Math and Life Satisfaction

 

The better you are at math, the more money seems to influence your satisfaction

Being better at math increases income but also ties satisfaction more closely to money. Jonathan Kitchen/Digital Vision via Getty Images

Pär Bjälkebring, University of Gothenburg and Ellen Peters, University of Oregon

Your grade school math teacher probably told you that being good at math would be very important to your grownup self. But maybe the younger you didn’t believe that at the time. A lot of research, though, has shown that your teacher was right.

We are two researchers who study decision-making and how it relates to wealth and happiness. In a study published in November 2021, we found that, in general, people who are better at math make more money and are more satisfied with their lives than people who aren’t as mathematically talented. But being good at math seems to be a double-edged sword. Although math-proficient people are very satisfied when they have high incomes, they are more dissatisfied, compared to those who aren’t as good at math, when they don’t make a lot of money.

Many researchers have suggested that more money only increases life satisfaction and happiness up to a certain point. Our research modifies this idea by showing that satisfaction derived from income relates strongly to how good a person is at math.

Nearly 6,000 people responded to a survey that asked about math skills, income and life satisfaction. PhotoAlto/Odilon Dimier via Getty Images

A math and happiness test

We investigated the relationship between math ability, income and life satisfaction, using surveys sent to 5,748 diverse Americans as part of the Understanding America Study.

The study included two questions and one test relevant to our research. One question asked participants about their household yearly income. Another one asked respondents to rate how satisfied they are with their lives on a scale of zero to 10.

Finally, people answered eight math questions that varied in difficulty to get a sense of their math skills. For example, one of the moderately difficult questions was: “Jerry received both the 15th highest and the 15th lowest mark in the class. How many students are in the class?” The correct answer is 29 students.

We then combined the results to see how they all related to one another.

Math skills and income also are tied to level of education, so, in our analyses, we controlled for education, verbal intelligence, personality traits and other demographics.

Connecting math skills to income and satisfaction

On average, the better a person was at math, the more money they made. For every one additional right answer on the eight-question math test, people reported an average of $4,062 more in annual income.

Imagine you have two people with the same level of education, one of whom answered none of the math questions correctly and the other answered all of them correctly. Our research predicts that the person who answered all of the questions correctly will earn about $30,000 more each year.

The survey also showed that people who are better at math were, on average, also more satisfied with their lives than those with lower math ability. This finding agrees with a lot of other research and suggests that income influences life satisfaction.

But prior research has shown that the relationship between income and satisfaction is not as straightforward as “more money equals greater happiness.” It turns out that how satisfied a person is with their income often depends on how they feel it compares to other people’s incomes.

Other research has also shown that people who are better at math tend to make more numerical comparisons in general than those who are worse at math. This led our team to suspect that math-proficient people would compare incomes more, too. Our results seem to show just that.

This chart shows that people who scored highest on the math test (red line) appear to be happiest when they make a lot of money (top right of graph), but also the least satisfied when they make less money (bottom left of graph). Different color lines correspond to the number of math questions answered correctly. Ellen Peters, Pär Bjälkebring, CC BY-ND

Simply put, the better a person was at math, the more they cared about how much money they make. People who are better at math had the highest life satisfaction when they had high incomes. But deriving satisfaction from income goes both ways. These people also had the lowest life satisfaction when they had lower incomes. Among people who aren’t as good at math, income didn’t relate to satisfaction nearly as much. Thus, the same income was valued differently depending on a person’s math skills.

Money does buy happiness for some

An often-quoted fact – backed up by research – says that once a person makes around $95,000 a year, earning more money doesn’t dramatically increase satisfaction. This concept is called income satiation. Our research challenges that blanket statement.

Interestingly, the people who are best at math did not seem to show income satiation. They were more and more satisfied with more income, and there didn’t appear to be an upper limit. This did not hold true for people who weren’t as talented at math. The least math-proficient group gained more satisfaction from income only until about $50,000. After that, earning more money made little difference.

For some, money does seem to buy happiness. While more work needs to be done to really understand why, we think it may be because math-oriented people compare numbers – including incomes – to make sense of the world. And maybe that’s not always a great thing. In comparison, those who are worse at math appear to derive life satisfaction from sources other than income. So if you are feeling dissatisfied with your income, maybe seeing beyond the numbers will be a winning strategy for you.

Pär Bjälkebring, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Gothenburg and Ellen Peters, Director, Center for Science Communication Research, University of Oregon

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

 

 

 

 

 

People who are bad with numbers often find it harder to make ends meet – even if they are not poor

 

 

Wändi Bruine de Bruin, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Paul Slovic, University of Oregon

The big idea

People who are bad with numbers are more likely to experience financial difficulties than people who are good with numbers. That’s according to our analyses of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll.

In this World Risk Poll, people from 141 countries were asked if 10% was bigger than, smaller than or the same as 1 out of 10. Participants were said to be bad with numbers if they did not provide the correct answer – which is that 10% is the same as 1 out of 10. Our analyses found that people who answered incorrectly are often among the poorest in their country. Prior studies in the United States, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Peru had also found that people who are bad with numbers are financially worse off. But our analyses of the World Risk Poll further showed that people who are bad with numbers find it harder to make ends meet, even if they are not poor.

When we say that they found it harder to make ends meet, we mean that they reported on the poll that they found it difficult or very difficult to live on their current income, as opposed to living comfortably or getting by on their current income.

Our analyses also indicate that staying in school longer is related to better number ability. People with a high school degree tend to be better with numbers than people without a high school degree. And college graduates do even better. But even among college graduates there are people who are bad with numbers – and they struggle more financially.

Of course, being good with numbers is not going to help you stretch your budget if you are very poor. We found that the relationship between number ability and struggling to make ends meet holds across the world, except in low-income countries like Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda.

Why it matters

The ability to understand and use numbers is also called numeracy. Numeracy is central to modern adult life because numbers are everywhere.

A lot of well-paying jobs involve working with numbers. People who are bad with numbers often perform worse in these jobs, including banking. It can therefore be hard for people who are bad with numbers to find employment and progress in their jobs.

People who are bad with numbers are less likely to make good financial decisions. Individuals who can’t compute how interest compounds over time save the least and borrow the most. People with poor numerical skills are also more likely to take on high-cost debt. If you’re bad with numbers, it is hard to recognize that paying the US$30 minimum payment on a credit card with a $3,000 balance and an annual percentage rate of 12% means it will never be paid off.

What still isn’t known

It is clear that people who are bad with numbers also tend to struggle financially. But we still need to explore whether teaching people math will help them to avoid financial problems.

What’s next

In her book “Innumeracy in the Wild,” Ellen Peters, director of the Center for Science Communication Research at the University of Oregon, suggests that it is important for students to take math classes. American high school students who had to take more math courses than were previously required had better financial outcomes later in life, such as avoiding bankruptcy and foreclosures.

Successfully teaching numeracy also means helping students gain confidence in using numbers. People with low numerical confidence experience bad financial outcomes, such as a foreclosure notice, independent of their numeric ability. This is because they may not even try to take on complex financial decisions.

Numerical confidence can be boosted in different ways. Among American elementary school children who were bad with numbers, setting achievable goals led to better numerical confidence and performance. Among American undergraduate students, a writing exercise that affirmed their positive values improved their numerical confidence and performance.

Other important next steps are to find out whether training in numeracy can also be provided to adults, and whether training in numeracy improves the financial outcomes of people who do not live in high-income countries.

Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Professor of Public Policy, Psychology and Behavioral Science, USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Paul Slovic, Professor of Psychology, University of Oregon

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why is Japan not happy?

 

Our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

 

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

I have heard of too many people who “knew well before it happened that the 2008 financial crisis was inevitable.” This sentence contains a highly objectionable word, which should be removed from our vocabulary in discussions of major events. The word is, of course, knew. Some people thought well in advance that there would be a crisis, but they did not know it. They now say they knew it because the crisis did in fact happen. This is a misuse of an important concept. In everyday language, we apply the word know only when what was known is true and can be shown to be true. We can know something only if it is both true and knowable. But the people who thought there would be a crisis (and there are fewer of them than now remember thinking it) could not conclusively show it at the time. Many intelligent and well-informed people were keenly interested in the future of the economy and did not believe a catastrophe was imminent; I infer from this fact that the crisis was not knowable. What is perverse about the use of know in this context is not that some individuals get credit for prescience that they do not deserve. It is that the language implies that the world is more knowable than it is. It helps perpetuate a pernicious illusion.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. Know is not the only word that fosters this illusion. In common usage, the words intuition and premonition also are reserved for past thoughts that turned out to be true. The statement “I had a premonition that the marriage would not last, but I was wrong” sounds odd, as does any sentence about an intuition that turned out to be false. To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.

** 

The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise. Imagine yourself before a football game between two teams that have the same record of wins and losses. Now the game is over, and one team trashed the other. In your revised model of the world, the winning team is much stronger than the loser, and your view of the past as well as of the future has been altered by that new perception. Learning from surprises is a reasonable thing to do, but it can have some dangerous consequences.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed

**

Hindsight bias has pernicious effects on the evaluations of decision makers. It leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound but by whether its outcome was good or bad. Consider a low-risk surgical intervention in which an unpredictable accident occurred that caused the patient’s death. The jury will be prone to believe, after the fact, that the operation was actually risky and that the doctor who ordered it should have known better. This outcome bias makes it almost impossible to evaluate a decision properly—in terms of the beliefs that were reasonable when the decision was made.

Hindsight is especially unkind to decision makers who act as agents for others—physicians, financial advisers, third-base coaches, CEOs, social workers, diplomats, politicians. We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact. There is a clear outcome bias. When the outcomes are bad, the clients often blame their agents for not seeing the handwriting on the wall—forgetting that it was written in invisible ink that became legible only afterward. Actions that seemed prudent in foresight can look irresponsibly negligent in hindsight. Based on an actual legal case, students in California were asked whether the city of Duluth, Minnesota, should have shouldered the considerable cost of hiring a full-time bridge monitor to protect against the risk that debris might get caught and block the free flow of water. One group was shown only the evidence available at the time of the city’s decision; 24% of these people felt that Duluth should take on the expense of hiring a flood monitor. The second group was informed that debris had blocked the river, causing major flood damage; 56% of these people said the city should have hired the monitor, although they had been explicitly instructed not to let hindsight distort their judgment.

The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias. In the case of a catastrophe, such as 9/11, we are especially ready to believe that the officials who failed to anticipate it were negligent or blind. On July 10, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency obtained information that al-Qaeda might be planning a major attack against the United States. George Tenet, director of the CIA, brought the information not to President George W. Bush but to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. When the facts later emerged, Ben Bradlee, the legendary executive editor of The Washington Post, declared, “It seems to me elementary that if you’ve got the story that’s going to dominate history you might as well go right to the president.” But on July 10, no one knew—or could have known—that this tidbit of intelligence would turn out to dominate history.

Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second-guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions—and to an extreme reluctance to take risks. As malpractice litigation became more common, physicians changed their procedures in multiple ways: ordered more tests, referred more cases to specialists, applied conventional treatments even when they were unlikely to help. These actions protected the physicians more than they benefited the patients, creating the potential for conflicts of interest. Increased accountability is a mixed blessing.

Although hindsight and the outcome bias generally foster risk aversion, they also bring undeserved rewards to irresponsible risk seekers, such as a general or an entrepreneur who took a crazy gamble and won. Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak. A few lucky gambles can crown a reckless leader with a halo of prescience and boldness.

**

The CEO of a successful company is likely to be called flexible, methodical, and decisive. Imagine that a year has passed and things have gone sour. The same executive is now described as confused, rigid, and authoritarian. Both descriptions sound right at the time: it seems almost absurd to call a successful leader rigid and confused, or a struggling leader flexible and methodical.

Indeed, the halo effect is so powerful that you probably find yourself resisting the idea that the same person and the same behaviors appear methodical when things are going well and rigid when things are going poorly. Because of the halo effect, we get the causal relationship backward: we are prone to believe that the firm fails because its CEO is rigid, when the truth is that the CEO appears to be rigid because the firm is failing. This is how illusions of understanding are born.

Money was created many times in many places

“Money was created many times in many places. Its development required no technological breakthroughs – it was a purely mental revolution. It involved the creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination.

Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Money enables people to compare quickly and easily the value of different commodities (such as apples, shoes and divorces), to easily exchange one thing for another, and to store wealth conveniently. There have been many types of money. The most familiar is the coin, which is a standardised piece of imprinted metal. Yet money existed long before the invention of coinage, and cultures have prospered using other things as currency, such as shells, cattle, skins, salt, grain, beads, cloth and promissory notes. Cowry shells were used as money for about 4,000 years all over Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Oceania. Taxes could still be paid in cowry shells in British Uganda in the early twentieth century.

**
“Money is thus a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else. Brawn gets converted to brain when a discharged soldier finances his college tuition with his military benefits. Land gets converted into loyalty when a baron sells property to support his retainers. Health is converted to justice when a physician uses her fees to hire a lawyer – or bribe a judge. It is even possible to convert sex into salvation, as fifteenth-century prostitutes did when they slept with men for money, which they in turn used to buy indulgences from the Catholic Church.

Ideal types of money enable people not merely to turn one thing into another, but to store wealth as well. Many valuables cannot be stored – such as time or beauty. Some things can be stored only for a short time, such as strawberries. Other things are more durable, but take up a lot of space and require expensive facilities and care. Grain, for example, can be stored for years, but to do so you need to build huge storehouses and guard against rats, mould, water, fire and thieves. Money, whether paper, computer bits or cowry shells, solves these problems. Cowry shells don’t rot, are unpalatable to rats, can survive fires and are compact enough to be locked up in a safe.

In order to use wealth it is not enough just to store it. It often needs to be transported from place to place. Some forms of wealth, such as real estate, cannot be transported at all. Commodities such as wheat and rice can be transported only with difficulty. Imagine a wealthy farmer living in a moneyless land who emigrates to a distant province. His wealth consists mainly of his house and rice paddies. The farmer cannot take with him the house or the paddies. He might exchange them for tons of rice, but it would be very burdensome and expensive to transport all that rice. Money solves these problems. The farmer can sell his property in exchange for a sack of cowry shells, which he can easily carry wherever he goes.

Because money can convert, store and transport wealth easily and cheaply, it made a vital contribution to the appearance of complex commercial networks and dynamic markets. Without money, commercial networks and markets would have been doomed to remain very limited in their size, complexity and dynamism."

Orta Kesim, Avustralya ve Türkiye Karşılaştırması

Avustralya ile Türkiye arasındaki en büyük farklardan birini Credit Suisse raporlamış:
Orta sınıf Avustralya'nın %66.1'ini oluştururken, bu oran Türkiye'de %9.9. Düşük sınıf Avustralya'nın %19.7'si, Türkiye'nin ise %89.3'ü.
Dünyada orta sınıfın en güçlü olduğu ülke Avustralya.

— Halil Babilli (@halilbabilli) June 18, 2018

Tabii iş bazı ülkelerde epey acıklı bir hal alıyor. Örneğin, Hindistan'da orta sınıf %3 civarındayken düşük sınıf nüfusun %96.8'ine tekabül ediyor.

— Halil Babilli (@halilbabilli) June 18, 2018

The Pareto Principle or the 80/20 Rule

Sometime in the late 1800s—nobody is quite sure exactly when—a man named Vilfredo Pareto was fussing about in his garden when he made a small but interesting discovery.

Pareto noticed that a tiny number of pea pods in his garden produced the majority of the peas.

Now, Pareto was a very mathematical fellow. He worked as an economist and one of his lasting legacies was turning economics into a science rooted in hard numbers and facts. Unlike many economists of the time, Pareto's papers and books were filled with equations. And the peas in his garden had set his mathematical brain in motion.

What if this unequal distribution was present in other areas of life as well?
**

At the time, Pareto was studying wealth in various nations. As he was Italian, he began by analyzing the distribution of wealth in Italy. To his surprise, he discovered that approximately 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by just 20 percent of the people. Similar to the pea pods in his garden, most of the resources were controlled by a minority of the players.

Pareto continued his analysis in other nations and a pattern began to emerge. For instance, after poring through the British income tax records, he noticed that approximately 30 percent of the population in Great Britain earned about 70 percent of the total income. 

As he continued researching, Pareto found that the numbers were never quite the same, but the trend was remarkably consistent. The majority of rewards always seemed to accrue to a small percentage of people. This idea that a small number of things account for the majority of the results became known as the Pareto Principle or, more commonly, the 80/20 Rule. 

James Clear

Liranın Hikayesi

“Yunanca lítra veya líthra ile Latince libra, iki kefeli terazide kullanılan ve başlangıçta yaklaşık 310 grama muadil olduğu sanılan bir tartı biriminin adı. Erken antik çağda bu ölçü Sicilya’dan başlayarak tüm Akdeniz dünyasına yayılmış. t – b eşdeğerliği kuraldışı olduğundan kelimenin asıl biçimini tahmin etmek mümkün değil; ama iki sözcüğün kökende aynı olduğu uzmanlarca kabul ediliyor.

İki sözcükten libra daha yaygın kullanıma kavuşmuş. Livre adıyla Fransızcaya geçmiş. İngilizcede libra ve Anglosakson asıllı pound biçimleri eş anlamlı olarak kullanılmış (o yüzden günümüze dek pound’un kısaltması lb. yazılıyor). Ağırlık birimi olmanın yanısıra, 1 lb. gümüş içeren standart para biriminin de adı olmuş. Avrupa’da ilk gümüş libre 8. yüzyılda Şarlman zamanında tedavüle girmiş. İtalyanca lira adıyla Floransa şehir devletinin dünyaca ünlü parası olmuş. Osmanlı devletinde Galatalı İtalyan bankerlerin kullandığı bir muhasebe birimi iken, 19. yüzyıl sonlarında bilfiil dolaşıma girmiş. 1919-20 enflasyonunda kuruşu ezip geçmiş. ”

Hakim Olan Kitap Endüstrisine Büyük Bir Eleştiri

Sanayi Devrimi'nden bu yana çoğu teknoloji ve ticaret biçimine uygulanan iktisadi model, yani mümkün olan en düşük bedelle üretip karşılığında mümkün olan en yüksek kârı elde edebilme gayesi, 1900'lerde kitap dünyasına da ulaştı.

Bu hedefe varabilmek için, kitap endüstrisinin büyük kısmı, özellikle de Anglo-Sakson dünyasında, güya matematiksel bir yöntemle hangi kitapların satacağını tahmin edip, bu tahmine göre hangi kitapların üretileceğini belirlemekle görevli uzmanlardan mürekkep bir takım oluşturuldu. Yazı işleri pazarlama birimi stratejistlerinden büyük kitapçı zincirlerinin satın alma görevlilerine ve belki de, sorumluluklarının o kadar da farkında olmayan editörler ve yaratıcı yazım öğretmenlerine kadar, kitap endüstrisinin neredeyse her üyesi, büyük ölçüde, (geleneksel anlamıyla) okurlardan değil, tüketicilerden oluşan bir kitle için yaratılan eserlerin üretim halkasının bir parçasına dönüştü. Elbette, kitap aşkıyla kitap endüstrisine girmeye yönelenlerin çoğu, asıl sorumluluklarına azimle sadık kalmaktadır, ancak bunu, özellikle büyük yayın grupları içerisinde hissedilen ve kitabı her şeyden önce satılabilir bir nesne olarak değerlendirmeye zorlayan güçlü baskıya karşın gerçekleştirirler. Edebi ahlakını muhafaza etmeyi başaran yayımcılar var tabii, fakat yayımcılıkla ilgili kararların giderek daha fazlası pazarlama birimlerine ve belli başlı kitapçı zincirlerinin satın alma görevlilerine boyun eğiyor ve neticede, eleştirel otosansür ve ticari kaygılar giderek artan bir sıklıkla yazı işleri alanına doğru sızıyor.
Endüstrinin stratejileri pervasız ve kendine yöneliktir.

Belirli bir model ("chick lit" [genç kız edebiyatı] olarak bilinen model) çerçevesinde üretilen ve buna uygun biçimde pazarlanan kitaplardan biri olan Devil Wears Prada'nın sinema versiyonunda, ana kötü karakter, moda piri Miranda Priestly, "moda zihniyetine" boyun eğmeyi reddeden masum kahramana, giydiği, kuşkusuz sıradan bir süpermarketten satın alınmış kıyafetin renginin, bir önceki sezonun titiz moda planlamasının bir sonucu olduğunu söyler; diğer bir deyişle, ticari dogmanın diktaları toplumun dokusuna öylesine derinden nüfuz etmiştir ki, bu dokunun hiçbir unsuru onların etkilerinden uzak kalamaz ve hatta günün modasını takip etmeyi bilinçli bir biçimde reddetsek dahi, yine de, "sistemin köleleri" olmaktan kaçamayız. Bu, kendi kendini doğrulayan bir gerçekliktir. Kitap endüstrisi yalnızca bu dogmayı üretmekle kalmaz, aynı zamanda dışında kalanlara çok küçük bir alan bırakır.

Kitapçı zincirleri vitrinlerini ve sergileme standlarıni en yüksek teklifi verene satarlar, böylece halk, yalnızca yayımcının ücretini ödediği eserleri görebilir. Dolayısıyla, çok satan olduğu duyurulan kitapların oluşturduğu yığınlar bir kitap dükkânındaki alanın çoğunu kaplar. Her birinin üzerinde, aynen yumurtaların üzerindeki gibi bir "son satış" tarihi vardır ki, bu da üretimin sürekliliğini teminat altına alır. Sözümona düşük kültürlü okurları hedef alan genel gazete politikasının baskısı altındaki kitap ekleri, benzer "fast-food" kitaplar için günbegün daha çok alan ayırarak "fast-food" kitapların da modası geçmiş herhangi bir klasik kadar değerli olduğu ya da okurların "iyi" edebiyatın keyfine varacak denli akıllı olmadığı izlenimini yaratırlar. Bu son nokta çok mühimdir: Endüstri bize aptal olduğumuzu öğretmek zorundadır, zira doğal yollarla aptallık edinmeyiz. Aksine, dünyaya zeki, meraklı ve öğrenmeye hevesli varlıklar olarak geliriz. Entelektüel ve estetik kabiliyetlerimizi, yaratıcı algımızı ve dil kullanımımızı bireysel ya da kolektif olarak köreltmek ve nihayetinde söndürmek, muazzam bir zaman ve çaba gerektirir.
 

İlkel Toplumlar 2

“Bugün biliyoruz ki “ilkel” diye nitelenen, tarımı ve hayvancılığı bilmeyen ya da yalnızca ilkel bir tarımla uğraşan, kimi zaman çömlekçilik ve dokumadan da bihaber olan, esasen avcılık ve balıkçılıkla uğraşan, doğadaki şeyleri toplayarak geçinen halklar, ne açlıktan ölme korkusuna ne de düşman bir ortamda yaşamlarını sürdüremeyecekleri endişesine kapılır.

Nüfuslarının az olması, doğal kaynaklar konusundaki olağanüstü bilgileri, bizim “bolluk” demeye dilimizin pek varmayacağı bir ortamda yaşamalarını mümkün kılar. Bununla beraber –Avustralya, Güney Amerika, Melanezya ve Afrika’da yürütülen titiz çalışmaların gösterdiği üzere– aktif aile üyelerinin iki ila dört saatlik günlük çalışması, besin üretimine katılmayan çocuklar ve yaşlılar da dahil bütün ailenin geçimini sağlamaya yetiyor da artıyor bile. Çağdaşlarımızın fabrikalarda ya da bürolarda geçirdiği sürelerle arada ne büyük bir fark var, değil mi!”

**

“XIX. yüzyılda temas kurduğumuzda karşımıza çıktıkları hal için “geri kalmış” ya da “azgelişmiş” dediğimiz toplumlar düşünüldüğünde, bariz bir olguyu gözardı ediyoruz: Bu toplumlar, bizim dolaylı ya da doğrudan yollardan sebep olduğumuz sarsıntı ve çalkantılardan sağ çıkabilmiş, kolu kanadı kırık kalıntılardan başka bir şey değildir. Zira Batı dünyasının gelişmesine imkân veren şey, XVI-XIX. yüzyıllar arasında egzotik diyarların ve buralarda yaşayan halkların sömürülmesi olmuştur. Azgelişmiş denen toplumlar ile sanayi uygarlığı arasındaki yabancılık ilişkisi öncelikle şu noktaya dayanır: Sanayi uygarlığı, söz konusu toplumlarda kendi eserini görür... – ama bir türlü kabul edemediği olumsuz bir kılıkta.”

**
“Sanayi sosyolojisi uzmanları, işlerin parsellenmesini ve basitleşmesini, çalışma inisiyatifinin yitimini, üreticinin ürettiği şeyden uzaklaşmasını dayatan nesnel üretim ile, çalışana kendi kişiliğini ve yaratma arzusunu ifade etme imkânı veren öznel üretim arasındaki çelişkiyi ortaya seriyorlar. Tek bir örnek verecek olursam; bir Melanezyalı toplumsal kurallar yüzünden kızkardeşinin ev işleriyle ilgilenmeye mecbur olduğunda ya da bahçesinde yetiştirdiği tatlı patateslerin boyu uğruna tarım tanrılarıyla iyi geçindiğini kanıtlamaya çalıştığında, teknik, kültürel, toplumsal, dinsel kaygıların hepsiyle birden hareket ediyordur.

İktisatçı –olur a– unuttuğunda antropoloğun hatırlattığı şudur: İnsan sürekli daha fazla üretmeye teşvik edilemez. Çalışırken, aynı zamanda doğasının derinlerine kök salmış birtakım arzuları tatmin etmeye de uğraşır: Birey olarak kendini gerçekleştirmeye, nesnelere damgasını vurmaya, çalışmaları aracılığıyla öznelliğine bir nesnellik kazandırmaya gayret eder.

İlkel denen toplumlar işte bu bakımlardan bize örnek olabilirler. Bu toplumlar, üretilen zenginlikleri ahlaki ve toplumsal değerlere dönüştürmeyi amaçlayan ilkeleri temel alırlar: Bir işte şahsen başarı elde etmek, akrabalara ve komşulara saygı göstermek, ahlaki ve toplumsal açıdan itibar kazanmak, insan ile doğa ve doğaüstü dünya arasında uyum kurmak. Antropolojik araştırmalar, insan doğasının bu farklı unsurları arasında uyum kurulması gerekliliğini daha iyi anlamamıza yardımcı olur. Ayrıca sanayi uygarlığının bu uyumu yok etmeye yöneldiği her yerde, antropoloji bizleri uyarabilir ve uyumu tekrar kazanmak için izlenecek yolları gösterebilir.”

**
“Bu toplumların gelişmeye ve sanayileşmeye gösterdiği direncin sebeplerini açıklamak için, içlerinden bir kısmının rekabetten uzak olduğuna gönderme yapılmıştır. Gelgelelim şunu unutmamalıyız ki bu toplumlarda eleştirdiğimiz pasiflik ve kayıtsızlık, en baştan beri mevcut olan bir durum değil, temasın akabinde ortaya çıkan travmanın sonucudur. Ayrıca bize bir kusur ve noksan gibi gelen birtakım şeyler, insanlar ile dünya arasındaki bağlara dair özgün bir tasavvurun ürünü olabilir pekâlâ. Bir örnekle açıklayayım: Yeni Gine’nin iç kısımlarında yaşayan halklar misyonerlerin futbol oynadığını görüp, bu oyunu büyük bir hevesle benimsemişlerdi. Ama iki takımdan birinin galibiyeti yerine iki takımın da galibiyet ve mağlubiyet sayısı eşit oluncaya kadar maç yapmaya devam ediyorlardı. Oyun bizdeki gibi, bir taraf galip gelince değil, iki tarafın da mağlup olmadığı kesinleşince sona eriyordu.”

What if Sociologists Had as Much Influence as Economists?

Walk half a city block in downtown Washington, and there is a good chance that you will pass an economist. People with advanced training in the field shape policy on subjects as varied as how health care is provided, broadcast licenses auctioned or air pollution regulated.

Turn on cable news, and the guests who opine on the weighty public policy questions of the day quite often have some title like “chief economist” underneath their name. And there are economists sprinkled throughout the government — there is an entire council of them advising the president in most administrations, if not yet in this one.

But as much as we love economics here — this column is named Economic View, after all — there just may be a downside to this one academic discipline having such primacy in shaping public policy.

They say when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And the risk is that when every policy adviser is an economist, every problem looks like inadequate per-capita gross domestic product.

Another academic discipline may not have the ear of presidents but may actually do a better job of explaining what has gone wrong in large swaths of the United States and other advanced nations in recent years.

Sociologists spend their careers trying to understand how societies work. And some of the most pressing problems in big chunks of the United States may show up in economic data as low employment levels and stagnant wages but are also evident in elevated rates of depression, drug addiction and premature death. In other words, economics is only a piece of a broader, societal problem. So maybe the people who study just that could be worth listening to.

“Once economists have the ears of people in Washington, they convince them that the only questions worth asking are the questions that economists are equipped to answer,” said Michèle Lamont, a Harvard sociologist and president of the American Sociological Association. “That’s not to take anything away from what they do. It’s just that many of the answers they give are very partial.”

--
For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward exchange of labor for money, a wide body of sociological research shows how tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity.

--
And trying to solve social problems is a more complex undertaking than working to improve economic outcomes. It’s relatively clear how a change in tax policy or an adjustment to interest rates can make the economy grow faster or slower. It’s less obvious what, if anything, government can do to change forces that are driven by the human psyche.

But there is a risk that there is something of a vicious cycle at work. “When no one asks us for advice, there’s no incentive to become a policy field,” Professor Gans said.

It may be true that these lessons on identity and community don’t lend themselves immediately to policy white papers and five-point plans. But a deeper understanding of them sure could help policy makers.

By Neil Irwin, www.nytimes.com

Capitalism

Most capitalists would probably dislike the title of religion, but as religions go, capitalism can at least hold its head high. Unlike other religions that promise us a pie in the sky, capitalism promises miracles here on earth – and sometimes even provides them. Much of the credit for overcoming famine and plague belongs to the ardent capitalist faith in growth. Capitalism even deserves some kudos for reducing human violence and increasing tolerance and cooperation. As the next chapter explains, there are additional factors at play here, but capitalism did make an important contribution to global harmony by encouraging people to stop viewing the economy as a zero-sum game, in which your profit is my loss, and instead see it as a win–win situation, in which your profit is also my profit. This has probably helped global harmony far more than centuries of Christian preaching about loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek. 

**

From its belief in the supreme value of growth, capitalism deduces its number one commandment: thou shalt invest thy profits in increasing growth. For most of history princes and priests wasted their profits on flamboyant carnivals, sumptuous palaces and unnecessary wars. Alternatively, they put gold coins in an iron chest, sealed it and buried it in a dungeon. Today, devout capitalists use their profits to hire new employees, enlarge the factory or develop a new product.
If they don’t know how to do it themselves, they give their money to somebody who does, such as bankers and venture capitalists. The latter lend the money to various entrepreneurs. Farmers take loans to plant new wheat fields, contractors build new houses, energy corporations explore new oil fields, and arms factories develop new weapons. The profits from all these activities enable the entrepreneurs to repay the loans with interest. We now have not only more wheat, houses, oil and weapons – but also more money, which the banks and funds can again lend. This wheel will never stop, at least not according to capitalism. We will never reach a moment when capitalism says: ‘That’s it. You have grown enough. You can now take it easy.’ If you want to know why the capitalist wheel is unlikely ever to stop, talk for an hour with a friend who has just earned $100,000 and wonders what to do with it.

‘The banks offer such low interest rates,’ he would complain. ‘I don’t want to put my money in a savings account that pays hardly 0.5 per cent a year. You can make perhaps 2 per cent in government bonds. My cousin Richie bought a flat in Seattle last year, and he has already made 20 per cent on his investment! Maybe I should go into real estate too; but everybody is saying there’s a new real-estate bubble. So what do you think about the stock exchange? A friend told me the best deal these days is to buy an ETF that follows emerging economies, like Brazil or  China.’ As he stops for a moment to breathe, you ask, ‘Well, why not just be satisfied with your $100,000?’ He will explain to you better than I can why capitalism will never stop. 

How did Capitalism Defeat Communism?

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, you can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but you won’t get an Apple or a Wikipedia.

There is a story (probably apocryphal, like most good stories) that when Mikhail Gorbachev tried to resuscitate the moribund Soviet economy, he sent one of his chief aids to London to find out what Thatcherism was all about, and how a capitalist system actually functioned. The hosts took their Soviet visitor on a tour of the City, of the London stock exchange and of the London School of Economics, where he had lengthy talks with bank managers, entrepreneurs and professors. After a few hours, the Soviet expert burst out: ‘Just one moment, please. Forget about all these complicated economic theories. We have been going back and forth across London for a whole day now, and there’s one thing I cannot understand. Back in Moscow, our finest minds are working on the bread supply system, and yet there are such long queues in every bakery and grocery store. Here in London live millions of people, and we have passed today in front of many shops and supermarkets, yet I haven’t seen a single bread queue. Please take me to meet the person in charge of supplying bread to London. I must learn his secret.’ The hosts scratched their heads, thought for a moment, and said: ‘Nobody is in charge of supplying bread to London.’

That’s the capitalist secret of success. No central processing unit monopolises all the data on the London bread supply. The information flows freely between millions of consumers and producers, bakers and tycoons, farmers and scientists. Market forces determine the price of bread, the number of loaves baked each day and the research-and-development priorities. If market forces make the wrong decision, they soon correct themselves, or so capitalists believe. For our current purposes, it doesn’t matter whether the theory is correct. The crucial thing is that the theory understands economics in terms of data processing.

Humanism: Think for Yourself

In the Middle Ages, guilds controlled the production process, leaving little room for the initiative or taste of individual artisans and customers. The carpenters’ guild determined what was a good chair, the bakers’ guild defined good bread, and the Meistersinger guild decided which songs were first class and which were rubbish. Meanwhile princes and city councils regulated salaries and prices, occasionally forcing people to buy fixed amounts of goods at a non-negotiable price. In the modern free market, all these guilds, councils and princes have been superseded by a new supreme authority – the free will of the customer.

Suppose Toyota decides to produce the perfect car. It sets up a committee of experts from various fields: it hires the best engineers and designers, brings together the finest physicists and economists, and even consults with several sociologists and psychologists. To be on the safe side, they throw in a Nobel laureate or two, an Oscar-winning actress and some world-famous artists. After five years of research and development, they unveil the perfect car. Millions of vehicles are produced, and shipped to car agencies across the world. Yet nobody buys the car. Does it mean that the customers are making a mistake, and that they don’t know what’s good for them? No. In a free market, the customer is always right. If customers don’t want it, it means that it is not a good car. It doesn’t matter if all the university professors and all the priests and mullahs cry out from every pulpit that this is a wonderful car – if the customers reject it, it is a bad car. Nobody has the authority to tell customers that they are wrong, and heaven forbid that a government would try to force citizens to buy a particular car against their will.

What’s true of cars is true of all other products. Listen, for example, to Professor Leif Andersson from the University of Uppsala. He specialises in the genetic enhancement of farm animals, in order to create faster-growing pigs, dairy cows that produce more milk, and chickens with extra meat on their bones. In an interview for the newspaper Haaretz, reporter Naomi Darom confronted Andersson with the fact that such genetic manipulations might cause much suffering to the animals. Already today ‘enhanced’ dairy cows have such heavy udders that they can barely walk, while ‘upgraded’ chickens cannot even stand up. Professor Andersson had a firm answer: 

‘Everything comes back to the individual customer and to the question how much the customer is willing to pay for meat . . . we must remember that it would be impossible to maintain current levels of global meat consumption without the [enhanced] modern chicken . . . if customers ask us only for the cheapest meat possible – that’s what the customers will get . . . Customers need to decide what is most important to them – price, or something else.’

Professor Andersson can go to sleep at night with a clean conscience. The fact that customers are buying his enhanced animal products implies that he is meeting their needs and desires and is therefore doing good. By the same logic, if some multinational corporation wants to know whether it lives up to its ‘Don’t be evil’ motto, it need only take a look at its bottom line. If it makes loads of money, it means that millions of people like its products, which implies that it is a force for good. If someone objects and says that people might make the wrong choice, he will be quickly reminded that the customer is always right, and that human feelings are the source of all meaning and authority. If millions of people freely choose to buy the company’s products, who are you to tell them that they are wrong?

Finally, the rise of humanist ideas has revolutionised the educational system too. In the Middle Ages the source of all meaning and authority was external, hence education focused on instilling obedience, memorising scriptures and studying ancient traditions. Teachers presented pupils with a question, and the pupils had to remember how Aristotle, King Solomon or St Thomas Aquinas answered it.

In contrast, modern humanist education believes in teaching students to think for themselves. It is good to know what Aristotle, Solomon and Aquinas thought about politics, art and economics; yet since the supreme source of meaning and authority lies within ourselves, it is far more important to know what you think about these matters. Ask a teacher – whether in kindergarten, school or college – what she is trying to teach. ‘Well,’ she will answer, ‘I teach the kids history, or quantum physics, or art – but above all I try to teach them to think for themselves.’ It may not always succeed, but that is what humanist education seeks to do.

Capitalist Faith!

Nowadays it is generally accepted that some version of free-market capitalism is a much more efficient way of ensuring long-term growth, hence rich farmers and freedom of expression are protected, but ecological habitats, social structures and traditional values that stand in the way of free-market capitalism are destroyed and dismantled.

Take, for example, a software engineer making $250 per hour working for some hi-tech start-up. One day her elderly father has a stroke. He now needs help with shopping, cooking and even showering. She could move her father to her own house, leave home later in the morning, come back earlier in the evening and take care of her father personally. Both her income and the start-up’s productivity would suffer, but her father would enjoy the care of a respectful and loving daughter. Alternatively, the engineer could hire a Mexican carer who, for $25 per hour, would live with the father and provide for all his needs. That would mean business as usual for the engineer and her start-up, and even the carer and the Mexican economy would benefit. What should the engineer do?

Free-market capitalism has a firm answer. If economic growth demands that we loosen family bonds, encourage people to live away from their parents, and import carers from the other side of the world – so be it. This answer, however, involves an ethical judgement rather than a factual statement. No doubt, when some people specialise in software engineering while others spend their time taking care of the elderly, we can produce more software and give old people more professional care. Yet is economic growth more important than family bonds? By daring to make such ethical judgements, free-market capitalism has crossed the border from the land of science to that of religion.

Most capitalists would probably dislike the title of religion, but as religions go, capitalism can at least hold its head high. Unlike other religions that promise us a pie in the sky, capitalism promises miracles here on earth – and sometimes even provides them. Much of the credit for overcoming famine and plague belongs to the ardent capitalist faith in growth. Capitalism even deserves some kudos for reducing human violence and increasing tolerance and cooperation. As the next chapter explains, there are additional factors at play here, but “capitalism did make an important contribution to global harmony by encouraging people to stop viewing the economy as a zero-sum game, in which your profit is my loss, and instead see it as a win–win situation, in which your profit is also my profit. This has probably helped global harmony far more than centuries of Christian preaching about loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek.

From its belief in the supreme value of growth, capitalism deduces its number one commandment: thou shalt invest thy profits in increasing growth. For most of history princes and priests wasted their profits on flamboyant carnivals, sumptuous palaces and unnecessary wars. Alternatively, they put gold coins in an iron chest, sealed it and buried it in a dungeon. Today, devout capitalists use their profits to hire new employees, enlarge the factory or develop a new product.

If they don’t know how to do it themselves, they give their money to somebody who does, such as bankers and venture capitalists. The latter lend the money to various entrepreneurs. Farmers take loans to plant new wheat fields, contractors build new houses, energy corporations explore new oil fields, and arms factories develop new weapons. The profits from all these activities enable the entrepreneurs to repay the loans with interest. We now have not only more wheat, houses, oil and weapons – but also more money, which the banks and funds can again lend. This wheel will never stop, at least not according to capitalism. We will never reach a moment when capitalism says: ‘That’s it. You have grown enough. You can now take it easy.’ If you want to know why the capitalist wheel is unlikely ever to stop, talk for an hour with a friend who has just earned $100,000 and wonders what to do with it.

‘The banks offer such low interest rates,’ he would complain. ‘I don’t want to put my money in a savings account that pays hardly 0.5 per cent a year. You can make perhaps 2 per cent in government bonds. My cousin Richie bought a flat in Seattle last year, and he has already made 20 per cent on his investment! Maybe I should go into real estate too; but everybody is saying there’s a new real-estate bubble. So what do you think about the stock exchange?  A friend told me the best deal these days is to buy an ETF that follows emerging economies, like Brazil or China.’ As he stops for a moment to breathe, you ask, ‘Well, why not just be satisfied with your $100,000?’ He will explain to you better than I can why capitalism will never stop.