Category - Pop Culture

A recent article in Psychological Science describes experiments aimed at understanding the psychology of accepting, or not, social inequalities. (If the abstract seems a bit abstract, try this slightly more reader-friendly summary from Science.)

The gist: people who accept justifications for inequality experience less emotional stress when confronted by evidence of the inequality. The more a person believes that there are good reasons for inequality, the less emotional stress they’ll have. (Stress in the form of moral outrage, existential guilt, and support for changing things to help out the disadvantaged.) So acceptance looks to be a self-protection mechanism. Also, showing people stories, propaganda, what-have-you, that feeds ideas of justification (for example, “rags-to-riches” stories) increases their acceptance of the justifications, and so decreases their emotional reaction to evidence of inequality.

As the authors abstract, “system-justifying ideology appears to undercut the [urge to bring about] redistribution of social and economic resources by alleviating moral outrage.”

I guess this helps explain why people are likely to accept that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” Giving a rat’s ass that the world ain’t so great is hard to do. It’s stressful. That’s why those of us who think otherwise have got to help each other keep our spirits up. More potlucks!

By Gerald Friedman, CPE Staff Economist

At the time of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, the Environmental Movement straddled two approaches to addressing environmental problems, approaches rooted in two alternative theories. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin proposed the first Earth Day to “force this issue onto the political agenda,” to promote changed government policy to protect the environment. But many of the 20 million Americans who took part in this first Earth Day were deeply suspicious of organized politics or state action. “Personal salvationists,” they blamed environmental troubles on our weaknesses as individuals. Instead of failed social policy, the enemy was ourselves: we use too much, waste too much, want too much; and the only salvation for the environment is to change our preferences, use less, recycle more, and choose to live simply.

Twenty seven years later, the Environmental Movement confronts the same division between personal salvation and political action, a division nicely illustrated by a new book, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. A prominent environmentalist, McKibben has written a clear attack on much of what ails us; but he misses the underlying cause of these ills and, therefore, his prescription for remedial action is necessarily off. In many ways, a pleasure to read, the book also left me so frustrated that I threatened to throw it against the wall.

It’s extremely common for articles about different health issues to cite some statistic about the drain on the economy that the illness causes, both in terms of direct expenditures for healthcare to deal with it, as well as the indirect costs of missed work time. It was this quote in The Ecologist that got me thinking about this, “The indirect costs [of obesity in the UK] are estimated to be in the region of £2.5 billion per year, including costs to the NHS [National Health Service] and costs to industry through sickness and absence” and typing “economic cost disease” into Google’s Scholar search turns up a slew of examples from the bowels of academia figuring the same way.

By Helen Scharber, CPE Staff Economist

When your child’s doctor gives you advice, you’re probably inclined to take it. And if 60,000 doctors gave you advice, ignoring it would be even more difficult to justify. Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy statement advising us to limit advertising to children, citing its adverse effects on health. Yes, banning toy commercials might result in fewer headaches for parents (“Please, please, pleeeeeeease, can I have this new video game I just saw 10 commercials for????”), but the AAP is more concerned with other health issues, such as childhood obesity. Advertising in general – and to children specifically – has reached astonishingly high levels, and as a country, we’d be wise to take the doctors’ orders.

Any present or past President has got to be used to being scorned, so the hue and cry now erupting over Jimmy Carter’s new book on the Israeli-Palestinian misery can’t be terribly surprising for him. I haven’t yet had a chance to read the book and so am not in a position to endorse or reject or somewhere-in-the-middle it. Still, some of the reaction is so clearly based on attacking Carter himself, rather than the content of his book–indeed it seems to be attacking Carter instead of attacking his arguments–and that’s just plain wrong. An example.

By Helen Scharber, CPE Staff Economist
Dec. 20, 2006

Ahh, the holidays. So full of joy, laughter, good cheer… and contradictions. The holidays are all about spending time with loved ones. Or are they all about finding the perfect gift? They are a time of relaxation and spirituality. Or perhaps a time of stress and consumerism? According to a 2005 poll by the Center for a New American Dream, more than three in four Americans (78%) wished that holidays were less materialistic, yet shoppers around the country planned to spend an average of $907 on gifts this holiday season. Sixty percent of people polled anticipated spending less this year than last, but according to the National Retail Federation, holiday retail sales were forecasted to rise five percent to $457.4 billion. As Howard Dvorkin, founder of Consolidated Credit Counseling Services, Inc. (CCCS), observes, “It seems that consumers are trying to be more conservative with spending this year over last, but many of the best laid plans fall through when the pressures of advertisers and unrealistic holiday expectations hit a fever pitch of season overload.” The fast pace and high cost of the holidays can seem to be out of our control, but there are a number of good reasons to take the reindeer by the antlers and reign in holiday consumption.

For all that social sciences are able to figure out patterns of behavior, there’s one thing that guarantees a continuing need for old fashioned history analysis: the existence of totally unpredictable twists and turns in culture and politics.

Now I can’t say with any confidence that the recent fall from grace of Rev. Ted Haggard, until this past Thursday the president of the huge and hugely influential National Association of Evangelicals and leader of a megachurch in Colorado Springs, will be one of those surprisingly pivotal events. But there’s a distinct possibility that his outing as a repeat customer of male prostitution could lead to major changes in US policy and cultural attention towards global warming.

Google buys YouTube. This was an opportunity for Adam Hanft over at Marketplace to think about the question: just why are these open-posting video sites so popular? For viewers they’re popular because (if) there are enough interesting videos to watch to make it worth a waste of some time. But what’s in it for the people uploading the videos? Adam’s answer is interesting.

By Liz Stanton, CPE Staff Economist

1. You’ve Been Psychologically Conditioned To Want a Diamond. The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.
2. Diamonds are Priced Well Above Their Value. The De Beers cartel has systematically held diamond prices at levels far greater than their abundance would generate under anything even remotely resembling perfect competition. All diamonds not already under its control are bought by the cartel, and then the De Beers cartel carefully managed world diamond supply in order to keep prices steadily high.