But not everything that is important can be quantified. I worry that as economists, we too often are like the drunk at 1 am looking for his keys under the glare of a streetlight. You go over to help and when you fail to find the keys you ask the drunk if he’s sure if he lost them here. Oh no, he responds. I’m not sure where I lost them. But the light’s better here.
Roberts points out that some of the most painful social problems are associated with people feeling lonely and unloved, and economics does not have much to say about this.
Economists focus on the material well-being of a large-scale society. The ability of strangers to cooperate in the context of the market is probably our key insight.
But does cooperating with strangers provide emotional satisfaction and a feeling of being loved? Probably not. Personal interdependence satisfies human needs for closeness better than impersonal interdependence. But personal interdependence is a characteristic of small-scale society–the family, the tribal band, the village.
Our increased material wealth arises from more specialization, which means more impersonal interdependence. But people still need the comfort and status that come from personal interdependence. It seems to me that in our modern world there is a tendency for people reach out for substitutes for personal interdependence. Russ mentions opiods. I sometimes think that the increased intensity of political engagement is another substitute. It is an opiod of a different sort.
Politics is the new religion is the opiate of the masses.
On opioids, I’m not sure there is a lot of data to back up the claim that opioid *use* has increased all that much; because of our policies it has just become more lethal for individual users. There is a small, but real, increase in the absolute rate of use/abuse, but the rise in deaths is *way* out of proportion.
I mostly agree but not fully. More use of opioids leading to addiction, and then the dangerous street drugs leads to death way too easily. I hope we can turn the tide quickly.
My sense is that opioid addiction has increased because of the widespread availability of prescription opioids. Some people get them for pain, and some people toy with them as some groups (especially teens and young adults) toy with various intoxicants.
At some point people transition to street drugs and the fentanyl-cut street drugs lead to fatalities.
When drug-curious teens could only get weed 35 years ago, and drink alcohol, things were safer. Many deaths were vehicular, but fewer from overdoses. There was a a time when weed was relatively mild, and powder cocaine was too expensive for high schoolers. Meanwhile, crack had not been invented yet or gone big, and heroin was weak and still mostly for IV drug users. Some of the “speed” pills sold may have just been diet pills in the guise of real pharmaceutical amphetamines. It’s easy to argue that imprudently tampering with drugs was much safer in the early 1980s.
A good social historian can fill in the details. And the regional markets seem to make a difference. It is claimed that black tar heroin is less likely to be cut with fentanyl.
The curious can learn a lot from reading Sam Quinones _Dreamland_, which discusses the market penetration of new regions by cells of young men from Xalisco selling black tar heroin so it’s as easy to buy as ordering a pizza.
= – = –
Loneliness is an issue, and mood regulation, and meaning, and belonging. Markets can go either way–they bring us malls and coffee shops, and they let us stay at home and order online.
When drug-curious teens could only get weed 35 years ago, and drink alcohol, things were safer.
That “When” statement is not true.
It’s easy to poke holes in my generalization, and hard drugs have always been available to people determined to get them. It still seems to me, based on anecdotal evidence, that there’s a kernel of truth to my assertion. I might be way off base.
Methinks this is a a topic for another blog entry. I still don’t understand how we have ended up with bright eyed high school and college students “dropping like flies” from drug overdoses. Over and over I see the statistics and the first person accounts of parents and to me it’s just about unbelievable, even as the evidence piles up
For me the moment was going to a fairly prosperous exurb town and seeing a “death by overdose” counter outside the town hall on the Main Street. Based on the billboard of a 10 year old warning of opioids I’m guessing many of that tally (just YTD) some were kids. Obviously, its not just deaths of despair is relatively well off towns have something like that.
In perhaps related news, the USA falls to 19th on the list of countries ranked by happiness. Jeffrey Sachs is quoted in the Daily Mail as saying “’The long-term rise in U.S. income per person has been accompanied by several trends adverse to subjective well-being (SWB): worsening health conditions for much of the population; declining social trust; and declining confidence in government.
‘Whatever benefits in SWB might have accrued as the result of rising incomes seem to have been offset by these adverse trends… [It’s] apparently due in part to the astoundingly large amount of time that young people are spending on digital media: smartphones, videogames, computers, and the like
‘The prevalence of addictions in American society seems to be on the rise, perhaps dramatically… They include gambling; social media use, video gaming, shopping, consuming unhealthy foods.
‘These addictions, in turn, seem to be causing considerable unhappiness and even depression.’ “
But then an elite master of the universe would place all the blame on the little people.
Loneliness is one angle and interdependence surely as a lot to do with it. Social media addiction and hate/politics addiction surely go hand in hand, but it seems like there is a lot more to it than that. I’ve google scholared the literature and what you get with studies aggregating cases seems to be mostly framing artifacts. From my personal anecdotal evidence, I’d suggest that the culture does not make it safe to be average. The 4 kids I have known who were lost to opioids all came from middle class homes with parents who had graduate degrees. They had plenty of friends, indeed, drug use would appear to be highly correlated with personal interdependence, at least among the young, but were all average students. Two had superstar siblings. One might consider that as a research angle. But if you are an average kid in the US today, without any claim to be special by virtue of sexual orientation, race, etc., my impression is that the world considers you to be garbage. This is a big change from when I was a kid and average students were frequently admired for their success in finding things to work at and excel in. Many went on to own their own businesses such as bars and restaurants but that avenue seems to be increasingly limited with increasing amounts of regulations and attendant capital requirements. The limited amount of evaluative research on the efficacy of career counseling for average students suggests that such kids are not getting the best of support. The rural kids I have known seem to be doing well because they are able to excel and master practical skills that make them useful and respected. One wonders if the decline in such opportunities is linked to increased opioid use.
At any rate, there seems to be a difference between the loneliness issues facing older people and younger people. Given how unpleasant social life is in much of the US, escaping may work for some. A warm-blooded woman, low cost of living, and a local village culture that respects and prizes everyone is an amazingly efficacious therapeutic environment. Fresh bread from the corner bakery each morning, going to the butcher and watching him trim and slice meat for you while you wait, buying fresh produce from the same stand each day and then cooking it for someone you care for, all the while surrounded by people who enjoy being happy (something one just doesn’t see much in the USA). Blessings enough to turn one to religion in thankfulness. And factors that will never be fully accounted for in any purchasing power parity calculation. Maybe even powerful enough to get one off a blog commenting addiction. Maybe a little more will power and I will be there.
Separately from specialization, there have also been the effects of the developments of Open Access societies (see, North, Wallis & Weingast) which also result in expanding not only the extent, but the crucial importance, of im-personal relationships.
The nature of the means of connections (vel non) may create what is really a sense of vulnerability, as much – or more so- than loneliness.
Perhaps “true community” for most people only comes when there are genuine hardships shared together.
“Misery loves company.”
And, together, the community solves “the problem” (at least one of the worst ones), or reduces it, and the folk feel better about their neighbors and about themselves.
We need more marriages, and more children; also brothers and sisters. Family bonds are more important than college grad networks.
If hardship made for good communities then all these dying towns and ghettos would have great communities.
I think it’s more continuity, commonality, and shared goals. When I go to the tot lot in Rodgers Forge I don’t see a lot of hardship, but I do see similar middle class people working and playing togethor.
I can tell you that as someone trying to keep a community together on of the hardest things is just distance. Our society expects people, at least from my class, to move around a lot in different phases of life. That makes it very hard.
Certainly hardship is not sufficient — but I’m claiming it’s necessary. And the rich kids mostly don’t have enough of it — the snowflakes need safety because too much of their lives has been smoothed for them by snowplow parents.
Distance is too hard, with my own sisters. Same street distance from mother & short distances from 3 sisters is good reason for my wife to want to stay in Slovakia. Which we do (happy marriages are based on happy wives. ) Today I helped my mother-in-law put fresh soil for the flowers on the grave her husband, my wife’s Dad – a big big help in raising his 4 grandkids from us, 3 from another of his 4 daughters.
Ex-commies had more community, so now with freedom, there is far more money and choices, but less bonding.
Why are communities weaker and people lonelier? The leftist has an answer, and it’s economic: it’s inequality, and its attendant ills of loss of stable employment, gentrification, and a loss of democratic ideals. Reagan said the best social program was a job.
A few months ago, a Haitian Uber driver in Miami told me Uber should get credit for reducing crime because it gave so many people an easy way to make a few bucks legally, and for most that was good enough to make crime unappealing. Unlike McDonald’s, you don’t have to wear a uniform, show up at 9 exactly, and the app doesn’t care about your race, gender, hairstyle, or anything other than how many rides you take and how passengers rate you.
I feel like in some ways people today are judged a lot more, and more consequentially, by distant and largely unaccountable institutions with unclear or seemingly-arbitrary rules. A shelf stocker at Wal-Mart is going to have a different experience of work than one at a small locally-run grocery store.
Large organizations are not inherently evil but they often favor centrally-developed rules over distributed judgment. My local small landlord never lost any sleep if you were a couple days late with the rent, and if you were running into hard times he was willing to talk. Nothing got reported to Experian. Make a late payment or two on a credit card and your score gets drilled. Your local bank president can’t decide to deny you a loan because you’re black anymore but he also can’t decide to give you a loan because he’s known you for ten years, assuming you even have a local bank of consequence.
Rule-based systems work well for people who are high on conformity, while centralized/professionalized bureaucracies are good for those high on extraversion. Feminists might say this is partly the patriarchy at work, but I believe women are generally more conformist and more extraverted than men. Cattle ranches, fishing vessels, and machine shops all provided lots of meaningful work opportunities for men who weren’t the best at following rules or social skills. There’s a lot less of that today than there used to be.
I sometimes think that the increased intensity of political engagement is another substitute.
I definitely see this among left-leaning friends as I’ve described before. People get a sense of community from participating in loosely “political” activities, which can include everything from joining Occupy protest marches to “supporting local agriculture” by participating in a farm-to-table cooperative, with all of the organic and anti-GMO propaganda that comes with that. With regards to Occupy, there was almost a direct translation into civic activism, as in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York. I intensely disagree with the politics of the occupy movement, but it’s just an undeniable fact that Occupy fills this role of giving people a sense community and civic engagement.
Of course this is a somewhat healthier response than opiates, but it still locks people into a value system, because they simply cannot question the politics that is being advanced by these groups without risking losing that community. (Sort of the same way that questioning one’s religion risks excommunication).
One of the great achievements of America was to defang religion. You could believe whatever you wanted–get whatever meaning and community from your religion as you could–as long as you didn’t force it on other people.
Alas, politics is all about forcing things on people. An awful thought is that a major reason for the decline of religion in America is that “live and let live” requirement. How true/sacred/important can it be if everyone can flout its truth or sacredness or importance?
It’d be nice if we could get Americans to think of secular views the way we generally think about religion in this respect. Kantians and utilitarians could live side by side, feminists and anti-feminists, effective altruists and Randian egoists, but all agreeing not to impose their creed upon one another. Instead, many people (and to some extent constitutional law) seem to think imposing their particular morals is ok, provided that the morals aren’t rooted in something categorized as a religion.
I think some people are starting to come around to that view. However, for many people there is a unifying effect of having an enemy, and political tribalism has that effect. So when you go to these liberal communities, there’s a shared sense of waging a war against these evil people on the other side of the political spectrum. So they don’t think of it as imposing their morals but as an existential struggle for their way of life, or the planet. To a certain extent the existence of the community depends on the feeling of an external threat – there’s a unifying effect of feeling threatened by the other political tribe. For example, that everyone at the farmers coop is part of this big fight against corporate agriculture or something.
See Rod Dreher on community, especially communities in transition.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/disintegration-and-its-discontents/
Big societal warning — UN pop graph estimate of 4 billion in Africa is frightening.
Russ Roberts: “By focusing on what can be measured, we are forgetting what brings joy and a sense of flourishing to the human experience. And if we are not careful, we think our models actually capture how people behave and what they care most deeply about.”
What does anyone care about? For one thing, having a say. Being heard. Not being written off.
Economists have this much in common with other people. Everybody wants their opinion to count for something. Maybe economists have an unusually hard time imagining that what is true of themselves is true of other people. Because a lot of economists keep saying explicitly that the other people just need to suck it up and deal with the reality that what they care about doesn’t matter. By which I mean, what those other people care about. As opposed to what these specific economists care about, which is to have their opinions heard and enforced through legislation. Although that is also what the other people care about too, at a certain level of abstraction.
These economists focus on what can be measured, but an economist isn’t a calculator. Like anybody else, these people are human beings who want to be respected and listened to.
There’s a very human desire in economists, same as everyone else, to matter and be counted. And yet it seems like a lot of economists don’t perceive that desire in themselves. So they throw a temper tantrum when their will is disrespected, and they don’t see any similarity between themselves and those other people in the hinterland. Call them voters. The gilets jaunes. Those hicks whose opinions are meant to be disrespected. In the normal course of things those other people are supposed to be railroaded or steamrollered. And then, when the flattened and blood-soaked shoe is on the other foot, it’s incomprehensible.
Economists can say their opinions are facts, so it’s completely different. But predictions aren’t facts. The 364 economists who said they knew best and Margaret Thatcher knew nothing, for example, didn’t settle anything by talking up their credentials. But suppose that these number-crunchers and anti-coal activists (who aren’t making reasoned arguments about costs and benefits, although they want to use words like “uneconomic” and “unsustainable”) or anti-gun activists or anti-sugar activists or anyone else who uses mathematical models or statistical feats to dominate their enemies, imagine if they could try to see things from the point of view of the losers and the write-offs, those remnants of a bygone era, the cigarette-smokers, the unemployed or the barely employed, Obama’s burly men and Tyler’s brutes, and if they could make that imaginative leap into supposing that other people want to feel respected and valued, same as the mathematically-inclined debating champs, the people who expect to always win arguments with some really convincing number.
Arthur Miller: “Anything’s better than wages.”
Wages were already rising when Marx was still alive. And yet, when Marx died, Marxism did not die with him. People care about things beyond PPP and GDP.