Sunday, September 28, 2008

Are the world's poor motivated solely by survival needs?

The answer to this question might seem fairly obvious. If people are living on less that a dollar a day, or even on less that two dollars a day, everything they do is likely to be motivated by survival needs. Right?

Actually, a recent working paper by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo suggests that perception is not correct. The paper is based on household surveys conducted in 13 low-income countries (‘Economic lives of the poor’, MIT working paper 06-29).

Those in poverty typically spend between about half and three-quarters of their income on food. The food they buy is not always the lowest cost way of obtaining nutrition – for example, where millets represent best nutritional value for money they also spend significant amounts on rice, wheat and sugar. They also spend significant amounts on tobacco and alcohol. Most surprisingly, they spend a substantial proportion or their incomes on entertainment e.g. television, religious festivals and weddings, and on funerals.

Does this mean that the world’s poor are eating enough? Not according to standards relating to such things as calorie intake and body mass indexes. The poor frequently suffer from illness related to malnutrition and many say that they often feel so weak that it is difficult for them to carry out daily activities.

Are they happy? The proportions reporting that they are worried, tense or anxious are relatively high. In general, however, the world’s poor are apparently not extremely unhappy, except when they have to go without meals.

Why do they spend on entertainment instead of spending more on food? Banerjee and Duflo suggest that this cannot be attributed to lack of self control because much of the entertainment spending of the poor tends to involve planning and saving. The authors argue that spending on entertainment is a strongly felt need and possibly associated with a desire of the poor to keep up with their neighbours. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the world’s poor do not focus exclusively on satisfying their physiological and security needs.

Why did these results surprise me? It must have been because I had faulty preconceptions about what it means to be very poor. As an undergraduate I learned about Engel’s law that the proportion of income that people spend on food tends to decline as incomes rise. At various times of my life I have also been exposed to Maslow’s pyramid of needs, which implies that people need to satisfy their basic physiological needs and their needs for safety and security before they become motivated by belonging and love needs, esteem needs and self actualization needs. Although Engel’s law and Maslow’s pyramid are broadly consistent with reality, they do not help people to understand that, like the rest of humanity, the very poor are not motivated entirely by physiological needs.

I read the paper by Banerjee and Duflo some time ago, but it has come to mind again as I have been reading Michael Hall’s book, “Self-Actualization Psychology” (Neuro-Semantic Publications, 2008). Hall is respectful of Abraham Maslow’s theories, but suggests that Maslow did not fully appreciate the importance to motivation of the meaning that people give to their circumstances. For example, Maslow admitted that it was a great mystery to him why affluence releases some people for personal growth while others stay fixated at a strictly materialistic level. Hall comments:
“Today, we can answer that puzzle. The experience of affluence is just an event or experience. What it means to any given person determines how that person will regard and feel about affluence” (91).

Hall emphasizes the importance of “meaning” as follows:
“Meaning is the most critical factor in human nature. There’s nothing more essential or core to our nature and experiences. In the end, no experience and no event makes us feel anything. In itself, no experience means anything. Meaning is not inside events” (90).

That provides food for thought. It also seems to me to help explain why very poor people do not focus their efforts exclusively on survival. Even though they are malnourished, living means a lot more to them than just survival.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Will the financial crisis lead to more protectionism?

In opening the WTO’s Public Forum for 2008, which is taking place in Geneva at the moment, Pascal Lamy, director-general or the WTO referred to newspaper headlines heralding a potential Great Depression Two. He noted that policy-makers in the United States and across the globe, are desperately seeking to avoid the series of mis-steps that accentuated the financial crisis of the 1930s. Lamy then added:

“They are all stressing that lessons from the Great Depression have been learned, and that the many policy mistakes that were associated with it will be avoided. But one of the important lessons of the Great Depression, which we must not forget, is that “protectionism” and economic isolationism do not work. They are policies of the past, which should have no place in our future” (here).

I suppose that quite a few economists who are concerned about the current financial crisis have recently revisited what Milton Friedman had to say about the origins of the great depression. My conclusion after re-reading the relevant chapter of “Capitalism and Freedom”, is that the policy mistakes that led to the great depression are unlikely to be repeated. I am less sure that the U.S. will avoid the policy mistakes that Japan made at the beginning of the 1990’s - but that is not what I want to write about at the moment.

After I had read what Friedman had to say about the origins of the great depression I then found myself reading his comments on trade liberalisation in the following chapter about international finance and trade. If Pascal Lamy has good cause to be concerned about a rise in protectionism in the current environment – as I think he has - it seems to me that the best way to defend against it would be to revive efforts toward trade liberalisation. The following comments by Friedman on approaches to trade liberalization seem to me to be particularly relevant in the light of the recent failure of international trade negotiations:

“Given that we should move to free trade, how should we do so? The method we have tried to adopt is reciprocal negotiation of tariff reductions with other countries. This seems to me a wrong procedure. In the first place, it ensures a slow pace. He moves fastest who moves alone. In the second place, it fosters an erroneous view of the basic problem. It makes it appear as if tariffs help the country imposing them but hurt other countries , as if when we reduce a tariff we give up something good and should get something in return in the form of a reduction in the tariffs imposed by other countries. In truth the situation is quite different. Our tariffs hurt us as well as other countries. We would be benefited by dispensing with our tariffs even if other countries did not. We would of course be benefited more if they reduced theirs but our benefiting does not require that they reduce theirs. Self-interests coincide and do not conflict” (Friedman, 1982: 73).

Friedman made it clear in the following paragraphs that he was using “tariff” to cover non-tariff impediments to trade as well as tariffs.

It is difficult for those who share Friedman’s views about trade liberalization not to view WTO negotiations as vaudeville. The negotiation process seems to exist to allow politicians to clown around on the world stage keeping their domestic audiences amused, while behind the scenes they continue to pander to narrow interest groups favouring high protection.

Does this mean that the WTO is worse than useless? Not necessarily. The WTO has potential value as a forum that can help member countries to resist the pressures of domestic interests seeking to retain or even increase trade barriers. It seems to me that it is not beyond hope that WTO processes could be used to help individual countries to develop trade negotiation strategies that would achieve the benefits potentially available to them through unilateral reductions in protection. If many countries can induce each other to do this simultaneously, all can also obtain the benefits flowing from reductions in trade barriers of other countries.

How this could happen? The best ideas I have seen are in a contribution to the WTO Public Forum by Bill Carmichael, former chairman of Australia’s Industries Assistance Commission (here).

Monday, September 22, 2008

Is liberty opposed to virtue?

Robert Skidelsky argues that we have come to think of morality as having to do only with rights and obligations (here). According to Skidelsky, where there is no right or obligation, morality has become silent:
A man who, having fulfilled his obligations to others, settles down to watch porn on television all day may be foolish, disgusting, vulgar and so forth, but he is not strictly speaking immoral”.

Skidelsky claims that increased liberty, as advocated by J.S. Mill, is largely responsible for this apparent contraction in the scope of morality and in the decline in virtue ethics. As is well known, Mill argued in “On Liberty” that adults should be legally free to do as they choose as long as they do not interfere with the rights of others. However, he also argued against what he described as the “despotism of custom”:
The human faculties of perception, judgement, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only by making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best” (Chapter on Individuality).

Skidelsky claims that contrary to Mill’s argument, increases in personal liberty have not enabled people to become more self-directed and happier. He observes: “Modern Britain, for all its profusion of choice, is hardly a showcase of fully developed personalities”. I imagine that Skidelsky would also consider that this observation applies to other western countries.

Skidelsky uses the TV show, “Big Brother” as an example of what he means: “It panders to the greed and vanity of its participants and to the voyeurism of its viewers. ... Yet from a liberal standpoint, there is nothing to be said against it. The participants are there of their own accord and may leave any time they please. ... On some level we know it is vile, yet we lack the authority and words to say so”.

Well, I think he just said that “Big Brother” is vile. In any case, Skidelsky has not convinced me that liberty is opposed to virtue. The fact that many people do not use their liberty to make good choices does not make their liberty responsible for their choices, or for the apparent absence of the use of moral language in the discussion of the choices that they make. It is only the possibility of choice that enables anyone to consider the morality or rationality or any other characteristic of the choices that anyone makes.

It seems to me that while liberty is not opposed to virtue, it is possible to argue that those who have been unduly influenced by Mill’s attack on “the despotism of custom” may have been left without a moral compass. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out, it is unwise to disregard customary rules just because their significance and importance is not obvious to us. These rules may embody wisdom resulting from the experimentation of many previous generations. Hayek also made the important point that whereas coercive rules unambiguously restrict liberty, customary rules are not despotic. They “can be broken by individuals who feel that they have strong enough reasons to brave the censure of their fellows” (“Constitution of Liberty, 1960: 62-63).
It is also possible to argue that in emphasizing the role of reason, Mill and his followers have not been sufficiently sensitive to the role that emotions play in morality. The role of emotions had previously been asserted by David Hume: “Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason” (“A Treatise of Human Nature”, 1739, III, I, i).

Nevertheless, even if it is possible to pin some blame on Mill for a decline in unthinking adherence to moral conventions, he can hardly be blamed for the apparent absence of moral language in the public discussion of the choices that people make. If anyone thinks that certain behaviour is unhealthy or in some other way inconsistent with living the good life, there is nothing stopping them from giving reasons why they think that. People might even be prepared to listen if those delivering the sermons regard themselves as moral equals.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Are our preferences always governed by hedonic factors?

Hedonic factors have to do with pleasure and pain. It seems to me that the answer to this question depends on how broadly or narrowly pleasure and pain are defined. It may be possible to define pleasure and pain so broadly that we can assume that our preferences are always governed by hedonic factors.

The question becomes more interesting, however, if a narrow definition of hedonism is adopted. Clive Hamilton has a very narrow definition of hedonism in mind when he writes: “The pleasant life, or life of pleasure, is one motivated by hedonism – the desire to maximise the number of emotional and physical ‘highs’ that is the signature of modern capitalism” (“The freedom paradox”, 2008: 12). Hamilton goes on to claim: “The hedonic conception of happiness is the one assumed by the utilitarian approach of neoliberal or free-market economics”.

Once you strip the gratuitous nonsense out of those statements it seems to me that you are left with nothing more than the assertion that the preferences that people reveal in their market behavior reflect only their desire to maximise the number of emotional and physical highs that they experience. That seems to me to be an offensive view to have of the motivations of one’s fellow human beings. If Clive actually observed the market behavior of real people he would see a lot of people making a lot of decisions with a range of motivations, including the longer-term well-being of their families.

Do free-market economists assume that the market behavior of people is motivated solely by a desire to maximise the number of emotional and physical highs they experience? I can’t speak for everyone, but I would be surprised if many free market economists would make that assumption. I imagine that most free-market economists would accept Lionel Robbins view that economists do not have to make judgements or assumptions about motivations: “Why the human animal attaches particular values ... to particular things, is ... quite properly a question for psychologists or perhaps even physiologists. All we need to assume as economists is the obvious fact that different possibilities offer different incentives, and that these incentives can be arranged in order of their intensity” (“An essay on the nature and significance of economic science”, 1945: 86).

Free-market economists believe that whatever motivates the market behaviour of individuals their preferences should generally be respected. My personal view is that individuals are generally capable of making judgements in their own best interests, that no-one else is better placed to make such judgements and that individuals are more likely to flourish when they know that they have to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own judgements. However, I also believe that some contrary views, such as those based on the evidence of irrational behaviour presented by psychologists and behavioral economists, deserve serious consideration (see previous posts on the topics of ‘autonomy and responsibility’ and ‘self control’).