Your research showed that having fewer choices actually makes us happier. But what if they're reduced involuntarily?
I think in many ways it’s more likely to work if it’s involuntary. Because the problem with limiting choice on your own is that you wind up looking to your left and to your right and seeing other people doing things and having things that you passed up. We are inveterate social comparers. In the short run, people are going to feel the pain of giving up something that they previously had. But if everyone is giving that up, then it won’t hurt nearly as much or nearly as long.
But let me get one caveat in. We’re talking about the silver lining in all of this, but it’s a disaster to lose your job. It disrupts security, it disrupts social networks and relationships and your sense of self-worth — it’s just a catastrophe. And that’s not what I’m talking about. The silver lining comes when you get a smaller bonus, or a smaller raise, or something like that.
Might you be romanticizing the not-so-good old days?
Certainly if you just thrust people back into those days, they’d hate it because it involves giving up all kinds of stuff, and losses really hurt. But the point I make is only that in the not-so-good good old days, people’s expectations were modest and so you could occasionally exceed expectations then. And that just wasn’t true in the U.S. six months ago. Also, the most important thing about well-being seems to be close networks of social relationships. If anything, those were better than they are now. I don’t think Facebook is a substitute for neighborhoods. It may become one, but it isn’t yet.
Are you arguing that we need less affluence?
There doesn’t have to be a direct relation between affluence and choice. Affluence certainly is a driver, in that if you don’t have disposable income, all those options are essentially invisible to you. But there’s also ideology involved in this proliferation of options — the ideology that says the more freedom people have, the better off they are. And the more choice they have, the more freedom they have, so adding options makes people better off. Period.
If that ideology got challenged, which my book partly tried to do, then you could imagine that even if we return to our previous levels of affluence, people are going to be spending their money differently. We may or may not go back to this crazy pattern of consumption and the pursuit of novelty. I think if people are forced to spend less time on getting stuff and more time on doing stuff, then that’s all to the good.
The irony, of course, is that everyone says in order for the economy to recover we have to spend money. So we’re going to be exhorted at every turn to keep shopping. It seems almost unpatriotic to save, although clearly that’s the prudent thing to do.
In 'The Costs of Living,' you wrote about the effect of market forces on American life. Will the recession change people's positive view of market forces?
I would love to see it. That book is more relevant now than it was when I wrote it. Just this morning on a Philadelphia talk show, they had some people on talking about executive compensation and bonuses. And all they could talk about was how you get people to work hard. The presumption was that people only have one reason for doing their job, and that is to make as much money as you can. The idea that people might actually work for other reasons never entered the conversation.
All of the stuff that you read about how to fix the economy points to two things: smarter incentives and more rules. But neither of them is up to the task. You certainly need rules and you need incentives, but you also need character. People need to want to do the right thing because it’s the right thing. There’s a yearning to be able to get home from work at the end of the day and not feel like you have to take a shower.
