“I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grand mother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her HOME for her birthday, but we live differently... I give her a xylophone and a sundress[.]”
--Joan Didion
There are probably enough good ideas in all of Barry Schwartz’s works to make one good book. Unfortunately, that book does not yet exist, but this article does. Schwartz argues that not only do power markets cause selfishness they cause short-term selfishness. Has anyone ever heard a power market pundit argue that oil corporations should be given subsidized oil in public wildlife refuges, but not right now because future generations will need the oil much more and will benefit from the oil much more?
Whatever is legal and beneficial for some corporations is assumed to be both legally and morally right. Power market ideologues blame problems primarily on less powerful wrong doers such as relativists on college campuses while ignoring market wrong doers. Most people go through their lives without taking a college class from a relativist or reading one of Richard Rorty’s books, yet people get millions of messages from the mass media. Almost no school warns about the destruction wrought by credit card debts. Gambling and the over consumption of legal drugs gets little attention from any curriculum.
Like communism, socialism and dictatorships, power markets encourage free riding. Manipulation and threats of punishment by more powerful individuals become the primary methods of keeping the peace and maintaining the status quo. Thinking primarily in terms of economic costs and benefits to the self has hidden costs, especially in moral feeling, appreciation, reasoning and actions.
The “everybody does it” and “I have to do it” excuses are among the common reasons given, a sort of Gresham’s Law of power markets operates: Immoral actions drive out moral actions. Milton Friedman’s old commandment that profit outweighs all else is both a legal and moral imperative for power marketers. Studies suggest that that most CEOs and MBA students believe anything that is legal is morally just and should be legally just--except, of course, legal things that violate power market ideology. Most of us are capitalists. We should ask what types of capitalists should we be and what does power markets do to people?
For power markets--or any type of markets to work--individuals must possess bourgeois values and numerous other values. Many who possess these traits, however, labor to produce products that destroy these traits--trustworthiness, thrift, self-control, flexibility, and industriousness--in their more manipulable fellow citizens. They follow philosophies of “Success is doing whatever you want,” and “No blood, no foul.”
Schwarz argues that trash culture values, whether underclass or other class, are power market values. Nike has done more to damage the moral development of individuals than Richard Rorty. Conscious and unconscious ideals are marketed as well as products. The power market ideals of constant novelty and diversion wreck the ideal of commitment to worthy endeavors. Many intellectuals and pop psychologists encourage lack of commitment, but their influence on commitment is minor compared to power markets.
Gangs and warlords seize capital by predation, but so do power markets, especially from parents, children and the unborn, requiring them the adhere to contracts they never agreed to, including federal debts, trade debts, retiree benefits and so on.
There are many potential reasons why power
markets decrease happiness. Among them:
·
Relentless trivia and manipulation.
·
Trivial choice and alternative overload.
·
Loss of friendships and family ties.
· Passivity inducing products.
· Emphasis on gaining status.
There are also some potential reasons
why power markets could increase happiness:
·
Roots out depressing people, and greater exposure to
happier people could increase happiness. (For example, depressing pundits get the
axe while perky pretty people fill the airwaves.)
·
Groupthink: Surrounded by happy people and advertising
pressure to be happy.
· Being unhappy is equated with having a psychological problem or character defect.
In any event character matter much more than happiness. Power markets may produce better character than socialism, but they do not produce adequate character.
—Article review by J.T. Fournier.
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