Human First, Economic Object, Second

Economic activity is a human activity, suggesting that economics must be based on some model of human behavior. We are not all capitalists, but we have been duped into believing that Homo economicus, economic man, is a valid model of human behavior.

Courtesy: county.milwaukee.gov

(CALGARY, Alberta) - Kevin Tokar, in his late twenties, had been working for four years as a sound editor for TV documentaries in Toronto. On the job, he often found his mind wandering as he realized that he was more interested in the stories than in his job of perfecting the presentations.

"I found myself wanting to be more involved with the people, places and problems presented on the screen in front of me than I could ever be from my comfy chair behind the sound mixing board."

A Canada-wide survey last year by Kelly Services Inc. found that more than a third of respondents were not really happy with their career choice. In another survey, by Adecco Group North America, 56 per cent of more than 2,100 U.S. workers polled said they would pick a different career if they could choose all over again.

When we are starting out in our worklife, many outside pressures act to help us make our choice: parents, relatives and friends; the feeling that a job will offer us status or a particular position in the world; pressure to pay off accumulated student loans and the like; most commonly, the need to have an income just to live and spend.

We are not all capitalists

In North America, we’ve forgotten the fundamental truth about life: We work to live, not live to work. Instead, we are caught up in corporate dogma to the point that many of the buzzwords and attitudes of the corporate suite have been transferred holus bolus to our off-the-job lives. Money and the need for money permeates almost everything we do. Capitalists are motivated by money. This is not a bad thing.

The bad thing is the overall societal belief that we should all be motivated by money, gain and accumulation. As business writer and my mentor, Peter C. Newman once wrote: “The businessman’s faith is more a collection of attitudes than any carefully conceived theology.

But it does follow a catechism of sorts. All men and the actions of all men, the orthodox believe, are essentially a product of the marketplace; everyone therefore and everything has its price.”

Mythology notwithstanding, we are not rational and free

Economic activity is a human activity, suggesting that economics must be based on some model of human behavior. We are not all capitalists, but we have been duped into believing that Homo economicus, economic man, is a valid model of human behavior.

Right-wing economists have adopted this concept, which sharply contrasts with those models developed by psychologists, sociologists, biologists, liberal economists and other social scientists who assume that human behavior is complex, imperfect, limited, self-contradictory and unpredictable. As a result, we are wide open to be manipulated.

In 1931, American economist E. H. Chamberlin decried advertising as using: “selling methods which play upon the buyer’s susceptibilities, which use against him laws of psychology with which he is unfamiliar and therefore against which he cannot defend himself, which frighten or flatter or disarm him—all of these have nothing to do with his knowledge. They are not informative; they are manipulative. They create a new scheme of wants by rearranging his motives.”

And advertising was just getting started.

In 1957’s The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard explored consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, such as depth psychology and subliminal tactics, used by advertisers to manipulate expectations and induce desire for products. He also explored the manipulative techniques of promoting politicians to the electorate, questioning the morality of political manipulation.

A decade later this started to be applied to politics as reported in depth by Joe Maginnis in 1968’s The Selling of the President—how Richard Nixon was first elected.

Anyone who thinks they are free must understand for themselves how they freely choose their toothpaste, laundry detergent, the car they drive, where they live (within their economic situation) and a whole host of things in their life that they believe they chose freely.

When I am in the supermarket I sometimes jokingly say that I long for the situation that the Soviets used to endure. They walk up to the shelf and they have the choice of one laundry detergent and that’s it. I look at all the choices we have for almost everything we buy and I know, deep down, that there is essentially no difference between them. It’a almost all waste.

Advertising has a single goal—to sell products, whether are needed or not—particularly if not. As Vance Packard put it in 1960’s The Waste Makers:

“A good many Americans and Europeans have a pretty direct stake in the failure or success of businessmen in inducing us all to be more wasteful. The wife of a supermarket operator, the engineer working for an appliance company—all these kindly people may feel uneasy about the wastefulness they see, and yet they have a vested interest in its accelerated perpetuation (emphasis added).

In the half century since Packard wrote that, nothing has changed. He put it in perspective “Growth is fast becoming a hallowed word alongside Democracy and Motherhood.”

On the job

The opening paragraph of Studs Terkel’s 1973 book Working was:

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the many of us.

In the 36 years since he wrote that, nothing has changed; the world of work has gotten worse and become even more dehumanized. As Montgomery C. Burns commented in a Globe and Mail online article: “Unfortunately, it's hard to love working anymore. An employee is given an unlimited amount of work and a finite amount of time to do it in. The days of working steady throughout the day, and being proud of one's accomplishments are gone. They've been replaced with a go-go-go type of behaviour that leaves people mentally and physically exhausted, and uncaring at the end of the day. Add to that the chronic mental and physical illnesses suffered, and the workdays missed due to stress, it's easy to see why one can become jaded.”

Human beings are not economic objects, to be used as profit centres when business is good and cast aside to fend for themselves when business slows down.

An offering of wisdom(?)

Here is the opening thought I had which prompted me to begin this article. From it comes a little bit of wisdom that I wish to impart.

When I was younger, I used to see old people sitting quietly, whether my old father, or people in a nursing home, and wonder what their thoughts were. Now that I am at the other end of the scale I have come up with this aphorism:

When we are young, we wonder what we might become; when we are old we wonder what we might have become. True or not, I don’t know, but I think it is a factor in the lives of many who have nothing but time on their hands.

A note about advertising

It’s easy to take a black and white approach to advertising as I did above. But it’s not all bad, just bigness is bad. I think in particular of those who advertise on this website. These people are friends and neighbors and are not out to manipulate or cheat us. They are making a living, just as you are doing, and their choice is to offer their goods and services to you in a friendly fashion. You want to go out to a restaurant in an evening, as just one example? Without advertising of some sort, you would not know they are available to you. It’s the national and multi-national corporations with hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted for advertising that we have to be careful of and learn to exercise our critical and cynical faculties.