What You Want To Do And What You Should Do: Lockdown Edition

I was sitting around at home on a weekend day feeling dispirited and trying to figure out what to do next. Someone suggested that I might think about what I wanted to do as opposed to what I should do, and do that. Don't worry: this suggestion was socially distanced.

It sounded so plausible as advice. But I had trouble putting it into action. I had no problem coming up with things that seemed immediately appealing, but most of them were things like sleeping and snacking that I knew would make me feel more dispirited in about twenty minutes. I certainly had tasks of various kinds waiting to be performed, but those all seemed like things I should do, not things I wanted to do.

As I should have known, I could have looked to this very blog to understand the source of my confusion. I have often written here about the weirdness of the typical desire-decision matrix of western popular culture. I see it is in 2010 -- ten years ago! -- that I wrote about the lost art of desire-management -- the way we treat our desires as if they are immutable and random forces of nature instead of responsive responses to habit, social context, and our own previous choices -- and thus, things that can be directed and managed.

One of the most destructive elements of that cultural desire-decision matrix is the bifurcation that splits everything into distinct categories of pleasure-yum-love and those of obligation-task-force-yourself-to-get-on-it. Or -- as I described it in 2014 -- that there are things you want, and there are costs to getting them, and the whole question is how much you're willing to "pay" to get your preference satisfied.  

I don't know how this bifurcated perspective got so entrenched in our way of thinking, whether it's a trickle-down from formal thinking and rational choice theory, or whether it's just the metaphors of capitalism creeping in everywhere, or whether it has something to do with the neoliberal entrepreneurial self, or what. But it is not good.

Among its more disturbing aspects is that it leaves out a huge category of things crucially important: the things that are difficult, voluntary, and worthwhile. Like making art, or writing something, or learning new things, or reading what for lack of a better term I'll call literary novels. You don't have to wake up with a burning desire to practice scales to make learning to play the piano a cool and worthwhile thing to do. No one finishes breakfast and discovers they're just dying to get on with re-editing the draft of the writing thing they've been working on and not getting anywhere with.

We don't even really have a good adjective to describe the positive subjective feeling that comes with engaging with these types of activities. "Satisfying" is about as close as I can think of, but that is such an oatmeal kind of word and doesn't really capture it.

The resulting perplexity is, I think, one reason that "goal" culture has so totally come into its own in modern life. If you set a goal, then somehow you're able to communicate -- to yourself and others -- why you're doing a thing and why it feels good to do it, even when it is difficult and motivationally challenging. But for me, anyway, the idea of a "goal" distorts the whole thing. I don't write because I need a badge celebrating ten years of continuous blog writing. I write because it's -- worth doing, or satisfying, or whatever the word is that we don't have.

I feel like lockdown has raised new challenges for these complicated pleasures of life that we don't have a name for. To me, one of the small sadnesses of the culture of lockdown is that this amorphous category has somehow formed a weird locus of interpersonal antagonism. First there were the people who said "Hey, you could use this time to learn something!" Which is true. Then there were the people who said "Speak for yourself! Some of us have kids and and chores and jobs!" Which is also true. Then it was pointed out that even if you don't have other demanding obligations, lockdown is hard, so if you want to eat a cookie, just eat a cookie ffs. Which is also, of course, true. 

I'm the kind of person whose general life sadness comes from the Pointlessness of Life demon rather than the Fear and Anxiety demon. So the answer to my weekend conundrum ultimately consistent in remembering that just because I didn't want to do a thing didn't mean it wasn't worth doing, and that even in lockdown, I had to keep making myself do stuff. Just because there's a global pandemic on doesn't mean I'm off the hook for doing stuff I don't feel like doing. So -- it wasn't really what I wanted to do or what I should do but something else altogether.

As always, your mileage may vary.

Irrationality: Why Not Make It Work For You?

Sometimes I read an advice column that advises people to save money by avoiding general or monthly fees in favor of a more pay-as-you-go approach. So, for example, as I understand it a lot of people who sign up for a gym at X dollars per month then use the gym less often than they expected, to the extent that they would have been better off financially paying per visit or something like that.

I think that often this is bad advice. It assumes several things that are certainly or maybe false:  that the number of times you go to the gym doesn't depend on how you pay, that your goal is to get as much gym time for as few dollars as possible, and that you are a rational decision maker.

If you drop all those assumptions, you get a different perspective on the problem. What if you articulate your main goal as working out as much as possible without spending more than X dollars? Suddenly the monthly payment system starts to look pretty good, even if you could have saved money by doing it the other way.

The reason this difference arises, I think, is that having paid a monthly fee incentivizes you to work out, while paying per use incentivizes you not to work out. What's interesting about this is that strictly speaking, there's a sense in which being incentivized to work out by having paid a monthly fee is irrational. And yet, it's such a common and familiar feeling. And you can use it to your advantage.

The reason it's seen as irrational has to do with the "sunk cost" fallacy. According to one strand of decision-making theory, the only factors you should consider when evaluating what to do are factors that actually come into play in your decision. When it's time to decide whether to go to the gym or stay on the sofa, this system says, the only things you should be considering are the options you have and how well those options satisfy your current needs and desires. The fact that you paid a non-recoverable fee for a gym membership is irrelevant, because you can't change it: it's the same no matter what you choose.

But we know from behavioral economics and from life that this isn't how it works. Of course having paid a fixed fee, you feel you should go to the gym -- to "get your money's worth," whatever that means. You pay a fee and you don't use the gym, you feel like an idiot. So you feel you should get to the gym. The pay-per-use is almost the opposite, encouraging you to think, again, on every occasion, are these dollars maximally satisfying my happiness and well-being when I spend them on the gym? Or would ice cream be even better?

Of course, if you pay a flat fee, you may pay more than you would have paid per-use. But you may also work out more than you would have worked out had you paid-per-visit. So it really depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to go to the gym more, even though it costs a bit extra per time, then the flat fee makes total sense. You can think of it like a self-nudge: you structure your own environment to exploit your own systematic irrationalities for your own gain. A nudge without the creepier effects of being nudged by the other people, because you're doing the nudging yourself.

I do this all the time -- structuring my own environment to make my impulses draw me toward a more desirable rather than a less desirable conclusion. And I can tell you: there's a lot to be said for seeing the emotive force aspect of your self and the logical structure aspect of yourself as cooperating friends, rather than enemies at war.

The Bus Riding Experience And Living In Late Capitalism

Last weekend I went to Vernon, Connecticut to visit some family members. Vernon is kind of near East Hartford, kind of in the middle of Connecticut, which means it's like a suburb in a state that is, itself, almost like a suburb of something else. All of that to say: it's a place where transportation becomes a major issue for me.

As regular readers know, I hate to drive -- and I often take the bus. I find it exhausting to pay close attention to a high-stakes and potentially lethal activity over a sustained period of time, and I find it stressful knowing that a wrong move could cause life-changing injuries or death for other people or myself. As someone who doesn't drive a lot, I'm constantly amazed that this kind of insane activity has become so embedded in everyday life.

Anyway, for complicated reasons, when I visit Vernon I usually fly in and out of Logan Airport in Boston. This is because a bus ride between Toronto and Hartford takes around 15 hours (literally, as we say nowadays -- you can look it up), and because flying between Toronto and Hartford is complicated and expensive. Going between Logan Airport and Vernon, I face a major decision: I can drive, which is around 1 hour and 45 minutes, in some pretty intense traffic, or I can take a sort of long public transit journey involving  the Silver Line bus between Logan and South Station and a bus between South Station and Hartford.

In the past, I've usually settled myself into what seems to be everyone else's denial, that driving is a normal everyday sort of activity, and done the drive between Logan and Vernon. This time, though, I was sick with a bad cold. So on the way back, I decided to do the transit option. And for the bus between Hartford and South Station, my best option was the Megabus (the fancy Acela doesn't stop in Hartford).

I have no complaint about the Megabus itself, which left on time and arrived early. What this post is about is about the Megabus ... um ... pick up spot? Which is 1) not associated with a station 2) not associated with a street address, 3) not marked as a Megabus location, and 4) not near any normal places where you could get some water or use a bathroom.

On the ticket, the "from" location is listed as "Hartford, CT, Columbus Blvd between Morgan & Talcott St." Here is the place viewed from across the street:

And here is the view from the bus stop:

I feel like having a bus that picks you up at an unmarked location between one street and another, surrounded by freeway overpasses, is a symbol of something distinctive about modern capitalism even if I'm not sure exactly what it is. Hartford has a perfectly good bus station, one that is actually linked with the train station, and is right downtown, very convenient. So I'm assuming this arrangement arises because there are fees associating with using the terminal that Megabus wants to avoid. I'm not blaming Megabus -- they want to offer cheap fares and make money. And who knows how those fees are set? Still, the outcome seems bad, and I hate the feeling that the things poor people use get worse and the things rich people use get better.

From a governance point of view, driving is massively subsidized, even though car accidents are a major cause of death and horrible for the environment. You couldn't toss in a few bucks for a bathroom, a water fountain -- or, I'm really dreaming now -- a ticket counter for bus riders? Maybe you could even incentivize companies like Megabus to use your station, rather than charging them for it?

From a markets point of view, when I'm reflecting on these matters, I frequently find myself thinking more broadly about the market forces that shape the options I have and don't have as a consumer. I want to take a reasonably comfortable bus ride, and I am willing to pay a bit extra for that, since I am lucky in making a good salary. But that option doesn't exist for me, partly because the other people who make the money I make prefer to spend it on driving. So, to satisfy my consumer preference would require getting enough people to share it that it becomes a profitable option for someone else.

When it comes to driving and busses, I think that project is a lost cause. Nobody likes to take the bus. In enjoying a ride of kicking back, with my podcasts and playlists, daydreaming out the window without a care in the world, I see to be in a tiny minority.

I Went Down The Ethical Cell Phone Rabbit Hole

Fairphone: modularity FTW.

I want a new phone. I don't need a new phone. I have a perfectly serviceable iPhone 6 that is about two and a half years old. But I never liked my iPhone 6. It's too big for me: I can't use it with one hand, which drives me crazy when I'm using it to read a book or when I'm trying to keep one hand in my pocket because it's freezing outside. When I got it, they hadn't had the brainstorm of the iPhone SE normal-size-phone concept. I also want a new phone because, like everyone else, I am a cog in the consumer paradise machine we are all caught up in.

I know that getting a new phone would be ridiculous along several dimensions. The most obvious is the negative impact that new phones have on the world. Some of these are obvious environmental impacts. But there are also issues related to conflict mines, where profits from minerals fund violence and war, children are working in dangerous conditions, workers sometimes handle toxic chemicals in contexts where workers have few protections. These latter impacts are negative impacts directly on people.

I often think about electronic gadget production when I'm teaching about theories of ownership in philosophy class. In one theory, ownership is historical. You have a right to what you get through voluntary exchanges, and the state of wealth distribution is just when it arises out of such exchanges. When exchanges are unjust -- through slavery or coercion or stealing or whatever -- the just distribution is the one that would have resulted had those injustices not happened.

As we've discussed before, it seems that if you take this literally, you'd end up with some dramatic conclusions, like the obligation for all non-Indigenous people to leave North America. But there are also smaller questions, like what about your phone?

I got my phone by paying for it in a voluntary transaction, but if you trace all the elements of the phone back, you get slavery and coercion and all the other things. What would it mean to truly own your phone under this theory of ownership?

Thinking about all this, I decided to see if there was an ethical phone available. I searched (with Duck Duck Go!) for "ethical cell phone." I found a lot of bad news, but I also found a phone. The "Fairphone." The Fairphone is an "ethical, modular smartphone." It's modular so that when it breaks, you can fix it easily, and use it longer, and recycle the parts. It's "ethical" in the sense of the supply chain and worker conditions. 

The complexity of the phone situation really comes to light when you see how many challenges Fairphone encounters. According to this article, they have sourced four out of thirty minerals in an ethical way. There is still child labor in the supply chain, because they get some minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Tin mining is still hugely environmentally destructive, even when done in a better way. The article concludes that Fairphone is making great progress, but still the concept of "ethical smartphone" is an oxymoron.

I probably wouldn't love the Fairphone. It's not a very attractive object, which is not surprising given that there's no Jonathan Ive equivalent hovering over everyone insisting on beauty. But whatever. It doesn't matter, because, surprise, surprise! the Fairphone doesn't even exist in North America. It's only available for Europeans.

Obviously, the thing to do is to not get a new phone. Compared to a lot of people, I don't even use my phone that much, so it's a testament to the power of advertising and consumerism that I'm even finding that any kind of challenge.

Can The Pursuit Of Pleasure Be An Addiction If It's Also Normal Human Life?

When I saw this headline -- "The pursuit of pleasure is a modern-day addiction -- I thought the piece might be some kind of joke or parody.

I mean, I know some people have expanded the scope of "addition" so that it includes things like shopping and carbohydrates, and I know other people can get agitated about that expansion, as if it implies that a chocolate habit and a cocaine habit are somehow on a par. But at least shopping and carbohydrates are actual specific things. And there's no question that these things can be "addictive" in the sense that the more you get the get the more you want.

But pleasure? I mean, that's not a thing you do or ingest, it's more a part of the human experience. How can you be addicted to a part of the human experience? Plus, isn't pleasure the mechanism through which those other things become so habit-forming? What does it mean to reduce the addiction to the very mechanism that makes them work?

I'm no expert on human psychobiology, but isn't pleasure supposed to be one of the main motivating forces of life? Isn't the pursuit of pleasure one of the central reasons people do things? How could it also be a pathological addiction?

And finally, what's a life without pleasure? The author of the piece, Robert Lustig is famous for his view that sugar is a poison. So is the idea that anything pleasurable is also bad? So .. even healthy food shouldn't be consumed because it is enjoyable to eat? WTF?

When I read the piece, it didn't seem quite as absurd as I thought it would be. When you get past the headline, there are more specific examples of ways in which particular pleasures are out of control. A fondness for soda leads to the "big gulp"; the love of likes leads to chronic Instagram checking. Constant stress and anxiety create the backdrop in which we're in constant need of the feel good chemicals in our brain, just to feel OK. To get the feel good chemicals, we do more and more of the "pleasure things," and get less and less out of them, and so on and so on. I guess you could describe that as being addicted to pleasure.

As regular readers of this blog may expect, I can never read things like this without thinking of the ways that these effects are sort of built into the whole capitalist system. What's more successful in capitalism than a commodity that the more people have of them the more they want? Armies of food technologists work day and night to bring about exactly this state of affairs. Whole university departments exist to train people how to do it. How is it surprising that this is where we've ended up?

Later in the essay, Lustig goes back to the more general idea that somehow it's pleasure itself that is the problem, and there he says that to live the right way we should seek "happiness" rather than pleasure. It's funny, because I was just getting ready to teach Mill, and we were going to talk about his "greatest happiness principle" where he says that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.  By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness pain, and the privation of pleasure.” So maybe Mill things happiness and pleasure are the same, or at least that he thinks we can use the words interchangeably. On the other hand, Mill famously distinguished between "higher" and "lower" pleasures so who knows.

Lustig says that "the more pleasure you seek, the more unhappy you get and the more likelihood you will slide into addiction or depression" and that "our ability to perceive happiness has been sabotaged by our modern incessant quest for pleasure, which our consumer culture has made all too easy to satisfy."

I see what he's getting at, but there seems to me something strange about the formulation. People have always sought pleasure, haven't they? So it's the world that's changing, not human nature. It seems to me like we just have a lot more easy sources of pleasure. As we've long said on this blog, easy sources of pleasure are difficult for humans: you think you want treats, but by definition a treat is a thing you don't get all the time. So.. how do you keep it in check? Before you know it, it you've cascaded into a misery of self-denial, living both as tyrant and supplicant, begging yourself for those treats that you yourself decided you can't have too much of.

But again, I think people have always been like that. It's OK to love pleasure. It's our modern surroundings that are the problem, not us.

Gutting The Social Commentary Of Opera: The Case Of The Marriage Of Figaro

From the COC production.

 Over the weekend, I went to see Mozart's Marriage of Figaro at the COC. It is an amazing opera, dealing with sex, love, and the fickle nature of the human heart. It's also about class, gender, power, and the relics of the feudal system in the eighteenth century -- but unfortunately you wouldn't know that from the staging of the COC production.

Do you know the story? It's the eighteenth century,  and the Count's loyal servant Figaro is about to marry the lovely Susanna, the Countess's maid. The Count is bored with his wife the Countess, whom he once loved passionately. He not only flirts with his more attractive female underlings, he also abuses his position of power to badger and coerce them into reciprocating his sexual attentions.

Even though the Count says he is all about abolishing "feudal privilege," in fact he is plotting and scheming to prevent the marriage so he can have Susanna all to himself. Through plotting and scheming of their own, Susanna, the Countess, and Figaro subvert his plans, and make a fool out of him.

Like so many works of artistic genius, the opera works along multiple dimensions. It's a comedy, with ridiculous disguises, mistaken identities, people hiding behind curtains, that sort of thing. It's also a love story, with all the modern rom-com conventions. And, on top of all that, it's a social commentary.

One of the more interesting social commentary aspects is reflection on the "sexual double standard." Why does the Count get to fool around with impunity, while his wife's briefest admiring glance brings censure and rage? Yes -- it turns out that people have actually been thinking about this problem for over two hundred years.

But the main social commentary has to do with power. The Count gets to do whatever he wants, because -- well, because he's the Count. If this includes sex with Susanna -- well, what are Figaro and Susanna going to do? They're servants. They're under his orders and under his protection. It's not like they can up and leave, wander the countryside for other options.

The opera takes you to the brink of horror -- is the Count really going to rape Susanna and prevent Figaro from marrying her, thus ruining both of their lives? -- before bringing you back to a happy ending through antics and absurd plot devices (literally "OMG, that's actually Figaro's long lost mom!").

Of course the Director chose to showcase how relevant a story of class, power, and sex is to our modern era -- Oh, just kidding! In fact the staging was such as to undercut the social justice commentary and to "psychologize" the whole thing.

Infuriatingly, the physical direction showed Susanna sort of willingly going along, as if it's a kind of half-hearted flirtation on her part and not a case of control of the weak from the strong. The Count is presented not as a menace, but just as a kind of bossy and irritable guy. There's a scene where in the story, the Count is going to kill someone out of jealous rage. The way it was in this production, you find yourself thinking, "Well, he'll just shout a lot and then he'll get over it." It changes the whole point of the story.

In the program notes, the Director says that in his interpretation, the characters are "completely torn between morality, desire, and impulse," and that this was why he wanted to "follow the characters into their darkest psychological depths, but at the same time leave space for exploring the utopian moments in Mozart's music."

Could any artistic statement be more of its time? I mean, for all the ridiculous hand-wringing about political correctness, so much art has become de-politicized. Or -- you can make political statements these days, but you can't put politics and entertainment together. Somehow it's like people think the Venn diagram of "entertainment" and that of "thinking about society" should be empty.

There's a trend of focusing on individuals, and what's in their hearts and minds, instead of the social structures and context around them. The forces of of individualism have become so deep and pervasive, it's like people find it hard to even conceptualize the idea of "social justice" as "social." The director thus sees only individual characters, torn between their own sense of morality, dignity and obligation, and their own desire, eros, and impulse.

As longtime readers know, this keeps happening to me with opera. I thought it might be something to do with the COC, but many of the productions with the same problem were created in other places and then brought here. So it's some kind of widespread phenomenon.

With all these productions, you'd think we were all living in a post-class and post-gender paradise, where everyone is equal and no one can exert absurd control over one another, where the idea of coercion and sexual assault through power dynamics was somehow past us.

As if you'd say to yourself, "Well, this opera is partly about power, gender, and class. But we don't have those problems in our society, so ... Wait, I know, I'll make it about the characters' 'darkest psychological depths!'"

Yes, Sometimes I Love Stupid, Problematic, And Even Sexist Things

A few weeks ago I was in the group exercise class BodyPump, and it was a "new release" -- which means new music, new choreography, and everyone doing the same new thing, all at the same time, for a while. Usually with music it takes me a few listens to get into it, but in this case as soon as the lunge track came on I was like "Oh, I LIKE THIS SONG."

I was also a little like, "WTF?" "Sleepless nights at the château"? "Visualize it"? "Kush kush?" Or was that "cutch cutch"? Anyway I got home and looked up the tracklist for the release, and I found out the song was "Peanut Butter Jelly," by the Swedish duo Galantis: "Sleepless nights at the château; Visualize it; I'll give you something to do ... Spread it like peanut butter jelly; Do it like I owe you some money; Spread it like peanut butter jelly; Do it like I owe you some money; Money, money, money ... "

The blog post where I happened to find out that information had one comment, and it was a comment about that song. The comment was from a BodyPump instructor who was pissed off, and who wrote, in part, ".. that lunge track is misogynistic and obscene. Why don't YOU 'spread it like I owe you some money?' Oh, if only I could perform like a prostitute can. Hate women much?"

Uh-oh. Had I fallen for a song that was sexist or misogynistic? Honestly, it wouldn't be the first time. It seems like I'm always getting all into something and then discovering that many people in my peer group find that thing a problem.

For example, I love Fellini movies, and one of the things I love about them is the way they deal with sex, desire, and the dilemmas of sexual novelty. As I wrote about in a recent blog post, when a woman loves a movie that deals with themes of male promiscuity and hot babes, there's always suspicion: what's a woman doing loving a movie like that? Isn't that kind of movie sexist and misogynistic?

As I explained there, though, if you want to see a movie about sex, desire, and the dilemmas of sexual novelty, you're almost forced to go see a movie about men, because of the sexism and double-standards of our society. So the problem isn't the movie. The problem is everything else.

But it's not only high-brow stuff where this happens. Maybe this will shock some people, but I also really liked that Robin Thicke song "Blurred Lines" that got everyone so mad a couple of years ago. I thought the song was catchy and fun, I thought the girls in the video were hot, and I thought "you're far from plastic" was a funny thing to say in a song.

Now let me emphasize: it's not that I didn't understand the criticism. When people said that "You know you want it" was an annoying and offensive thing to say, when they said the video had naked women and dressed men, when they pointed out that "blurred lines" seemed to suggest non-consensuality, I got it. It's just that instead of thinking "What a horrible song," I thought instead, "Oh, that's too bad, 'cause that's an otherwise fun song." 

I also thought, as I did with Fellini, that the problem is partly "everything else." As so often, it's because of sexism in society that we can't enjoy sexualization without experiencing it as sexist. In my perfect world, there'd be enough videos with naked men and dressed women that when there's naked women and dressed men, it reads as fun rather than as some kind of problem.

Even leaving aside the possible complexity of that topic, what always surprises me about the reaction to songs like "Blurred Lines" is how seldom anyone expresses ambivalence. When that song was popular, I felt like everyone who expressed an opinion felt either 1) that song is disgusting on all levels and the people who like it are stupid or 2) you feminazis better STFU about our song.

So, all this to say, I was in familiar territory with "Peanut Butter Jelly." I did, however, want to see if I could find out more about what the song was about and what other people thought the song was about. At this site there's no consensus. Does "kush kush" refer to marijuana? Or is it "cwtch cwtch," a Welsh word for hug? Is "ace high" a reference to gambling or is it a metaphor? What is "visualize it"?

When I found an interview with Galantis specifically about "Peanut Butter Jelly," I figured I'd hit the jackpot: song explained! But in fact in the entire interview no one talks about the meaning of the song at all. It's just all about the concept of disco retro. I feel like this fact tells us something deep and important about the modern world, but I don't know what it is.

Eventually I watched the video. In it, people are in a grocery store, schlepping around -- regular people, and one hot chick on roller skates. As the song goes on, everyone gets entranced: they throw off their clothes, start dancing around, eventually start making out.

Was the video offensive or progressive? Well -- it does have diversity of appearance, bodyshape, age and race. People are smiling, happy, dancing. But then: was this showcasing and promoting sexual freedom for everyone? Or was it subtly mocking everyone but the hot chick? I couldn't decide and I got tired thinking about it.

The following week I went to my BodyPump class, which has a wonderful instructor who has an LGBTQ vibe and a lot of tattoos. Just before the lunge track there was a music problem, and "Peanut Butter Jelly" didn't come on.

The instructor stopped everything to sort it out, and just as the song was starting up, he paused and smiled and said, "I love this song." And I smiled and nodded back: Yeah, I love it too : )

What Is Femininity, Anyway?

Back in July, Laura Jane Grace was the guest on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, and one of the things she talked about was her "experiences as a trans woman in a punk rock world." I'd never heard of Laura Jane Grace and I don't know much of anything about her music -- but as usual it was an interesting discussion.

At one point Laura Jane and Marc got talking about gender dysphoria. Laura Jane described being a little boy and seeing -- I think it was Madonna? -- on TV and hoping to grow up into that kind of person, and slowly becoming aware that that wasn't the way things were heading.

Later she described how much more recently she began hiding her gender dysphoria experiences. She talked about how she was trying to keep it a secret, and so she would hide that part of herself away from people, and act on it only when she was alone, on tour or something. 

Marc asked about what that was like -- like what texture did that experience have, what did it involve? And she talked about wanting to wear women's clothing, and how sad it could be to have to settle -- to settle for the first thing you could grab at Target or whatever, instead of being able to have things you really like, in your own style.

And at one point she was elaborating on the clothing point, and -- I'm just recounting this from memory of course -- she said something about how she would want to wear feminine clothing, like either specifically feminine items like a dress or clothes styled in a certain way. For example, if she was going to wear a tank top, she'd want it to be a tank top cut in a particularly feminine way.

When she said that, I felt like I knew just the kind desire she was referring to. I love to wear feminine clothing, and sometimes I feel a strong desire to do so. And I've had just that feeling. Sure, a tank top. But can it be cut in a certain style, please?

There's something about this kind of desire I've never really felt I understood though, and that is: What's femininity got to do with it? What is femininity anyway?

I mean, if someone has a strong desire to wear one kind of tank top rather than another, what is that about?

Is it just that we live in a world that socially constructs gender strongly through clothes, so that a desire to feel like a woman manifests itself as a desire to wear certain kinds of tank tops?

That could be it. But that answer's never felt sufficient to my own experience. I'm a cisgender woman with a pretty curvy bod. Even when I wear jeans and a hoody, I feel like a woman and I look like a woman and people -- usually -- respond to me as a woman. But I don't feel feminine. And sometimes I want to feel feminine, and I want to wear the clothes associated with that feeling. So for me it seems to go beyond gender identification.

Another answer that insufficient to my personal experience is the "sexiness" answer. When I want to wear feminine clothes, it's not the same as wanting to wear a sexy outfit. On me, a low-cut shirt and snug pants often conveys way more sex appeal than a dress. But that outfit is not feminine. And it's the dress I often find myself wanting to wear.

About a year and a half ago I was on a plane coming home from Paris and I watched this movie "Les Adieux à la reine" -- "a fictional account of the last days of Marie Antoinette in power seen through the eyes of Sidonie Laborde, a young servant who reads aloud to the queen." This movie, incidentally, passes a double-secret reverse Bechdel test: as far as I can recall, there are no scenes where two men talk to one another at all. It is all women all the time.

From Les Adieux à la reine

The clothes in this movie -- the clothes! I haven't felt so stirred by a something on a small screen in a long, long, time. Yet even as I was filled with strange emotion and longing, I was unclear what exactly the emotion and longing were about. Why did these lace gowns, elaborate hairstyles and cinched waists speak to me in this way? What were they trying to say?

I don't know the answer. I think it's something about femininity, but what, exactly, I have no idea.

None of this, of course, is meant to speak to Laura Jane Grace's experience -- it's just my story. But if the bridal gown industrial complex is any indication -- I am not alone.

The Hegemony Of Improvement Culture, Or, Why Can't I Just Enjoy BodyAttack?

BodyAttack: doesn't it look like fun?

There this group exercise class I love called BodyAttack. If you told me when I was a kid that some day I would grow up to enjoy a sports-inspired work-out class with athletic moves like sit-ups and squats I would definitely have said you were nuts. You think I'm going to go to gym class by choice? No.

But for me, BodyAttack is way fun. It's the way things are fun when you're a seven-year-old: you're running and jumping around to music, all with other people who are also having fun. It's a super-intense work out, and even though the official description uses phrases like "intervals" and "plyometrics," there's actually a lot of just goofy exuberance.

There are silly moves, like where you're doing jumping jacks and every fourth one you jump as high as you can. There's the anthemic track 8, which is basically a high-intensity chorus line to an emotional pop song. There's an outstanding mix of songs like the hip-hop track "Dibby Dibby Sound" and the impossible-to-classify "Hardcore Salsa 2K14 (Hardstyle Edit)."

I went to BodyAttack in Paris, and you know what they do there? They do the class in the dark with blue disco lights. Clearly, I am not the only one who thinks BodyAttack is fun.

Now. You would think that any sensible person, having found a healthy-well-rounded form of exercise that they really enjoy, would be in seventh heaven. You want to exercise and have fun? Just go to the class.

And yet such is the perverseness of some aspect of my psychology that I find this outlook almost impossible to hold on to. I find it extremely difficult to think of BodyAttack as an end in itself. Instead, I'm constantly thinking I need to use the fitness I've gained through BodyAttack to do Something Else.


Like -- maybe I should try to go beyond being pretty fit to become "super-fit." I could start going to the BodyPump weightlifting class, cut the empty wine calories, become one of those people who eats boiled chicken breast and lettuce for every meal.

Or maybe I should take up some intense and time-consuming new athletic activity, like snowboarding or surfing.

Or maybe I should train for some "goal-oriented" end point like a triathlon, or a race, or something.

But the truth is, I don't want to do any of these things. I like BodyAttack. The one activity I could see adding is dance class of some kind -- I used to dance as a young person, and it is fun. But even there -- am I really going to add that class time to the already large amounts of time I'm spending just exercising? Every time I try to put that idea into action, there are just too many other things to do in the day.

Typically, having cycled through and rejected all of these ideas, I come back to the obvious idea that there's already something I'm doing that I like doing, so what the hell is the problem with just doing that?

Well, this is territory we've touched on before. I'm a bar-raiser from way back: no matter what good thing we are talking about, I usually adjust immediately to think of that as the baseline. Then I'm like -- OK life, but what have you done for me lately?

I'm also a first-derivative sort of girl. It's not enough to have happiness and pleasure, you have to feel that the pleasure and happiness are on the upswing. You can't just do a fun thing. The fun thing has to get bigger, stronger, better, FUNNER.

I also have a problem with a pleasant day. What, I'm just going to go do a fun thing because .. it was fun? What's the point of that?

But it takes two to tango, and it's not just me making this problem. Remember, we're in the great fun crisis of the 21st century. No one does things because they're fun anymore. You can't even walk into a gym these days without someone assaulting you about what your goals are and how if you don't have goals you'll never move forward to achievement.

The whole tracking/life hacking mood of modern life is like "Oh, you're doing that thing? Don't you want to do that thing better? Or do a different better thing? Are you sure you're doing the thing better than other people and the best you can possible do yourself?"

What the hell happened to doing things just because ... they're things you want to do? Does that concept not even make sense for us anymore?

What really gets me though, at the end of the day, is that having thought about these things, and seen through the difficulties, and actually written it all out -- you'd think I could put it all behind me, just go to the stupid class, and have a good time, and listen to DJ Fresh and think about the blue disco lights.

But I can't. Such is the relative impotence of rational thought.

The Prestige Markets, Or, Explanatory Problems in Economics

Harvard. Prestige, we has it.

A few months ago I read the book Flash Boys, which is the Michael Lewis cowboy shoot-em-up story of the recent High Frequency Trading shenanigans. Early in the book, Lewis gets talking about the American Banker Lifestyle and its associated ecosystem, and how in that ecosystem it's REALLY important to work for the "right" bank.

And the "right" bank, it turns out, isn't the one that is the most successful financially or the one that has the best job amenities or whatever. The "right" bank is basically a matter of cool. Central to Lewis's narrative is how the Canadian outsider hero of his story comes to town and is a little mystified by the way the whole thing works -- and how the Canadian bank he works for, RBC, is never really in the running for cool, even when they start to make a gazillion dollars and come out on top of various official rankings and so on. Though you'd think money is the thing -- money isn't really the thing.

In banking, it seems hierarchy isn't about money. It's about ... something else, something associated with aggression and masculinity and something something I'm not clued into. When I read that I thought, "Wow, people are really motivated by ... something."

Then I a week or so ago I read this Washington Monthly article about how students at Harvard, who come in to university determined to something interesting or different or altruistic, and who have never even really heard of investment banking when they arrive, are nonetheless lining up like lemmings for the Wall Street jobs come senior year.

The article showcases how the banks have created a system on campus that attaches prestige to banking jobs and taps into the students' shared mania for competition. It's like the kids go, "Oh, that's the plum? Oh, OK -- look, I can get it!" with little sense of why this particular thing would be the thing at all or what the point is of any of it.

And I thought -- aha, that's it! It's "prestige" that is the word I was looking for, for what so often motivates people in surprising ways.

Once you think about prestige as itself a kind of consumer good, you can see some interesting things. Because it's a social value, it's entirely a matter of culture what does and does not grant prestige. And culture is, as always, fickle. Men can often get prestige through money and career achievement -- but not always. For women it's almost like "being hot" is a necessary -- but certainly not sufficient! -- condition for prestige. One of the effects of racism and other -isms is that some people can't get prestige, because no matter what, other people don't see their accomplishments with a prestige-oriented halo.

As the New York Times explained the other day, it's difficult to get men to want to be school teachers. One reason? It's a "status" thing. Low prestige.

I know it's not news that people are motivated to gain prestige. But these examples seem to suggest that people are not just "sort of" motivated to gain prestige, but that they're really motivated to gain prestige. And the Harvard example suggests that it's not all that hard, in certain contexts, to nudge people's perceptions about what does and doesn't count.

From the economic point of view, does the pursuit of prestige reflect an irrational obsession with status over "real goods" or does it reflect the rational pursuit of subjective, but proper, goal?

Actually, I think you could say either -- but in some ways both answers seem wrong to me. Many of the goods we pursue are social goods, and it would be most peculiar to set up a theory in which it's always irrational to pursue a social good at the cost of, say, material objects or other kinds of experiences. The whole idea of rational choice theory is that it's supposed to be neutral with respect to what is, actually good: so if what you want is status and prestige who is any theorist to tell you you're wrong?

On the other hand, it seems strange to say that a person who gave up a lucrative career they would otherwise have loved only because their friends made it seem appealing and they got all competitive about it had actually not lost anything at all. So that the prestige points -- even if they are fleeting and fade -- are just as good as the everything else points. Yet that is what we'd have to say if prestige is an ordinary good alongside others.

It seems to me to matter what the context is for the given preference and how the person came to have it. That's not a radical view: some theorists of preference have said it's essential, in using preferences, to pay attention to where the preference came from.

The thing about that, though, is that once you start talking not just about preferences but also about where those preferences come from, you're suddenly actually talking about "why people do what they do" -- which, in case you haven't noticed, is kind of a complicated humanistic contextual etc. etc. kind of question.

That is, it's not the kind of thing you can understand with economic models and axioms and stuff. You actually have to read some history and literature and philosophy and sociology and probably art and music theory and all kinds of other things.

If you do happen to want to learn those things I'm happy to tell you those departments still exist and we still get together and talk about stuff -- but with the way things are going, it might not be for long.

The Great Fun Crisis Of The Twenty First Century

Mary Cassatt, Woman Reading in a Garden, via Wikimedia Commons

This post is about the great fun crisis of the twenty-first century. You may be asking yourself, how is it possible that a culture that features binge-watching, cupcakes, professional wrestling and craft beer could possibly be a culture suffering from a crisis of fun? Well, I'll tell you.

The great twenty-first century fun crisis isn't quantitative. It's not a like a fun shortage, where you have to line up for fun in the style of the old 1970s gas lines. It's more like a crisis about the nature of fun. Fun and its friends are caught up in a special dilemma of our time, one rooted in creepy theories about preferences and the point of doing things.

One one horn of the dilemma is GOALS. I'm so sick of hearing about goals. You're not allowed to do anything any more without goals. I went to look into taking dance classes a while ago and there was a form for new students and it asked "What made you want to take our classes?" And there were answers for getting in shape, learning to dance for a wedding, hoping to make friends, yada yada yada. You know what was missing? Fun. I had to write it in.

God forbid you get interested in some physical activity without some goal in mind. Fitness people like trainers don't even want to talk to you unless you have goals. About a year ago I was mindlessly musing about how it might be cool to learn to swim in open water -- you know, for fun. I googled around for how to learn, and quickly found that nobody seems to swims in open water for fun. If you're swimming in open water, you're probably training for a triathlon or something. Not that triathlons can't be fun. But you know what I mean. If you're open water swimming to to train for a triathlon, you're not doing it just for fun. You have a goal.

Goals are fine as far as they go. But what we have is goal imperialism. The prevalence of goal oriented amusement means you can't even explain to people why you might be reading a book or going for a walk without some backstory about how your activity fits in to some life plan like "reading the classics in hardcover" or "trying to lose weight." It's ridiculous.

UNLESS, that is, you're willing to commit to something completely pointless.

The other horn of the modern fun dilemma is hedonistic pointlessness. The one loophole in the Rule Of Goals is that you get to do things that you do purely for pleasure, with no point whatsoever, just because the activity is hedonically perfect -- but only if the activity is hedonically perfect.

The Get-Of-Of-Goals-Free card can be played for anything you're willing to do as a pure pleasure. Binge-watch Game of Thrones, eat a pan of brownies, and no one asks you what your goals are. They get it: Girls Just Want To Have Fun.

But increasingly the loophole only works for things that are super double extra secret pleasurable. Why would you do something sort of mildly pleasant, engaging, constructive and healthy when you could be doing something ridiculous and Xtreme?

If you don't have the goal backstory for the pleasures of the reading or the walk, you get that quizzical look where people are like "Oh, so that's your very favorite thing that you like to do? That's cute, I guess." As if choosing to do these mild activities -- just for fun -- makes you some kind of culture snob or Puritan.

The more I thought about this, the more I noticed how its embedded in our whole way of talking and thinking about what we do and why. We use the language of preferences, costs, and trade-offs. What do you want to do? What are you willing to pay? What are you willing to do to get there? Work hard play hard! There's no room in there for just nice activities that are sort of pleasant and good things to do.

I don't know how the causal arrows go, but it's striking that our contemporary formal theory of what it makes sense to do -- rational choice theory -- takes as axiomatic that there are things you want, and there are costs to getting them, and the whole question is how much you're willing to "pay" to get your preference satisfied. So the problem is officially built in.

There's something about separating your life's activities into these categories that encourages the crisis of fun. If you're paying a cost to get something, you want to pay as little as possible. If you're getting a preference satisfied, you want as much satisfaction as possible.

So, for instance, if you're thinking about learning how to open water swim, or taking a dance class, you have to ask yourself either What Is My Ultimate Goal Here -- and am I pursuing it in the most efficient way possible? OR you have to ask yourself Is This The Most Hedonically Perfect Way To Spend My Acquired Preference Capital?

It's an odd fit for many of life's activities, and it's a terrible crisis for fun. I'm thinking this is why, in the end, I have a problem with a pleasant day.

Guest Post: Cool People

This guest post is by my former co-blogger at Commonwealth and Commonwealth, Captain Colossal. 

I have always wanted to be cool. I will always want to be cool. I’m in my late thirties now, and I am confident that if I live to eighty I will still want, in some shadowy recess of my mind, to be cool.

I grew up in a neighborhood that turned out, when I was around twenty, to be very cool. You understand, I didn’t know when I was growing up there that it was cool. It was only later, when the newspaper wrote a story about it and celebrities started relocating there, that I learned that it was cool. But it was cool while I was growing up there, cooler in some ways than it is now, I just didn’t know it. I wasn’t tapped into it. Lucinda Williams was writing music off in the hills and all kinds of people were doing crazy interesting things and I was wandering around in my own little world.

I went away and then later I moved back there. When I moved back there I knew it was cool. I lived there and I was pretty unhappy for reasons that had little to do with coolness. And then I moved away again. Last week, I was listening to a band that is now moderately famous. They lived in that neighborhood and played music there during that second time that I was living there, and they weren’t famous then (I didn’t know anything about them) but now they are, a bit. I always think about that when I listen to their music. And I always think that I should have befriended them then, on the same principle that I should have invested my $27.65 in savings in Google in 1993.

And then I remember what going to parties and bars and online dating in this widely-recognized-to-be-cool neighborhood was like. I would be in a place, thinking I was pretty cute with my Budweiser and my Marlboros and my line of patter. And there would be these people with important haircuts and cool clothes and I would look at them and I would think, these people are too cool to want to hang out with me. My mind could not formulate any points of common humanity between me and them. If I look at pictures of this band and try to imagine them as people rather than members of a moderately famous band, I realize that I would never have felt comfortable talking to them.

In fact, it’s them being famous that creates a relationship between me and them. Relationship is not the right word, but it kind of is. I have a way of relating to them: I appreciate what they do. They make music and I like it. They don’t have a relationship with me in particular, but they have a general relationship with me as one of the people appreciating them and maybe spending money on their music or buying a t-shirt as a show of support. If I wanted to say something to the people in this band I could write them a letter and say, I think your music is great. But if I were able to travel back in time to the era when I lived in the same place as them and were able to be at the same party or bar or whatever, I would have nothing to say. There would be no bridge between me and them. Which I guess means that people are not really that much like Google stock.

When I was seventeen I thought the coolest thing in the entire world would be to be a surfer and I didn’t do anything about it except look at the pictures of the vast blue ocean in the one surfing magazine that I bought for myself in an airport. And then when I was in my late twenties it hit me again that surfing was the coolest thing in the world and I kicked myself for not having taken those seventeen-year old impulses seriously, for lacking follow through. Then I took a surfing lesson and the ocean rolled me around in my wetsuit and I thought, I can’t do this. None of the qualities that surfing required were qualities that I had. Upper body strength, balance, physical courage -- I lacked them all. And so I gave up on surfing. But sometimes I still look out at the vast blue ocean and think that maybe if I tried again, everything would be different. In the same way, that urge, to sidle up to the source of things I like, to buy coolness low and sell high, hits me in the stomach every now and then. I just try to let it wash over me.

I Have A Problem With A Pleasant Day

Silvestro Lega, A Walk in the Garden, via Wikimedia Commons

Yes: I have a problem with a pleasant day.

My problem is not the well-known Future-Freak-Out problem -- that you can't enjoy a pleasant day today because you're too worried about what will happen tomorrow. For whatever reason that's not my thing. Generally I'm probably not worried enough about what will happen tomorrow.

My problem also is not Mindfulness-Or-A-Lack-Thereof. I know there are people who can enjoy now because they're distracted thinking about something else. But I don't think that's me. Generally, if the day is pleasant, I can enjoy it.

No, my problem with a pleasant day is more perverse, and has to do with OK-What-Was-The-Point-Of-That? I mean, that AFTER a pleasant day, I can't see the point of having had the pleasure. The pleasure over, the day feels wasted, spent or given way for nothing, something I was cheated out of. Somehow I can't enjoy the pleasure after it's ended. And then the fact that I'm going to feel this AFTER infects how I feel NOW.

If you think about it, it's surprising this doesn't come up even more often. I mean, one of the main elements of folk psychology of our time contrasts the impulsive feeling and pleasure seeking parts of ourselves with the rational planning parts of ourselves. 

But how is the rational planning part supposed to factor in pleasure? In this previous post I expressed my mystification at the idea that the planner could have any way of adjudicating how much pleasure is the "right amount" - it's like needing an answer to an ill-formed question.

But then there is this whole other problem, which is that from the point of view of the planner, how is the pleasure of the past any use at all? At least with the pleasure of the present and future, you can see how that would get a grip on a person, capture their motivation, feel meaningful. But the pleasure of the past?

It feels like in terms of the past, the planner can only evaluate how well certain goals were achieved. Like, if you're trying to finish writing the Great Canadian Novel and on Tuesday you spend five hours on it and you get 10 pages written then the planner inside your heart has a clear way of entering this information into the system. But what if you knocked off on Sunday and sat around watching TV or even just going for a nice walk? What can the planner say about that other than, Oh Well.

For me this problem is most acute when it comes to A Pleasant Day. Because if something is really fun, exciting, super-pleasurable,  you just kind of get swept up in it and you tell the planner to go to hell. But a garden variety pleasant day: it's harder to figure out.

It seems to me the planner can only make sense of a pleasant day by working in some idea of a "goal" of having pleasant days in one's life. But why would that be a goal? I mean, insofar as something is a pleasure, it'd seem you'd want it. But that seems almost like a tautology. It's not a thing you'd come to think because of reasons.

If you ask me, the problem is the whole feeler versus planner metaphor, which seems to misconstrue the relationship between how you feel about something and how you decide whether to do it, by seeing these as two separate things.

If that's part of the story, then it would seem the reason I've got a problem with a pleasant day is that I've somehow internalized the feeler versus planner metaphor, despite its difficulties. And I think that is possibly true. Doing a little armchair psychology we might observe that the subject -- me -- spent her young adulthood as one of the worst planners in the world, routinely missing class to drink, take drugs, and "just hang out."

It wouldn't be surprising that such a person, faced with the prospect of life as an endless succession of doing nothing, would over-develop her planning capacities, and adopt, even if subconsciously, the metaphor of the all powerful planner who knows all and controls all.

As long as the subject hasn't shut that planner up with some pinot grigio, anyway.

Penis Envy, Or, I Can Haz Fluffer Plz?

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Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They're Not Out To Get You: Revealed Preference Edition

Giacinto Gimignani, An Angel and a Devil Fighting for the Soul of a Child, via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe you've had an inchoate sense that dark forces are aligning against you. Maybe you're scared. Maybe you're too bored to think about it for more than five minutes. Well you're in luck, because to preferred clients of TKIN like yourself, we are proud to offer our premium service: we think it through so you don't have to.

This week, how advertising and cost-benefit analysis bond in unholy matrimony, spawning The Policy Methodology From Hell.

As we all know, if you're wondering how to make policy decisions, one popular answer is "cost-benefit analysis." And as we all know, if you're wondering what to count as a cost and what to count as a benefit, one popular answer is an "economic" one. What a person prefers is what is a benefit to them; giving up what is preferred is a cost; where for a preference set to be rational just means that it obeys formal consistency axioms like transitivity.

Maybe less well-known is that if you're wondering how to tell what preferences a person has, one popular answer is that the preferences to count are "revealed preferences." If you chose x over y, you manifested a preference for x; if you paid good money for that future-item-in-a-landfill tchotchke, you showed that you revealed a tchotchke-related preference.

It's obviously not news that there's something shady about the use of revealed preferences to reason about what is good and bad. What people choose is shaped by what options they have. And in classic "sour grapes" fashion, people who have no access to a given option sometimes come not to prefer it -- their preferences are "adaptive." Also, people might choose on the basis of false information. No one thinks the person who mistakenly ingests pesticide in food has some kind of latent preference for death.

But one another interesting fact about revealed preferences doesn't come up as often, overshadowed as it is by all these other things. That has to do with weakness of will. It's evidently a problem, because if you thought choosing y was for the best, but you caved to pressure/cravings/madness for x, then your choosing x plausibly does not plausibly reflect a way that x is good for you, and so counting your revealed preference as a preference would be a mistake.

It's easy to get lost in the philosophical thickets of weakness of will, meandering around like a drunk person, trying to figure out what could possibly determine the difference between "I chose it even though I thought it best not to" and "I chose it because I changed my mind" and other important distinctions. But perhaps we can say this: there is sufficient agreement on the concept to allow for a robust research program in the social sciences. Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have conducted study after study measuring the effects various things have on weakness of will.

One conclusion they came to will surprise no one who has lived a human existence, and that is that the will is a thing that can be worn down.

Ask people to exercise their will -- eating radishes instead of chocolate, keeping a straight face when something is funny, etc. etc. -- and they'll become less and less able to effectively exercise their will. They call this "ego depletion." The "active self" is a "limited resource."

Among other weird things, this means that they more you have to resist temptations, the more you deplete your ego. The more you deplete your ego, the less you're able to resist temptations. So the more environmental factors there are requiring resistance -- the more bakeries you have to walk past, the more click-bait you have to ignore, the more advertised consumer items you have to not buy, the more likely you'll exhibit the weakness of will.

And this is where it gets interesting. Because when you put "the preference taken into account in cost-benefit reasoning fail to track your good when there's weakness of will" together with "the more you have to resist, the less you can resist," what you get is that the massive forces always present in a consumer society, urging you to BUY EAT DRINK ENTERTAIN YOURSELF YOU DESERVE IT, are actually making your revealed preferences less likely to be for your actual preferences.

Let's do an example. In one of their Freakonomics books, Levitt and Dubner said that fighting climate change through change in behavior was pointless because "It's not that we don't know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don't want to stop, or aren't willing to pay the price."

Their evidence for the implicit claim about preferences is our behavior: our behavior reveals preferences for convenience and fun over environmental goals. Plausibly, our actual preferences are sometimes for clean air and a world inhabitable by our children even when immediate forces make it hard to resist the temptations of climate damaging behavior. So basing judgments about our good based on our revealed preferences is a planning FAIL.

What's crazy about this whole thing is that the more other stupid temptations we have to resist -- the more we're subjected to BUY EAT DRINK ENTERTAIN YOURSELF YOU DESERVE IT -- the more likely we'll fail to act in accordance with our judgments, and thus the more likely that cost-benefit analysis will track our preferences for stupid consumer goods instead of, you know, clean air and water.

Remember the old picture of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other? This is like the devil has two kinds of minions: those shouting at you to listen and obey, and those who watch you obey and conclude: Well, we know what will make that person better off, nudge nudge wink wink.

You see why I called it an unholy alliance, eh?

The New "What Do Women Want"?

I was annoyed to see this book shelved only under "Gender Studies." Why not "Health and Well-Being?"

I just finished reading the new book What Do Women Want, by Daniel Bergner.

1. My super-double-extra number one favorite thing in this book is the way it challenges the twin stereotypes of women-want-intimacy-and-love and women-are-naturally-monogamous. Bergner compiles an impressive array of empirical research suggesting a radically different picture: that women want novelty and variety; that desire in a long-term monogamous relationship often wanes; that desire wanes with boredom for women more than for men.

It's true that the book pushes its "naturally promiscuous" alternative without a lot of nuance or in-depth consideration of opposing views. But this didn't bother me, because the twin stereotypes have such a strange crazed grip on people.

2. Indeed, with respect to monogamy, Berger's arguments are particularly effective at challenging the evolutionary argument, you know, that women have to invest a ton of energy in offspring and so are naturally picky whereas men want to spread their seed. Bergner cites a ton of animal studies in which females are sexually aggressive, and sexually promiscuous, and mentions quite astonishing examples of cases where scientists of the past seem to have seen what they wanted to see rather than what was there.

Of course, taking what seems "obvious" to some science guys and cooking up a story to show how it's "adaptive" and thus an essential aspect of our biology instead of the result of social and cultural forces has always been the problematic strategy of evolutionary biology applied to things like sex. And the risk is always high when we're talking about things people want to be true. And a lot of people -- men and women -- seem to want the women-intimacy-monogamy thing to be true.

3.  One of the most interesting -- OK, to me frightening -- parts of the book was the description of how female desire drugs are being consciously interpreted as supports for monogamy, appropriate and approvable only if they don't make women just, you know, really want to have sex. Desire drugs for middle-aged married woman who love their husbands but compare the pleasure of sex with them to the pleasure of returning library books? We are on it! Girls just want to have fun? Not so much. Various people want the drugs to be "good but not too good." You can read more about this part of the story in Bergner's piece in the Times.

4.  Though I get why it had to be this way, I wish the title/argument didn't have to be expressed in terms of What Do Women Want -- in fact, I wish the word "want" wasn't here at all. In addition to the obvious invitation to stupid remarks like the one on the back cover from Gay Talese (it's "a subject that often exceeds our intelligence" -- women, so kooky, so strange, so Other!) it also invites misinterpretation because the word "want" is used in a "desire or interest, conscious or unconcious" sense, in a "this is what I ultimately want to do sense -- i. e., intend, always conscious and reflective, and in a "this is what will satisfy -- ultimately make happy" sense. All very different.

There are women in this book who describe fantasies, sometimes disturbing to themselves, of being forced to have sex, sometimes violently, sometimes with multiple strangers. While it's essential to recognize these as important and genuine parts of these women's sexual lives and desires, connected to "want" in the first sense, fantasies need not be connected to want in the second or third sense, of this being something these women ultimately want to do or have done to them in reality. It's complicated.

Also, saying "What Do Women Want?" makes it sound like women in some obvious way don't know themselves, but I don't think that's an apt description of what is going on.

5. While I admired, and was persuaded by, the frank discussion of the possibility that women are turned on by the desire and interest of others and thus have a sexuality that is to some extent "other-directed," I wish the word "narcissistic" didn't come into play in describing that. As I discussed a bit in this previous post 1) it would be better if both sexes had a mix of self-directed and other-directed desires and 2) other-directed isn't "narcissistic" - why not a nice word like "generous"?

6. Everyone should keep in mind the possibility that women are different. It's wrong to say women really want X or Y or Z -- people vary a lot. It's because the alternative intimacy-monogamy narrative has been so outrageous on this score that I think it's OK that this book does a bit of generalizing in opposition to that narrative.

But do remember, one woman's meat is another woman's poison.

When It Comes To The Moral Problem, You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

Fricka and Wotan during a crucial negotiation, Die Valkyrie, Paris 2013

Warning:  This post discusses moral theory, economics, and Wagner. If your brain has been softened by Mad Men binge watching, wake up! Sharpen your pencils!

I start this train of thought with the seemingly simple question, why ought people to play by the rules they've agreed to? Like, why should you keep your agreements and contracts if you could get away with fraud? Why should you put a stamp on a letter if you knew it would slip through the cracks?

I was prompted to think about this first by the question in The Ethicist about the guy who wanted to hand in one paper for credit in two different college classes. Chuck Klosterman, who seems like a nice guy but who definitely does not deserve to be called even "An Ethicist," never mind "The Ethicist," said there was no problem handing in one paper for more than one course.

This led to the predictable controversy and hand-wringing. OMG won't somebody think of the children?! At one point someone brought up the possibility that doing this was against university policy. And Klosterman said that was irrelevant: if there was a policy against gay sex, that would obviously not make gay sex immoral.

This did not, and does not, strike me as a suitable analogy. What kind of sex you're having is irrelevant to your education. But if the exam policy says "no talking to your fellow students about the questions," then of course talking to your fellow students about the questions is cheating, and wrong. It doesn't matter that talking to your fellow students about the questions is not wrong in itself.

So this got me thinking, what about all the ways you can get away with not playing by the rules? What about in commerce, trade, business? 

It seems to me there are two possible answers to the question of why people ought to play by the rules, and I'm going to say that both of them require reflection on the deep and puzzling question of what is right and wrong.

If that's true, I think it's a pretty dramatic conclusion. Because it seems to entail, among other things, that you can't set up any economic system that doesn't ultimately rest on values  - values which, of course, might be contentious. You can't just legislate order out of chaos.

Before we get to the two answers, we have to set aside an attempt to avoid the question by saying that not playing by the rules is in your own simple self-interest, because if you don't, you'll get caught and you won't be able to reap the benefits of cooperation and exchange. So the answer would be: don't play by the rules, you'll suffer for it, because the rest of us won't let you play.

But this rests on beliefs that seem empirically false. People get away with stuff all the time. I bet that kid got away with handing in one paper for two courses. I remember reading somewhere -- I thought it was the Freakonomics blog, but I can't find it -- about an economist who discovers that he can get away without stamping a letter, who then thinks, well, indeed, if I can do this, why am I buying stamps at all? Often it will be in your self-interest to break the rules.

So this, I set aside.

The first real answer answer is that you could say that since an agreement to play by the rules is like a promise, it's immoral to cheat, just as it's immoral to break a promise.

That's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far in the absence of moral theory. Economic reasoning uses rational choice theory, and rational choice theory says that people, insofar as they are rational, make choices based on fulfilling their own preferences at the least cost to themselves. So how could something's "being moral" be a good reason to do it?

One thing you hear about this is that because of our feeling and psychology, we get a "ping" of pleasure from doing the right thing. More formally, you might say that our moral feelings are there to shape our preferences toward doing the right thing.

But in the absence of a moral theory, this is question-begging, since the issue isn't whether we have those feelings, it's whether we ought to have to those feelings.

Feelings and preference are things you can act to foster or act to eliminate. For example, suppose you were born in a strict religious home, and you were taught that dancing was a sin, and you grew up to think that was stupid, and that dancing was great. You might have a leftover "feeling" against dancing. But clearly the right thing to do would be to "de-bias" yourself: try to get the feeling to go away.

Now, how would you know whether your inclination or preference for keeping your agreements and playing by the rules is one to foster and keep or one to get rid of? It's not obvious. The idea that morality is just for chumps is thousands of years old. If it is, you'd be better off seeking psychological treatment, drugs, or hypnotism to rid yourself of these irrational feelings of integrity.

Doc! I can't cheat! You gotta help me, doc!

The second answer -- well, it's not an answer so much as a way of thinking about the problem -- is that it's in the nature of rules that there have to be consequences for breaking them, and although such a system might not be perfect, it'll dissuade enough of the people enough of the time.

True enough. But notice how deeply morality is implicated in this answer. Is the punishment only for motivation? Can the punishment be unfair? What makes it unfair?

Worse, how do you make a system with an effective punishment system that isn't also a surveillance state with an all powerful person or institution at the top -- something to impose the order the system relies on?

I was pondering these questions as I went to see the four operas of Wagner's Ring cycle recently. Amazing, incredible; if you think Wagner is about metal breast plates please look again at the picture at the top of this post, depicting a crucial negotiation scene among the gods at Valhalla.

Anyway, in reading around about the operas, I came upon this excellent book review by philosopher Jerry Fodor, who brings up related thoughts about law and contracts. In particular, he argues that the Ring is largely about "a paradox" of law and order: "laws and contracts are obeyed when the cost of breaking them isn’t reckoned to be worth the benefits." It's in moments of passion that laws and contracts are needed, to preserve order. But when passions are intense -- when desire is in ascendance, when passion would "give anything to have its way," law and order must break down, precisely because the costs of compliance are now reckoned as astronomical.

So just when you need law and contracts to keep order, they cannot help but fail. It's related to the morality problem: the full version of the "why" can never be simply the rationality of agreements. 

Fodor puts the conclusion beautifully:  "So if it’s not law and it’s not love, what then, according to the Ring, is the solution of the problem of order? The Ring doesn’t offer one."

There just isn't any answer.

And by the way -- of course it would be unethical to hand in one paper for more than one class without permission. Duh!