CURING AFFLUENZA: WHY ECONOMIC GROWTH SHOULD BE STOPPED

Talk to Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney Opera House
October 3, 2010

Our economy, and pretty much every economy, has been growing for at least the past 200 years. Almost every year the quantity of goods and services being produced has increased. Production has grown faster than the population has grown, meaning that, on average, people’s annual consumption has increased. Our material standard of living has risen by a percent or two every year; we’ve become more affluent.

Almost every economist, business person and politician believes this is the way things should be and must continue to be forever. All those groups are convinced this is what the public wants: ever-increasing affluence. They think any politician who failed to promise economic growth would be pilloried; any government that failed to deliver it would be thrown out. Even the Greens avoid publicly expressing any doubt about the desirability of continuous growth. It’s just too hot. So deep-seated is this belief that it constitutes a bedrock assumption underlying the whole economic debate. Most of my participation in that debate - most of what I write in the Herald - implicitly accepts this conventional wisdom.

But the longer I’ve continued as an economics writer, the more I’ve read and thought about it, the more I’ve come to doubt the conventional wisdom. My rejection of the case for economic growth is spelt out in my new book, The Happy Economist. I have three reasons for breaking with this almost-compulsory belief.

The first is that, contrary to everything economists, business people and politicians assume, our increasing material standard of living over time hasn’t made us any happier. In many countries, annual surveys of the public’s satisfaction with life have stayed essentially unchanged over the decades despite ever-increasing real incomes. It’s true that, at any point in time, people with higher incomes tend to be happier - a little happier - than people with lower incomes. But as everyone’s income rises over time, average happiness is unchanged. Psychologists offer two main explanations for this paradox. One is that we quickly get used to pay rises and promotions and the extra stuff they allow us to buy; we soon take them for granted as our expectations adjust. The other is that what we like is an increase in our relative income, because the income and the flashy stuff it buys give us greater social status. It allows us to engage in conspicuous consumption, demonstrating to the world that we’re not only keeping up with the Joneses but getting ahead of them. That cynical and sexist old American journalist H. L. Menken said that to be wealthy is to have an income that’s at least a hundred dollars a year more than the income of your wife's sister's husband. But no amount of economic growth can make all of us feel socially superior to everyone else. It’s a status race that some people can win only at the expense of those who lose. So it’s socially wasteful.

My second reason for breaking with the belief that the pursuit of unending economic growth is desirable is that the things we do to encourage growth by increasing the economy’s efficiency often generate social costs, many of which go unnoticed. They go unnoticed partly because they’re subjective and hard to measure, but also because, being things that fall outside the economic model - the economic way of looking at things, which has a deep influence on the habitual lines of thought of politicians and business people - we’ve never put much effort into measuring them.

One of the clear lessons of the ‘science of happiness’ confirms something we all know: how much of the satisfaction we derive from life comes from our relationships. Relationships with our spouse and our children, our parents and siblings, our wider relatives, workmates, neighbours and friends. But despite their central importance to our wellbeing, our relationships simply don’t figure in the economists’ model. Which means economists frequently urge on our politicians ‘reforms’ they are sure will add to our affluence, without a moment’s thought about what effect these may have on our relationships and the social dimension of our lives.

A prime example is the effort in recent years to lift the nation’s productivity by deregulating shopping hours and getting rid of penalty payments, which has hastened the demise of the weekend, when most adults and school children weren’t working and so were able to enjoy each other’s company. Only when the economics-types went to the extreme of Work Choices did many people see clearly the social costs that would accompany the economic benefits - the greater affluence - it might have brought about.

My third reason for rejecting the belief that the pursuit of unending economic growth is desirable - or even possible - is the one that would have sprung first to the mind of many of you: the sheer impossibility of exponential growth in the economy - growth at a reasonably steady percentage rate - continuing indefinitely within a finite natural environment. The basic economic model, which hasn’t changed much since the second half of the 19th century, is a model of market transactions: the factors of production - land, labour and capital - change hands for a price and are used to produce goods and services which also change hands for a price. So it’s the model of a market and the only things in the model are things that have a price. Anything that isn’t bought and sold at a price - including clean air, clean water, photosynthesis, native species, natural sinks for carbon dioxide - is external to the model and thus tends to be ignored. So the ‘ecosystem services’ that are utterly essential to the functioning of the economy - indeed, to the survival of humanity - have historically been treated by economists as ‘free goods’ - goods in such abundant supply they don’t carry a price and so can safely be ignored. The natural environment is outside the market, so we can forget it.

Now, it’s important to note that, 100 or 150 years ago, this was a reasonable approximation of the truth. Human activity - most of which is economic activity - obviously caused damage to the local environment, but so limited was that activity relative to the vastness of the natural world that it was reasonable to assume it was having no significant effect on the overall ecosystem. If so, it was reasonable to ignore the natural environment.

Two things have happened since then. One is advances in the natural sciences, which have allowed us to understand the harmful effects of economic activity on the ecosystem that often aren’t visible to the naked eye. The other is the massive growth in economic activity, as a result of the success of capitalism and the technological advance it fosters and exploits. In the past 200 years, the world’s population has increased by a factor of more than six, thanks to advances in public health and medical science. In the same period, the average material standard of living of all the people in the world has also increased by a factor of six, thanks to capitalism and technological advance. Multiply the two together and you see the amount of economic activity - as measured by GDP - has increased 45-fold in the past 200 years since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

And all this in a natural environment that’s grown no bigger. So whereas it was possible say economic activity was too small to have much impact on the global ecosystem, it’s not credible to say it today. We get back to the earlier question of whether economic activity can continue growing exponentially in an ecosystem of fixed size. Clearly it can’t. And this raises a vital question: are we reaching the limits to growth? When ecologists first suggested this in the 1970s, economists laughed at them. But in the time since then the evidence has been stacking up on the scientists’ side. It’s now apparent, for instance, that we’re rapidly approaching the limits to growth in one dimension: greenhouse gas emissions arising from the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests. There could be no clearer example of how economic activity is starting to do great damage to the ecosystem, some of which may soon be irreversible. But there are other areas where the damage we’re doing to the environment is mounting up: all the problems we’re having with water, rivers, farming methods and soil quality; the irreversible decline in fish stocks and the difficulties associated with fish farming; the declining reserves of certain non-renewable resources, and the destruction of species.

My fear that we’re approaching the limits to growth more generally than just in the case of greenhouse gas emissions is greatly increased by the rapid economic development of the two most populous countries in the world, China and India, which between them account for almost 40 per cent of the world’s population. We’re well aware of how hugely resource-intensive is the lifestyle of the 15 or 20 per cent of the world’s population in the developed countries. But now these two big countries have been growing at rapid rates for the past two or three decades. China’s GDP has been doubling every seven years; India’s every eight or nine years. Should this growth continue for another 20 or 30 years, the material standard of living of another 40 per cent of the globe’s population would be approaching that of ours. Question is: do we have enough natural resources available to make this possible? And could the global ecosystem survive such an immense call on its services?

Problem is: we’re in no position to urge the Asians to abandon their efforts to become as materially affluent as we have long been. It wouldn’t be moral for us to try and it wouldn’t have any effect if we did. There are two dimensions to the problem: the continuing growth in the world’s population and the continuing growth in the world’s average material living standards. I believe the only way to try to reconcile the poor countries’ material aspirations with the ecological limits to growth is for the developing countries to focus particularly on limiting their population growth and for developed countries such as Australia to focus on limiting our economic growth. (The rich countries don’t need to worry about population growth because our fertility rates are already below the replacement level of 2.1 babies per female.)

We rich countries need to move to a ‘steady-state’ economy, where there is no growth in our use (‘throughput’) of natural resources, even though there is no restriction on efforts to use all resources (natural, labour and man-made capital resources) with greater economy - that is, on productivity improvement. With a fertility rate below the replacement rate and limited net immigration, this should not involve a significant decline in our present material standard of living.

How would this absence of growth in the use of natural resources be achieved? By the much wider application of cap-and-trade schemes such as the emissions trading scheme proposed for greenhouse gas emissions. This would have the effect of raising the prices of natural resources and everything made from them, but provided the permits for firms to put natural resources into the production chain were auctioned rather than given away, the rise in prices would be equalled by an increase in government revenue. That is, the scheme would be equivalent to, in Tony Abbott’s immortal phrase, ‘a great big new tax on everything’. But the proceeds from the natural resource tax could be used to make equivalent cuts in other taxes, particularly income and consumption taxes. In other words, the tax system would be realigned, so that we increased the tax on environmental ‘bads’ while reducing the tax on environmental ‘goods’, without much change in the level of taxation overall. In the process, we’d be changing relative prices in the economy, discouraging activities that involved heavy use of natural resources while encouraging activities involving little use of natural resources.

At present, developed economies are oriented towards economising on the use of the most expensive (and most heavily taxed) resource, labour, but in the new regime labour would be a lot cheaper and the most expensive resources would be natural resources. So all of capitalism’s economising, productivity-seeking efforts would be redirected towards reducing the use of natural resources. The recycling of natural resources would become more economic, as would the repair rather than replacement of durable consumer goods. We’d still have a market-based, efficiency-oriented economy, but we’d impose a different set of constraints on it. It would be an economy that strove for improved quality, not increased quantity.

My guess is that a lot of people like the sound of an economy that does less damage to the environment, and aren’t particularly perturbed by the thought that their level of consumption wouldn’t keep increasing year after year, but wonder whether a capitalist economy that stopped growing would implode. If we stopped consuming more each year wouldn’t that lead to mass unemployment? They seem to think of the economy as being like riding a bike: if you stop going forward you fall off. Certainly, there are plenty of economists and business people who’d be happy to leave you with that impression.

The strongest argument in favour of economic growth is that we need a bigger economy to generate the extra jobs needed to gainfully employ an ever-growing workforce. But if ever there was a time when we were freed from that imperative it’s now. Like the other developed economies - and China - we’re entering a period where the ageing of the population means, if anything, the demand for labour will exceed its supply. What’s happening in Australia right now is that more than half the growth in our population and labour force is coming from immigration. In other words, our problem at present is the reverse of the one people worry about: to maintain our rate of economic growth we’re having to import workers from other countries. So if we give up our desire for growth in our use of natural resources, we can cut our rate of net migration and have little trouble finding jobs for everyone who wants to work. Should unemployment persist, however, the answer would be to take the gains from increases in workers’ productivity not as real wage rises (to permit higher consumption) but as a shorter working week.

The conventional view among economists, business people and politicians is that economic growth must continue. I believe, on the contrary, that growth in our use of natural resources must stop; that this could be achieved without great technical difficulty, that it wouldn’t involve any loss of human happiness and could lead to improvements in social relationships. The only question is how much further damage to the global ecosystem must occur before we come to accept the need for change. When we do come to accept it, however, it’s to the economists that we’ll turn to work out how it can be done.

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ECONOMICS AND LIFE

Talk to Hunter Valley Research Foundation Wellbeing Watch
June 19, 2008

I’m very pleased to be back in my home town to support the HVRF and the presentation of the Wellbeing Watch report for 2008. I think the last time I was in this building it was to receive my commerce degree in 1970. By then I’d moved to Sydney to work and I’ve lived there ever since. All my formal education in economics was gained in this town, at Boys High and then the University of Newcastle. Trouble was, at the time I had my heart set on becoming an accountant. I resented all the economics I was forced to study, couldn’t see the point of it and promptly forgot most of it as soon as I’d passed the exam - which I had trouble doing. It wasn’t until I’d passed my last exam to become qualified as a chartered accountant that I realised this great goal I’d been working towards since high school wasn’t very satisfying and wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. I soon stumbled into journalism at the Herald - the Sydney Herald - which was what I wanted to do with my life - and was pressed into service as an economic journalist. I’ve been writing about economics and the economy ever since and this month I’ve clocked up 30 years as the Herald’s Economics Editor. I’ve spent most of that time desperately trying to remember what I was supposed to have learnt back in Waratah, Tighes Hill and Shortland all those years ago. Callahan. Three-pointed star steel rods used for fencing.

The economy - the economic dimension of our lives; the bit concerned with working, earning and spending - is very important. I’ve found working out how the economy works - how best to make it work smoothly without too much inflation or too much unemployment, how to make it grow and make ourselves more prosperous - is a subject of great importance and infinite fascination. As I’ve gained an understanding of these things, however, and perhaps as I’ve got older and wiser, I’ve come to realise that there’s a lot more to life than economics. And that’s what we’re here today to discuss.

Economics is concerned with the material aspect of life, with the production and consumption of goods and services. When we pursue economic growth - measured by a faster increase in GDP - as economists, politicians and business people almost universally say we should, we’re trying to raise our material standard of living. Now, the material is very important. Only a fool - or an aesthete - would deny it. But, equally, only a fool would believe that the material aspect of life was all that mattered. Almost everyone agrees that the quality of our relationships with family and friends is more important than how much money we make. Our trouble is the practical one of making sure we actually practice what we know to be true, because we all have a tendency to regard our material concerns as more urgent and pressing than our relationships with spouses, children and parents. Similarly, most people agree that good health is more important than money. It’s very important to us to have a sense of purpose in our lives, to gain satisfaction (not just money) from our jobs and to have a sense that we belong to a community. For many people the cultural side of their lives is important, as is the spiritual dimension.

The dominant measure of the country’s progress from month to month and year to year is the growth in GDP. It measures the economy’s production of goods and services during a period. It’s also a good measure of the growth in our incomes. When you take the growth in the nation’s income per person you have the standard measure of the increase in our material standard of living (though this tells us nothing about how that increase was shared between rich and poor). But there’s a difference between our standard of living and our quality of life. Our quality of life takes in the other, non-material dimensions of life we’ve just agreed are so important. But all of those things are excluded from GDP. So GDP is a good measure of income - of the material side of life - but is far too one-dimensional to adequately measure our broader wellbeing. And, in fact, was never designed to measure our wellbeing.

For that we have to look beyond GDP and inflation and unemployment, which is just what’s been done for the Hunter in the Wellbeing Watch we’re here to discuss. What is wellbeing? Well, it goes by lots of other names: happiness, utility, satisfaction. It’s a subjective measure - not what we’ve got, but how we feel about what we’ve got. It’s about whether people are happy with their lives, whether they feel their life has meaning, how valued by others we feel we are, how satisfied we are with our standard of living, how optimistic we are about the future, and how satisfied we are with our lives as a whole.

Subjective wellbeing is an issue psychologists, economists and others have been studying closely in recent years. They’ve found that most people in developed countries rate themselves pretty high on a scale of one to five. But they’ve also found that, though people on higher incomes generally rate themselves more highly than do people on low incomes at any point in time, the significant increase in all our real incomes over time - the past 40 or 50 years - has produced no increase in our subjective wellbeing. And when you look at partial measures of objective wellbeing - such as rates of depression, illegal drug-taking, and the rate of crime - you find they’ve worsened. It’s generally only in the early stages of a country’s economic development that you can see subjective wellbeing increasing in line with rising real income per person.

So we can’t assume that because the Hunter regional economy has grown strongly in recent years, the people of the region are doing well. Whether or not they’ve been doing well is, of course, an important question for community leaders and the rest of us to have answered. But it can’t be answered from the usual economic measures. It has to be measured in other ways and that’s what we’re here to hear about today.

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WHAT’S WRONG WITH STANDARD ECONOMICS

Talk to Sydney University Economics Society
September 13, 2007

I want to start by saying that, in a minor way, The Sydney Morning Herald is an employer of economics graduates from Sydney University. We hire about one every two years. Over the years we’ve hired Steve Burrell, Stephen Ellis (now a columnist from America in the Business Australian), Tom Allard, Jessica Irvine and Jake Saulwick. We’ll have another one coming on board next year. (I wish I’d hired another name you may recognise, Stephen Long of the ABC.)

The thing to note is that everyone on that list is a product of Political Economy, not the mainstream economics course. So I have pretty well-formed views about Sydney University graduates as potential employees. Why do I hire out of PE? I like PE students because PE is an essay-based course (and economic journalists have to be able to explain economics in words, not diagrams or equations), because PE students have a demonstrated interest in politics (and I regard economic journalism as a branch of political journalism) and because PE seems to attract a disproportionate share of very bright students (and I try to hire only people who are exceptionally bright).

In passing I should tell you that I don’t select trainees on the basis of the marks they got. I’m more interested in their extra-curricular activities - whether they were on the SRC, got involved in running clubs and societies, whether they wrote for Honi or the Union Record - because what I’m really looking for is people with a burning desire to be a journalist, people who’ll throw themselves into it, people who are ‘hungry’ to succeed.

I should tell you that I’m very happy with the people I recruit from PE, which is why I keep going back. In recent years, however, I’ve encountered one problem: most PE graduates haven’t actually done any courses in standard, neoclassical economics. It’s amazing, but true. This is a significant weakness and I usually have to insist that the people I hire go back and do some standard economics by distance education. I don’t think the people running PE are doing their students any favours churning out supposed economists who know less about conventional economics than someone who’d done economics at high school.

What I say to my PE graduates is that I don’t require them to believe the neoclassical model - as we’ll see, I have a lot of doubts about it myself - but I do require them to know it inside out. Why? Because the neoclassical model is the language of the public debate about economics in this country and every other country. If you don’t speak the language, you don’t participate or even understand the argument. You’re certainly in no position to convince the participants in the debate they’re barking up the wrong tree.

Of course, some of the conventional economics graduates who are whizzes at the maths aren’t good at speaking the language, either. But while I’m offering a critique of PE, let me be equally frank about the conventional course. I think its great weakness is the opposite of PE’s - it’s so busy teaching the intricacies of the neoclassical model that it doesn’t find time to give students an adequate understanding of the significant limitations of the model and the alternatives to it. To teach the model without adequately explaining its limitations is, to me, professional negligence. So there’s nothing wrong with economics at Sydney Uni that couldn’t be fixed by rolling the rival courses together - by making sure each side gets a fair dose of what the other side is teaching.

I also suspect the conventional course would be better if it devoted less time to exploring the model’s limiting cases and more to giving students practice at applying the model to specific problems. That is, after all, what economic practitioners do: apply the theory they learnt at uni to the real-world policy problems they are grappling with. But don’t get the idea from this I’m critical of the emphasis on theory in university economics courses. I’m not - not a bit. Universities should be all about theory. Theory is their comparative advantage. It’s the only thing they’re good at and they should stick to it. They shouldn’t worry about teaching vocational skills because it’s hard to learn vocational skills at uni and surprisingly easy to learn them on the job - when you get a job. It’s because economic practitioners spend their professional lives applying the theory they learnt at uni - because pretty much all the theory they know is the theory they learnt at uni - that unis should concentrate on giving their students the best understanding of theory possible. And students should concentrate on tanking up with theory while they’ve got the chance and not worry that it’s all too theoretical. The practice will come later. And when you’ve had a bit of practice you’ll realise that the theory was more useful than you thought when you were learning it.

That’s probably the most useful thing I could say to many of you: don’t sit around telling yourself how useless and unrealistic all the theory is they’re trying to make you learn. You haven’t actually had enough experience to have an informed view of what theory’s useful and what isn’t. So take your lecturers on trust: accept that if they think it’s worth teaching it must be worth learning. If my experience is any guide, when you are experienced enough to judge you’ll realise most of what they taught you was worth learning.

Of course, decent teaching of theory gives plenty of attention to teaching the limitations of the theory. So now that I turn to my topic of what’s wrong with standard theory please don’t think I’m saying economics is rubbish and you’re wasting your time with it. I’m not saying that and I don’t believe that. I could give you a speech on what’s right and useful about the neoclassical model - and if I had time I would - but instead I want to talk about the limitations of the model because that’s where I suspect the conventional course is weakest. Everything in life has strengths and weaknesses and neoclassical economics is no exception.

Perhaps before I launch in I should explain that my view of my role as an economic commentator has changed over the years. For a long time I saw myself as a sort of missionary for economics, explaining the economic way of thinking and trying to persuade people to accept the economic rationalists’ policy prescription. But that was before I’d thought more and read more about the limitations of standard economics. So now I see my role as someone paid to provide the Herald’s readers with a critique of economics and economists, just as theatre critics provide our readers with a critique of the latest plays. Economists are so influential in the debate about public policy - and they act so certain that they’re the bearers of God’s Infallible Truth - that our readers often need reminding of their blind spots and the narrowness of their advice. Of course, putting economists back in their box when I consider they’ve overstepped their area of competence doesn’t stop me still devoting a lot of time to explaining economic concepts and the motivation behind government policy positions.

I suspect the biggest problem with economics is that it split off from the rest of science - the natural sciences and the social sciences - over 100 years ago, so that while there have been many major advances in those sciences since then, economics has been in its own, self-contained world and has carried on down its own path oblivious to those advances.

In Eric Beinhocker’s recent book, The Origin of Wealth, he argues that, thanks to the work of Leon Walras and others in the 19th century, the primary inspiration for neoclassical economics was physics, particularly the physics of motion and energy. Walras introduced differential calculus to economics and the organising paradigm that the economy is an equilibrating system. But Beinhocker says economics took its inspiration from physics at a time when physicists had discovered the first law of thermodynamics, but not yet discovered the second law. As a result, economics is based on terribly out-of-date physics. It’s now clear to physicists - but not economists - that the economy isn’t a closed, equilibrating system at all, but rather an open, disequilibrium, complex adaptive system.

To quote Beinhocker, ‘when Walras imported the concept of equilibrium from physics into economics, he gained mathematical precision and scientific predictability. But he paid a high price for that gain - realism. The mathematics of equilibrium required Walras and later economists to make a set of highly restrictive assumptions that have increasingly detached theoretical economics from the real world. Traditional economics has what computer programmers call a “garbage in, garbage out” problem. If you feed a computer bad inputs, it will with absolute precision and flawless logic grind out bad outputs. Likewise, most traditional economic models begin with unrealistic assumptions and then, with mathematical inevitability, work their way to equally unrealistic conclusions. … This is why there is little empirical support for many core ideas of traditional economics, and in some cases empirical evidence directly contradicts the theory’s predictions.’

The point here is not that conventional economics is too mathematical, but that it’s not using the right maths. The right maths would, no doubt, be a lot trickier and permit a lot less precise conclusions. But I don’t want to be drawn any further on this point because, though I’ve been happy to quote Beinhocker, I don’t profess to know anything much about physics and maths.

I’m a lot more confident in pointing to another area of science where, more than 100 years ago, economics split off on its own track, so that it’s now largely oblivious to subsequent advances. That science is psychology. It was quite primitive 100 years ago, but since then has made considerable gains in understanding the drivers of human behaviour. It’s quite understandable that, with psychology being then as primitive as it was, economics built itself on the assumption that economic agents behaved rationally in all things. It was very much a product of the thinking of the Enlightenment.

But psychology’s challenge to microeconomic theory strikes at that central assumption of Homo economicus. Economic man is assumed to be rational and self-interested. He or she always carefully evaluates all the options before making any decision, and always with the object of maximising his or her personal ‘utility’ or satisfaction. But cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that humans simply lack the neural processing power to make the carefully calculated decisions economists assume. People are not rational, they are intuitive. And altruism is often an important consideration in their decision-making. People can’t chose correctly between three options where the best option is not immediately apparent. Rather than carefully thinking through the pros and cons of every decision, people tend to rely on mental shortcuts (‘heuristics’) which often serve them well enough, but also lead them into systematic biases. People are often slow to learn from their mistakes. They are frequently capable of reacting differently to choices that are essentially the same, just because the choices have been ‘framed’ (packaged) differently. This means that, rather than being coldly rational, people’s decisions are often influenced by emotional considerations.

All this means that Homo sapiens differs from Homo economicus in many important respects. He doesn’t conform to economists’ assumption of fungibility (one dollar is indistinguishable from another), he is often not bothered by opportunity cost and thus has a strong bias in favour of the status quo. He doesn’t ignore sunk costs as he’s supposed to and often can’t order his preferences consistently. He is not averse to risks so much as averse to losses and he focuses more on changes in his wealth than on its absolute level.

Unlike Homo economicus, Homo sapiens cares deeply about fairness. Experiments show people will walk away from deals they consider treat them unfairly, even though those deals would leave them better off. People are prepared to pay a price to punish others they consider to have been behaving badly towards the group. Often people are concerned about ‘procedural fairness’ – how things are done, not just how they end up.

I believe this has powerful implications for the aspect of the neoclassical model that economic rationalists (particularly right-wing rationalists) find so attractive: its elevation and celebration of individualism. The individual should be free to choose, and governments should be most circumspect in how they constrain individuals’ freedom, including by taxing them to pay for the public provision of services and to redistribute income. This elevation of the individual and, by implication, denigration of a more communitarian approach, turns out to rest heavily on the assumption that individuals are rational. If individuals are rational decision-makers then it follows, as the rationalists keep asserting, that governments can never know what is good for you better than you know yourself. Governments should therefore tax individuals as little as possible, and maximise the private provision of such things as education and health care. If individuals are not particularly rational in their decision-making, however, then there may well be a case for government paternalism in certain circumstances.

Another aspect of the non-rationality of economic agents is the way, contrary to the assumptions of the model, they aren’t rugged individualists but are heavily influenced by the behaviour of people around them. My tastes and preferences aren’t fixed, but are highly variable, influenced by what others are doing and what happens to be fashionable. I care deeply about winning the approval of others and have a great desire to fit in. At the same time I’m preoccupied with my social status. I want by my conspicuous consumption to not just keep up with the Jones but to overtake them, demonstrating my superior social standing. As my real income rises over time, more and more of it will be devoted to the purchase of positional goods. This is a particular challenge to conventional economics because, while it’s very skilled at raising the material living standards of the community generally, it’s simply powerless to do what most people would wish it to: raise their relative income. Obviously, anything it does to raise the relative income of some people will lower the relative income of just as many. Another aspect of the fact that humans are group animals is the herd behaviour investors so frequently exhibit in markets for financial assets, contrary to the contentions of the efficient market hypothesis.

Thanks to relatively recent advances in neuroscience, we now know a lot more about how our lack of rationality is a function of the way our brains have evolved. It turns out that the primitive, more instinctive, emotional part of our brain often overrides - or beats to the punch - the more recent, more logical part of our brain. This leads to a strange dualism in our minds: we’re often motivated to do things by considerations the more intellectual part of our brain knows to be silly.

It’s as though we have two selves, an unconscious self that’s emotional and short-sighted and a conscious self that’s reasoning and far sighted. We have trouble controlling ourselves in circumstances where the benefits are immediate and certain, whereas the costs are longer-term and uncertain. When you come home tired from work, for instance, the benefits of slumping in front of the telly are immediate, whereas the costs - feeling tired the next day; looking back on your life and realising you could have done a lot better if you’d got off your backside and played a bit of sport or studied harder for exams - are prospective and uncertain. Similarly, the reward from eating food is instant, whereas the costs of overeating are uncertain and far off in the future - being regarded as physically unattractive, becoming obese, becoming a diabetic, dying younger etc. As everyone knows who’s tried to diet, give up smoking, control their drinking, gambling or even speeding, save or get on top of their credit card debt, it’s very hard achieve the self-control our conscious, future selves want us to achieve. Problems of self-control are ubiquitous to modern life, but standard economics is oblivious to their existence.

Before we pass on I should acknowledge that the relatively recent school of economic thought known as behavioural economics is fully aware of the way the assumptions of standard economics fly in the face of advances in psychology and is seeking ways for more realistic assumptions about human behaviour to be incorporated into the equations of the standard model. I suspect, however, it won’t be easy.

Moving to a more mundane level, economists suffer the same problem as every other profession: what I call model-blindness - a tendency to view the world and to analyse problems exclusively through the prism of their model. To focus on those variables their model focuses on and a tendency to ignore all those factors from which their model abstracts. This is a simple error, but it’s amazing how often it’s made. It occurs partly because there is so little engagement between economists and people from other disciplines - so that economists rarely get a chance to see themselves as others see them - and partly because the teachers of economics devote so little attention to ensuring their students fully appreciate the limitations of the model.

As we’ve seen, the community is preoccupied with perceptions of fairness, whereas standard microeconomic analysis ignores equity considerations. When you press them, economists will tell you they have nothing to say on the fairness of their policy prescriptions because this involves value judgments that are beyond their area of competence. Yet it’s remarkable how often economic rationalists in particular will press policies on the community without bothering to warn people that, in reaching those policy prescriptions, they have taken no account of equity issues. This is unprofessional behaviour.

The neoclassical model focuses on one often very important factor – price – while ignoring a lot of other potentially important factors. It assumes that buyers and sellers have roughly equal bargaining power – which is often not the case. We’re hearing more about this lately as farmers and other small businesses complain about being squeezed by big business, such as the two supermarket chains. It’s been remarkable to see the Howard Government running advertisements to remind small businesses of the changes to the Trade Practices Act that now permit them to bargain collectively with big business, while at the same time using Work Choices to discourage collective bargaining between individual workers and their employers.

Another assumption of the conventional model is that both buyers and sellers have complete knowledge – about the qualities of the product being exchanged and about all the prices being charged by other sellers. In reality, sellers usually know far more about these things than buyers do, giving them a significant advantage. This ‘information asymmetry’ explains a lot of the problems and ‘market failure’ in markets. It’s what allows doctors to over-service their patients and allows the CEOs of public companies to enjoy salary packages many times greater than the value of their contribution to the firm.

The conventional model assumes away the importance of institutions – including laws and social norms of behaviour – that are critical to the efficient functioning of markets. It’s only recently, for instance, that model-blinded economists have realised the valuable role that ‘trust’ and other aspects of social capital play in lubricating a market economy. But other important institutions include the well-enforced law of contract, bankruptcy law, accounting standards and trustworthy auditors. Economists’ failure to understand this simple truth – because it’s not part of the model – led to them having a hand in some terrible disasters in recent times, such as the Asian crisis (where developing countries with utterly inadequate commercial infrastructure were urged to open their financial markets to hugely destabilising ‘hot money’ flows of foreign capital) and the badly botched transition to capitalism of Russia and other formerly planned economies.

Yet another major weakness of the model is its failure to take account of social externalities. The deregulation of shopping hours, combined with the attack on weekend penalty rates, is fast bringing about the demise of the weekend without the community ever consciously deciding this would be a good thing. Similarly, I believe Work Choices’ attack on overtime, weekend and public holiday penalty rates and provisions for the partial cashing out of holiday pay could be damaging to family life.

Then there’s the sloppy thinking that goes from the fact that economics is capable of dealing only with monetary incentives to the implicit assumption that only monetary incentives matter. This is classic model-blindness. Clearly, the real world abounds in important non-monetary incentives, including the intrinsic enjoyment of work and pursuit of job satisfaction, and the pursuit of power and status. Ignore these factors and you get wrong answers.

But perhaps the thing that worries me most about standard economics is the way its adoption of the assumption of ‘revealed preference’ - that what people do is a reliable guide to what they want - in the 1930s allowed the goal of economic efficiency to be changed from maximising utility to maximising consumption. Clearly, much utility exists outside consumption - including utility derived from job satisfaction, job security and family life. I fear this derailing of the goals of economics has turned economics into the ideology of materialism and economists into the high priests in the temple of mammon.

This at last brings me to my ostensible reason for being here, to publicise my new book, Gittinomics. What is Gittinomics - what’s my special twist on the subject? Well, most of what I’ve said today isn’t in the book. The book is a kind of exposition of how the micro economy works, but from the perspective of the ordinary person. I call it home economics. My emphasis is on understanding the system to make sure you’re a master of the market system, not a victim. Making it work for you, not you for it. To that end, the first thing to understand is the need to keep economics in perspective and economists in their place.

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WELLBEING, MONEY, PSYCHOLOGY AND ECONOMICS

Conference on Quality of Life, Deakin University
November 30, 2006

I want to talk to you about the increased interaction between the disciplines of psychology and economics, and focus particularly on the relationship been income and subjective wellbeing, as befits a conference on quality of life. But first I need to explain that I’m not an economist myself. Rather, I’m a journalist who writes about economics.

Psychology and economics

You won’t be surprised to know that the academic discipline of economics is pretty inward-looking and hidebound. It’s still dominated by the neoclassical model of markets developed first by economists such as Adam Smith in the 18th century and Alfred Marshall in the 19th. It’s evolved a bit since then, but not as much as you might expect and not as much as I suspect psychology has. The conventional neoclassical model is built on many debatable assumptions, but most of the academic effort has gone not on trying to improve those assumptions but on mathematising the model, which permits many rigorously logical conclusions to be drawn - given the assumptions. All this maths allows the economists - like psychologists - to believe their discipline is more rigorously scientific than the other social sciences.

There have been various new developments in economics over the years - most of which have come to dead ends - but the relatively recent developments I find most interesting and most promising are based on borrowings from the work of psychologists. It may surprise you to know that the Nobel Prize in economics has twice been won by psychologists. Herb Simon of Carnegie-Mellon won it in 1978 for his ‘pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organisations’. Conventional economics assumes economic man - homo economicus - to be a lightning-quick calculator of costs and benefits. Simon argued that people often use rules of thumb that economise on the cost of collecting information and on the cost of thinking. Their rationality was thus ‘bounded’ and rather than maximising their utility they ‘satisfice’ - they do as well as they think possible.

The second Nobel to a psychologist went to Daniel Kahneman of Princeton in 2002. He took Simon’s work a lot further, winning the prize ‘for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty’. It’s not directly relevant to quality of life, but I’ll say a little about it because it is interesting and it does, at present anyway, represent psychology’s most successful incursion into the thinking of economists. With the help of some economists, Kahneman founded a new school of thought within economics, known as behavioural economics, which has attracted a big following among younger academics.

Decision-making

As we’ve seen, behavioural economics challenges one of the central elements of conventional microeconomic theory: the assumption of Homo economicus. Economic man is assumed to be rational and self-interested. She always carefully evaluates all the options before making any decision, and always with the object of maximising her personal ‘utility’ or satisfaction. But cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that humans simply lack the neural processing power to make the carefully calculated decisions economists assume. People aren’t rational, they are intuitive. And altruism is often an important consideration in their decision-making. People can’t chose correctly between three options where the best option is not immediately apparent. Rather than carefully thinking through the pros and cons of every decision, people tend to rely on mental shortcuts (‘heuristics’) which often serve them well enough, but also lead them into systematic biases. People are often slow to learn from their mistakes. They are frequently capable of reacting differently to choices that are essentially the same, just because the choices have been ‘framed’ differently. This means that, rather than being coldly rational, people’s decisions are often influenced by emotional considerations.

All this means that Homo sapiens differs from Homo economicus in many important respects. He doesn’t conform to economists’ assumption of fungibility (one dollar is indistinguishable from another), he is often not bothered by opportunity cost and thus has a strong bias in favour of the status quo. He doesn’t ignore ‘sunk costs’ as he is supposed to and often cannot order his preferences consistently. He is not averse to risks so much as averse to losses and he focuses more on changes in his wealth than on its absolute level.

Unlike Homo economicus, Homo sapiens cares deeply about fairness. Experiments show people will walk away from deals they consider treat them unfairly, even though those deals would leave them better off. People are prepared to pay a price to punish others they consider to have been behaving badly towards the group. Often people are concerned about ‘procedural fairness’ – how things are done, not just how they end up.

Wellbeing and utility

That’s enough about psychology’s first challenge to economic orthodoxy. After Kahneman had made his mark on the theory of decision-making he moved on to join many other psychologists - and a few pioneering economists - in studying subjective wellbeing, quality of life, life satisfaction, happiness, call it what you will. This study ought to be of intense interest to economists because it’s hard to see much difference between psychologists’ subjective wellbeing and economists’ utility or satisfaction. In original intention, neoclassical economics is about studying the way individuals maximise their utility. As you know, conventional economics was heavily influenced by Bentham’s utilitarianism. So if economics has a goal, it’s to help the community maximise its utility.

The problem is that economics has rather lost its way on the question of utility. Sometime in the 1930s it was decided that the trouble with utility is that it’s unobservable - you can’t measure it. You can’t know how much utility A derives from the consumption of a glass of beer relative to B. The most we can hope to know is how they order or rank their choices. A prefers beer to wine, but wine to lemonade. But no mater. Since A and B are rational, and are always seeking to maximise their utility, it’s clear their preferences will be revealed simply by looking at what they choose to buy with their income. Their ‘revealed preference’ will tell us all we need to know about their utility.

Note how this seemingly neat shortcut relies heavily on the assumption of rational choice, that people always know and do exactly what’s best for them. They never do anything they subsequently regret and if occasionally they make a mistake, they quickly realise their error and never repeat it. Note, too, how circular the logic has become. How do we know what people want? From what they do. How do we know they do what they want? Because they do it. And here we see an old prejudice among economists that affect their attitudes towards psychology and its experiments, as well as surveys of wellbeing: ignore what people say they want, just focus on what they do. The other short-circuitry at work is that, though in theory economics is about maximising utility, in practice it ends up being about maximising consumption. Which particular forms of consumption? Doesn’t matter - just consumption. Which consumption is the private business of each consumer and not a fit subject for economists or governments to meddle with. How do you maximise consumption? By maximising the income from which people finance their consumption. How do you do that? By getting the economy to grow as fast as you reasonably can.

Now perhaps you see why the psychologists’ huge body of work on wellbeing is highly relevant to the work of economists - and highly challenging to their conventional views. And the particular pressure-point is obvious: the relationship between income and wellbeing. That’s what the economists who study wellbeing are most interested in. So what have we discovered about income’s role in wellbeing? We’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to say something about terminology.

Speaking the same language

I think there’s much to be gained from an inter-disciplinary approach to many issues, but I’m constantly disappointed by the lack of contact between academics of different disciplines. They often criticise each other from afar - from the comfort of their own camps - but rarely get together to argue through issues of common interest. As a result, they’re often quite ignorant of the others’ way of looking at things, thus allowing much misunderstanding and incomprehension.

Joan Robinson, perhaps the most famous female economist and a contemporary of Keynes at Cambridge, once said that the purpose of studying economics is to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists. My take on the subject isn’t so defamatory: I think we study economics to learn when to use the many synonyms for the word ‘money’. Money is a vague term, can’t you be more specific? I’ve noticed that many social scientists use the words ‘income’ and ‘wealth’ interchangeably, whereas to economists they have quite specific, and different, meanings. Economists, like a lot of academics, are quite arrogant. So when you use those two words interchangeably, they’re either confused or they conclude you’re ignorant and not worth taking seriously.

Income is what you earn during a period from wages, business profits or investments, plus cash benefits received from governments. Most income is spent on living expenses - consumption - while some is saved. Wealth, on the other hand, is the value of the assets you own, less any money you owe. You add to it by saving some of your income, by gifts and bequests from others and by capital gain. Income is measured over a period of time - a week or a year - whereas wealth is measured at a point in time, such as the first day or the last day of a week or a year. So income is a flow of value over time, whereas wealth is a stock of value at a point in time. Consumer spending is primarily done from income, but the two aren’t the same thing because people spend less than their income when they save, or more than their income when they borrow to finance additional consumption.

It’s clear that what we’re talking about in the wellbeing context is almost always income, not wealth or consumption. Another thing psychologists seem weak on is the distinction between absolute levels of income and relative income. Relative income is how much I earn during a period relative to what other people are earning. A person or household’s absolute level of income is viewed in isolation from other people’s, though it can be compared over time - with how much I earned a year ago or how much I expect to earn in a year’s time. This distinction may seem pedantic but, as we shall see, it’s pivotal to the interpretation of the effect of income on wellbeing.

Income and wellbeing

Let me summarise the research results as I understand them. The first point to make is that, contrary to popular wisdom, money does make us happy - up to a point. Studies of developing countries show that the higher the average level of income per person in a country, the happier the people in that country say they are. So, up to a certain point, rising GDP per person does make people happier. That point, however, is about $US10, 000 or $US15,000 a year per person - a point that Australia and all the other developed countries passed a very long time ago. Studies show that even though the people in rich countries' income per person has doubled or trebled in real terms since the 1950s, average levels self-reported happiness haven't changed - they haven't fallen, but nor have they risen. In other words, and to use an economists' term, when it comes to happiness, money is subject to significant DMU - diminishing marginal utility. An increase in our income adds little if anything to our utility.

Why do increases in absolute income do little to make us happier? Because of a pervasive human trait psychologists call adaptation. It doesn't take long before we get used to our newly improved circumstances and come to take them for granted. They get absorbed into the status quo and we go back to being about as happy as we always were. To put the point another way, soon after we achieve a higher level of material success, our aspirations move up another notch and we go back to being dissatisfied with our achievements.

The second point to make is that if, instead of comparing different countries over time, we look at particular countries at a point in time, we do find that people with higher incomes are happier than people with lower incomes. Particularly in the case of Australia, however, the difference is surprisingly small - that is, on average, rich people are only a bit happier than poorer people. How are these two seemingly contradictory findings reconciled? It's simple: people seem to be a lot more concerned about the level of their income relative to others than about what's happened to the level of their income over time. When all of us enjoy rising incomes at pretty much the same rate - which is what's been happening over the decades - none of us feels any better off. What little satisfaction we get from high incomes comes from having an income that's higher than other people's. We use our income as an indicator of success in life and of our social status. And some research suggests that it's really social status that affects our happiness much more than income as such.

Now, here’s where I beg to differ with my mate Bob Cummins (professor of psychology at Deakin University, Melbourne). When Bob looks at the results from the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index, and in his article in the Journal of Happiness Studies in 2000, he concludes that income has a significant effect on wellbeing. On average, people in the top income bracket report greater subjective wellbeing than those in the middle bracket and those in the middle report greater wellbeing than those in the bottom bracket. Well, I could quibble about whether those differences are big enough to be judged significant - to me they seem quite small. Very large increases in income are needed to produce quite modest increases in wellbeing - my point about income being subject to greatly diminishing marginal utility as income rises beyond the poor-country threshold.

Bob uses this evidence of greater levels of wellbeing for higher income-earners to argue that it supports the homeostatic theory of wellbeing - the theory that subjective wellbeing is held within a narrow range determined by personality. Bob argues that people with higher incomes enjoy higher wellbeing because they suffer less from homeostatic defeat. This is because they can buy the resources necessary to optimise the operation of their homeostatic system. Now, I want to make it clear that I’m not attacking the homeostatic theory as such. Indeed, I think we can drop the homeostatic bit out of the argument completely and we’re left with the standard materialist argument in favour of being rich: the rich are happier because they can afford to buy more than other people - more comfort, more assistance, more everything.

My point is that Bob hasn’t demonstrated, as he claims, that income has a significant effect on wellbeing. Rather he’s demonstrated a much smaller claim, that relative income has an effect on wellbeing. The point is that, if more income makes us happier because we can afford to buy more stuff (or, in Bob’s terms, because we can buy resources to overcome homeostatic failure) then, as everyone’s income rises over time in line with economic growth, all of us can afford to buy more stuff so our reported wellbeing should rise over time. But we know from many studies that though the real incomes of people in the developed economies have risen by a factor of three or four since World War II, their reported wellbeing hasn’t budged. So we’re left with the much more qualified statement that higher relative income increases the wellbeing of those towards the top. And we’re left with the likelihood that the reason a high-income earner feels a little happier has to do not with her ability to buy more stuff but with her knowledge that’s she’s been more socially successful than many others.

Why am I labouring this distinction between increasing absolute income over time and possessing a higher relative income at a point in time? Because it has profound implications for the goals of economic management. From the point of view of economists and politicians, this finding is bad news. Why? Because though the pursuit of economic growth can raise everyone's income in absolute terms, there's nothing it can do to raise everyone's relative income. Obviously, there'll always be some people who come towards the top of the class and some people who come towards the bottom. We might change the order around, but that will produce as many losers as winners, leaving the population no better off overall.

To repeat, this is a devastating conclusion for economists – and particularly economic rationalists – whose whole practical motivation has been based on the assumption that helping the community raise its productivity and increase its production and consumption of goods and services will leave it unequivocally better off. There is no doubt that, materially, we are better off than we were even 10 years ago: our homes are bigger and better, our cars are better, our food and clothing are fancier and we have any number of wonderful new gadgets to save us labour or entertain us. But though we are better off, we don’t feel better off.

Implications for economic policy

This brings us to the implications of wellbeing research for economic policy should economists and politicians someday incorporate them into their thinking. Richard Layard, a leading British economist who has embraced the psychological push says that, beside adequate income, the research shows six main factors affect happiness: mental health, satisfying and secure work, a secure and loving private life, a secure community, freedom, and moral values.

So my first policy implication is that reducing unemployment should be given a much higher priority by the economic policy-makers. Research shows that being unemployed makes people particularly unhappy, a lot more unhappy than can be explained by the loss of income they suffer by not having a job. What people miss is the sense of identity and self-worth that comes from a job, and also, no doubt, the social contact. Economists may protest that they are already giving high priority to reducing unemployment but, in truth, their pursuit of this goal is conditional. Their concern with the efficient allocation of resources means they frown on any solutions (job sharing, job-creation schemes, public sector employment, for instance) that involve modest inefficiencies. The truth is that the overwhelming goal of economists is to hasten the growth in the economy’s production of goods and services, and the jobs generated in this process are just a fortunate by-product.

My second policy implication is that governments and employers could do a lot to raise subjective well-being if they put more emphasis on the enrichment of jobs – increasing job satisfaction by giving workers more personal control, opportunity to use their skills, variety in tasks, respect and status, and contact with others. Taken literally, the economists’ model assumes that all work is unpleasant – a disutility – and is undertaken purely to gain the money to buy the things that bring utility. Like the rest of us, economists know that, in reality, work carries much intrinsic satisfaction. But they don’t follow this realisation through to their policy prescriptions. They are perpetually advocating labour market reform aimed at ensuring labour is used more efficiently, treating labour as though it were just another inanimate economic resource, and ignoring the feelings of the human beings attached to the labour. Various of the ways labour can be used more efficiently make life unpleasant and even unhealthy for the workers involved: ever-changing casual hours, rolling shift work, split shifts and firms continually moving their staff to different cities. When we pursue efficiency at the expense of people, economists have got things round the wrong way, trashing ends so as to advance means.

A third implication is that economic policy-makers should recognise the benefit of stability. People like stability – it makes them feel secure and happy. What’s more, it breeds a highly valuable commodity: trust. People don’t like continuous change. Macroeconomic management is aimed a stabilising the rate of growth in demand, and that’s good. But microeconomists perpetually advocate change (‘reform’) aimed at increasing efficiency, raising productivity and quickening the production of goods and services – the very objective we now know doesn’t make people any happier. Often, micro reform involves ‘displacing’ workers from the reformed industries where their labour wasn’t being used efficiently. This is a process that causes no heart searching among economists because their model: first, assumes alternative employment will be readily forthcoming; second, ignores the intrinsic satisfaction from work and, third, assumes unemployed workers will have a whale of a time enjoying all their new-found leisure.

A fourth policy implication is that the thing economists celebrate as ‘competition’ and are always trying to encourage because it acts as a spur to efficiency and growth, is actually ‘rivalry’ that creates losers as well as winners and thus generates roughly as much unhappiness as happiness. Rivalry is hardwired into our brains, but a case can be made that social comparison is not something we should be encouraging. Seen in this light, we should think twice about the unceasing calls for us to do this or do that to preserve or improve the economy’s international competitiveness. But why? It is just rivalry on a global scale. It is saying, we must make sure foreigners do not get richer at a faster rate than we are, or even, God forbid, overtake us on the league table.

Fifth, instead of merely unquestioningly promoting consumption, economists should be doing something they rarely do: studying it. They need to see whether there are some forms of consumption that that yield more satisfaction than others. It may be that, in our striving for social status, we are devoting too much of our time and income to the purchase of ‘positional goods’ - conspicuous consumption – and too little to activities empirical research now tells us would yield greater satisfaction. Robert Frank of Cornell says the ‘gains that endure’ are more likely to include social life, time with our children, less travel time to work, more job security and better health care. Layard says we should be spending a lot more on fighting glaring evils – and sources of profound unhappiness - such as depression.

Sixth, the evidence that income is subject to diminishing marginal utility strengthens the case for redistributing income from rich to poor, since such transfers should increase total happiness. As yet, however, there is mixed evidence on the question of whether people who live in countries with a narrower gap between rich and poor are happier. Alesina et al. (2001) find that income inequality has a large negative effect on happiness in Europe, but not in the United States.

Finally, we should look sceptically at the incessant calls for lower tax rates to encourage people to work harder. By its very nature, the economists’ model assumes away all non-monetary motives for work. We do it only for the money. But the reminder of the intrinsic satisfaction we derive from work also reminds that higher income-earners in particular have powerful non-monetary motives for working long and hard: job satisfaction and the pursuit of power and status. Reducing tax rates would merely allow us to run faster on the hedonic treadmill, whereas I think we should slowdown. The drive for reduced government spending and lower taxes would leave people with more disposable income they could use to purchase education and health care privately, in the hope that these positional goods would enhance their social standing. Layard warns we should worry lest leisure, public goods and inconspicuous consumption (consumption that is not compared with the consumption of others) are under-produced because people focus so much on conspicuous consumption.

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AN ECONOMICS FIT FOR HUMANS

Ronald Henderson Oration, Melbourne
August 2004.

1. Introduction

The further I have strayed from my days as an undergraduate, the more convinced I have become of the importance of theory – not just to economics, but to any discipline. Theory is important because it is so pervasive in influencing the way we think, the way we analyse problems in our discipline and the nature of the solutions we favour. Often, we fall into ways of thinking about issues without fully appreciating the influence theory is having on us (Keynes 1936).

At a time when economic rationalists are so influential in government policy making, theory becomes highly relevant because economic rationalists can be defined as people who take conventional economic theory – the neoclassical model of markets, in its simplest form – and raise it to the status of religious doctrine.

In addition, I have become interested in some relatively recent developments in cognitive and social psychology. Psychology has become a lot more interesting to people interested in public policy since the advent of ‘positive psychology’, which has switched the focus from the study of mental illness to the study of people who are perfectly well (Seligman 2002; Kahneman et al. 1999: p. ix).

Two aspects of psychological research present significant challenges to conventional economics: the study of how people make decisions and the study of happiness or ‘subjective well-being’. I wish to draw out the respects in which these advances challenge various aspects of economic theory and the policy prescriptions conventionally flowing from the theory. The first challenge – concerning decision-making – is being taken quite seriously by the economics profession. The thriving school of economic thought it has given rise to is behavioural economics, and the psychologist who did most to inspire this school, Daniel Kahneman, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002. The second challenge to conventional economics – from the burgeoning happiness research – is taking longer to win converts among economists. But I am enough of an optimist to hope that we are witnessing the early stages of another revolution in economics, one to match or even exceed the influence of the Keynesian revolution of the 1940s and 50s. Surprisingly, Keynes is now being hailed as one of the earliest behavioural economists (Akerlof 2002), though his contemporary followers largely ignored that aspect of his contribution.

2. Decision-making

2.1 Challenge to theory

Psychology’s first challenge to microeconomic theory strikes at one of its central elements: the assumption of Homo economicus. Economic man is assumed to be rational and self-interested. He or she always carefully evaluates all the options before making any decision, and always with the object of maximising his or her personal ‘utility’ or satisfaction. But cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that humans simply lack the neural processing power to make the carefully calculated decisions economists assume (Simon 1957). People are not rational, they are intuitive. And altruism is often an important consideration in their decision-making (Mullainathan and Thaler 2001; Frey and Meier 2002). People can’t chose correctly between three options where the best option is not immediately apparent (Simonson and Tversky 1992). Rather than carefully thinking through the pros and cons of every decision, people tend to rely on mental shortcuts (‘heuristics’) which often serve them well enough, but also lead them into systematic biases (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). People are often slow to learn from their mistakes (Mullainathan and Thaler 2001). They are frequently capable of reacting differently to choices that are essentially the same, just because the choices have been ‘framed’ (packaged) differently (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). This means that, rather than being coldly rational, people’s decisions are often influenced by emotional considerations.

All this means that Homo sapiens differs from Homo economicus in many important respects. He doesn’t conform to economists’ assumption of fungibility (one dollar is indistinguishable from another), he is often not bothered by opportunity cost and thus has a strong bias in favour of the status quo (Thaler 1980). He does not ignore sunk costs as he is supposed to (Thaler 1980) and often cannot order his preferences consistently (Tversky and Kahneman 1974; Kahneman and Tversky 1979). He is not averse to risks so much as averse to losses and he focuses more on changes in his wealth than on its absolute level (Tversky and Kahneman 1981).

Unlike Homo economicus, Homo sapiens cares deeply about fairness (Kahneman et al. 1986). Experiments show people will walk away from deals they consider treat them unfairly, even though those deals would leave them better off (Kahneman et al. 1986). People are prepared to pay a price to punish others they consider to have been behaving badly towards the group (Fehr and Gachter 2000). Often people are concerned about ‘procedural fairness’ – how things are done, not just how they end up (Tyler 2000).

2.2 Policy implications

I believe this has powerful implications for the aspect of the neoclassical model that economic rationalists (particularly right-wing rationalists) find so attractive: its elevation and celebration of individualism. The individual should be free to choose, and governments should be most circumspect in how they constrain individuals’ freedom, including by taxing them to pay for the public provision of services and to redistribute income. This elevation of the individual and, by implication, denigration of a more communitarian approach, turns out to rest heavily on the assumption that individuals are rational. If individuals are rational decision-makers then it follows, as the rationalists keep asserting, that governments can never know what is good for you better than you know yourself. Governments should therefore tax individuals as little as possible, and maximise the private provision of such things as education and health care. If individuals are not particularly rational in their decision-making, however, then there may well be a case for government paternalism in certain circumstances. Add to this the findings that people’s decisions are often influenced by altruism, their concerns about fairness, their willingness to punish people who act contrary to the interests of the group, and that their behaviour is often influenced by the behaviour of those around them (Ormerod 1998: chap. 2), and you get a further argument in support of communitarian interventions and income redistribution.

A second strand of policy implications also flows from abandoning the assumption that people are rational. It calls into question economists’ adherence to consumer sovereignty – their belief that consumers should and do determine what producers produce. When consumers’ decisions can be influenced by the way propositions are framed, and when decisions are frequently influenced by emotions, producers can use advertising and other marketing to manipulate consumer demand. This contravenes a basic tenet of market economics that, in Keynes’s phrase, consumption is ‘the sole end and object of all economic activity’ (1936: chap. 8). If producers can use advertising to increase as well as manipulate consumption, this puts the cart before the horse, it reverses the direction of causation in the economic system, turning means into ends.

Economists do not like talking about advertising. To make it fit their model they have to assume that it is purely informational, whereas we all know that smart advertisers sell the sizzle not the steak (Camerer 2003). Advertisers prey on our inadequacies and irrationalities (Layard 2005), subtly selling us propositions which become absurd as soon as someone puts them into words: that buying certain products will at last put us among the beautiful people or give us a healthy, happy family. But if advertising is antithetical to consumer sovereignty, why are economists usually so disapproving of proposals to limit or ban advertising?i

3. Happiness

3.1 Challenge to theory

There’s not a big difference between subjective well-being – happiness - and the economists’ goal of maximising utility or satisfaction (Easterlin 2001; Frey and Benz 2002; Frey and Stutzer 2002). So this is an area of research that ought to be of considerable relevance to economists. One common reservation they have, however, is that it is all so subjective – asking people to rate their satisfaction with life on a scale of one to 10. But psychologists have demonstrated that a person’s own assessment of their happiness has a high correlation with other people’s assessments of that person’s happiness and with physical measurements of brain electroencephalogram readings (Diener 1984; Veenhoven 1993; Davidson et al. 2000).

The most surprising finding of the happiness research, confirmed in an Australian study by Heady, Muffels and Wooden (2004), is that the link between life satisfaction and income and wealth is quite weak. It exists, but it is small. Once a nation’s income per person exceeds about $US15,000 a year (Inglehart and Klingman 2000; Helliwell 2003), the acquisition of further income is subject to rapidly diminishing returns. And, as was first pointed out 30 years ago by the economist Easterlin (1974), in the period since World War II the correlation between GDP and happiness has broken down in rich countries (Myers 1993). In America, for instance, real GDP per person has trebled while subjective well-being has been unchanged (Diener and Seligman 2004). Similar results are found for other developed countries where life satisfaction has been regularly measured (Blanchflower and Oswald 2000).

This is a devastating conclusion for economists – and particularly economic rationalists – whose whole practical motivation has been based on the assumption that helping the community raise its productivity and increase its production and consumption of goods and services will leave it unequivocally better off. There is no doubt that, materially, we are better off than we were even 10 years ago: our homes are bigger and better, our cars are better, our food and clothing are fancier and we have any number of wonderful new gadgets to save us labour or entertain us. But though we are better off, we do not feel better off. Why not? Why is it that the acquisition of income does so little to increase our satisfaction?

Psychologists (and a few economists) have proposed two main explanations. First, it’s a characteristic of humans that we adapt surprisingly quickly to our changed circumstances (Helson 1964; Frederick and Loewenstein 1999). We get a promotion, move into a better house or buy a new car and, for a while, we really feel better off. But all too soon we adapt to our new circumstances and absorb them into the status quo. People who win the lottery are no happier than normal within a few years but, by the same token, most accident victims who suffer paraplegia end up being no unhappier than normal (Brickman et al. 1978). The thing that is surprising about all this is our failure to learn from all the times the buzz from an acquisition has worn off so quickly (Schwartz 2004). We keep striving to acquire another new toy in the hope it will be the one that finally delivers nirvana. This amnesia – which, in terms of the economists’ model, constitutes a major information failure (Layard 2005) - is why psychologists describe us as being trapped on a ‘hedonic treadmill’ (Brickman and Campbell 1971).

The second part of the explanation for the diminishing marginal utility of money is rivalry (Duesenberry 1949; Hirsch 1976; Frank 1985, 1999; Solnick and Hemenway 1998; Easterlin 2001). The economic model assumes that what satisfies us is absolute increases in our income or wealth. This is because we’re all individualists, who not only don’t care about the well-being of others, but also don’t ever compare ourselves with others. In truth, we are highly social animals, obsessed by what those around us think of us and what we think of them. Remember Gore Vidal’s crack: when I see a friend succeed . . . a little part of me dies. Evolution has made us a species highly conscious of our social status. We care deeply about how we rank in the pecking order, and are always striving to advance our status – or avoid slipping back - by the promotions we get, the size of our incomes, the location and opulence of our homes, the newness and foreignness of our cars, the private schools we send our children to and the private hospitals we use when sick. In our mania for getting ahead of the Joneses, what we care about is not absolute increases in our income, but relative increases.

The trouble with this rivalry, however, is that it is a zero-sum game. To the extent that I succeed in making myself happy by moving up in the pecking order, those people I move ahead of suffer a loss of status that makes them unhappy. In economists’ language, my efforts to advance myself generate offsetting negative externalities for those I pass. And what is more, the whole leapfrogging game tends to leave us perpetually anxious about slipping back in the race for status.

3.2 Policy implications

There are many policy implications from this and I will only scratch the surface. Layard (2005) says that, beside adequate income, the research shows six main factors affect happiness: mental health, satisfying and secure work, a secure and loving private life, a secure community, freedom, and moral values.

So my first policy implication is that reducing unemployment should be given a much higher priority by the economic policy-makers. Research shows that being unemployed makes people particularly unhappy (Clark and Oswald 1994), a lot more unhappy than can be explained by the loss of income they suffer by not having a job (Di Tella et al. 2001). What people miss is the sense of identity and self-worth that comes from a job, and also, no doubt, the social contact. Economists may protest that they are already giving high priority to reducing unemployment but, in truth, their pursuit of this goal is conditional. Their concern with the efficient allocation of resources means they frown on any solutions (job sharing, job-creation schemes, public sector employment, for instance) that involve modest inefficiencies. The truth is that the overwhelming goal of economists is to hasten the growth in the economy’s production of goods and services, and the jobs generated in this process are just a fortunate by-product.

My second policy implication is that governments and employers could do a lot to raise subjective well-being if they put more emphasis on the enrichment of jobs – increasing job satisfaction by giving workers more personal control, opportunity to use their skills, variety in tasks, respect and status, and contact with others. Taken literally, the economists’ model assumes that all work is unpleasant – a disutility – and is undertaken purely to gain the money to buy the things that bring utility. Like the rest of us, economists know that, in reality, work carries much intrinsic satisfaction. But they don’t follow this realisation through to their policy prescriptions. They are perpetually advocating labour market reform aimed at ensuring labour is used more efficiently, treating labour as though it were just another inanimate economic resource, and ignoring the feelings of the human beings attached to the labour. Various of the ways labour can be used more efficiently make life unpleasant and even unhealthy for the workers involved: ever-changing casual hours, rolling shift work, split shifts and firms continually moving their staff to different cities. When we pursue efficiency at the expense of people, economists have got things round the wrong way, trashing ends so as to advance means.

A third implication is that economic policy-makers should recognise the benefit of stability. People like stability – it makes them feel secure and happy. What’s more, it breeds a highly valuable commodity: trust. People don’t like continuous change. Macroeconomic management is aimed a stabilising the rate of growth in demand, and that’s good. But microeconomists perpetually advocate change (‘reform’) aimed at increasing efficiency, raising productivity and quickening the production of goods and services – the very objective we now know doesn’t make people any happier. Often, micro reform involves ‘displacing’ workers from the reformed industries where their labour wasn’t being used efficiently. This is a process that causes no heart searching among economists because their model: first, assumes alternative employment will be readily forthcoming; second, ignores the intrinsic satisfaction from work and, third, assumes unemployed workers will have a whale of a time enjoying all their new-found leisure.

A fourth policy implication is that the thing economists celebrate as ‘competition’ and are always trying to encourage because it acts as a spur to efficiency and growth, is actually ‘rivalry’ that creates losers as well as winners and thus generates roughly as much unhappiness as happiness. Rivalry is hardwired into our brains, but a case can be made that social comparison is not something we should be encouraging (Layard 2005). Seen in this light, we should think twice about the unceasing calls for us to do this or do that to preserve or improve the economy’s international competitiveness. But why? It is just rivalry on a global scale. It is saying, we must make sure foreigners do not get richer at a faster rate than we are, or even, God forbid, overtake us on the league table.

Fifth, instead of merely unquestioningly promoting consumption, economists should be doing something they rarely do: studying it (Scitovsky 1976). They need to see whether there are some forms of consumption that that yield more satisfaction than others. It may be that, in our striving for social status, we are devoting too much of our time and income to the purchase of ‘positional goods’ (Hirsch 1976) - conspicuous consumption – and too little to activities empirical research now tells us would yield greater satisfaction. Frank (1999) says the ‘gains that endure’ are more likely to include social life, time with our children, less travel time to work, more job security and better health care. Layard (2005) says we should be spending a lot more on fighting glaring evils – and sources of profound unhappiness - such as depression.

Sixth, the evidence that income is subject to diminishing marginal utility strengthens the case for redistributing income from rich to poor, since such transfers should increase total happiness. As yet, however, there is mixed evidence on the question of whether people who live in countries with a narrower gap between rich and poor are happier. Alesina et al. (2001) find that income inequality has a large negative effect on happiness in Europe, but not in the United States.

Finally, we should look sceptically at the incessant calls for lower tax rates to encourage people to work harder. By its very nature, the economists’ model assumes away all non-monetary motives for work. We do it only for the money. But the reminder of the intrinsic satisfaction we derive from work also reminds that higher income-earners in particular have powerful non-monetary motives for working long and hard: job satisfaction and the pursuit of power and status. Reducing tax rates would merely allow us to run faster on the hedonic treadmill, whereas I think we should slowdown. The drive for reduced government spending and lower taxes would leave people with more disposable income they could use to purchase education and health care privately, in the hope that these positional goods would enhance their social standing. Layard (2005) warns we should worry lest leisure, public goods and inconspicuous consumption (consumption that is not compared with the consumption of others) are under-produced because people focus so much on conspicuous consumption.

4. Conclusion

My conclusion is not that economics should be abolished but that it, rather than the economy, is what is in desperate need of radical reform. Neoclassical economics is a product of the state of man’s knowledge during the 18th and 19th centuries, and has actually lost some of its human subtleties since then as it has been made more mathematical (Frey and Benz 2002). It needs to assimilate our now vastly superior understanding of human decision-making and motivations. The community will always need the advice of people who specialise in studying the economic aspects of our lives, but those specialists need to rebuild their models using more realistic assumptions about human behaviour. This would give us an economics fit for humans.


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