expansion during our age, just as agriculture did in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth and as manufacturing, transportation and utilities didin the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. The growing demand for health-care services is due primarily, not to a distortion of the price system, but to the increasing effectiveness of medical intervention. p201

What does self-realization mean? Interestingly, Maslow is not mentioned at all, nor are the older classical ideas about virtue in any detail. Instead, Fogel develops his own list.

To those philosophers who have developed the concept, self-realization means the fullest development of the virtuous aspects of one's nature. ..Of all the maldistributed spiritual resources, sense of purpose may be the most important. p205

Others include "a vision of opportunity", "a sense of the mainstream of work and life" which means a sense of where opportunities are and how to pursue them. There must be "a sense of community", an "ability to engage with diverse groups", which entails an "ethic of benevolence". As self-realization is often achieved through an occupation, a "work ethic" and "sense of discipline" are required, as well focus and a "capacity to resist the lure of hedonism". There needs to be a "capacity for self-education", a "thirst for knowledge". an "appreciation of quality", and some "self-esteem." p205-206

To this updated list of virtues he adds a sense of balance or, as Aristotle would put it, the golden mean.

Each of the fifteen spiritual resources just outlined must be possessed in moderation. There is an optimal amount of each spiritual resource, which will vary from one individual to another. Too much of a sense of purpose turns dedication into ruthlessness. Too little sense of purpose may cause one to be uncompetitive in a given pursuit. p207

It isn't quite a virtue ethics, perhaps, as it is more a list of desirable psychological attributes, being well-adjusted rather than arete or excellence. But it comes close. It is not utilitarian, nor based on more simplistic ideas about happiness. It is certainly reconcilable with older virtues such as courage or temperance or practical wisdom. It is also reconcilable with other ideas we have looked at, such as the evolution of the economy from manufacturing to services to experiences to, finally, transformation of individuals, or the requirements for individual flourishing.

What it does not do (and no book can do everything) is explain what happens to labor markets and economic incentives when material needs are saturated. How might a post-scarcity economy work? How will people make a living?

In all, it is quite a radical book for an academic economist. It is also politically quite eclectic - egalitarian, but taking religion seriously; interested in the condition of the poor but skeptical of government intervention. It asks the right questions, even if the answers are not wholly developed.

The basic conclusion is income is no longer a suitable end-point for policy discussions. Nor are national income statistics. Like the rich sons of Athens two thousand years ago, the nature of the good life is the main question that confronts us once material needs are saturated. Even some Nobel Prizewinners in Economics can see that.

 

 

 

Happiness versus Meaning

Here's an interesting article in the Atlantic. New research confirms what Victor Frankl famously wrote about following his experience in Nazi concentration camps: a sense of purpose is deeply necessary to people, even more so than immediate happiness.

Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."

This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.

How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.

Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver."

People want to contribute to something.

Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves -- by devoting our lives to "giving" rather than "taking" -- we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.

It's worth reading the whole article.

 

The Golden Age and the stale 1980s debates

Here's a take on Keynes' long view from an Australian economics professor. (H/t AI Daily).

Malthusian ideas of scarcity began to be contested in the late 19th century.

The idea that a combination of technological progress and political reform could produce a genuine utopia became an appealing alternative to the ‘pie in the sky’ of an afterlife. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), a critique of 19th century capitalism written from the imagined perspective of the year 2000, was the archetypal example of this literature.

Few utopians had a serious theory of growth, he says, but Keynes was more realistic in expecting incremental improvements in living standards over many decades.

The trouble is Keynes' vision has not been realized.

So on a first reading, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ seemed prophetic. Yet, 40 or so years later, I am a grandparent myself, the year 2030 is rapidly approaching, and Keynes’s vision seems further from reality than ever. At least in the English-speaking world, the seemingly inevitable progress towards shorter working hours has halted. For many workers it has gone into reverse.

The culprit, he thinks, is market liberalism. He says

If work was distributed more equally, both between households and over time, we could all be better off. But it seems impossible to achieve this without a substantial reduction in the centrality of market work to the achievement of a good life, and without a substantial reduction in the total hours of work.

The first step would be to go back to the social democratic agenda associated with postwar Keynesianism. Although that agenda has largely been on hold during the decades of market-liberal dominance, the key institutions of the welfare state have remained both popular and resilient, as shown by the wave of popular resistance to cuts imposed in the name of austerity.

Key elements of the social democratic agenda include a guaranteed minimum income, more generous parental leave, and expanded provision of health, education and other social services.

This is the problem. He sees it as a reason to go back to 1980s-style welfare liberalism and expand already bloated public services. It is fighting out the debates of the late twentieth century over and over. It makes it far more difficult to achieve any genuine change if it becomes associated with outdated liberal leftism.

However, he does come close to a good point.

It seems clear enough that technological progress can generate the necessary productivity gains, so what is needed most is a change in attitudes to work that would make a guaranteed minimum income socially sustainable. The first is that the production of market goods and services needs to become pleasant enough that those doing it don’t mind supporting others who choose not to. The second is that the option of receiving a guaranteed minimum income does not become a trap, leading into the kind of idleness that produces despair.

The key is to make some form of minimum income "socially sustainable" without causing resentment. That is where the left's ideas of equal distribution block anyway forward. Without some convergence on ideas about the good life, most people will not want to subsidize other's "rights". Liberal ethics undermines liberal economics.

 

Small Towns and Big Cities

Happy New Year! We are back in New York after traveling to see family over Christmas. It is is great to go away, and it is also great to come back home.

We were in a small mountain town for ten days, and it was very nice. Small towns are so much more livable than they were even twenty years ago. The town is filled with good restaurants of all kinds and cuisines - perhaps not as good as New York, but not bad and much cheaper. Standards have leapt ahead in recent years.

The supermarkets are vast. We love Freshdirect here in the city, but going to those big Safeways etc felt a bit like communist era visitors to the West looking at acres of food with big aisles. You can get pretty much anything even in the sticks now. The cost of living is very low, with Walmart dragging down the price of basics.

And that is before you count instant connection with the Internet and cable and Kindle downloads. We can read the Times updated to the second in a place where you would never have seen a paper copy before. It used to be living far away from a good bookstore was a hardship. Now almost any book you want is instantly downloadable, or can be delivered within days. And the town in question has a magnificent second hand bookstore as well.

We're still happy to come back to our little apartment perched in a tower. But sometimes I feel we pay a lot to live in the big city. Perhaps the relative advantage of cities is changing again.

Of course, relative advantage is always changing. People fled downtowns for the suburbs in the postwar years, escaping apartment blocks for houses with big yards. But many still want to be within commuting distance of major cities. Despite predictions of telecommuting revolutions, jobs still cluster in the major urban centers, with property prices to match.

It has been going on a long time. The fact you can buy enoki mushrooms in a small town is a small change compared to the coming of the railroad in the nineteenth century or radio in the early twentieth. But it still feels as if the relative sophistication of the metropolis is fading.

One theme of this blog is we are approaching material abundance, indeed material saturation as a society. In fact, we tried to hint to relatives that we didn't really have room for more stuff this year as gifts, so memberships, subscriptions etc were great as an alternative. ( We got stuff anyway.) Consumption naturally shifts towards intangibles - culture, relationships, vitality.

But many of these intangibles are spread in different ways.The level of material and cultural services even in remote places is now very high. You may not have the Met Opera, but the local cinema was advertising live HD broadcasts from the Met Opera.

It used to be you would escape stultifying repression in small towns for the anonymity and freedom of the city. But that difference has narrowed too.

Cities if anything have a slight deficit in terms of material standard of living. The main advantage they still have is cultural vitality. But even that can be priced out by soaring real estate prices.

It is now easier to take your life with you anywhere. Digital goods are omnipresent anywhere with a fast connection. I wonder if that will ultimately change property calculations.

Krugman, Robots and Redistribution

There's a lot of attention to this post by Paul Krugman on long-term growth.

And this means that in a sense we are moving toward something like my intelligent-robots world; many, many tasks are becoming machine-friendly. This in turn means that Gordon is probably wrong about diminishing returns to technology.

Ah, you ask, but what about the people? Very good question. Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

Perhaps at some stage there will be a deeper discussion of these issues. He says in a related column he will talk more about long-term growth in due course. But, he concedes, economists know very little about long-run prospects.

The great bulk of the economic commentary you read in the papers is focused on the short run: the effects of the “fiscal cliff” on U.S. recovery, the stresses on the euro, Japan’s latest attempt to break out of deflation. This focus is understandable, since one global depression can ruin your whole day. But our current travails will eventually end. What do we know about the prospects for long-run prosperity?

The answer is: less than we think.

The long-term projections produced by official agencies, like the Congressional Budget Office, generally make two big assumptions. One is that economic growth over the next few decades will resemble growth over the past few decades. In particular, productivity — the key driver of growth — is projected to rise at a rate not too different from its average growth since the 1970s. On the other side, however, these projections generally assume that income inequality, which soared over the past three decades, will increase only modestly looking forward.

It’s not hard to understand why agencies make these assumptions. Given how little we know about long-run growth, simply assuming that the future will resemble the past is a natural guess. On the other hand, if income inequality continues to soar, we’re looking at a dystopian, class-warfare future — not the kind of thing government agencies want to contemplate.

Yet this conventional wisdom is very likely to be wrong on one or both dimensions.

An additional problem is economics has very little understanding of the drivers of productivity. I don't know how many times senior officials have told me that it is a "residual of a residual" in quantitative terms.

 

Redistribution

We've looked at these issues before, such as here and here.

In particular, we looked at an excellent survey of technological developments here. Diamandis and Kotler conclude their book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think with this:

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff—it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

However, simply transferring money from "the rich" to the middle class or the poor is ultimately self-defeating. It undermines self-reliance and self-respect and the fact that living is more than just having stuff.

Redistribution is going to be the core issue in coming years - but even the word itself is tainted with leftist welfarism.

Instead, we need a better conception of how people earn a living, especially if the labor market is in trouble. And that means a better idea of value. And that entails some idea of the good life for people, instead of liberal neutrality whose whole point is to avoid any discussion of value.

Economics has deep difficulty with this, because value is primarily an ethical issue which is not reducible to models. Indeed, we saw recently economics as a discipline sidestepped the problem of value in the marginalist revolution by replacing it with a poorly conceived mathematical treatment of utility.

The whole apparatus of pareto-equality and welfare economics is flawed. Liberal ethics is flawed. Both lack any conception of human flourishing. Automatic equality of respect destroys any prospect of a better life, because it corrodes value. If everything is equal, there is no value.

 

The Art of Choosing

I read Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing last week. It is a stimulating and rewarding book about recent psychological investigation, often by Iyengar herself, into choice. She is a Professor at Columbia, and her work seems another prime example of the renaissance of psychology has a discipline in the last ten-twenty years. We looked, for example, at Martin Seligman's work here, and Daniel Kahneman has had a major impact on economics.

Iyengar is more interested in choice than happiness or heuristics, however.

Our deep need for choice

First, she emphasizes the profound importance of a feeling of agency, of having some control, to almost all creatures. Even zoo animals exhbit listlessness and distress if they do not have agency. One might think of a zoo as a paradise for wild animals, with food and material needs taken care of. Instead, this "perfect hotel" is anything but.

In spite of the dedication of their human caretakers, animals in zoos may feel caught in a death trap because they exercise minimal control over their lives. .. Due to these physically and psychologically harmful effects, captivity can often result in lower life expectancies despite objectively improved living conditions. Wild African elephants, for example, have an average life span of 56 years as compared to 17 year for zoo-born elephants. p11, 13

There are other examples. Lower ranks of the British civil service have worse health and die younger than the upper ranks, according to a famous piece of research, as they have less control over their daily tasks. Giving residents of an old people's home more control over trivial things - plants, movie screening times, TV - leads to significantly better outcomes in health and happiness.

This is fascinating. We need a minimal sense of control over our surroundings and workflow to be happy. A utopia that takes care of material needs but allows us no sense of control or agency is likely to be make us miserable.

A society built on keeping people in captivity is bound to be unhappy. People need to feel they have choice, or they shrivel. Material abundance alone is not enough to make people happy. It is more likely to be an existence like a captive zoo animal.

Cultural differences

However, cultures differ quite radically in how they think about choice. Most cultures emphasize collective needs and approval over individual needs. The United States, not unexpectedly, is at the individualist extreme.

She contrasts this with the SIkh wedding of her parents in India. All choices were made by the families and tradition. The first time the groom saw the bride was when he lifted her veil after the marriage ceremony.

These cultural predisposotions affects workplace behavior too. She studied worldwide employees of Citibank, carrying out the same tasks. They differed significantly in the amount of choice they perceived they had on their jobs, and how much they preferred management to exert.

 

"Freedom from" versus "freedom to"

She traces such cultural attitudes back to a more fundamental difference over "freedom from" versus "freedom to", which she says Erich Fromm postulated in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom (which I read as a teenager). "Freedom from", said Fromm, is "freedom from the political, economic and spiritual shackles that have bound men,", especially others interfering with the pursuit of our goals. "Freedom to" is an ability, the ability to "attain certain outcomes and realize our full potential."

A system tending too far in either direction can limit people's opportunities, Iyengar says. Capitalism tends towards "freedom from", but not everyone will have access to all the choices available. Communism tends towards "freedom to", including equality of outcomes rather than opportunities. The problem is there is little incentive to work harder or produce more, and it requires a strong government which may become corrupted by power.

She found strong differences still endure between West and East Berliners in her research, for example.

.. people's long-held assumptions about fairness can't simply be swapped for another set of beleifs. I consistently found that West Berliners, like Westerners in general, understand the world through the lens of "freedom from." On the other hand, East Berliners, and in particular the older people, focused on "freedom to", even though communism was now only a memory for them. p65

The American dream is all about "freedom from".

People who see themselves and others as having high personal control tend to favor "freedom from", not only because it provides more opportunities to attain their personal goals but also on grounds of justice - those who put in the most effort will be rewarded, while those who slack off won;t be able to ride on anyone else's coattials. p68

Americans as a whole arguably believe more wholeheartedly in "freedom from" than any other nation.. The basic premise is no one can stand in the way of your highest aspirations, provided that you have the ambition and skills to realize them. p70

This matters because it might mean potentially fundamental and irreconcilable cultural differences in what people believe about the good life, which is a primary interest of this blog. The good life in the Confucian tradtion would be very different from the good life in the Jeffersonian tradition, so perhaps it is better not to think about it at all.

Freedom to what?

I don't think that's true, though. The fact of abundance, the end of the struggle for material survival, is a challenge to every culture, whether one contronts it on an individual or social level. We face "freedom from" the traditional limits of material and social scarcity. That is a massive change from the lot of humanity for all the thousands of generations before we solved the "economic problem".

Since the 1960s, many of the traditional limits in society have been lifted. What have we achieved with it? TV and the welfare office.

We have abundance. Then the question is - what do we actually want? And "Freedom from" in isolation doesn't say anything at all about that. It suffers the traditional liberal blindspot about where preferences and tastes and wants and desires and pleasure actually come from.

How do people find what they want, especially when older cultural institutions like the churches are in decline? What cultural influences or standards influence what people want to do with their lives after it becomes genuinely a matter of choice? Iyengar doesn't go into this.

For example, we looked some time ago at economist Tibor Scitovsky's work. People want the right level of stimulation, he argues, but it has to be genuinely novel stimulation, not simply quantitatively more. How do we achieve a system where there is more genuine choice, rather than people running faster and faster on hamster wheels for more of the same?


But at the same time, simply accepting traditional or collective notions of what "freedom to" means seems alien to our tradition in the West, and at risk from technological and cultural change. There is an impoverished group of choices for "freedom to".

In the past, "freedom to" has often meant spoilt aristocrats fighting futile dramas of status and prestige and honor, or rich trust fund kids subsiding into drugs and nihilism. It has meant religious extremism and monastric austerity and self-denial. At present, it often means crystal meth in small towns and people thinking of the office cubicle as a second home. In practice, it can lead to alcoholism and divorce and loneliness and pursuit of celebrity. As John Stuart Mill once pointed out, much rests on the quality of what we want.


There is, in fact, a longer history to these ideas. "Freedom from" is analagous to "liberty", whereas "freedom to" is more consonant with older ideas of "freedom", where being free has a positive meaning. (This reminds me of one of David Hackett Fisher's books, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (America: A Cultural History)which I must look at again. ) America was at the forefront of liberty in the eighteenth century, with lingering social consequences. It ought to be at the forefront of what freedom means now.

Everyone has to answer the question of "what next?". Perhaps the Woodstock Festival or the ABC Fall Line-up or the Google free snackbar in their Silicon Valley offices is the highest point people will ever achieve. Perhaps not. We do not discuss what we should aspire to any more, beyond egailtarianism.

 

"Freedom to" is not necessarily egalitarian or traditionalist

Iyengar's conception - and the traditional view - of "freedom to" is too limited. "Freedom to" is not necessarily socialist or egalitarian. It is not necessarily about minimal provision for all, or Rawlsian maximin welfarism. After all, we've seen that Aristotle's account of the good life has been criticized since for being so unconcerned with equality.

Instead, I think this is an example of where we have taken such a wrong turn. As soon as any suggestion of material sufficiency or abundance has appeared, the first response has been equal distribution. It seems to set off an egalitarian mania, in terms of welfarism and rights and taxation. Yet egalitarianism is not the only vision of the good life, or indeed, a particularly inspiring or just one.

There are deep potential problems with "freedom to", particulalty if people are coerced into a state vision of what it means. But once "freedom from" has been achieved, the only alternative to more discussion of "freedom to" is an unthinking default socialism or nihilism. We need a new conception of "freedom to" that will also correspond to an answer to the conundrum of "value" in economics which we were discussing recently.

I think that has to be centered on people developing their skills and capacitiies to their full potential, and that has to be connected to a conception of virtue and the good life.

We'll look at more of the book tomorrow.

 

 

 

Welfare and the Good Life

 

We're looking at Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, starting here.

Against the European Welfare model

The connection between the four basic social institutions and happiness leads Murray to argue for American exceptionalism, as against the European welfare model.

The tacit assumption of the advanced welfare state is correct when human beings face starvation or death by exposure. Then, food and shelter are all that count. But in an advanced society, the needs for food and shelter can be met in a variety of ways, and at that point human needs can no longer be disaggregated. The ways in which food and shelter are obtained affects whether the other human needs are met.

People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned—it cannot be self-respect if it’s not earned—and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.

This is of course a version of what I have talked about before, a change in needs as we rise up Maslow's hierarchy. The welfare state ramified in the 1960s as one response to abundance. Given sufficient wealth, the main political drive has been towards equal distribution rather than new flourishing and possibility.

Upper class people still generally practice these four institutional virtues, he says. They are much more likely to be married, see a job as a calling and work hard, practice religion, and believe others can be trusted. In a sense, getting ahead requires them.

The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead.

He thinks this view, nonjudgemental "niceness", is living on borrowed time, however, as science produces more results which refute it.

Here are some more examples of things I think the neuroscientists and geneticists will prove over the next few decades: Human beings enjoy themselves when they are exercising their realized capabilities at the limit of those capabilities. Challenge and responsibility for consequences is an indispensable part of human motivation to exercise their realized capabilities at the limit of those capabilities. People grouped by gender, ethnicity, age, social class, and sexual preference, left free to live their lives as they see fit, will produce group differences in outcomes, because they differ genetically in their cognitive, psychological, and physiological profiles. Regardless of whether people have free will, human flourishing requires that they live in an environment in which they are treated as if they did.

So he thinks it will become obvious that nonjudgemental welfarism will be understood to undermine the crucial institutions of society.

The institutions surrounding marriage, vocation, community, and faith will be found to be the critical resources through which human beings lead satisfying lives. It will be found that those institutions deteriorate in the advanced welfare states for reasons that are intrinsic to the nature of the welfare state. It will be found that those institutions are richest and most robust in states that allow people to work out their lives on their own and in company with the people around them.

Putting it together

So what do we make of this? As a rule I consider libertarianism a horrible mistake. But Murray is a strange kind of libertarian. He is not so much arguing for the market and voluntary Ayn Randian contractualism, as strengthened independent social institutions.

He calls for an emphasis on virtue, which I like, but it in practice he means strengthening his four core institutions rather than the Aristotelian virtues as such. It is sociology more than ethics. He does not have much of the rest of virtue ethics, such as the golden mean, or an emphasis on the multiplicity of virtues.

What he does have is a kind of sociological vision of the good life, of flourishing, which I think makes him divergent from full libertarianism. Flourishing for him means strengthening those four institutions and reducing the role of government and bureaucracy in life.

I think this is what my friend, who I mentioned at the beginning of the post, was hostile to. Murray says people have to make their own choices in life, but his view is much less sympathetic for radical innovation in lifestyles. He believes in marriage, in standard jobs, in the churches, in stability.

But there is a basic confusion here. People do not work out their lives on their own, or even just in the company of those around them. They do so in the context of an ethical vision of the good life, of what contributes to happiness. We do not start off from year zero every time we make a decision.

Government and bureaucracy cannot run our lives for us. That much is true. But we still need a conception of the common good. Traditional libertarianism does not do that. It is just about process. Murray's distaste for government means he throws much of the possibility of common culture out as well.

I've said a number of times I think the debate between government and the market is a stale 20th century debate. Instead, the real issue is what we do about abundance and what flourishing means. Murray contributes some hard statistical evidence to that question, about the value of social institutions. But it correlation, rather than explanation.

It is a good argument against welfarist government. But it does not make any case for the positive possibilities of abundance, or how institutions need to adapt. What becomes of work if the demand for medium-skilled jobs is being hollowed out, for example? How do you promote social trust?

America is about new possibilities of freedom - and what that means substantively when material necessities are met.

 

 

Virtue and the Founders

We're looking at Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, starting here.

Murray argues that mainstream America is seeing crucial social institutions erode. He gives a fascinating account of how the founders of the United States were convinced that the bedrock of the Republic was the virtue of the people. Naturally, I found this illuminating because of my continued interest in virtue ethics, like this post the other day. According to Murray,

Everyone involved in the creation of the United States knew that its success depended on virtue in its citizenry—not gentility, but virtue. “No theoretical checks, no form of government can render us secure,” James Madison famously observed at the Virginia ratifying convention. “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

For Benjamin Franklin, this meant that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” On the other hand, virtue makes government easy to sustain: “The expense of our civil government we have always borne, and can easily bear, because it is small. A virtuous and laborious people may be cheaply governed.”

Washington emphasized the point too:

George Washington said much the same thing in the undelivered version of his first inaugural address, asserting that “no Wall of words, no mound of parchment can be formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.” Or as he put it most simply in his Farewell Address: “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” In their various ways, the founders recognized that if a society is to remain free, self-government refers first of all to individual citizens governing their own behavior.

This shows, of course, how natural and widespread and unexceptional a belief in the virtues was before the utilitarian 19th century.

Now Murray believes virtue is eroding.

The success of America depended on virtue in the people when the country began and it still does in the twenty-first century. America will remain exceptional only to the extent that its people embody the same qualities that made it work for the first two centuries of its existence. The founding virtues are central to that kind of citizenry.

 

Four key institutions

He spends much of the rest of the book distingushing between the mores of an upper class suburb, which he calls Belmont, and a lower class one, Fishtown. The four core institutions of society - marriage, work, religion, and social trust - have all eroded markedly in Fishtown, he says. Marriage has declined:

For the first time in human history, we now have societies in which a group consisting of a lone woman and her offspring is not considered to be sociologically incomplete—not considered to be illegitimate—and so I will adapt and call them nonmarital births.

So too has the work ethic. One interesting thing is he emphasises work as a vocation, a calling, rather than just a means to pay the bills. He thinks that even low-paying work can give meaning if it helps support others.

Yes, you can overdo it. There is more to life than work, and a life without ample space for family and friends is incomplete. But this much should not be controversial: Vocation—one’s calling in life—plays a large role in defining the meaning of that life. For some, the nurturing of children is the vocation. For some, an avocation or a cause can become an all-absorbing source of satisfaction, with the job a means of paying the bills and nothing more. But for many others, vocation takes the form of the work one does for a living.

The data shows lower-class neighnborhoods have changed much more than upper-class ones.

In 1960, 81 percent of Fishtown households had someone working at least forty hours a week, with Belmont at 90 percent. By 2008, Belmont had barely changed at all, at 87 percent, while Fishtown had dropped to 60 percent. And that was before the 2008 recession began. As of March 2010, Belmont was still at 87 percent. Fishtown was down to 53 percent.

Religious adherence - Catholicism in the case of Fishtown, which is based on an actual inner suburb in Philadelphia - has declined sharply.

The jury is still out on the metaquestion of whether secular democracies can long survive. But the last few decades have brought forth a large technical literature about the role of religion in maintaining civic life and the effects of religion on human functioning.

Social trust has also plunged.

The scariest message from the GSS [survey] does not consist of declines in specific activities that make up social capital, but this: The raw material that makes community even possible has diminished so much in Fishtown that the situation may be beyond retrieval. That raw material is social trust—not trust in a particular neighbor who happens to be your friend, but a generalized expectation that the people around you will do the right thing. As Francis Fukuyama documented in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, the existence of social trust is a core explanation of why some cultures create wealth and other cultures are mired in poverty.

Diversity, for all its positive qualities, also erodes social trust.

Another problem regarding social trust, and one that may help explain the decline, has surfaced more recently: The key ingredient of social capital, social trust, is eroded by ethnic diversity. In the years after Bowling Alone appeared, Robert Putnam’s research led him to a disturbing finding: Ethnic diversity works against social trust within a community—not only against trusting people of the other ethnicity, but against trusting even neighbors of one’s own ethnic group. In addition, Putnam’s research found that in areas of greater ethnic diversity, there was lower confidence in local government, a lower sense of political efficacy, less likelihood of working on a community project, less likelihood of giving to charity, fewer close friends, and lower perceived quality of life.

The erosion of these institutions diminishes happiness. And there is a common notion of what happiness means, says Murray.

... the core nature of human happiness is widely agreed upon in the West. It goes all the way back to Aristotle’s views about happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics. Distilling his discussion of happiness into a short definition leaves out a lot, but this captures the sense of Aristotle’s argument well enough for our purposes: Happiness consists of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole. The definition in effect says that when you decide how happy you are, you are thinking of aspects of your life that tend to define your life (not just bits and pieces of it); that you base your assessment of your happiness on deep satisfactions with the way things have gone, not passing pleasures; and that you believe in your heart of hearts that those satisfactions have been worth achieving. It is not really a controversial definition—try to imagine a definition of happiness you could apply to your own life that is much different.

There seems to be a strong connection in survey evidence between the strength of Murray's four core institutions and happiness.

At baseline—unmarried, dissatisfied with one’s work, professing no religion, and with very low social trust—the probability that a white person aged 30–49 responded “very happy” to the question about his life in general was only 10 percent. Having either a very satisfying job or a very happy marriage raised that percentage by almost equal amounts, to about 19 percent, with the effect of a very satisfying job being fractionally greater. Then came the big interaction effect: having a very satisfying job and a very happy marriage jumped the probability to 55 percent. Having high social trust pushed the percentage to 69 percent, and adding strong religious involvement raised the probability to 76 percent.

I'll conclude looking at the book tomorrow.

 

Coming Apart

I read Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 the other day. Murray, of course, is controversial. I had lunch back in late spring with a liberal friend from work who mentioned the book in passing - and spluttered in outrage. I wasn't sure why. My friend didn't give arguments, but radiated hostility to the book. So I decided I should read it at some point, although I looked at Murray before, here.

Murray repeats and extends his arguments in the book, with much more data. He argues that America is increasingly not divided by race, but by class. Hence he uses statistical evidence to demonstrate massive declines in social institutions among whites since the early 1960s (specifically, the date Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, marking the end of an era), without needing to consider any racial differences or stereotypes about an underclass.

THIS BOOK IS about an evolution in American society that has taken place since November 21, 1963, leading to the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever known. I will argue that the divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America. ..

It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.

He has a marked libertarian view, but with a conservartive slant. Government is the enemy because it saps vitality out of the other institutions of society, the "little platoons" as Edmund Burke would have called them.

But the American project was not about maximizing national wealth nor international dominance. The American project—a phrase you will see again in the chapters to come—consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems.

The most interesting thing by far is his discussion of the emergence of a new elite university-educated upper class which is heavily clustered into a few narrow districts, the "SuperZIPS". The value of brainpower started rising sharply in the postwar years, he says, as the economy developed from agriculture and manufacturing and towards more sophisticated services and technology. More people, and smarter people, went to college.

The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960. The same thing happened throughout the college system.

And the graduates of selective colleges naturally associated with each other.

The human impulse behind the isolation of the new upper class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk. Cognitive segregation was bound to start developing as soon as unusually smart people began to have the opportunity to hang out with other unusually smart people.

The shift in the upper class was dramatic and swift, with consequences that we are still feeling today. The new upper class is very different to the past, he says. He uses alumni data from Harvard and Yale, among other sources, to show that a huge proportion of the graduating classes live in just a few upscale suburbs and cities across the continent. Unsuprisingly, there are clusters in New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and LA.

The new upper class is liberal, but not notably more so in most of the country. It is very much the four principal major cities which have very liberal upper classes.

They have increasingly little exposure to the mainstream of American life.They are isolated, mostly talking and interacting just with each other. (I of course live in one of those "superZIPS" in Manhattan).

That is not an argument for turning the clock back, he says.

..I have described the America of 1960 in ways that have sometimes sounded nostalgic. But if a time machine could transport me back to 1960, I would have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. In many aspects of day-to-day life, America today is incomparably superior to the America of 1960.

The increased presence of brainpower in the upper reaches of society starting in the 1960s made a major difference in daily life:

That brings us to the timing of changes in the American standard of living. From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, not much changed in the technology of daily life. ... Then things took off. Beginning around the mid-1970s—the appearance of the Apple II in 1977 is a good symbolic opening—the cascade of changes has been unending. They range from the trivial (it was still difficult to get a really good cup of coffee or loaf of bread in most parts of America in the late 1970s) to the momentous (the Information Revolution is rightly classified alongside the Industrial Revolution as an epochal event). The design, functionality, and durability of almost any consumer product today are far better than they were in 1960.

The social changes are not simply a product of wealth, however. Taxing the upper classes to achieve greater income equality would make little difference in behavior or culture.

The new-upper-class culture is not the product of great wealth. It is enabled by affluence—people with common tastes and preferences need enough money to be able to congregate—but it is not driven by affluence. It is driven by the distinctive tastes and preferences that emerge when large numbers of cognitively talented people are enabled to live together in their own communities. You can whack the top income centile back to where it was in the 1980s, and it will have no effect whatsoever on the new-upper-class culture that had already emerged by that time. Places like Marin County are not fodder for cultural caricature because they are so wealthy.

This is very interesting.

Education and cultural change

He essentially says the cultural change is a natural outcome of sorting and acculturation by higher education. As I see it, perhaps it is a shift in society in a more priestly direction - the triumph of the brahmins, as opposed to the warrior, merchant or lower classes in the traditional fourfold Indian classification , for example.

In the past, a military aristocracy has often dominated society. Now the ruling class is the one which is more skilled at symbolic manipulation and arguments and moral deliberation - traditionally the role of the priests. We have a secular religion with its own upper class factions.

We have discussed before whether the massive social changes of the 1960s came about because humanity for the first time was not impelled by immediate survival needs. The possibility of abundance caused an outbreak of aquarian utopianism, followed by backlash.

Part of it was also technological, like the new possibilities opened up by the contraceptive pill.

And part of it was the rise of a more intellectual, educated upper class.

I'm not sure that higher education is inherently liberal or egalitarian in orientation. Rather, it was in a particularly liberal and secular phase in the 1960s and since. Harvard started off as a training center for the hardline Calvinist ministry, after all. The Jesuits have been famously highly educated, and not particularly liberal. The same applies to Chinese scholar-officials educated in the classics, or many Jewish Rabbis or graduates of the old Islamic Universities like Al-Azhar.

But having an upper class that did pass disproportionately through a few key institutions means it is likely to be stamped with the ethos of those institutions at a point in time. Most of the people would never have attended those institutions had they not become meritocratic. Hence there was natural self-interest in reinforcing those values.

We'll look at more of the book tomorrow.