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The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction
When this classic work was first published in 1976, its central tenet--more is not necessarily better--placed it in direct conflict with mainstream thought in economics. Within a few years, however, this apparently paradoxical claim was gaining wide acceptance. Scitovsky's ground-breaking book was the first to apply theories of behaviorist psychology to questions of consumer behavior and to do so in clear, non-technical language. Setting out to analyze the failures of our consumerist lifestyle, Scitovsky concluded that people's need for stimulation is so vital that it can lead to violence if not satisfied by novelty--whether in challenging work, art, fashion, gadgets, late-model cars, or scandal.
Though much of the book stands as a record of American post-war prosperity and its accompanying problems, the revised edition also takes into account recent social and economic changes. A new preface and a foreword by economist Robert Frank introduce some of the issues created by those changes and two revised chapters develop them, discussing among others the assimilation of counter-cultural ideas throughout American society, especially ideas concerning quality of life. Scitovsky draws fascinating connections between the new elite of college-educated consumers and the emergence of a growing underclass plagued by drugs and violence, perceptively tracing the reactions of these disparate groups to the problems of leisure and boredom.
In the wake of the so-called "decade of greed" and amidst calls for a "kindler, gentler" society, The Joyless Economy seems more timely than ever.
Though much of the book stands as a record of American post-war prosperity and its accompanying problems, the revised edition also takes into account recent social and economic changes. A new preface and a foreword by economist Robert Frank introduce some of the issues created by those changes and two revised chapters develop them, discussing among others the assimilation of counter-cultural ideas throughout American society, especially ideas concerning quality of life. Scitovsky draws fascinating connections between the new elite of college-educated consumers and the emergence of a growing underclass plagued by drugs and violence, perceptively tracing the reactions of these disparate groups to the problems of leisure and boredom.
In the wake of the so-called "decade of greed" and amidst calls for a "kindler, gentler" society, The Joyless Economy seems more timely than ever.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 11, 2021
This book made me think, regardless of what you think of the author's (somewhat elitist...?) conclusions that Americans are just boors who can't appreciate a good Mercedes or Louis Vuitton purse.
The human mind craves novelty, but not something so novel that it cannot make sense of it; thus, there needs to strike a balance between novelty and redundancy; “the most pleasant is on the borderline with the unpleasant... the borderline is occasionally blurred... differently placed for different people... [shifting] with changing circumstances.” Teachers try to make things and concepts relatable to those already understood. A lack of stimulation can be seen the ill effects with solitary confinement. “Variety is not the spice of life, it is the very stuff of it.” -A Nazi prisoner. The Protestant Work Ethic brought about the importance of creating meaning through work; Industrialization took away a lot of that meaning, with tasks that became meaningless, with no variety nor stimulus. There was no more meaning or pride to be taken in craftsmanship. “[T]he Puiritan disapproval and distrust of pleasure is not against all enjoyment, but only against activity and expenditure specifically and exclusively aimed at providing or enhancing enjoyment.” Author suggests culture as an antidote to our seeking of novelty that we do not find in our work; we have to work to be able to appreciate it. We hold as the ultimate cause those things which make money, due to the work ethic background. We are thus focused on the supply side, not on the how to consume (demand) side. This leads to a homogeneity in our consumer products, where we do not appreciate many of the more refined products that are characteristic of Europe (I.e. German cars, fine Italian goods, etc), for better or for worse. We are able to raise or lower our activation level through our activities (I.e. physical exercise or mental exercise) as well as what we ingest (I.e. stimulants or depressants). Introvert and extrovert are personality types with different levels of average arousal; introverts have less of a need to raise their arousal level, preferring a safer/quieter/more reserved life. Extroverts prefer consuming stimulants, introverts depressants. Our brains process information and break it down into more relatable/understandable chunks (I.e. series of numbers). “In order to enjoy information, I must understand it and make it my own, by doing so I reduce and, ultimately, eliminate its subjective novelty by incorporating it into the already familiar.” This creates the ongoing need for novelty. Uncertainty precludes the relatability of something to the familiar, thus humans hate uncertainty; people hate waiting for election results or children waiting to know what a gift is. Feelings of comfort/discomfort have to do with arousal level and whether or not it is optimal; pleasure has to do with change in arousal level, coming up or going down towards the more optimal (analogy made of speed vs. Acceleration/deceleration). Explains a distinction in economics and GDP, which happens when things which were not in the market before become a part of the market (I.e. something someone in the family did for free before but now pays someone to do). Further explains “the secular rise in the poverty norm” which can result in an increase of people living “in poverty” without any actual change in life circumstances for those people. Also, statistics on income and its relation to satisfaction does not take into account the factor of who: if new people enter the marketplace (I.e. women, immigrants, etc), the workforce increases, and thus alters statistics. Points to the importance and immeasurability of externalities in an economy and how that very much relates to satisfaction (I.e. if everyone blared their loud car stereos). When standard of living goes up in a society, along with associated costs, people must pay for it in dollars, or in “discomfort” -- that manufactured social feeling of being left out. “Status and rank are themselves habit-forming: losing status and losing rank can be a source of suffering and the fear of losing them a source of anxiety.” Habits are easily formed and hard to be broken. Points to status satisfaction, work satisfaction, novelty enjoyment, and addition as explanatory why ones happiness depends so much on ranking in society – one can enjoy a better job, more easily find novelty, etc, as a higher member of society. Points to our society’s Puritanical disdain for criminals and victimless crimes, an assault on individual liberty in which many are complicit; we allow gambling on the stock exchange, our values for those with money, but we do not allow the use of slot machines, our disdain for those without it. “In other countries, personal freedom is much more carefully cherished and guarded. They put out a good deal of publicity about hazards to life, limb, and health, trying to persuade and inform the individual, but they leave the final decision to him. Our intolerance makes us seek safety in coercion.” The idea that we should have pleasure, and enjoy things in life, such as culture, is very anti-Puritan. Modern education evolved to produce factory workers, not to propagate culture, as had been the history of education in Europe. People are unable to find satisfaction, as evidenced by lower life expectancy amongst retired men, becoming bored and aimless, the remedy being, says the author, culture. Fashion, changing of vehicles, of living situation, etc, all point to our hunger for novelty. The way our production-heavy bias in culture works points to automotive tastes in the 60s and early 70s, for huge cars, and then imports came on the scene, which people had a huge hunger for, little to the knowledge of our producer-focus culture (and bad focus groups, though this disregards the oil crisis). Our culture disdains the generalist (I.e. the housewife, the connoisseur of a range of goods), and prizes the specialist (the income earner). Points to our interest in violence as an indication of our lack of stimulation, and our tolerance for it.
“[D]anger and the fear of danger are exciting; excitement within limits is pleasant; therefore, danger is pleasant as long as it is limited, controllable or under control, vicarious, or make-believe... tastes differ greatly as to the degree and nature of excitement considered enjoyable”
“Anything new, in the sense of anything unexpected, is a threat to our survival, because we do not know how to deal with it. Each of us, through the accumulation of personal experience, develops a view of the world, starting from day one. And that view is the basis of the strategy we use for living—for surviving.”
“The two kinds of danger—chance of failure and consequences of failure—are totally different and independent; no wonder if their implications for man’s behavior are also different.” Thus, the potential consequences of riding a bike poorly on the street are being flattened by a truck; riding a bike poorly up to the Hollywood sign may result in not making it all the way to the sign. “For my enjoyment of a stimulus, the likelihood of failure, the precise degree of danger of my failing at whatever the problem or task I am tackling, is more important than the amount of danger I would be exposed to in case of failure”
“The simplest remedy for too low arousal is bodily exercise.” “There is some evidence that many laboratory animals manage to do about as much running or moving around as they would in the wild.”
“The pleasures of stimulation, unlike those of want satisfaction, are not eliminated by their too persistent and too continuous pursuit.” “The satisfaction of wants eliminates a discomfort whose initial presence is a necessary condition of pleasure. We eat to appease hunger, but we must be hungry to enjoy eating... By contrast, stimulation eliminates the discomfort of boredom, but the condition of deriving pleasure from stimulation is the discomfort not of the boredom it relieves, but of the temporary strain it creates. To be enjoyable, a play or a film must build up tensions which are resolved before the end, but the audiences does not have to be bored on its arrival at the theater.”
“Drives to relieve discomfort, stimulation to relieve boredom, and the pleasures that can accompany and reinforce both –those are the three motive forces of behavior distinguished by psychologists today”
“The dividing line, therefore, between necessities and luxuries turns out to be not objective and immutable, but socially determined and ever changing, very differently drawn in different societies, by different people, and at different times by the same people...” (I.e. indoor plumbing.)
“Of all nations, we have the reputation of being the most anxious about health, hygiene, and proper nutrition, yet we have little to show for it. Europeans take a much more casual attitude to these things, yet most of them live longer than we do and their mortality and infant mortality rates are lower than ours... The discomforts, therefore, that we feel when we are deprived of our accustomed routine cannot, as a rule, be explained in terms of legitimate concern over increased dangers to health, but is... explained by our difficulty of relinquishing habits we have become used to.”
“As the stimulus is repeated, the primary reaction” (I.e. feeling drunk) “remains unchanged, but the opponent process recruits more promptly, becomes stronger, and lasts longer” (I.e. hangover). This explains addiction. The secondary processes try to get us back to equilibrium
“We use money not only as a medium of exchange, but also as the measuring rod of a man’s worth, and we value income not only for the goods it will buy, but also as the proof of our usefulness to society. Being useful to society is a source of satisfaction and comfort; money income is a token of such usefulness and therefore becomes itself a source of satisfaction and comfort... “
“In short, the primacy of production over consumption, of monetary over non-monetary values, are both manifestations of the moral judgment which sets service benefiting others ahead of concern for oneself.” (an interesting Catch-22). Thus we do not care about externalities, and we scoff at civilizations with different value structures.
“[W]e Americans are more inclined to go in for austere ostentation, displaying our ability to spend a lot of money on goods distinguished from their cheaper counterparts mainly by their conspicuous expensiveness. In that way we maintain our puritanical disdain for the frivolous matter of consumption...”
“The same Puritan mentality is manifest in the way in which members of our counterculture seek status. They want to establish their rejection of the dominant culture and their membership in the counterculture at the same time, and they accomplish this feat by means of uniform grooming and dress which asserts their solidarity and appalls the Establishment.” (without regard for style)
“The interest of our counterculture in handicrafts may look like a turning back of the clock, but it is a perfect resolution of the dilemma [of insufficient stimulation and low requirements for consumption skills] and the only one fully in the American tradition of simplicity and functionalism”
“The rise in the relative price of novelty puts the squeeze on its supply and confronts its suppliers—artists, entertainers, and other such—with the uncomfortable choice between a reduction in their incomes and a decimation of their numbers.” Thus, artists must, in some way, pander to the masses to eat.
“In short, even though our Puritan attitude, lack of consumption skills, and disdain for the generalist deprive us of much enjoyable stimulation as consumers, we can make up for the loss by seeking the creative satisfaction of productive work... We have an unfortunate tendency to underestimate the importance of goods and services, activities and satisfactions, that do not go through the market and therefore fail to acquire a monetary value”
“The irony is that what I have called our Puritan ghost is largely responsible for the high cost of our life-style, and we find it hard to accept the idea that one way of making our lifestyles less costly is to make it less austere.”
The human mind craves novelty, but not something so novel that it cannot make sense of it; thus, there needs to strike a balance between novelty and redundancy; “the most pleasant is on the borderline with the unpleasant... the borderline is occasionally blurred... differently placed for different people... [shifting] with changing circumstances.” Teachers try to make things and concepts relatable to those already understood. A lack of stimulation can be seen the ill effects with solitary confinement. “Variety is not the spice of life, it is the very stuff of it.” -A Nazi prisoner. The Protestant Work Ethic brought about the importance of creating meaning through work; Industrialization took away a lot of that meaning, with tasks that became meaningless, with no variety nor stimulus. There was no more meaning or pride to be taken in craftsmanship. “[T]he Puiritan disapproval and distrust of pleasure is not against all enjoyment, but only against activity and expenditure specifically and exclusively aimed at providing or enhancing enjoyment.” Author suggests culture as an antidote to our seeking of novelty that we do not find in our work; we have to work to be able to appreciate it. We hold as the ultimate cause those things which make money, due to the work ethic background. We are thus focused on the supply side, not on the how to consume (demand) side. This leads to a homogeneity in our consumer products, where we do not appreciate many of the more refined products that are characteristic of Europe (I.e. German cars, fine Italian goods, etc), for better or for worse. We are able to raise or lower our activation level through our activities (I.e. physical exercise or mental exercise) as well as what we ingest (I.e. stimulants or depressants). Introvert and extrovert are personality types with different levels of average arousal; introverts have less of a need to raise their arousal level, preferring a safer/quieter/more reserved life. Extroverts prefer consuming stimulants, introverts depressants. Our brains process information and break it down into more relatable/understandable chunks (I.e. series of numbers). “In order to enjoy information, I must understand it and make it my own, by doing so I reduce and, ultimately, eliminate its subjective novelty by incorporating it into the already familiar.” This creates the ongoing need for novelty. Uncertainty precludes the relatability of something to the familiar, thus humans hate uncertainty; people hate waiting for election results or children waiting to know what a gift is. Feelings of comfort/discomfort have to do with arousal level and whether or not it is optimal; pleasure has to do with change in arousal level, coming up or going down towards the more optimal (analogy made of speed vs. Acceleration/deceleration). Explains a distinction in economics and GDP, which happens when things which were not in the market before become a part of the market (I.e. something someone in the family did for free before but now pays someone to do). Further explains “the secular rise in the poverty norm” which can result in an increase of people living “in poverty” without any actual change in life circumstances for those people. Also, statistics on income and its relation to satisfaction does not take into account the factor of who: if new people enter the marketplace (I.e. women, immigrants, etc), the workforce increases, and thus alters statistics. Points to the importance and immeasurability of externalities in an economy and how that very much relates to satisfaction (I.e. if everyone blared their loud car stereos). When standard of living goes up in a society, along with associated costs, people must pay for it in dollars, or in “discomfort” -- that manufactured social feeling of being left out. “Status and rank are themselves habit-forming: losing status and losing rank can be a source of suffering and the fear of losing them a source of anxiety.” Habits are easily formed and hard to be broken. Points to status satisfaction, work satisfaction, novelty enjoyment, and addition as explanatory why ones happiness depends so much on ranking in society – one can enjoy a better job, more easily find novelty, etc, as a higher member of society. Points to our society’s Puritanical disdain for criminals and victimless crimes, an assault on individual liberty in which many are complicit; we allow gambling on the stock exchange, our values for those with money, but we do not allow the use of slot machines, our disdain for those without it. “In other countries, personal freedom is much more carefully cherished and guarded. They put out a good deal of publicity about hazards to life, limb, and health, trying to persuade and inform the individual, but they leave the final decision to him. Our intolerance makes us seek safety in coercion.” The idea that we should have pleasure, and enjoy things in life, such as culture, is very anti-Puritan. Modern education evolved to produce factory workers, not to propagate culture, as had been the history of education in Europe. People are unable to find satisfaction, as evidenced by lower life expectancy amongst retired men, becoming bored and aimless, the remedy being, says the author, culture. Fashion, changing of vehicles, of living situation, etc, all point to our hunger for novelty. The way our production-heavy bias in culture works points to automotive tastes in the 60s and early 70s, for huge cars, and then imports came on the scene, which people had a huge hunger for, little to the knowledge of our producer-focus culture (and bad focus groups, though this disregards the oil crisis). Our culture disdains the generalist (I.e. the housewife, the connoisseur of a range of goods), and prizes the specialist (the income earner). Points to our interest in violence as an indication of our lack of stimulation, and our tolerance for it.
“[D]anger and the fear of danger are exciting; excitement within limits is pleasant; therefore, danger is pleasant as long as it is limited, controllable or under control, vicarious, or make-believe... tastes differ greatly as to the degree and nature of excitement considered enjoyable”
“Anything new, in the sense of anything unexpected, is a threat to our survival, because we do not know how to deal with it. Each of us, through the accumulation of personal experience, develops a view of the world, starting from day one. And that view is the basis of the strategy we use for living—for surviving.”
“The two kinds of danger—chance of failure and consequences of failure—are totally different and independent; no wonder if their implications for man’s behavior are also different.” Thus, the potential consequences of riding a bike poorly on the street are being flattened by a truck; riding a bike poorly up to the Hollywood sign may result in not making it all the way to the sign. “For my enjoyment of a stimulus, the likelihood of failure, the precise degree of danger of my failing at whatever the problem or task I am tackling, is more important than the amount of danger I would be exposed to in case of failure”
“The simplest remedy for too low arousal is bodily exercise.” “There is some evidence that many laboratory animals manage to do about as much running or moving around as they would in the wild.”
“The pleasures of stimulation, unlike those of want satisfaction, are not eliminated by their too persistent and too continuous pursuit.” “The satisfaction of wants eliminates a discomfort whose initial presence is a necessary condition of pleasure. We eat to appease hunger, but we must be hungry to enjoy eating... By contrast, stimulation eliminates the discomfort of boredom, but the condition of deriving pleasure from stimulation is the discomfort not of the boredom it relieves, but of the temporary strain it creates. To be enjoyable, a play or a film must build up tensions which are resolved before the end, but the audiences does not have to be bored on its arrival at the theater.”
“Drives to relieve discomfort, stimulation to relieve boredom, and the pleasures that can accompany and reinforce both –those are the three motive forces of behavior distinguished by psychologists today”
“The dividing line, therefore, between necessities and luxuries turns out to be not objective and immutable, but socially determined and ever changing, very differently drawn in different societies, by different people, and at different times by the same people...” (I.e. indoor plumbing.)
“Of all nations, we have the reputation of being the most anxious about health, hygiene, and proper nutrition, yet we have little to show for it. Europeans take a much more casual attitude to these things, yet most of them live longer than we do and their mortality and infant mortality rates are lower than ours... The discomforts, therefore, that we feel when we are deprived of our accustomed routine cannot, as a rule, be explained in terms of legitimate concern over increased dangers to health, but is... explained by our difficulty of relinquishing habits we have become used to.”
“As the stimulus is repeated, the primary reaction” (I.e. feeling drunk) “remains unchanged, but the opponent process recruits more promptly, becomes stronger, and lasts longer” (I.e. hangover). This explains addiction. The secondary processes try to get us back to equilibrium
“We use money not only as a medium of exchange, but also as the measuring rod of a man’s worth, and we value income not only for the goods it will buy, but also as the proof of our usefulness to society. Being useful to society is a source of satisfaction and comfort; money income is a token of such usefulness and therefore becomes itself a source of satisfaction and comfort... “
“In short, the primacy of production over consumption, of monetary over non-monetary values, are both manifestations of the moral judgment which sets service benefiting others ahead of concern for oneself.” (an interesting Catch-22). Thus we do not care about externalities, and we scoff at civilizations with different value structures.
“[W]e Americans are more inclined to go in for austere ostentation, displaying our ability to spend a lot of money on goods distinguished from their cheaper counterparts mainly by their conspicuous expensiveness. In that way we maintain our puritanical disdain for the frivolous matter of consumption...”
“The same Puritan mentality is manifest in the way in which members of our counterculture seek status. They want to establish their rejection of the dominant culture and their membership in the counterculture at the same time, and they accomplish this feat by means of uniform grooming and dress which asserts their solidarity and appalls the Establishment.” (without regard for style)
“The interest of our counterculture in handicrafts may look like a turning back of the clock, but it is a perfect resolution of the dilemma [of insufficient stimulation and low requirements for consumption skills] and the only one fully in the American tradition of simplicity and functionalism”
“The rise in the relative price of novelty puts the squeeze on its supply and confronts its suppliers—artists, entertainers, and other such—with the uncomfortable choice between a reduction in their incomes and a decimation of their numbers.” Thus, artists must, in some way, pander to the masses to eat.
“In short, even though our Puritan attitude, lack of consumption skills, and disdain for the generalist deprive us of much enjoyable stimulation as consumers, we can make up for the loss by seeking the creative satisfaction of productive work... We have an unfortunate tendency to underestimate the importance of goods and services, activities and satisfactions, that do not go through the market and therefore fail to acquire a monetary value”
“The irony is that what I have called our Puritan ghost is largely responsible for the high cost of our life-style, and we find it hard to accept the idea that one way of making our lifestyles less costly is to make it less austere.”
December 3, 2019
His book brings in psychology and economics to better understand how people behave. While economics focuses on maximizing utility, Tibor puts a bit more nuance there. His basic point is that buying more and more is wasteful for two reasons: 1) We crowd out experiences and effort when we buy things, and the experience and effort lost may make us more happy that what we bought and 2) Mass production makes a lot of what we buy decent quality, but not great, and therefore often a waste or just not very satisfying. He compares our culture to that of Europe to make some general points, and I did not find this preachy but rather a statement of fact so we could see an alternative outcome despite our similarities. Some quotes that stand out:
P57: For “new and unexpected to be pleasantly stimulating, it must be sufficiently related to the familiar…Uncertaainty makes things unmanageable.” Unless it is under control.
Lesson: novelty is good, within reason.
“man’s main response to increasing affluence seems to be an increase in the frequency of festive meals;
P79: affluence crowds out the pleasures of want satisfaction
P90: Marx: “only in being productively active can man make sense of his life.”
P91: Exploration, research and artistic and scientific creation probably provide the most satisfying stimulation known to man
P220: desire for stimulation and excitement from limited danger get squashed by regulations of safety and prohibitions. Thus, we may seek stimulation from other sources including violence. As an example of a safety reg: P223: no swimming in drinking reservoirs even though “water supply engineers discuss the absurdity of the practice” given the purifying systems we have in place.
P274: “our faith in the producer makes us readily accept the saving of labor as the supreme good” – again, saving labor doesn’t make sense if we get more satisfaction from the creation or the effort.
P284: “we get and pay for more comfort than is necessary for the good life, and some of our comforts crowd out some of the enjoyments of life.” “Far from being bad news, that is really good news, for it means that more people can attain the good life that would be possible if our way were the only one leading to it.”
February 23, 2015
This was a landmark book in my life that changed the way I think about pretty much everything. Scitovsky pretty much destroys the classic economic models of utility and consumer satisfaction, replacing them with a more nuanced model of stimulation. This has implications for everything, which he outlines in the book. Some questions that he answers: What is culture and why is it important? What does it mean to be cultured? Why do Americans seem to work so much harder than Europeans, and is that good? How has the feminist movement helped men in ways they have no idea about? There is a lot more that I haven't mentioned here. Read this book.
April 12, 2008
I went to the BYU bookstore one time for a specific book, and while I was walking up and down the aisles trying to find it, this one caught my eye and I bought it. I love this book, I love the idea behind this book. Some of his ideas: "pleasure is the fleeting state that occurs in the transition from discomfort to comfort;" we have more free time and money than things we can effectively spend it on; in other words, more is not necessarily better. He uses this to explain introverts vs extroverts, how standardizing societies leads to boredom, our dining habits, the drug underclass, etc.
March 19, 2012
An economist in the 1970s who had the audacity to view economic behavior through the lens of behavioral psychology.
In recent years, such cross-pollination between disciplines regularly finds itself reflected in Economics Nobel Prizes; back then, it was a jarring novelty for his fellow economists. A pioneering work.
In recent years, such cross-pollination between disciplines regularly finds itself reflected in Economics Nobel Prizes; back then, it was a jarring novelty for his fellow economists. A pioneering work.
July 23, 2018
The title “The Joyless Economy” describes pretty much exactly the situation one would deduce from its words. For those who live in wealthy and advanced societies, where their economies are so diverse and productive that they are able to produce virtually anything one can imagine, why do so many people feel joyless? The book digs into this in great detail, as can be seen from the sub-headings in just a few chapters.
Chapter 3, for example, considers
The Pursuit of Novelty
Physical Stimulation
Mental Stimulation
Some of the Evidence
Threat
Measurement
Attention
Redundancy
Signs and Supersigns
Uncertainty.
Chapter 6 considers
Necessities and Comforts
Necessities and Luxuries
Defensive and Creative Products
Some of the Comforts
The Comfort of Belonging
The Comfort of Being Useful
The Comfort of Sticking to Our Habits
What It Means To Become Spoiled.
But, for me, an area where the book delivers some of the most important insights, and some of the greatest value, is in Chapter 11 (Our Disdain for Culture) and the Appendix (Culture Is a Good Thing). The analysis and discussion here is brilliant.
A few sentences of Chapter 11 are worth quoting verbatim.
“I shall define culture as knowledge; it is that part of knowledge which provides the redundancy needed to render stimulation enjoyable. Culture is the preliminary information we must have to enjoy the processing of further information. Consumption skills, therefore, are part of culture, while production skills are not. … All stimulus enjoyment other than physical exercise requires a certain degree of skill, but all of us acquire some of it so easily that we do not think of it as learning. It is useful, therefore, to define culture a little more narrowly, as the training and skill necessary to enjoy those stimulus satisfactions whose enjoyment requires skill and training. That excludes knowledge everybody picks up unwittingly in the course of everyday living.”
In the Appendix, Scitovsky speaks of culture in connection with the third of a series of three broad areas of activity. The first of these areas is work, the need to spend time in exchange for the wherewithal to live. The second is a group of negative, anti-social activities, activities that deliver satisfaction of a sort to the people undertaking them, but at the cost of inflicting pain, humiliation, physical harm, loss for others, and includes forms of violence, sadism, vandalism, mental and physical domination of other people, torture, war, and so on.
The third group, the activities associated with the notion of culture, comprises all those activities which impose no burden, cause nobody harm, and give pleasure and satisfaction all round. These include love in all its finest aspects, learning, enjoyment of the arts, skilled hobbies, and any other creative use of leisure time. For any of these things, enjoyment to the full requires some degree of understanding, awareness and skill. In other words, knowledge.
I return to this book regularly, and I am impressed anew each time I do so.
Chapter 3, for example, considers
The Pursuit of Novelty
Physical Stimulation
Mental Stimulation
Some of the Evidence
Threat
Measurement
Attention
Redundancy
Signs and Supersigns
Uncertainty.
Chapter 6 considers
Necessities and Comforts
Necessities and Luxuries
Defensive and Creative Products
Some of the Comforts
The Comfort of Belonging
The Comfort of Being Useful
The Comfort of Sticking to Our Habits
What It Means To Become Spoiled.
But, for me, an area where the book delivers some of the most important insights, and some of the greatest value, is in Chapter 11 (Our Disdain for Culture) and the Appendix (Culture Is a Good Thing). The analysis and discussion here is brilliant.
A few sentences of Chapter 11 are worth quoting verbatim.
“I shall define culture as knowledge; it is that part of knowledge which provides the redundancy needed to render stimulation enjoyable. Culture is the preliminary information we must have to enjoy the processing of further information. Consumption skills, therefore, are part of culture, while production skills are not. … All stimulus enjoyment other than physical exercise requires a certain degree of skill, but all of us acquire some of it so easily that we do not think of it as learning. It is useful, therefore, to define culture a little more narrowly, as the training and skill necessary to enjoy those stimulus satisfactions whose enjoyment requires skill and training. That excludes knowledge everybody picks up unwittingly in the course of everyday living.”
In the Appendix, Scitovsky speaks of culture in connection with the third of a series of three broad areas of activity. The first of these areas is work, the need to spend time in exchange for the wherewithal to live. The second is a group of negative, anti-social activities, activities that deliver satisfaction of a sort to the people undertaking them, but at the cost of inflicting pain, humiliation, physical harm, loss for others, and includes forms of violence, sadism, vandalism, mental and physical domination of other people, torture, war, and so on.
The third group, the activities associated with the notion of culture, comprises all those activities which impose no burden, cause nobody harm, and give pleasure and satisfaction all round. These include love in all its finest aspects, learning, enjoyment of the arts, skilled hobbies, and any other creative use of leisure time. For any of these things, enjoyment to the full requires some degree of understanding, awareness and skill. In other words, knowledge.
I return to this book regularly, and I am impressed anew each time I do so.
May 19, 2021
in all honesty, yes this book has several important concepts used in the modern day, but it was a little repetitive and a bit boring . . . Nice writing, but I think you can learn these concepts elsewhere. Since it’s an older book, it relates to concepts already known, and it focuses mostly on the rich, not the poor. Kind of elitist so read with this knowledge. But still an interesting read if you push through. I loved how he related culture to the book.
May 2, 2021
Oddly enough, fav chapter was the introduction. It feels very fresh at the beginning, but halfway through starts getting very repetitive which is quite... Ironic. Still, a valuable read.
January 9, 2020
I have a new perspective about what I thought unnecessary, eg:
Relative redundancy of English language is estimated 50% higher. In other words, the subjective information flow contained in an English text is around 2.3 bits per letter.
In fact redundancy is sometimes can come in handy when there’s an imperfect information transmission.
This is just one example that can be found. I like the narrative since the example given is most likely day to day experience with additional interesting facts.
Relative redundancy of English language is estimated 50% higher. In other words, the subjective information flow contained in an English text is around 2.3 bits per letter.
In fact redundancy is sometimes can come in handy when there’s an imperfect information transmission.
This is just one example that can be found. I like the narrative since the example given is most likely day to day experience with additional interesting facts.
to-keep-reference
October 11, 2018...boredom and violence could be pervasive in an opulent country like the US, and attempted to find reasons for this apparently paradoxical phenomenon. By drawing from psychology research, he argued that one fundamental biological need is the need for stimulation. Unfortunately, opulence distracts people’s choice towards material comfort, which tends to produce boredom. Violence would appear as an abnormal reaction from the need for stimulation.
Capabilities and Happiness Pág.3
A possible ‘‘relational’’ explanation of the happiness–income paradox was originally put forward by Scitovsky in his The Joyless Economy (1976).
Capabilities and Happiness Pág.134
Capabilities and Happiness Pág.3
A possible ‘‘relational’’ explanation of the happiness–income paradox was originally put forward by Scitovsky in his The Joyless Economy (1976).
Capabilities and Happiness Pág.134
March 8, 2013
Basically our economy is set up to make us depressed. Capitalism has an incentive not to sell us the goods we want, but the goods it wants to sell, hence, advertising. This was the book that got economists to first start thinking about happiness. It is a sort of reinvention of economics looking through the prism of why people actually spend money. Sort of a meta-step between traditional economics and behavioral. It was poorly received at the time, apparently, but now it reads like common sense. It spends an extraordinary amount of time on clinical studies that are no longer relevant, but you don't sense that its core arguments are that weak. Whenever he talks about sex and gender it's a little weird. But overall, an important step in making economics more realistic.
November 1, 2016
This book starts out with interesting theories on human behavior but then turns into a personal diatribe about the American way of life as compared to the European wife of life. It soon takes on a Pro-European stance including a direct attack on any legislation that would impair liberties under any kind of moral standard. There is clearly a worldview masked within a look at human psychology.
I started this book with high expectations at it seemed to be an early framework for the application of behavioral psychology applied to consumerism and economic decision-making. I finished it highly disappointed as it became a personal thesis. It's a book that is out of print and only available via resale -- that's probably a good thing.
I started this book with high expectations at it seemed to be an early framework for the application of behavioral psychology applied to consumerism and economic decision-making. I finished it highly disappointed as it became a personal thesis. It's a book that is out of print and only available via resale -- that's probably a good thing.
December 24, 2013
This is a remarkable book in which Scitovsky draws on his knowledge of economics, the arts, and psychology in the form of Berlyne's experimental aesthetics. He has many provocative and original insights. His perspective remains current, especially insofar as they apply to achieving satisfaction through the arts, enjoying novelty, consumerism, resource depletion and the imperative to discover a sustainable way of life.
January 5, 2009
I loved this book.
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