Social production of moral indifference - 11b

William Golding’s widely read book, The Lord of the Flies, is supposed to be the unwitting inspiration behind a popular entertainment genre on television today: reality TV. The premise of so-called reality shows, is that human beings, when left to their own devices, behave like beasts. ‘I read and re-read Lord of the Flies,’ divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview. ‘I read it first when I was about twelve, again when I was about twenty and again when I was thirty and since we did the programme as well.’

Apparently, reality shows help us to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. And 'getting  real' means to behave nastily towards each other. But behind the scenes of programmes like these, candidates are maipulated in subtle ways to bring out the worst in them. In the article, 5 Ways You Don't Realize Reality Shows Lie, one kid who paticipated in a reality show called 'Kid Nation' describes his experience.

The idea in the show was that these children would be left alone to run an abandoned town in the New Mexico desert, to hopefully disastrous results. Everyone who showed up fit into some archetype -- there were kids there who looked like they'd come from the inner city, kids with cowboy hats. 'Everybody had a broad, stereotypical role to play, and once the cameras rolled, the kids were all happy to go along with it. . . . even children know to self-censor and come up with their own bits to make themselves more interesting. We all want attention . . .'

Periodically the TV bosses would find that the kids were getting along too well, and they'd have to induce something for them to fight over. But things often did not pan out the way the makers of the show wanted despite all of the attempts at manipulation. Where most reality shows like to boil everything down to just the worst of the worst behavior, that wasn't true of the smallest children on the show who actually came off much better than the reality. Where they couldn't manufacture real conflict among the group, they would try fudge things so the 'What Happens and What Airs Are Very Different'.

You could say: What does it really matter? We all know it’s just entertainment. Stories are not something you watch and forget. When you keep watching such stories, you might forget their specifics but their basic premise of disageable humans seeps into your mind. Studies have shown that such television shows can make people more aggressive. In children, the correlation between seeing violent images and aggression in adulthood is stronger than the correlation between asbestos and cancer, or between calcium intake and bone mass.

There are two opposing forces inside us: one good and one evil. What plays a pivotal role in making us see greed and selfishness everywhere is the daily news, soaps and reality shows on TV which so many of us are addicted to. Cynical stories have a marked effect on the way we look at the world. In Britain, another study demonstrated that girls who watch more reality TV also more often say that being mean and telling lies are necessary to get ahead in life. As the journalist and documentary film maker Richard Curtis says:

‘If you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years – something that has happened probably once in history – it’s called searingly realistic analysis of society. 

If I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.

’At the heart of Lord of the Flies is a thought experiment: What are people like if you put them in a context in which civilization is stripped away, leaving them to behave in their natural state? Absent, in Golding’s terms, “the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law,” what do people do? For many, answers to such thought experiments reveal Machiavellian assumptions about human nature: that free of the structures and strictures of society, our base and violent tendencies spring forth. This is the view that T.V. programs promote. 

The real Lord of the Flies happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months on a deserted island near Tonga in 1965 with few resources and no adult supervision. It turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, Lord of the Flies. It a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. But the real-life story is forgotten while the fiction is widely read and hailed as an accurate depiction of reality.

George Orwell said, 'All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.' And where do they get their ideas from? In On killing : the psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society, Dave Grossman also blames the media for perpetuating the myth of easy killing and have thereby become ‘part of society's unspoken conspiracy of deception that glorifies killing and war’. It gives very superficial insights concerning the nature of killing and war. 

Grossman points out that young people see on television or at the movies detailed, horrible suffering and killings. They are learning to associate this violence with their favorite soft drink, candy bar, and the close contact of their date. Firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers, are found in interactive video games. Grossman argues that this is responsible in part for the rising rate of murder and violence, especially among the young. He writes:

We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the infliction of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.'

There is a Native American parable about a debate between two wolves that takes place inside everybody. One is evil, representing  annger, envy, greed, arrogance, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good,  representing love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth and compassion. Which wolf will win? The one you feed. The media - especially visual and social media - feed the evil wolf. By cutting off his food supply, you will use your energy and resources on thoughts, feelings, and emotions that serve you in healthy ways. 

Social production of moral indifference - 11a

‘[He] who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour.’ - Media scientist George Gerbner

Somebody once wrote on the idea of innate aggressiveness and war in humans, “you can’t kill a bad idea.” He was probably right. The common public perception of Darwinian evolution is as a process that is always “red in tooth and claw”. This view is often promoted by mass media hype which concentrates on our battles and the negativity. Occasional reports about our goodness and kindness usually comes at the end of news broadcasts. Watching the news regularly will give you the impression that humans were born to be destructive, violent, and antagonistic. 

Aggression and violence are emotions that easily attract attention and stay in the brain. Positive experiences and emotions rarely stick to the brain to the same extent nor do they receive the same attention in the popular media. We should remember, however, that cheating, corruption, and murder make the news because they are relatively rare. As the phrase “common decency,” suggests, prosocial behaviour is so common we tend not to notice it. We should not forget that Adam Smith argued that just as important as self-interest is the human passion of sympathy, what he called “fellow-feeling.”

Many think that an engaged citizen should follow the news closely. They think that keeping a close eye on diverse  news outlets and following the tweets and Facebook posts of many political figures is a sign of intelligence. I think it is the opposite. The news, according to many studies, is a mental health hazard. Too much of the news is filled with PR-inserted nonsense. Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. People who follow the news regularly are more likely to agree with statements such as ‘Most people care only about themselves.’ Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. 

We overestimate our own capacity for truly independent thought. In most areas of life, we necessarily rely on others for the presentation of facts and ultimately choose between manufactured alternatives. The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul, a French philosopher,  argued that it is only the disconnected — rural dwellers or the urban poor — who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate. He wrote of the individual: 

If he is a propagandee, it is because he wants to be, for he is ready to buy a paper, go to the movies, pay for a radio or TV set. Of course, he does not buy these in order to be propagandized — his motivations are more complex. But in doing these things he must know that he opens the door to propaganda. 

There is a persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish, aggressive and quick to panic. But, contrary to what we normally see in the movies, there’s never total mayhem when a disaster hits a city.  Whether it is cities being bombed or struck by natural disasters, people don’t go into shock, they stay calm and spring into action. There is often a marked fall in crime and other forms of antisocial behaviour. The picture we’re fed by the media is consistently the opposite of what happens when disaster strikes. Rutger Bregman writes in Humankind: A Hopeful History:

‘My own impression,’ writes Rebecca Solnit, whose book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) gives a masterful account of Katrina’s aftermath, ‘is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image.’ Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.

We tend to think that when people take decisions after discussing an issue in a group, an 'average' of the group view emerges. But this is not what happens. People take more extreme views when in a group rather than when they are alone, a phenomenon known as group polarization. Many studies from different parts of the world have shown the phenomenon of group polarization in action. For example, after a group discussion, people already supportive of a war become more supportive, people with an initial tendency towards racism become more racist. 

This phenomenon also occurs in online discussion. Algorithm driven programs popularize more extreme views. People with more extreme views are more likely to express their feelings through clicks, likes and postings than moderates. Over time, the algorithm figures out which box you fit into and tailors suitable results towards you. (It will be called 'enhancing user experience'.) Moderates will give a lot fewer data points for the algorithm to work with and so the targeting will be less precise.

The people behind Facebook, Twitter and Google know what shocks and horrifies you and that this is what makes you click. They know how to grab your attention and hold it so they can serve you the most lucrative helping of personalised ads. ‘Nice’ doesn’t sell ads. And so they keep offering us ever more sensational clickbait, knowing full well, as a Swiss novelist once quipped, that ‘News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.’ Umberto Eco criticised social networks, saying for example that 

"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots."

Google ranks pages according to the number of links they get and they proclaim that their search results show that ‘democracy on the web works’. But some have the resources to generate more links, perhaps by paying influential sites  to link to them. As Google learns more about our search histories, and customizes the search results through its estimation of our interests, we will increasingly find ourselves in a bubble. You will never encounter the unexpected, the different, the ‘Other’. You will only get information that fits your prior beliefs. So although information has been made available to everyone in theory, walls get built up in practice.

We need to be extremely vigilant about the influence of the media,  Most of us have very little idea how easily the words and images of television, film, and popular music drop into the depths of the mind. We have grown so accustomed to the illusions of film and television that we forget just how powerful they are. They hold us spellbound in a kind of willing suspension of the world in which we really live.

Social production of moral indifference - 10b

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis says that by denying that values are real or that sentiments can be reasonable, modern education saps moral motivation and robs people of the ability to respond emotionally to experiences of real goodness. He holds that  the true purpose of education is higher than work or skill: it is wisdom. He believed that unless students were shown how to understand the proper way to feel toward virtue and vice, we risk committing cultural and societal suicide.

If we prevent children from ever feeling shame over wrongdoing, we encourage shamelessness. Indeed, the logical end of a world in which negative emotions are not allowed to signal error is a world in which error is excused, permitted, and expansive — in other words: chaos. 

Rather than education seeking to improve young people by both increasing their stock of facts and improving the sensitivity of their sentiments, students began to be tutored in facts alone. This shift was thought to benefit youth, protecting them from the emotional sway of propaganda. But Lewis argues that not only did dropping an education in and emphasis on sentiment fail to provide this protective effect (and in fact made students more susceptible to hype and disinformation), it deadened their capacity for virtue and human excellence.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. . . a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

What Lewis is saying is that young people have a tendency to be apathetic or cynical or complacent anyway. You only magnify this cynicism by telling them that all value and emotion is subjective and that absolute truths do not exist. Being subjected to the endless rubbishing of ideals imparts to young people a smug “pleasure in their own knowingness”. By doing this, you create a vacuum that is actually more vulnerable to being filled by advertising and propaganda. A man with a well developed sentiment for an ideal, a real love for something, does not fall prey to the enticements of advertising. 

Emotional sentiment not only functions as a defence against negative propaganda, but acts as a catalyst for “offensive” activity. As Lewis argues, dry rationality alone can never be a sufficient spur to positive action. It is not recognized that pursuing the simple virtues may not be welcomed by authority and power. Mainstream schooling is designed to make us all conformists and harmless  citizens.  Courage doesn’t have to look dramatic or fearless. Sometimes it looks more like quiet perseverance.

Gandhi said that education had made a 'fetish' of the knowledge of letters and ignored completely the ethical dimension, cultivating instead 'the pretension of learning many sciences'. One recent article, for example, proclaimed in true MBA style,  “Whether we like it or not, colleges and universities are a business. They sell education to customers….While the typical for-profit firm tries to maximize its profit, non-profit universities generally try to maximize their endowments or operating revenue…”.

In Small is Beautiful, E. F. Schumacher writes about the terms 'divergent' and 'convergent' to distinguish between problems which cannot be solved by logical reasoning from those that can. Life consists of solving divergent problems which have to be 'lived'. The true problems of living - in politics, economics, education, marriage, etc. - are always problems of overcoming or reconciling opposites. They are divergent problems and have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word. 

They force people to bring love, beauty,  goodness, and truth into their lives. It is only with the help of these higher forces that the opposites,  that are an inevitable part of divergent problems,  can be reconciled in real life situations. These are problems that cannot be soled by employing reason alone. To have to grapple with divergent problems tends to be exhausting, worrying, and wearisome. Hence people try to avoid them and to run away from them. 

Convergent problems on the other hand do not exist in reality but are created by a process of abstraction. The solution can be written down and passed on to others, who can apply them without needing to reproduce the mental effort necessary to find them. Convergent problems may even require difficult brainwork, but they do not call for straining to a higher level which is the specific challenge of a divergent problem.  Modern education deals mostly with convergent solutions which comes with a big price - the loss of all higher forces to ennoble human Life.

Allen Shawn said, ‘Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them.' Conversion of divergent problems into convergent problems results in the degradation not only of the emotional part of our nature, but also of our intellect and moral character. Schumacher shows this tendency with an extract from Darwin's Autobiography:

'Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it', wrote Charles Darwin in his autobiography, 'poetry of many kinds ... gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. 

But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost almost any taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. ... 

The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.'

Schumacher gives an example of this phenomenon which has had negative consequences in the modern world. Keynes said, 'For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.' When great and brilliant men talk like this we cannot be surprised if people are losing the ability to distinguish between fair and foul. Schumacher writes:

That avarice, usury, and precaution (i.e. economic security) should be our gods was merely a bright idea for Keynes: he surely had nobler gods. But ideas are the most powerful things on earth, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that by now the gods he recommended have been enthroned.

Social production of moral indifference - 10a

‘School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.’ - Ivan Illich 

Much reliance is today being placed in the power of education to enable ordinary people to cope with the problems thrown up by scientific and technological progress. The modern way of life is becoming ever more complex: this means that everybody must become more highly educated.  But subjects like science and engineering produce only 'know-how'; 'know-how' is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end.  Education should mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts. As Daniel Kahneman says in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow: 

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

Many people believe that education makes people more enlightened, accepting and more humane. It’s almost like they believe that education is the saviour of the human race. If only we could learn this or that, or teach this or that, THEN all will be well in the world.  This is a fallacy. Modern education only enables wicked people to be more cunning in their wickedness. But the idea that education is what wicked people need to make them better is surprisingly common.

Educated people have caused untold miseries to large numbers of people through their fancy ideas like social Darwinism or medical procedures like frontal lobotomy. Many of the vicious, misogynist, jingoistic comments by trolls on Twitter are by college-going students. More than 95% of the causalities in riots in India have been in cities, where the majority of the educated live, and not in the villages, where the majority of the population lives. These riots are orchestrated and  directed by the educated. 

A Lancet study pointed out the disturbing possibility that recent increases in literacy and Indian per-person income might have contributed to increased selective abortion of girls. I heard in a talk by the Dalai Lama that over 200 million people were killed by violence in the last century and most of these were at the hands of educated people. Educated people seem to be more likely to drool over terrible weapons that cause immense destruction somewhere far away and over the costly ceremonials of state power. 

Many of the vicious Nazis were Germany's educated upper class, and their education did not make them more moral. In fact it was the uneducated soldiers who more often objected to the horrific orders handed down to them. Being more educated and advanced enabled us to split the atom, which was great, but it also illustrates the fact that education gives people power to magnify what they would otherwise have done: hurt (e.g. nuclear warfare) or help (e.g. nuclear energy and medical application). In The Educationist as Painkiller (pdf) ,  Neil Postman writes: 

The teaching profession, it grieves me to say, has generated dozens of . . . superstitions — for example, the belief that people with college degrees are educated, . . . For me, the most  perilous of all these superstitions is the belief, expressed in a variety of ways, that the study of literature and other humanistic subjects will result in one’s becoming a more decent, liberal, tolerant, and civilized human being. 

Whenever someone alludes to this balderdash in my presence, I try to remind myself that during the last two decades men with Ph.D.s in the humanities and social sciences, many of them working for the Pentagon, have been responsible for killing more people in any given week than the Mafia has managed since its inception.

On average, the educated and uneducated don't seem to be very different when it comes to basic human values. Knowing more about protons or perfect markets doesn't seem to help in this regard. Education merely enables people to be more resourceful in doing whatever they wanted to do anyway. People with a genuine desire to do the things that we think are  good, caring and helpful are able to do so all the more thanks to a good education. C S Lewis says in  The Abolition of Man, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” 

The first task of education should be the transmission of ideas of values. It is foolish to put great powers into the hands of people without making sure that they have a reasonable idea of what to do with them. Our mind is already filled with all sorts of ideas and this makes us  think that we know what to do with the immense power that science gives us. Thinking is generally the application of pre-existing ideas to a given situation. In modern times no importance  has been given to the study of the ideas which are used to interpret facts. In Small is Beautiful, E. F. Schumacher writes: 

Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory. In fact, many economists are themselves unaware of the fact that such a view is implicit in their teaching and that nearly all their theories would have to change if that view changed. 

Social production of moral indifference - 9b

A typical economist will tell you that if the price is sorted out, the rest will follow. But while prices matter, economists tend to overestimate the effectiveness of price as a lever, and to underestimate the role of values, sense of reciprocity, networks, and heuristics. We have to decide how to value the goods in question — health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. 

We often associate corruption with illicit payoffs to public officials. But corruption also has a broader meaning: we corrupt a good, an activity, or a social practice whenever we treat it according to a lower norm than is appropriate to it. The last few decades have witnessed the remaking of social relations in the image of market relations. One measure of this transformation is the growing use of monetary incentives to solve social problems.

That is especially true when it comes to relationships that we have traditionally managed with our morals by encouraging qualities like trustworthiness, honour, and concern for others’ welfare. Emphasizing material incentives, it turns out, does more than just change incentives. At a very deep level, it changes people. Relying too much on selfishness can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By treating people as if they should care only about their own material rewards, we ensure that they do.

Evidence from a wide range of policy initiatives raises a warning signal around introducing cash incentives in social spaces. When it comes to creating deep and lasting social and ecological behaviour change, the most effective approach is  to connect with people’s values and identity, not with their pocket and budget. Richard Titmuss first raised this concern in his 1970 book, The Gift Relationship, which contrasted the blood donor service in the US, where people  were paid for their contributions, with the far more successful service in the UK, where volunteers gave more and healthier blood for free. 

Merely mentioning market roles can crowd out our intrinsic motivation. One online survey asked participants to imagine themselves as one among four households facing a water shortage due to a drought affecting their shared well. The survey described the whole scenario in terms of ‘consumers’ to one half of the participants, and in terms of ‘individuals’ to the other half. Those labelled ‘consumers’ reported feeling less personal responsibility to take action and less trust in others to do the same than did those referred to as ‘individuals’. Simply thinking like a consumer, it seems, triggers self-regarding behaviour, and divides rather than unites groups who are facing a common scarcity. 

Another experimental survey found that university students who were invited to take part in a ‘Consumer Reaction Study’ identified more strongly with notions of wealth, status and success than did their fellow students who were merely told instead that they were participating in a ‘Citizen Reaction Study’. Markets don’t only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way.

Another example comes in the area of managing nuclear waste. For years, Switzerland had been trying to find a place to store radioactive nuclear waste. Few communities wanted nuclear waste to reside in their midst. In one location designated as a potential nuclear waste site, some economists surveyed the residents of the village, asking whether they would vote to accept a nuclear waste repository in their community, if the Swiss parliament decided to build it there. Although the facility was widely viewed as an undesirable addition to the neighbourhood, a slim majority (51 percent) of residents said they would accept it. 

Apparently their sense of civic duty outweighed their concern about the risks. Then the economists added a sweetener:  suppose parliament proposed building the nuclear waste facility in your community and offered to compensate each resident with an annual monetary payment. Then would you favour it? The result: support went down, not up. Adding the financial inducement cut the rate of acceptance in half, from 51 to 25 percent. The offer of money actually reduced people’s willingness to host the nuclear waste site. 

For many villagers, willingness to accept the nuclear waste site reflected public spirit — a recognition that the country as a whole depended on nuclear energy and that the nuclear waste had to be stored somewhere. If their community was found to be the safest storage site, they were willing to bear the burden. But, the offer of cash to residents of the village felt like a bribe, an effort to buy their vote. In fact, 83 percent of those who rejected the monetary proposal explained their opposition by saying they could not be bribed.

When the economists increased the monetary offer, even in excess of the median monthly income the result was unchanged. You might think that adding a financial incentive would simply reinforce whatever public-spirited sentiment already exists, thus increasing support for the nuclear waste site. After all, aren’t two incentives — one financial, the other civic— more powerful than one? Not necessarily. It is a mistake to assume that incentives are additive. The price effect is sometimes changed by moral considerations, including a commitment to the common good. 

We should ask if it is always necessary to maximize social  utility  regardless of the moral worth of the preferences. Economists say that they don't 'traffic in morality' but their belief in maximising utility is itself a value judgement.  You can say that it is just a question of semantics but this reflects a mindset that is increasingly prevalent. Excess of market thinking leads people to view employees as nothing more than statistics to be manipulated in order to beautify the balance sheet. 

I saw a strange statement by Larry Summers quoted in What Money Can't Buy, ‘We all have only so much altruism in us. Economists like me think of altruism as a valuable and rare good that needs conserving. Far better to conserve it by designing a system in which people's wants will be  satisfied by individuals being selfish, and saving that altruism for our families, our friends, and the many social problems in this world that markets cannot solve.’ Altruism is a 'rare good'? I have been surviving on altruism for over 24 years and have never felt that it was so rare. 

Social production of moral indifference - 9a

“Altruism, generosity, solidarity and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. ― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Markets have become detached from morals and market values are moving into areas of life where they don't belong, eg. health, education, family life, nature, civic duties, etc. A market economy is inexorably turning into a market society. Michael Sandel writes in What Money can’t Buy, ‘The difference is this: A market economy is a tool — a valuable and effective tool —for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.’ In The Market as God, Harvey Cox writes:

The latest trend in economic theory is the attempt to apply market calculations to areas that once appeared to be exempt, such as dating, family life, marital relations, and child-rearing. Henri Lepage, an enthusiastic advocate of globalization, now speaks about a "total market." . . . There seems to be nowhere left to flee from its untiring quest. Like the Hound of Heaven, it pursues us home from the mall and into the nursery and the bedroom.

It used to be thought — mistakenly, as it turns out — that at least the innermost, or "spiritual," dimension of life was resistant to The Market. . . But as the markets for material goods become increasingly glutted, such previously unmarketable states of grace as serenity and tranquillity are now appearing in the catalogues. . . Thus The Market makes available the religious benefits that once required prayer and fasting . . . 

All can now handily be bought without an unrealistic demand on one's time, in a weekend workshop at a Caribbean resort with a sensitive psychological consultant replacing the crotchety retreat master.

Markets promote certain vales and attitudes towards what is being priced. In standard economic theory, a transaction is fine if it results in some people being better off and no-one else is worse off. It assumes that putting a price on a good doesn't change the character of the good. Is this true in all situations? A growing body of research confirms that financial incentives and other market mechanisms can backfire by crowding out non-market norms. Sometimes, offering payment for a certain behaviour gets you less of it, not more. And when market norms displace social norms, the effects can be hard to reverse, as demonstrated in an experimental study in Haifa, Israel in the 1990s. 

Some child-care centres faced a familiar problem: parents sometimes came late to pick up their children. To solve this problem, the centres imposed a fine for late pickups. The parental response? Rather than arriving more promptly, twice as many parents started arriving late. Introducing the fine changed the norms. Before, parents who came late felt guilty; they were imposing an inconvenience on the teachers. Now the social norm of a moral obligation was viewed through a market lens as overtime fees. Rather than imposing on the teacher, they were simply paying him or her to work longer.

When the fine was removed, the number of late pickups rose higher still: the price had gone, but the guilt hadn’t come back. The temporary marketplace had, in essence, erased the social contract.  The price effect - when the price goes up, people buy less of a good, and when prices go down, they buy more - is generally reliable when material goods like PCs or mobile phones are being discussed. But  it is less reliable when applied to social practices governed by non-market norms. Sociologists argue that we live in two worlds, one where social norms dominate and the other where market norms dominate. 

The social norms are the actions among friends that are not based on money. For example we might help a friend move his couch without expecting any payment (in fact it would probably be rude to require payment). In contrast to the vague, unclear and implicit dealing of the social world, the market world is the opposite. Here we only deal with people who can benefit us and make us money. When social norms are involved, applying market logic often confounds expectations. Economics is about trade-offs and the trade-off between market and social norms is often ignored.

Depending on which norms we adhere to also affects our behaviour. Studies show that when people are in the social norm world, they are more likely to ask for help and help others. Whereas when people are in the market norm world, they are more self-reliant and self-focused. They are less likely to help strangers or explain things to confused fellow students. They are more likely to work alone and choose individual activities over teamwork. So when we think about money and put ourselves in the market norms world, then we behave as traditional economics expects.

Social production of moral indifference - 8

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in. - Issac Asimov 

Take an example where the assumption of self interest is commonly used - the management of the commons. The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. Unlike private property, the commons are inclusive rather than exclusive – their nature is to share ownership as widely, rather than as narrowly, as possible. For millennia, the commons constituted almost everything on earth. 

But over the past 10,000 years, much of the commons has been taken up by the market and the state. It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. The concept of the commons gained currency with a piece published in the journal Science by American biologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 called 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. Hardin used the term ‘tragedy’ in the Greek sense, to mean a regrettable but inevitable event: ‘Freedom in a commons,’ he said, ‘brings ruin to all.’

Hardin’s paper went on to become the most widely reprinted ever published in a scientific journal.  ‘[It] should be required reading for all students,’ declared an American biologist in the 1980s, ‘and, if I had my way, for all human beings.’ Hardin theorized that if each herdsman sharing a piece of common grazing land made the individually rational economic decision of increasing the number of cattle he keeps on the land, the collective effect would deplete or destroy the commons. In other words, multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen. 

Hardin was convinced that there was no way to manage communal property sustainably. At some stage it will be overgrazed and the ecosystem may fail. That risk is not borne by any individual, however, but by society as a whole. The only solution was to remove the communal aspect. Either the commons could be nationalised and managed by the state or the commons could be privatised, divided up into little parcels and handed out to individual farmers, who would then look after their own land responsibly. The idea of a communally owned resource might be appealing but it was ultimately self-defeating. 

But perhaps it was Hardin who was the one failing to think deeply enough. The logic of “The Tragedy of the Commons” worked well to frame a class of environmental problems. The problem was that Hardin generalised this model as applicable to all situations without looking at how other, similar-looking problems were being solved, again and again, by communities all over the world. This was noticed by Elinor Ostrom, an American political economist and researcher at a time when universities didn’t exactly welcome women. 

She became interested in Hardin's paper because she was convinced that it was wrong.  She  knew that there was nothing inevitable about the self-destruction of “common pool resources”, as economists call them. Hardin’s article had ignored the complexity with his assumption that all commons were in some sense the same. But they aren’t. Common pool resources could be found all over the planet, from the high meadows of Switzerland to the lobster fisheries of Maine, from forests in Sri Lanka to water in Nepal. Many of these resources had been managed sustainably without Hardin’s black-or-white solutions.

Unlike Hardin, Ostrom had little interest in theoretical models. She wanted to see how real people behave in the real world. While models do bring important insights, it is harmful to claim that models whose assumptions greatly distort the real world are adequate for real-world applications. In her book, Governing the Commons, Ostrom writes: 'The key to my argument is that some individuals have broken out of the trap inherent in the commons dilemma, whereas others continue remorsefully trapped into destroying their own resources.'

Ostrom set up a database to record examples of commons from all over the world, from shared pastures in Switzerland and cropland in Japan to communal irrigation in the Philippines and water reserves in Nepal. She conducted field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters and forests. Vincent Ostrom, Elior’s husband, had developed the idea of “polycentricity” in political science: polycentric systems have multiple, independent and overlapping sources of power and authority. By their very nature, they are messy to describe and hard to compare with each other. 

Using this idea, Elinor Ostrom showed that the use of exhaustible resources by groups of people (communities, cooperatives, trusts, trade unions) can be rational and prevent depletion of the resource without government intervention. The problem with Hardin’s logic was the assumption that communally owned land was a free-for-all. It wasn’t. The commons were owned by a community. They were managed by a community. These people were neighbours. They lived next door to each other. In time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable. 

Ostrom was able to show that the diverse solutions reflected a smaller number of design principles.  She argued that these arrangements were rarely designed or imposed from the top down; they usually evolved from the bottom up. Some of these principles were that, a community must have a minimum level of autonomy, an effective monitoring system, graduated sanctions for those who break rules; and cheap access to conflict-resolution mechanisms.  But she stressed that there’s no blueprint for success, because the characteristics of a commons are ultimately shaped by the local context.

Modern economics is founded on the assumption that self-interest automatically leads to collective wellbeing. But Ostrom's work showed that neither central planning nor laizzez fair would work in effectively managing common pool resources.  Self-interest often leads to the overexploitation of resources and other problems that make life worse for everyone, not better. When everyone acted as they pleased, there was no invisible hand to rescue the situation.  In 2009, Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. 

 ‘Social Capital’ refers to the wealth of trust and reciprocity that is created within social groups as a result of their networks of relationships. Through these groups, we build norms, rules and relations that enable us to cooperate with and depend upon one another. These connections build social cohesion and help to meet our fundamental human needs such as for participation, leisure, protection and belonging. An economy’s vibrancy depends upon the trust, norms and sense of reciprocity nurtured within society.