Tibor Scitovsky: An Economist Discovers Joy
In 1959, years before other economists began to ask what really makes us happy, Tibor Scitovsky asked: “What price economic progress?” Enlightenment era philosophers predicted that increasingly sophisticated organization of production would result in more leisure time for workers. Perhaps naively, they hoped individuals would use this leisure time to cultivate their minds for the pure joy of learning and creativity. Noting that economic progress has raised “living standards” by several conventional measures, Scitovsky observed that increases in material comforts and possessions have not been accompanied by predicted increases in leisure.
Furthermore, he observed that leisure time is increasingly focused on consumption of goods that do not require significant intellectual engagement. Considering that mass-produced goods become steadily cheaper with economies of scale and improved manufacturing techniques, but intellectual creative products cannot benefit from these developments, we can expect the cost of mindless consumption to fall relative to more sophisticated choices. This, Scitovsky eventually came to argue in “The Joyless Economy,” is a trap that we should struggle to avoid. He warned us: “Our economic well-being is constantly increasing, but as a result, we are no longer happy." So what did Scitovsky discover about joy and how to cultivate it? Read on to find out.
Economic Progress — A Trap For The Rational Actor?
Scitovsky began to suspect that economic theory was over-simplifying consumption choices. According to the rational actor model, consumers know what they want and do their best to get it. We can infer their true consumption preferences from the choices that they make. Scitovsky realized that this might not always be the case. He postulated three situations where true preferences and observed consumption choices might be in conflict, identifying a tension between comfort and pleasure, between the convenience and low cost of standardized goods, and between consumption that is easy and consumption that requires effort and skill. For instance, you can listen to Katy Perry, or you can learn to play the piano.
Comfort Versus Pleasure
His predecessor, Ralph Hawtrey, came up with the idea of defensive versus creative products, by which he meant goods that prevent suffering versus goods that create satisfaction. Inspired by this concept, Scitovsky introduced a nuanced version, dividing goods into those that provide comfort and those that provide pleasure or stimulation. Goods that save time and effort, increase convenience, or prevent pain are grouped with products that provide physical comfort, in contrast to goods that delight the senses and require us to use our various capabilities and skills. Hawtrey’s defensive consumption makes life easier and provides contentment. Hawtrey’s creative consumption provides life’s true pleasure.
One might think that we will naturally choose the best mix of contentment and pleasure, but there are at least two reasons that we might fail. The stimulating activities that provide true pleasure by definition require some degree of effort. Sometimes, perhaps, we may simply be lazy, and fail to realize the enjoyment we can gain if we exert ourselves.
The way we structure our economic efforts as a society also encourages us to consume too much comfort and too little true pleasure. We focus our productive capacity on making things easier, on reducing discomfort and increasing comfort. When we focus our ability to make things easier on activities that produce true pleasure, we realize that in this context, easier is not better. Replacing challenge with ease replaces pleasure with comfort, destroying what we sought to enhance. Economic progress, then, makes pursuing comfort easy and attractive. Economic progress, having little or nothing to offer in terms of enhancing our ability to experience true pleasure, encourages us to focus more on comfort. New offers of comfort deliver immediate results, while the lost pleasure of effort is only slowly realized.
Psychological Research Supports Scitovsky
Unlike the enlightenment philosophers who preceded him, Scitovsky did not simply accept his own a priori assumption that active effort and engagement create a deeper kind of pleasure than mere comfort. He looked to the science of neuro-psychology and found validation in the work of his contemporary, D.E. Berlyne.
Berlyne’s research built on the theory that behavior is based on arousal. The earliest versions of this theory postulated that needs increase the arousal level of the nervous system. When a need is excessively strong, arousal becomes too high, and hence unpleasant. Economists and psychologists theorized that behavior can be explained by an aversion to being over-stimulated. But Scitovsky believed that we can also be under-stimulated, and he found validation in Berlyne’s work.
Expanding on the earlier theories of Wund and Fechner, which said that pleasure can be understood as a function of arousal, where the maximum level of pleasure occurs when arousal is neither too high or too low, Berlyne added an important nuance and backed it up with experimental data. He discovered that our comfort or pleasure does not depend on an absolute level of stimulation, but a relative one. Pleasure changes when arousal changes. When we are in a situation that we find boring and our arousal level changes, we experience pleasure. When we are in a situation that is over-stimulating and we are uncomfortable, a reduction in stimulation produces comfort.
True Pleasure Comes From Challenge And Novelty
Now we see the reason that creative, challenging activities that require effort provide a profound form of satisfaction. Pleasure arises from a change in arousal. Striving to create an equilibrium state of effortless pleasure is self-defeating. For an activity to continue to provide true pleasure, it must involve an ongoing challenge. By pursuing challenges, embracing complexity and variety, and struggling to develop skills, we can create the novelty that is the root of true pleasure.
Seeking comfort, on the other hand, will lead to diminishing returns as we become habituated to a steady state of comfort. We will become addicted to something that gives us very little real pleasure. Scitovsky suggests we can also apply our creativity to struggle against habituation to comfort type goods, seeking to inject some stimulating change. He provides the example of choosing to prepare fresh and varied meals rather than opting for the convenience of mass-produced food offerings. Ultimately, it is by engaging with life, by creating for ourselves, by committing to some level of struggle, that we find the greatest happiness.
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