The intellectual converter

1. Recently, some economists and politicians have suggested that a shift in emphasis is needed away from simple quantitative measures of income (based on assumptions about the role of rational calculation in human decision-making and satisfaction) and towards alternative more nuanced understandings of "happiness" and "well-being." However, a closer look at the reasoning of these suggestions reveals that they boil down to the recognition of the importance "behavioral" or "irrational" factors for the purpose of maximizing economic productivity of individuals as consumers and employees.

2. Advertisers often play on consumers' sense of cynicism about the advertizing itself and on their dissatisfaction with a life dominated by work and consumption, trying in this way to position the products they are promoting as "with us" in our alienation with the economic world we live in.

These two statements are cynical, but granted that, they almost pass for a kind of common sense. In the hands of the intellectual, however, they are converted into this (William Davies in the NLR 71)

1'. "At key moments of crisis, capitalist accumulation has alternately drawn on those criticizing its unfairness (the ‘social critique’) and those criticizing its dullness (the ‘artistic critique’) in order to find ‘routes to its own survival’. In promising to answer these critics, it pledges to treat the moral and human injuries that it itself has enacted, thereby renewing its legitimacy." (71)

2.' "Advertising, like management theory, is fuelled by a critique of the dominant normative-economic regime within which it sits, facilitating safe acts of micro-rebellion against the macro-social order. It acts as capital’s own trusted moral and artistic critic in order to inspire additional psychological engagement on the part of ordinary worker-consumers. Dissatisfaction is reduced to a psychological tendency to be fed back into processes of production and consumption. As a result, understanding such psychological qualities as impulse, libido and frustration—often in the micro-social context of the ‘focus group’—has been key to the development of advertising since the 1920s." (73)

I understand in principle what he's going for here. The idea is that there are ostensibly two opposing ways to look at the "behavioral" turn in economics:

T: It represents a scientific development that, appropriately, responds to empirical shortcomings in existing theories to propose a better, that is to say more accurate and more predictive, conceptualization of a key issue in economics, namely individuals' decision "function."

vs.

A: The cynical reading in (1) above.

Yet, it could be claimed that while (A) makes a valid criticism of (T), it is nonetheless something of a caricature, since it is true that behavioral economics is attempting to grapple, albeit in a inevitably one-sided way, with something that is manifestly inadequate with the current state of economics. Thus, the goal is to synthesize both the inherent limitations in behavioral economics, which provides the basis for the cynical outlook a (A), while resisting the urge to merely "debunk" (S) and instead locating its logic within those limitations, and in this way gesturing towards how this logic immanently, albeit by omission, highlights those very limitations. To wit:

Human ill-being is never merely an absence of pleasure, which is one thing that consumer society can usually promise to avoid; nor is it even an absence of any substantive meaning, which the ‘spirit’ of capitalism can partially deliver on, if only as an epiphenomenon. Followed to its logical conclusion, it is an absence of democracy, and consequently a basis for resistance and critique. Happiness economics starts with a psychological interest in hedonia and the mind, strays into ethical questions of eudaimonia and society, and eventually grapples clumsily with the Kantian dilemma of Enlightenment—what is all this rationality, efficiency and technology ultimately for? The meaninglessness of utilitarianism, and the emptiness of hedonism, are now subject to empirical and statistical analysis. On the one hand, this is a co-option and subsumption of core Enlightenment and critical thinking, to rival—but exceed—the capacity of management and marketing discourse to internalize the critique of capitalism. To the pessimist, the fact that economists have discovered unhappiness and history may look like the final triumph of immanence. The optimistic reading would be that when positivists seek to grasp and quantify the immeasurable problem of unhappiness, they encounter causes of that unhappiness that are far larger than economic or medical policy can calculate or alleviate. Is it too much to hope that, if critique can be rendered psychological, then the reverse may also be true: that mental ill-being may be rendered critical? (80)

 So yeah, I think I see how it's supposed to work but I'm not really sure it's worth the trouble.


While I'm talking about this particular essay, I think this is just a deep misreading of the dynamics of capitalism:

Capitalism would seem to require an optimal balance of happiness and unhappiness amongst its participants, if it is to be sustainable. The need for dissatisfaction is implicitly recognized by Keynesian economics, which sees the capitalist system as threatened by the possibility of individual or collective satisfaction, manifest as a demand shortfall. Capitalism’s gravest problem is then how to maintain governments or consumers in a state of dissatisfied hunger, and how to find ever more credit through which to feed that hunger. The defining difference between the Keynesian era and the neo-liberal era was simply that the former depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ state, whereas the latter depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ consumer. The question of who or what is to inject such an appetite in future has no apparent answer as yet. (71)

I seriously suspect this kind of confusion arising from reading Adorno without Marx. I suppose in principle "collective satisfaction" could suppress aggregate demand and thus create problems for the realization of profit by capitalists. Indeed, in a long historical perspective, the possibility of non-market subsistence by peasants was one of two structural factors distinguishing the economic dynamics of pre-capitalist economies from those of capitalism. However, once the mass of the population has been "liberated" from the peasant community and its mechanisms for the direct provision of subsistence, the problem becomes not that capitalists might not be able to entice consumers to pay for what they're selling but instead that capitalists are frequently disinclined to invest sufficiently in production to employ the entire population. Or to put it another way, the health of the economy--from the perspective of providing for the livelihood of the population--is held hostage to the "investment climate," or to use Keynes' phrase, capitalists' "animal spirits." The great paradox is that it's a hostage situation in which there is no one with whom to negotiate--this, as an aside, is the essence of neoliberalism. "Capitalism's gravest problem" is not the maintenance of "a state of dissatisfied hunger," but instead the irrationalities that arise necessarily from property relations that allows decisions about investment and thus production and employment to be contingent on the realization of profit by individual owners.