Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I’m reading Francis Fukuyama’s book Trust. He argues that a culture’s ablity to support spontainous sociablity and hence form numerous overlapping organizations with is key to lowering transaction costs and creating economic vitality.

He spends a lot of time on various national and religious cultural frameworks; contrasting them with that model. Here, for example, is a list of attributes of that appear to be lifted from Weber’s The Protestant Ethic

Max Weber

• hard work
• frugality
• rationality
• innovativeness
• openness
• honesty
• reliablity
• cooperativeness
• sense of duty to others
• the capacity to cohere in new communtities
• service

I was struck by how few of these I would be tempted to ascribe to the neocons. Curious.

He has something very interesting to say about “family values”. He argues that countries with extremely family centric ethical frameworks (for example in Confucism family loyality trumps all other kinds) tend to have very few organizations that exist outside of the family circle. In such nations the demand for such intermediate organizations must be met by the federal government.

He makes an interesting point about totalitarian regimes, like the Communists or the French monarcy, where they view all other organisations as competitors and labor to wipe them out. That reminded me of a similar pattern in religious cults that treat anything outside the cult (family, job, thoughts, etc.) as a competitor that to be suppressed.

In turn that got me thinking about how hard that is in a world with lots and lots of communications channels. Why you’d practically need a war to get people not to notice that the Bush tax cuts are making good progress thru the congress, or that there were tornados recently in the Southern United States.

Med Rants — A doctor’s blog who appears to be writing usefully about the SARS situation.

Useful - Spin Sanity’s Myths and misconceptions about Iraq.

Some good news.: “He was a mere 1.5 metres from the brink of the falls.”

“He could have reached out and touched the brink of the falls with his hand,” said John Jacoby, battalion chief of the Niagara Falls Fire Department.

Maybe he was decided the time had come to move to Canada?

Some people this happens to are fools.

Some people are just plain crazy and do this on purpose.

Some people even survive to tell their story, including audio recordings from inside the barrel.

Over the last few years a number of people attempting to cross the border
from Canada have decided to swim across the river down stream from the falls. Unaware that the currents are incredibly strong and violent they are drawn underwater and drowned.

There is an amazing moral dilemma hidden in the text of Richard Layard’s lectures on economics and happiness.

If you are evil, he outlines a reasonably simple reciepe you can use to make a large groups of people unhappy. The
trick is to engineer a change in their self ranking. That’s easier to do than you might expect. All you have to do is breakdown the barriers around their local community while working to assure that they assume this new community is of higher rank.

One story he tells is of the East Germans. In the last decade and a half they have been set free from a horrible Government (one that arranged to see to it that they all spied on each other) and thier their incomes have been raised substantially. This is obviously wonderful. But? Why are they collectively less happy? Apparently it’s because they now calibrate themselves against the West Germans.

What a mess. You do the obviously right thing; free an entire nation of people and pour tremendous amounts of energy into raising their standard of living and after a long period the end result is an overall decrease in the happiness of the very people you set out to help. At that point your only hope is to start to calculate some other score; maybe one where justice can counter the decrease in unhappiness. What a mess!

This problem is far more common than it appears at first. He reports the same story for holds true for many women in industrial nations who now compare their rank against that of men. Or, he reports, that watching television with pictures of beautiful people living rich lives causes people to start contrasting their rank with the people in those images (fictional people!) and this makes them unhappy.

If you are really evil - get a satellite television station. Beam images of first world life styles into the homes of third world citizens.

People say of the third world’s anger “What’s their problem?” Maybe it’s not our cultural imperialism. Maybe it’s not the way our media is full of violence, or loose morals. Maybe it’s not the destructive effects our culture has on local culturals, persay.

It could be entirely that our media erodes the boundary around their local frames of reference and in doing so it implicitly suggests that their rank is lower than ours. That doesn’t trigger a desire to strive; it only triggers a sense of unhappiness, frustration and worse.

You might make this argument not just between the first and third world, but between the urban and rural cultures or (between rich and poor) inside the first world.

All that got me to thinking - could you use these insights to make people happier. I think you might argue that the old TV show ‘Queen for a Day’ is an example of TV that made people happy. Queen for a Day ran for 25 years, each show would share with it’s audience two contestants who’s lives were mind boggling awful - the grinding poverty of recent widows who’s small children were suffering some crippling affliction. These stories gave the audience a point of reference that could only raise their self assessment of their rank in the world.

I recall traveling in Ireland many years ago where on the TV I saw documentaries about an awful place I was entirely unfamiliar with. This place went by the name America. These shows certainly did seem to cheer up all the Irish folks who were watching them.

But the most fascinating insight is that if you want to be a more cheerful person the answer is simple. Work to help those less fortunate than yourself.

Done right, this is a win all around. First the very poor gain substantial happiness from each and every improvement in their material condition. Those of us who are quite well off gain very little happiness from increases in our material well being. Second by associating with those who are less well off we recalibrate where we stand in the overall ranking of things. And that will make you happier!

Good news indeed; as long as in doing it you don’t create more unhappiness as in the West German example.