The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction

353 Pages·1992·16.04 MB·English

by  Tibor Scitovsky

The Joyless Economy
THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF HUMAN SATISFACTION
Revised Edition
TIBOR SCITOVSKY
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1992
TO ELISABETH
who provided the stimulus, the comfort, and
many of the ideas for writing this book
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1976, 1992 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scitovsky, Tibor.
The joyless economy : the psychology of human satisfaction
/ Tibor Scitovsky. —Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-507346-0
ISBN 0-19-507347-9 (pbk.)
1. Consumer satisfaction. 2. Motivation research (Marketing) I. Title.
HF5415.3.S355 1992
658.8'34—dc20 91-18743
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
FOREWORD
Most people in advanced industrial economies confront a problem
much like the one confronting a man I saw depicted in a cartoon
many years ago. Having died and gone to heaven, he was sitting
on a cloud playing his harp in the company of two other angels.
His desperation was apparent as he asked them, "You mean this
goes on forever?" The difficulty in both cases is that persistently
high material comfort levels tend to undermine traditional sources
of pleasure. Indeed, there can be little real joy in the lives of people
whose every appetite is gratified almost instantaneously.
When the first edition of Tibor Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy
articulated this message in 1976, most economists simply were not
ready for it. The profession was on a roll, triumphantly extending
the neoclassical model into one new area after another. Most of us
were in no mood to be distracted by Professor Scitovsky's penetrat-
ing criticisms. Even so, The Joyless Economy managed to attract a
loyal band of enthusiastic supporters, and it continues to be cited
by scholars from many disciplines. Yet it never quite made it into
the economics mainstream.
In the intervening years, however, evidence against certain
predictions of the neoclassical model has continued to mount.
iv Foreword
More important, much of this evidence has become widely dissem-
inated in the profession. Our new Journal of Economic Perspectives,
for example, devotes its regular "Anomalies" column to an assess-
ment of it. Almost everyone who has confronted this evidence is
troubled by it, and younger economists appear particularly in-
clined to rethink our conventional approach. It has become in-
creasingly clear that theories and evidence from psychololgy have
something useful to contribute to this reassessment. So Oxford's
release of The Joyless Economy's revised edition comes at an espe-
cially opportune moment. This time, I think, the profession is
primed for Professor Scitovsky's message.
His first four chapters present what remains one of the most
artful and accessible summaries of what psychologists know about
human motivation. Economists will learn that the concept of utility
in economic models corresponds to the psychologist's notion of
comfort; and they will see substantial evidence against the idea
that people are comfort maximizers. As Professor Scitovsky ex-
plains, our utility-maximization model leaves out the psychologi-
cal concept of pleasure, which is the fleeting state that occurs in the
transition from discomfort to comfort. As he convincingly demon-
strates, there are many human behaviors that are difficult to
explain without invoking the concept of pleasure.
The comfort-pleasure distinction is important for both norma-
tive and positive analysis. One normative message of traditional
neoclassical economics, for example, is that happiness will rise if
the level of consumption either rises or becomes more uniform
over time. But the comfort-pleasure distinction informs us that
neither change is a sufficient condition for increased satisfaction.
On the contrary, Professor Scitovsky shows why we often do
better when consumption is both lower and more variable over
time.
Although I am sure Professor Scitovsky did not intend The Joyless
Economy as a self-help manual for those trying to kick a drug habit
and members of the leisure class, his book is filled with acute
observations about how consumption activities might be restruc-
tured to the benefit of both these groups. Its subject matter and
Foreword v
engaging style will continue to appeal to intelligent lay readers and
scholars from a variety of disciplines. Its most enduring value,
however, will be as a source of guidance and inspiration for
economists whose goal is to predict human behavior and to
analyze the welfare consequences of different institutional ar-
rangements.
There are stimulating ideas aplenty in this volume. The chal-
lenge for the next generation of economists is to discover how to
formalize these ideas and integrate them into the existing body of
neoclassical thought. We can be confident that careful research
along these lines will yield high returns indeed.
Robert H. Frank
Professor of Economics
Cornell University
PREFACE
This book was written more than 15 years ago in an America very
different from the one we are living in today. Ours was then the
world's richest nation. Thirty years of unbroken prosperity had
almost doubled the average person's income in real terms and yet
people seemed to be missing something. The book analyzed the
psychology of human motivation and satisfaction in order to
explain why such unprecedented and fast-growing prosperity had
left its beneficiaries unsatisfied. To devote a whole book to explain-
ing that paradox may seem frivolous today, when a decade of
misrule, corruption, and neglect of public health, education, the
poor, and our country's infrastructure have created many much
more pressing economic and social problems. On the other hand,
to know what motivates us, what our needs are, and which
unsatisfied need explains the disappointment even of the affluent
among us is necessary for fully understanding why our youth and
the unemployed poor turn so easily to drugs, why violence is on
the rise, and even helps to explain the deterioration of the environ-
ment.
The disappointment I am referring to is boredom: people's need
to keep busy and their failure to find the right stimulus to keep
Preface vii
them busy. As Blaise Pascal, the French catholic philosopher and
scientist put it in his Pensees 350 years ago: "I have discovered that
all human evil stems from one fact alone: Man's inability to sit
still."
Boredom creates no problem for hard-working men and women
whose labor leaves them no time to sit still long enough to relax,
get rested, and start fidgeting. The problem only plagues people
with leisure—more leisure than they know what to do with. Up
until Pascal's time, men of leisure whiled away much of their
leisure time with riding, bloodsports, dueling, jousting, and with
intrigue, murder, war, and aggression against their fellow men.
Violence seems to be men's instinctive outlet for their pent-up
energies; and combining it with danger, especially danger they feel
confident of overcoming, makes it all the more exciting and satisfy-
ing. Less cruel leisure activities were available in their time, but
gambling and card games, their ladies' pastimes, were insufficient
to satisfy the need for stimulating activity of strong, energetic men
with nothing to do. They lacked the education and discipline
necessary to enjoy more constructive excitements and leisure
activities. Today, we are much more civilized, but not civilized
enough to enable everybody to escape both boredom and the more
objectionable means of relieving it.
Civilization consists in originating stimulating activities other
than violence and back-breaking labor, developing the skills
needed to exercise and enjoy those activities, and making available
the education needed to learn the requisite skills and discipline. By
now, the number and variety of enjoyable benign interests has
become enormous: they comprise scientific research, exploration,
literature, art, sports, games of skill and chance, and the offerings
of the entertainment industry, among many other things. We need
them all, considering that scientific research in turn is forever
increasing our leisure and with it our need for nondestructive
leisure activities to keep-us busy. They differ greatly in the degree
of exertion they involve, the intensity of the stimulus they provide,
and the amount of skill, education, discipline, and perseverance
their enjoyment requires. Such differences cater to different peo-
viii Preface
pie's differing temperaments, tastes, and abilities; unfortunately,
however, the most stimulating benign activities are usually also
the ones whose enjoyment requires the most skill and perse-
verance, whereas the people most avid for strong stimulus are
seldom the most able and willing to acquire the skills and discipline
necessary for their enjoyment.
Advancing civilization would advance our happiness if our
education for enjoying leisure by putting it to good use increased
in step with the increase in our leisure. Problems arise when it does
not, and they are the problems this book sets out to explore.
The first part of the book presents a simple account of the
psychological theory of motivation. It relates our feelings of pain
and pleasure to the physiology of the brain, explains the complex
relationship between those two feelings, and shows that boredom
is as powerful a drive as hunger, making our psychological need to
relieve it with stimulating physical or mental activities as urgent as
are our physiological needs for food, drink, or sex. That, to my
mind, is the most valuable part of the book because, quite apart
from its use for the purpose at hand, motivation theory is interest-
ing and fascinating in its own right, since all its findings seem to be
confirmed by introspection and add to one's self-knowledge and
understanding of others.
The second part of the book puts the theories of the first part into
practice. It compares our chosen life-style to that which Europeans
choose, documents our excessive demand for comfort, and shows
how our Puritan tradition, work ethic, and educational system all
contribute to depriving us of many of the skills and tastes neces-
sary for the enjoyment of the more stimulating and creative leisure
activities. That is why we try to satisfy our need for stimulation
with activities that require no or negligible skill but soon turn out to
be insufficiently stimulating and so leave us bored and dissatisfied.
Most of the conclusions reached, especially those concerning
our overuse of comfort, are equally valid today. I argue in the book
that people's too great love of comfort deprives them of some of
life's pleasures; I would add now that it also harms their environ-
ment. Comfort seems to be the most costly source of human
Preface ix
satisfaction in terms of the depletable resources and ecological
degradation of our planet. If international comparisons of stan-
dards of living are to be trusted, the Swedes, Norwegians, Swiss,
and ex-West Germans are as well off today as Americans, yet they
consume less than half the energy and generate less than half the
household waste per head of population than we do—presum-
ably, because their life-style goes easy on comfort, but makes up
for it on other sources of satisfaction. It would greatly benefit the
environment if they, not we, were the world's leaders of fashion as
far as life-style is concerned.
Some other aspects of our life-style, however, seem to have
changed noticeably since the time to which my statistics refer. I
mention in the book the emergence in this country of a countercul-
ture, in revolt against its parents' Puritan ethic, searching for a
more meaningful life-style but too young for their tastes to show
up yet in the statistics (p. 151). By today, they have become part of
the dominant generation, and their newfound interest in the
quality of life has become apparent. Indeed, I originally wanted to
revise that part of the book and bring its factual data up-to-date,
only to find that most of them are unavailable for the 1980s, partly
because statistics are part of this country's infrastructure on whose
upkeep our previous and present administrations are trying to
economize, and partly also because several international compari-
sons I had found useful and made much use of in the original
edition have not been repeated.
With not enough documentary evidence to support my impres-
sions of recent developments in our way of life, I decided to change
nothing in the first twelve chapters of the book, let Chapters 8
through 12 stand as a record of the use we then made of our
postwar prosperity, and encourage readers to note and judge for
themselves the changes in our attitudes that have occurred over
the past 15-20 years. The only and very minor change was to add
more up-to-date figures in Tables 7 and 8, where they show a
notable difference between then and now; and readers must
excuse the retention of the present tense of the 1976 edition even
where it refers to conditions that have greatly changed in the