Margot St. Clair

Leave it to the Neuroeconomists!

As a close friend of the brilliant economist, Noah Masters, (view his blog here) I am forever working to broaden my understanding of economics, a branch of social science quite outside my realm of easy understanding. So it was with great pleasure that I stumbled upon a few articles in recent publications of The Economist that caused me to question the essential nature of what drives markets, and what makes consumers tick.

First, From “Aggro of the Agora” The Economist, January 14, 2006:
“Mr McFadden's speech leaned on the work of neuroeconomists, who claim to prove what Adam Smith long ago asserted: man's ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange’ runs deep in our nature. According to brain scans, it lurks in the same primitive, limbic vaults of the cerebrum as our instinct to fight, flee and feed ourselves. Indeed, ‘shopping and sex share the same neurotransmitters and receptors,’ Mr McFadden jokes.”

This idea really fed into my liberal lit-major’s tendency to question the superiority of capitalism as an economic system. Isn’t one of the principles of polite society to overcome just these instincts -- ‘to fight, flee, and feed ourselves’? Then again, the major argument against a socialist economic system is the assertion that people are naturally greedy, and predisposed to fight for individual gain, as opposed to collective security. My response to this is always that overcoming these primitive urges is what makes us human. Besides, intelligence is not rewarded monetarily, and to sooth the soul, one must find a spiritual outlet - again, something that cannot be purchased at Target or Bergdorf Goodman.

These ideas aren’t that revolutionary to my understanding of economics, but the thought that shopping is a part of an essential human nature is kind of baffling, considering that an economic system that supports disposable income and the unnecessary acquisition of goods is only a few centuries old. Does this support the claim that capitalism is the essential economic paradigm, as it is a system that finally supports the needs of human nature, or does it take us backward in a theory of social evolution?

With these ideas in mind, I was giddy to come across this article in Intelligent Life, a spin-off magazine under The Economist. The article describes the decline in the cachet of luxury goods, as brands create materials that a wider audience can afford – the democratization of luxury, if you will.

From “The four facets of chic”, by Rosemarie Ward, Intelligent Life, Summer 2005.
“A luxury product has ‘four pillars’, says Milton Pedraza, head of the Luxury Institute, a consultancy that tracks trends for the wealthiest 10% of American households. First, the item must demonstrate superior quality. Second, it must be truly unique and difficult to acquire. Third, it must enhance one’s status. And fourth, it must brighten one’s self-image, making the buyer feel special. Mr Pedraza is worried that the growth of ‘masstige’ (mass-market plus prestige) will devalue a luxury brand’s worth.”

So how are we to understand the primitive nature of the urge to shop in light of the ‘four pillars’ of luxury products? Wouldn’t it hold that the acquisition of these luxury items would appeal to our basest primitive natures? I believe the branding establishment of these luxury items would lead you to believe that an appreciation of the ‘finer things’ is a mark of sophistication, though perhaps the neuroeconimists among us may beg to differ. But maybe we have to wait for the study on the impact of price tags on brain scans.

posted by Margot St. Clair @ 8:41 AM 0 Comments

Edmund Wilson, mon amour

Reading this week’s New York Review, I fell in love yet again. This time the honor is bestowed upon Edmund Wilson, the literary critic and journalist who wrote for The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Vanity Fair (among other things) for over sixty years. Gazing at his picture, one is struck with his pudgy literary critic exterior; it his not his appearance that causes my heart to flutter. His writing speaks through ages: describing the literary scene of Paris, alongside Hemingway, dos Passos, and Fitzgerald in the twenties; bemoaning the unquestioned literary authority of Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats in the thirties; and forever contemplating the plight of the alienated American liberal.

John Updike, reviewing his journals, described his commentary on the American scene of the thirties as having renounced, “the hope of a civilized intelligence to identify itself with America.” Ahhhhh, such truthful words, but applied in our present context, so eerily prescient. It is this prescience which really characterizes much of his later writing. Of course, in time eternal quotes on the state of society continually recycle their applicability. But Wilson hits the nail so directly on the head so often; one cannot help but revel in his genius.

To investigate:
In his preface to Europe without Baedeker, written during the Vietnam War, Wilson claimed that, “our talk about bringing to backward peoples the processes of democratic government and of defending the ‘free world’ is as much an exploit of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy as anything ever perpetrated by the English.”
In the sixties, Wilson wrote of his growing distrust of what he denounced as “the policies of the lying governments; the inevitable standardization of what we assume to be ‘exotic’ and ‘backward’ peoples; the stupidity of applied ideologies; the competition of ‘success’ with ‘status.’”
In the twenties, he claimed that “the landslide of American nationalism had already begun’, and he feared that, “the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily extinguished as the German ones were in 1914.”
And finally (and isn’t this a feeling we’ve all had, at the very least on November 3, 2004) “I find – with a certain surprise – that I am rather out of tune with the US. It has suddenly come over me that, whatever you are doing, functioning in America is a terrible struggle – in the long run, it wears you out.”

There is more to love about Wilson than just his dissatisfaction with the state of America. Inside his dissatisfaction is embodied a kind of loss of innocence, which I think any critic/appreciator of society and literature happens to stumble upon at some point. But still, despite his bitter nostalgia, he held on to a focus that directed his reading and pursuits, (and one which I continually site as my own raison d’etre), as he had, “made it his business to extend himself into every kind of human consciousness with which he can establish contact.” He was forever seeking, “the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art.” These sentiments, however radically optimistic, are so necessary in our society, and so easy to bury beneath the clutter of Fox News and People Magazine. As I sit listening to the confirmation of hearings of Samuel Alito, Jr., I can’t help but think that this biography has come about at a most auspicious time.

(all quotes from “The Unquiet American.” Pankaj Mishra. The New York Review, January 12, 2006)

posted by Margot St. Clair @ 11:56 AM 0 Comments