Tibor Scitovsky on Economics, Psychology and The Joyless Economy

Tibor Scitovsky on Economics, Psychology and The Joyless Economy Viviana Di Giovinazzo ∗
Abstract Personal experiences and economic theories merge in the work of Tibor Scitovsky (1910-­‐2002). This paper describes the creation of The Joyless Economy (1976) in historical context; it considers Scitovsky’s early education and the influence upon him of not only psychology but also several important works of art, literature and architecture of the prewar period. These were fundamental in shaping the book that made Scitovsky as a key contributor to the field of consumer psychology. While he came from a privileged background in Budapest, and was trained as an economist at both Cambridge and the LSE, he was also affected by his reading of Gustav Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules and André Gide’s Retour de l’U.R.S.S., as well as his visits to the 1937 Paris Exposition and the 1938 Münich Degenerate Art Exhibition. Thus, the paper considers the life experiences that made him turn from welfare studies to consumer psychology. Particular attention is paid to Scitovsky’s adoption of the ideas of sociologist Erich Fromm and the experimental work of psychologists D. Hebb and D. Berlyne, as he developed his ideas on the formation of individual preferences and the role therein of culture and leisure activities. The paper concludes by discussing Scitovsky’s economic psychology in relation to the recent behavioural economics movement. Keywords: Tibor Scitovsky; motivational psychology; endogenous preferences; culture and leisure activities; behavioural economics; happiness and economics Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University (NC) for research support. The visit to King’s College Archives at Cambridge University (UK) for documentation on Kaldor’s papers and correspondence has been made possible thanks to a FAR 2010 grant from the University of Milano Bicocca. I wish to thank T. Scitovsky’s daughter, Catherine Eliaser Scitovsky, for her precious help. University of Milano Bicocca, Dept. of Sociology, Viale Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 8, 20126 Milano, Italy. E-­‐mail: [email protected]. ∗
1 Introduction Personal experiences and scientific enquiry merge in the work of Tibor Scitovsky (1910-­‐2002). The Joyless Economy (1976) is his successful, though controversial, monograph, that summarizes his inquiries at the borderline between economics and psychology. The book first presents a simple account of the motivational theories of arousal by the neuropsychologist Donald O. Hebb (1949) and the aesthetic psychologist Daniel E. Berlyne (1960). These theories relate feelings of pain and pleasure to the physiology of the brain and explain the complex relationship between them. In particular, they show boredom, and the need to relieve it, to be as powerful a drive as hunger or thirst. The book then moves from individual psychology to social analysis, documenting the excessive demand for comfort in the American lifestyle and showing how the Puritan work ethic combine to deprive people of the skills and tastes necessary for the enjoyment of creative leisure. Partly because of its psychological approach and partly because it attacked many basic principles of traditional economics, when it was first published The Joyless Economy was harshly criticized by many economists (Friedman 1976; Peacock 1976; Aufhauser 1976; Zikmund 1977; Ballard 1978). Not only was it critical of how neoclassical economics conceived of consumer behaviour but, following on Scitvosky’s studies of arousal theory (Hebb 1949; Berlyne 1960), it made a clear and substantial distinction between pleasure and comfort, thereby distancing itself from the hedonistic-­‐utilitarian perspective. Moreover, at the social level, Scitovsky’s analysis of modern consumption choices was interpreted as an open attack on the “American lifestyle”: it called into question a value system that was based on intensive, often conspicuous, consumption, and an educational philosophy that, reflecting America’s Puritan legacy, favoured the technical 2 specialization conducive to economic production over the cultivation of leisure activities. It took an almost twenty-­‐year delay for The Joyless Economy to be re-­‐
evaluated, i.e., only after the publication of the second edition, in 1992.1 Despite being virtually unchanged relative to the first edition, this second one was well-­‐
received, which suggests that both the intellectual and cultural climate had become more receptive to Scitovsky’s message in the interim. This paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 gives an overview of the cultural atmosphere of Scitovsky’s boyhood, ranging from meetings with the intellectual élite in the family’s sumptuous Budapest villa to summer gatherings in their semi-­‐
feudal manor on the Hungarian plain. The section illustrates his training as an economist both at Cambridge and the London School of Economics and presents the readings and personal experiences that help explain his later turn from welfare studies to consumer psychology. Section 2 explores Scitovsky’s inquiry into the sources of human satisfaction and discusses the experimental evidence he used as he reconsidered the formation of preferences in economics. Particular attention is played to the importance given by Fromm and demonstrated by psychologists D. Hebb and D. Berlyne, of the influence exerted by leisure and cultural activites for both the avoidance of boredom and the pursuit for novelty. The section ends up by discussing Scitovsky’s economic psychology in relation to what would become the behavioural economics movement. A brief conclusion resumes the argument. 1 A simple survey of the articles archived in the JSTOR database from 1976 to 1992 shows that The Joyless Economy is mentioned mainly in journals concerning art and design (Withers 1977; Di Maggio and Useem 1980; Chartrand 1989) and ethical issues (Lane 1978, 1981; Haack 1981; Sagoff 1986). 3 § 1. Scitovsky: the early years Born into a rich Budapest family of aristocratic origins, Scitovsky’s adolescence was passed in an upper-­‐class Hungary that was soon to disappear under the impact of the war and the Communist takeover. Rózsadomb (Rosehill) is the name of the rise on which the Scitovskys built their villa (fig. 1) slightly to the north of the old Castle district in the picturesque Buda area. The villa of the roses was built in such an Fig. 1. Located in Lórántffy Zsuzsanna utca 7, Budapest, the villa is now the private residence of the British Ambassadors in Hungary. imposing way in a much sought-­‐after position because Lady Hanna De Scitovszky2 was convinced that Tibor senior needed a more appropriate abode than the run-­‐of-­‐the-­‐mill apartment in downtown Pest in order to mirror his prestigious appointment as Foreign Minister in the anti-­‐communist government of Count István Bethlen.3 2 The title comes from the 1927 portrait by the famous Hungarian painter Philippe de László (1869-­‐
1937), which Scitovsky donated to the Benedictine boarding school. It was later put up for auction at Sotheby’s. 3 In that period, Bethlen was working on the creation of a conservative, authoritarian government of aristocratic stamp: an anti-­‐modern regime which sought to preserve social arrangements that had disintegrated with the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire. Scitovsky’s father, who belonged to a respectable family of primates and landowners was probably one of those best suited to represent the Count’s interests abroad. 4 §1.1 The Veblenian style of a bourgeois family Symbol of a feudal, pre-­‐capitalist life philosophy according to which money was there to be spent, not saved, the Scitovskys’ 18th century French, baroque-­‐style villa was a favourite meeting-­‐place of several remarkable witnesses of the contradictions of Fig. 2. Villa De Scitovszky; the music room. modern society: Paul Valéry, lost in the enchantment of his poetry as he fled the hustle and bustle of modern life;4 scandalous Colette, with her notorious fast tongue; John Galsworthy, and his stinging description of the snobbish, acquisitive attitudes of the upper-­‐middle class; Luis Kentner giving recitals from his Hungarian repertoire in the magnificent music room (fig. 2); Ambassador Madariaga and Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), discussing state affairs along the path leading from the charming portico to the rose garden. The imposing presence of Thomas Mann himself sitting in the Mirror Room was a reflection of the art of the bourgeois century.5 Such an upper-­‐class lifestyle forced Scitovsky to observe a rigid etiquette in public. With a platoon of servants and private tutors teaching French, English, German, fencing, dancing and piano, Scitovsky was both busy and comfortable. Yet, he was lonely too, for the only friend to whom he could talk freely was the family chauffeur, Antal, who entertained his afternoons with rousing tales of Hungarian socialism: “I owe to him my knowledge of things mechanical, love for exercising my 4 When, in ‘L’infini esthétique’ (1934), Valéry claims that “le changement se fait souhaitable en soi”, he actually presents a theory of human needs and desires surprisingly similar to the one Scitovsky would propose in The Joyless Economy.
5 Memoirs, p. 24. 5 manual dexterity on home repairs and, since he was a socialist, also my acquaintance with socialism and first introduction to economics through reading the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital.”.6 But the glittering soirées among the Buda Hills were not Scitovsky’s only world. He also belonged to another, not-­‐so-­‐distant but very different environment: that of the simple summer days at Nőtinc (fig. 3), a small village 32 miles north of Budapest, where the family used to spend their summer holidays. Scitovsky compared the ambience there to that of a Chekhov play, where peasants and landlords were too bored to flee the boredom of their daily routine: animal husbandry, and the afternoon siesta after long lunches in the courtyard. I have no recollection of ever seeing anyone reading a book; and there was no tennis court, nor much riding, no shooting, no hunting, no outings, no walkings even beyond the garden, because there was nowhere to go, no town, no water, not even a clump of trees anywhere nearby, because in that part of Hungary every bit of land was cultivated leaving few trees standing other than the ubiquitous mulberries bordering the dusty roads. (Memoirs, p. 10a) Fig. 3. The Gyurcsányi-­‐Scitosvzky’s m anor, Nőtinc. The contagious indolence of the village inhabitants involuntarily leads to a truth that would be central to the argument of The Joyless Economy: the pleasant stimulating activities of the leisure class not only served to display ostentatious opulence; they staved off boredom and stimulated creativity. The villa and the manor, the glittering town parties and the lazy evenings in the countryside. The strict etiquette imposed by the Budapest bourgeoisie and the 6 Scitovsky (1995), p. 223. 6 rural simplicity of the semi-­‐feudal Nőtinc. The upper-­‐crust visitors to the town house and the blunt Nőtinc peasants are only one example of the paradoxes which would go to inspire Scitovsky’s work on welfare and wellbeing. For Scitovsky had always lived in two opposing worlds, which soon made him realize that the leisure activities of the rich and idle may be more of a burden than a pleasure, just like a life void of challenge. A paradox he found perfectly embodied in his mother’s behaviour. The illegitimate daughter of a French officer, member of La Rochefoucauld family, Madame Hanna dedicated the whole of her life to convincing all and sundry that despite her shaky origins, she really was a lady. Hence the ostentation of an opulence which she could not have afforded herself, in a perfect Veblenian style. A psychological pressure that provoked her famous tantrums, whose cause would be identified by the experts only a few years later: the positional treadmill effect, or the anxiety of “keeping up with the Joneses”. § 1.2 A pupil of Keynes at Hayek’s court Like other middle-­‐class youngsters with no special vocation, Scitovsky followed his father’s advice and enrolled at the Law faculty in Budapest. Finding professors and classes rather boring –“I attended the lectures but soon recognized it for the waste it was, because most professors repeated almost verbatim their own textbooks, which were the only required readings”,7 at the age of 18, Scitovsky decided he had had enough. Seized by an adolescent desire to emancipate himself from a family that kept him in a suffocating tradition, Scitovsky obtained permission to continue his studies abroad. He left for Western Europe and arrived in Cambridge in October 1929. Looking for something more captivating than international law, he switched 7 Memoirs, p. 33. 7 over to economics. He encountered Nicholas Káldor, Maurice Dobb, Dennis Robertson and Joan Robinson, with the latter becoming his supervisor. It was all very stimulating: “I hardly even knew Keynes’ name […] I was so overwhelmed by the novelty and excitement of the Cambridge atmosphere. My fellow students’ enthusiasm for English and German literature and avid hunger for learning just about every aspect and field of intellectual life were contagious”.8 Curiously enough, Scitovsky felt the impact of Keynes later on, after enrolling at the LSE in 1935.9 At the time, the head of department was Friedrich von Hayek, whose publications, along with those of Ludwig von Mises, Wicksell, Wicksteed, Taussig and Lionel Robbins, were the main readings. Scitovsky was immediately impressed by “the elegant logic of the perfectly competitive model’s self-­‐
equilibrating mechanism, but equally disturbed by its unreality and apparent uselessness”.10 It was the London of the depressed 1930’s, where misery and unemployment were everywhere. It was difficult to accept a teaching curriculum that centered upon the theory of full employment equilibrium at the very time when the rate of unemployment was 15 per cent in Britain and even higher in the United States. Scitovsky felt that something was missing in order to bridge the gulf between beautiful economic theory and ugly economic reality. The elements of conflict and exploitation, he felt, ought somehow to be introduced into the economists’ model of the competitive market economy. Then, a year after his arrival at the LSE, Keynes’ General Theory appeared, putting an end to such thoughts. “I remember dropping 8 Colander and Landreth (1997), p. 205. 9 Scitovsky graduated in law at the University of Budapest in June, 1933. After Hungarian military service and having spent a year as teller at the Magyar Általános Hitelbank (The Hungarian General Creditbank) – the bank of which his father was made president after finishing his mandate as foreign minister – Scitovsky enrolled at the LSE in 1935, where he completed his MS degree in 1938. 10 Memoirs, p. 54. 8 everything to concentrate on it day and night, because reading it was a tremendous experience, not only intellectual but emotional as well. For the book seemed to answer all the problems I had with reconciling the gloomy economic reality with the elegant theories we were being taught”.11 Thus the LSE graduate Monday seminars became theatres of emotionally charged battles between professors and students. “Indeed, I got so immersed in thinking and arguing about the Keynesian explanation of unemployment that I temporarily forgot all my other objections to economic theory and lived from Monday seminar to Monday seminar so-­‐to-­‐speak, spending the rest of the week discussing the arguments of the previous Monday and girding for those of the next”.12 The result of Scitovsky’s effort was ‘A Study of Interest and Capital’ (1940), in which he presented in simpler and clearer language Keynes’s proof that the capitalist economy is not always self-­‐equilibrating and sometimes in need of monetary or fiscal policy to bring about equilibrium. Scitovsky always regarded this first article as among the most important, but it appeared in August 1940, when even the most cloistered academics were preoccupied with the events of Dunkirk and the fall of France. Notwithstanding its different political orientation, the LSE was no less important than Cambridge for Scitovsky’s intellectual formation. There, it became clear to him for the first time what he should do in life: study and teach economics in order to make it more realistic and thereby more useful. § 1.3 A study of the popular mind During these years of study, Scitovsky did not neglect to spend various periods abroad, in France and Germany. Those experiences were as critical for his 11 Colander and Landreth (1997), p. 207. 12 Memoirs, p. 55.
9 intellectual evolution as were Cambridge and London for his economic studies. After graduation from Budapest, in 1933, Scitovsky followed his father’s will and spent a year in Paris to improve his French. Determined to carry on with his studies in economics, he began to attend lectures at Sciences Po (École libre des sciences politiques). He soon discovered however the differences between the theoretical Anglo-­‐Saxon and institutional Gallic approaches to economics and therefore opted simply to perfect his French. He enrolled at the Alliance Française and attended courses ranging from French grammar to composition, history and literature. In this first period in Paris, Scitovsky dedicated himself mainly to reading –
“from French history and historians to politics, psychology and above all French classical and modern literature”13 – wandering around the arrondissements, and browsing among the countless old book shops along the banks of the Seine, visiting the Comédie Française, the experimental theatre of the Pitoëffs in rue du Vieux Colombier, and spending the weekends visiting all the magnificent royal residences and beautifully laid-­‐out forests around the city. Nonetheless Paris was not merely a pleasurable distraction from the hectic schedule at Cambridge and London. This was the time of the Stavisky affair (February 1934),14 an episode that so struck Scitovsky that considered devoting himself to the study of mass psychology. It was thus in Paris that he read for the first time Psychologie des foules (1895), the famous essay in which Gustave Le Bon describes and analyses the dynamics of the masses. 13 Memoirs, p. 50. 14 The Stavisky Affair was a French financial scandal that came to light in December 1933 when the bonds of a credit organization in Bayonne, founded by the financier Alexandre Stavisky, proved worthless. When Stavisky was found dead in January 1934, police officials said that he had committed suicide. Members of the French right believed, however, that Stavisky had been killed to prevent the revelation of a scandal that would involve prominent people, including ministers and members of the legislature. Demonstrations against the government by anti-­‐republican groups culminated in a riot on February, 6, 1934, which killed fiftheen people. The scandal resulted in a major crisis in the history of the Third Republic. 10 Le Bon’s work was a milestone in the field of the psychology of the unconscious. In the years following the book’s publication, its ideas were extended by Tarde and Freud. The latter drew on the collected features of the unconscious brought to light by Le Bon in developing his theory of instinct. Le Bon’s writings were studied also by various economists and politicians who sought to understand the behavior of the masses, a phenomenon that appeared on the political scene in the late nineteenth century and would dominate the twentieth. Indeed, Schumpeter (1942, XXI, 3) attributes to Le Bon the merit of having opened his eyes to the importance of the extra-­‐rational and irrational elements in human behavior. Thanks to Psychologie des foules, Stalin and Hitler managed to win over the trust of the parliaments they were about to destroy. Mussolini, too, was a fervent admirer of Le Bon.15 The use of precise suasion techniques comes directly from the psychologist: simple ideas, precise affirmations, re-­‐iterated, are listed as the principal instruments of persuasion based on the ease of learning. According to Scitovsky, this strategy also applies to the economic sphere. Thus ‘Plutocracy and the mob rule’ would be the introductory chapter of The Joyless Economy, in which he provocatively claimed the doctrine of consumer sovereignty – which understands consumers as their own masters, free to follow their personal tastes independently of the other consumers’ tastes and inclination – to be a gross oversimplification in the age of mass production. § 1.4 La vie moderne If, in his young days, Scitovsky had been favourably impressed by the lofty ideals of communism, seduced by the tales of the family chauffeur, and won over by the 15 Interview with the Paris journal La Science et la Vie, June 1926. In, Mussolini, B. (1951-­‐1963), Opera Omnia, Vol. XXII, p. 156. 11 ideology of Eisenstein’s magnificent films and the pro-­‐communist literature of the 1920’s, in the 1930’s, he re-­‐examined his political beliefs. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, accounts of the Moscow trials and, above all, André Gide’s personal reports in his Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (1934), began to make Scitovsky less sympathetic to Communism. Seeking solutions to France’s problems in Russia – growing inequality, culture and intellectual freedom suffering under capitalism and emerging Nazism – Gide came back in a state of disillusionment: “he [Gide] was repelled by the extreme ugliness and shabbiness of all products, by people’s complete lack of taste, the impersonality of their homes, by an exhibition of modern painting on which he would “not comment for charity’s sake” and, above all by the frightening conformism of everybody he encountered, which he believed to be at the base of the cultural wilderness”.16 Not only did Gide’s desolate portrait of Stalin‘s Russia make Scitovsky change his political ideals, its account of the product monotony and conformism of the Soviet state made him realise the importance of variety and creativity and the enhancement of the quality of life. The description of the levelling effects produced by the elimination of class difference would ultimately persuade him that wellbeing (i.e. happiness) is perceived in, not absolute, but relative terms. But it was Scitovsky’s visit to the 1937 Paris World Exhibition that led him to reject communism for once and all and also realize that Nazism was only another form of totalitarianism. Organized at a historic moment of great political tensions in Europe, the Expó organizers intended it to favour a climate of détente. However, things did not go exactly as they had expected, as the exposition soon became an occasion for comparing military force. From the simple layout of the national 16 Memoirs, p. 57a.
12 pavilions, it could be understood what military set-­‐up the world war was going to take. The intense hate was already clearly expressed even in the drafts of the pavilion projects. The German and the Soviet pavilions had been sited directly facing each other across the main pedestrian boulevard at the Trocadéro on the north bank of the Seine (fig. 4). The totalitarian buildings designed by Albert Speer and Boris Iofan were constructed with symmetry, simplicity and a general lack of ornamentation or complexity. These architectonic features were one of the many ways both Hitler and Stalin chose to unify their citizens by creating “mass experiences” in which crowds could gather and take part in patriotic community events. Faced with the two exhibitions, Scitovsky realized not only how far-­‐reaching political conclusions could follow on from aesthetic judgments but also, and most importantly, how aesthetic judgments could, in turn, influence individual preferences. Fig. 4. The 1937 Paris Expó, from Palais de Chaillot. 13 § 1.5 A Mitteleuropean in transition Scitovsky first visited the States in the fall of 1939 on a Leon Travelling Fellowship. These were the most trying years, with cultural integration proving difficult. Thus he wrote to Káldor: “It seems to be primarily the long tradition of culture which makes life so very pleasant in England and in France and it seems to have less to do with the particular form of government than I thought. I feel very home-­‐sick for England”.17 He would have liked to teach, but he lacked the credentials, as neither the English nor the American government was willing to grant him a visa. He had neither previous experience as a lecturer nor significant publications on his CV. He was also a critical observer: in 1942, from Harvard, Scitovsky wrote skeptically to Káldor of the new “craze for mathematics” he had encountered there: [E]verybody – foremost Schumpeter – admires the recent “dynamic” articles of Tintner, Samuelson, and others of that ilk, the more so the less they understand it. […] They seem to be too general (and mathematically too elegant) to lead anywhere. (Scitovsky to Káldor; letter 31 March 1942) The problems of cultural integration were resolved when Scitovsky was forced to join the Army, in 1943. In order to avoid eternal kitchen-­‐ and night-­‐guard duty, he volunteered to become a truck driver in Europe. One of his unit’s tasks was to capture Albert Speer. When the German officer was apprehended by another unit a few weeks later, Scitovsky had to content himself with surveying the hiding-­‐hole that contained Speer’s personal library too –“mostly French volumes of architectural pictures and drawings, some of which I recognized, because they were also in my parents’ library”.18 When Scitovsky’s unit eventually interrogated the prisoner, he drew satisfaction from having captured the person who had managed to spread Nazi 17 Letter to Nicholas Káldor, 11th December 1939. 18 Memoirs, p. 82. 14 ideology so efficiently by playing on some elementary rules of aesthetics. Scitovsky later worked on the Strategic Bombing Survey, along with Kenneth Galbraith, Fritz Schumacher and Nicholas Káldor. At the end of the war, Scitovsky decided not to go back to Hungary, but stayed in the States. After a brief, unexciting period at the US Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, he was called to the University of Stanford (1946). There, he obtained tenure in 1949, largely on the basis of his publications earlier in the decade, with the work on welfare (1941), perhaps, being the most significant.19 During his academic career, Scitovsky taught Keynesian economics also at Berkeley (1958-­‐68), Harvard (1965-­‐66), Yale (1968-­‐70) and the LSE (1976-­‐78). However, his Stanford years (1946-­‐1958, 1970-­‐1976, 1978-­‐1981) were to be the happiest, both for his private life and his public life as an economist. At Stanford he came into contact with Kenneth Arrow, the mathematicians Gábor Szegö and George Pólya, the latter a Cambridge acquaintance, and later on, János Kornai. “My colleagues at the department were like a group of friends; and I also befriended a sociologist, a physicist, an anthropologist, a novelist, a statistician, the two Hungarian mathematicians and a few other, many of whom remained lifelong friends.”.20 His becoming professor in a foreign country represented a great advance in his development and self-­‐esteem. He enjoyed the academic routine, the persistent mental stimulus provided by having to lecture, participate in conferences, answer students’ occasionally penetrating questions, and do some writing and publishing. Nonetheless, it was not all-­‐work-­‐and-­‐no-­‐play: “I had no intention to sacrifice any 19 Scitovsky’s Stanford colleague, Kenneth Arrow, regarded this early work on community indifference curves as “permanent classics” (E-­‐mail to author, 24 December 2012). 20 Memoirs, p. 84a. “The physicist was probably Felix Bloch, the novelist surely Wallace Stegner. The anthropologist was probably Bernard Siegel (although it might have been Felix Keesing).” K. Arrow, E-­‐mail to author, December 24, 2011. 15 part of my interesting and varied life for the sake of rising higher on the professional or economic scale.”.21 § 2. An inquiry into human satisfaction While the Stanford years were professionally productive, and the publication of Welfare and Competition in 1951 established his international reputation in time, and especially with the security of a permanent post, his publications progressively began to reflect his personal interests. Kenneth Arrow recalls: Like most outstanding economists, his work has been absorbed and become standard. Certainly, the two papers on community indifference curves and that on externalities in economic development are permanent classics. […] As for Readings in Welfare Economics, we [Arrow and Scitovsky] were asked by Bernard Haley (an older member of the department and a long-­‐time editor of the American Economic Review) to edit this volume. We took this as an assignment to be executed responsibly to the state of the field and not to our particular interests. Indeed, his own views were changing radically. (K. Arrow, e-­‐mail to author, December 24, 2011) In the background, Scitovsky’s reading extended to critical social writers such as Galbraith and Erich Fromm, and beyond that to psychology, philosophy and the other humanities. In his personal library, donated many years later to the Central European University of Budapest, beyond the works of Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle and Hegel, one can find Collingwood’s The Principles of Art (1938), Malinowski’s Magic, Science And Religion And Other Essays (1948).22 This critical, searching attitude began to be reflected in his work. Thus, in ‘Ignorance as a source of oligopoly power’ (1950), he claims that the increasing complexity of consumer goods caused by technological progress rendered the 21 Memoirs, p. 91. 22 Other titles in his library include Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), Rudolf Arnheim’s Art and visual perception (1954) and Mihalyi Csikszenthmihalyi’s Beyond boredom and anxiety (1975). 16 majority of their buyers unable to judge the quality of the products, a fact that favoured the formation of oligopolies. In ‘What price economic progress?’ (1959), he draws on Erich Fromm’s concept of alienation in order to show the political and psychological implications of the increasing specialization of knowledge. This, in turn, would become the core argument of chapter 5 of The Joyless Economy.23 In ‘A critique of the present and proposed standards’ (1960), he builds on Galbraith’s mistrust of consumer judgement as a guide and arbiter of resource allocation in order to develop a critique of the conventional theory of consumer choice. Traces of the paternalism of which Scitovsky would be later accused are already evident in ‘On the principle of consumer sovereignty’ (1962), where he speculates that the increasing neglect of an informed minority’s preferences by the mass production system may have undesirable effects upon the development of majority preferences as well. § 2.1 From economics to psychology At this point, Scitovsky’s intellectual evolution was guided by the turns taken in his personal life. In 1966, following divorce from his first wife, and marriage to fellow Hungarian immigré, Erzsébet Vida,24 he accepted a post at the Development Centre of the OECD in Paris. There, he noticed that a drastic reduction in his disposable income was nonetheless accompanied by a greater fullness of life: “That contradiction between my inner personal experience and the economist’s belief that a person’s income and a country’s national income were important and fairly 23 See Scitovsky (1992), p. 314, footnote 4. Unlike Marx, Fromm does not conceive of alienation as solely a product of the modern era, but detects it every time Man becomes estranged from himself, through either idolatry or ideology. 24 Scitovsky divorced Anne Aickelin (1916-­‐2012) in August 1966 and soon after he got married in Paris to Erzsébet Vida (1919-­‐2009) who had fled Hungary in 1956, after the Revolution and the Russian occupation, and was working in the early Sixties at the Berkeley University library, when she met Scitovsky. At the time, he was chair of the Economics Department. 17 reliable measures of personal and national welfare became so extreme in Paris that thereafter my published work began to be increasingly focused on trying to explain and resolve that conflict”.25 Initially, he turned to what he called the “minor writings” of the “economic-­‐
philosophers” (1991, p. 235) such as Marshall and Keynes (“all of whose ideas on the subject originated, as I later discovered, in the work of the classical Greek philosophers.”26). Plato’s desire for wisdom and knowledge, Marshall’s activities sought for their own sake, Keynes’ animal spirits, became in Scitovsky’s eyes, just different ways of evoking the same intriguing stimulation. However, for Scitovsky, the economist who furnished the clearest distinction between mere wants and creative activities was Hawtrey (1925). Hawtrey had drawn a careful distinction between creative consumption and mere defence against boredom, thus identifying two broad classes of objects of consumption: “defensive goods”, intended to prevent or remedy pains, injuries or distresses, and “creative goods”, aiming at supplying some positive gratification.27 Scitovsky himself identified the latter with the pursuit of arts, literature and sports, as well as work, artistic creation, exploration and discovery, and gathered them all together in the concept of “culture” (Scitovsky 1992, p. 300). Since these activities do not depend on a specific need and are not directed towards the alleviation of pain, but spring from a positive pleasure, Scitovsky concluded that reaching the most pleasing position is not the 25 Memoirs, p. 99. 26 Ivi, p. 105a. Marshall had been the first to make a distinction between activities pursued for their own sake and outcome-­‐oriented activities: “it is, again, the desire for the exercise and development of activities, spreading through every rank of society, which leads not only to the pursuit of science, literature and art for their own sake, but to the rapidly increasing demand for the work of those who pursue them as professions.” (Marshall 1890, III, II; quoted in Scitovsky 1986). In the same way,
Hawtrey (1925, p. 193) and Keynes (1936, pp. 149-­‐150 and pp. 161-­‐162) (all quoted in Scitovsky, 1986), show how human beings are moved in great part by instinct, acting not so much on the basis of a careful calculation of costs and benefits, or solely for the pleasure of carrying out the action. 27 Hawtrey (1925), pp. 190-­‐191. 18 same as reaching repose – the unstimulated condition in Freudian psychology (Scitovsky 1973, p. 10), the equilibrium position of economic models. For Scitovsky, the Cantabrigians had the correct intuition as regards the importance of those challenging activities that keep us from getting bored, but they failed to integrate them into models in a manner satisfactory to economists. Once back to Stanford (1968) a psychologist of the Medical School drew his attention to the writings on motivation of a group of physiological psychologists. Scitovsky was particularly interested in the experimental work on boredom of neuropsychologist Donald O. Hebb (1949), and on motivation by aesthetic psychologist Daniel E. Berlyne (1960; 1971).28 Hebb’s experiments showed paradoxically that the absence of pain, i.e. comfort, leads to pain in the terms of boredom. Berlyne linked motivation for action or learning not to a more or less remote reward, but to the sheer pleasure of engaging in such actions or learning. Contrary to the outcome-­‐oriented perspective of the standard economic theory of behaviour, the psychologists demonstrated that pleasantly stimulating activities, set in place for no particular aim other than pure recreational reasons were major sources of satisfaction. “All that proved so interesting and revelatory that in my enthusiasm I immediately started writing a book merging the psychologists’ findings and my economist’s thoughts and data, trying to present them in a language accessible to economists and the general reader alike”.29 28 Hebb’s and Berlyne’s theories on the origins of behaviour were well received because of the changes they made to the discipline. Hebb’s innovation in The organization of behavior (1949) was to sidestep behaviourism and integrate psychology and physiology, which meant his text was psychologists basic reading for twenty or so years (Legrenzi 2012). Berlyne’s Conflict, arousal, and curiosity (1960) was just as revolutionary in the way it abandoned the automatisms of the stimulus-­‐
response scheme and introduced new concepts like “complexity” and “curiosity” to explain human and animal learning mechanisms. 29 Memoirs, p. 106. 19 His first contribution Scitovsky to the field of economic psychology was a paper titled ‘The Lopsided Progress’, presented at the Conference on Boredom organized at Berkeley in June 1973 by Franz Goetzl, Scitovsky’s family doctor, a specialist on boredom and a follower of Freud.30 “Some of my colleagues were shocked by that change of venue, perceiving it, I suspect, as a sign of incipient senility; but to me it seemed a logical extension of my interests. After all, much of my work had a welfare orientation: what more natural than look also at the effect on consumers’ welfare of their own behavior?”.31 The entertaining soirées at the villa and the sleepy atmosphere of Nőtinc; Le Bon’s madding crowds and Gide’s reports aesthetics and politics; the intriguing complexity of Degenerate Art and the reassuring simplicity of its totalitarian counterpart; Fromm’s concept of alienation in the mass production society. For Scitovsky, the psychological readings were nothing short of illuminating. They allowed him to order the various tesseræ collected over the years, through leisure reading and personal experience, and form them into a coherent picture. The result clashed sharply with the idea of the perfectly rational consumer conveyed by standard economics, and this contrast between the psychological evidence and the economic theory is the subject of The Joyless Economy. § 2.2 Pleasure and comfort reconsidered Scitovsky was particularly interested in the theory of arousal, to which the entire Part I of his book is devoted.32 This theory, developed by Hebb, Berlyne and other 30 ‘The Lopsided Progress’ appeared in the collection of conference proceedings edited by Goetzl Boredom: Root of Discontent and Aggression (1975). 31 Scitovsky (1995), p. 234. 32 Scitovsky titled Part I of The Joyless Economy, ‘The Psychology and Economics of Motivation’. 20 motivational psychologists,33 and based on the introspections of psychophysiologist Wilhelm Wundt (fig. 5), sees the organism as being in a state of constant activation, aiming at maintaining a dynamic rather than homeostatic equilibrium. When the excitement level becomes too high, the arousal system sends impulses to the brain, which are translated into actions lowering it. When the excitement level is too low, the arousal system sends impulses to the brain which are then translated into actions aimed at increasing it. A fairly high level corresponds to a pleasurable level of excitement, and a very high level can indicate euphoria, as well as anger or panic. Sensations of pain and pleasure intervene as “regulators” of the emotion, so that the state of excitement is kept in an intermediate range. Such actions generally coincide with pleasantly stimulating activities, undertaken for recreational reasons. Figure 5. The inverted “U” relationship between sensation of pain/pleasure and stimulus intensity. Fig. 5. Scitovsky (1992, p. 34) reproduced the same graph Berlyne (1960) used to draw connections between his theory of arousal and the one developed by Wundt in 1874. The graph shows the inverted “U” relationship between the sensations of pain/pleasure and the stimulus intensity (newness in Berlyne’s interpretation). With too low or too high levels of arousal, performance is poor. The best performance comes when the arousal level is intermediate. How the arousal mechanism functions opened up important questions of an economic nature for Scitovsky. Firstly, on the basis of such observations he concluded that an individual, or indeed an economy or society, focused exclusively on the reduction of the arousal level or the elimination of discomfort through the satisfaction of a need, would have the effect of reducing 33 Hebb (1949); Berlyne (1960); Dember (1961); Hunt (1965); Eysenck (1972). 21 rather than increasing individual wellbeing. He found confirmation of this in the pioneering experiment carried out on boredom by the McGill University psychologist Hebb, who showed paradoxically that the absence of pain leads to pain in the terms of boredom.34 Secondly, and consequently, through his studies of psychology of arousal, Scitovsky was led to draw a clear and substantial distinction between pleasure and comfort. The situation in which individual feels comfort in not being disturbed by any need, Scitovsky regarded as a static position. Since pleasure is instead the sensation felt after a change in the excitement level, due to either an increase or decrease, Scitovsky identified pleasure with change in the arousal level.35 He thus concluded that since pleasure and comfort are ontologically different, they cannot be measured on the same scale of values.36 Lastly, if moderate amounts of change in the arousal level are the most gratifying along the arousal continuum, it follows that satisfaction is greatest with pleasure at a medium level. Scitovsky points out that the experimental evidence of motivational psychologists confirmed the justness of this age-­‐old principle:37 The idea that the most pleasant lies between the extremes of too little and too much was well known to the philosophers of ancient Greece. They talked a lot about the “Golden Mean” and preached moderation in everything. (Scitovsky 1992, p. 35) 34 Scitovsky (1992), p. 22. The experiment is reported by Heron (1957). It is worth noting that Scitovsky reports the same experiments as those extensively commented by Fromm in his lecture ‘Is Man Lazy by Nature? (1974) (in Fromm (2010)), which strives to understand how humankind can best overcome its own tendencies toward inertia. 35 Scitovsky (1992), pp. 59 and ff. See also Bianchi (2003). 36 Scitovsky (1992), p. 61. Also Fromm (1955) observed that the complete satisfaction of bodily needs is not a sufficient condition of sanity and health; rather, just as the neglect of bodily needs is conducive to death, the neglect of the psychological needs is conductive to mental sickness and to the manifestation of neutrotic symptoms. 37 The justness of the Right Means is, of course, not a thesis shared in classical philosophy. Clearly Scitovsky is referring to Plato and Aristotle, whose intuitions he regards as fully realized in the discoveries of motivational psychologists in ‘Psychologizing by Economists’ (1986). 22 What emerges becomes very important for the theory of consumer behaviour: more is not always better. § 2.3 Culture as preference develpment Thanks to the psychologists’ experiments on arousal, Scitovsky also concluded that visual patterns with a moderately new content are always preferred to ones that are already familiar. This realisation of the general importance of variety in shaping preferences – that is, just the right balance between novelty and redundancy – allowed Scitovsky to do two things. In the first place, he began to develop a critique of standardized mass-­‐produced objects, which, by virtue of their homogeneity and their lack of distinction with regard to the goods consumed by others, soon lose their attractiveness and produce a latent sense of dissatisfaction which encourages consumerism (ivi, p. 252). Secondly, he insisted on the role of knowledge and culture in determining the evolution of preferences. The latter do not simply change in time, but evolve endogenously according to a process of growing sophistication in taste, which springs essentially from learning and experience.38 As Scitovsky, indeed, noted, “[n]ovelty creates a problem, and its enjoyment comes from the resolution of the problem. […]. The more difficult that is, the more enjoyable it becomes”.39 His observations were drown from his examination of Berlyne’s work in experimental aesthetics which reasonably explained why the “distortion, misreprentation, non-­‐representation and abstraction”40 of the “degenerate” artists’ attracted his attention, as the attention of so many other visitors, to the 1938 Münich exibition. 38 Fromm, too, understands taste as “a product of cultural development and refinement like musical or artistic taste” (1947), p. 190. 39 Scitovsky (1992), p. 54. 40 Ivi, p. 56. 23 In one such experiment, subjects were asked to rate the aesthetic qualities of works of art plus various shapes and patterns (fig. 6). To the question about which images they preferred, the Fig. 6. Berlyne (1971), p. 100. interviewees responded that they regarded as more pleasing those patterns with simpler content, with a certain level of symmetry and redundancy, while they deemed more interesting the more complex ones, with a higher information content, thereby showing that individuals find greater pleasure in an intermediate level of novelty, while they are also attracted by higher levels.41 To show the inner dynamics of this process, and how it is connected to both the sophistication of tastes and personal development, Scitovsky resorted to an original combination between the criterion devised by Shannon and Weaver (1949)42 for measuring the uncertainty of a signal and the aesthetic theory developed by Kurt Alsleben (1962), who was among the very first to write about information aesthetics. Following Shannon, Scitovsky linked the uncertainty of the signal to the level of novelty. The more uncertain the signal, the greater the novelty. Too little uncertainty means boredom, while too great uncertainty means 41 On the connection between Scitovsky’s observations on an intermediate level of novelty as source of individual satisfaction and Herbert Simon’s “search and satisficing” theory, see Castellani, Di Giovinazzo and Novarese (2010). 42 Scitovsky (1992), p. 46. The term “information”, taken literally, means 'give form', and form requires structure, which is created and preserved by the brain in the form of signs and supersigns. 24 information overload.43 Thus, as Berlyne had already shown, an attractive and satisfying level of novelty requires an intermediate measure of uncertainty.44 Continuing with Alsleben, Scitovsky says that, in order to keep in mind as much information as possible, the brain organizes it into signs and supersigns, which are then used to decipher and acquire new information.45 Learning to read, Scitovsky notes, is a clear example of how this mechanism works, simplifying complexity and allowing us to acquire new knowledge. First, we learn to remember the sign of a letter. With practice, the sign of a letter becomes redundant; the brain uses this already − possessed information to attribute a supersign to the words containing it. With time, the word itself passes from being a supersign to sign, which attributes meaning to the phrase, and so on up to the point of giving a completed sense to the entire sentence.46 This process is identical for perceptual stimulation, such as in music and art appreciation, which, Scitovsky emphasises, is “an acquired skill, requiring deliberate effort and practice. […]. A person who is unused to abstract painting may need to recognize the representation of a familiar object to provide him with that minimum redundancy without which the information in the picture is too new and therefore too bewildering for him to enjoy”.47 Thus, the incessant reprocessing of signs into supersigns provides a mechanism for the evolution of preferences, with a tendency 43 In ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), Georg Simmel was among the first to interpret both boredom and neurotic behaviours as the consequence of brain overload. The mental process described by Scitovsky offers a scientific explanation of the sociologist’s speculations on the maladies of modernity. 44 Scitovsky’s understanding of uncertainty as a possible source of satisfaction clashes with most standard economic models, in which uncertainty is treated variously as something to be reduced, eliminated, or otherwise mastered. 45 Scitovsky (1992), p. 52. 46 Ivi, p. 53. 47 Ivi, p. 56. 25 towards an increasingly ordered assimilation of greater complexity.48 Scitovsky concluded that the capacity to assimilate increasingly complex information, be it artistic, literary or other, depended on one’s level of education or culture: “culture is the preliminary information we must have to enjoy the processing of further information”. 49 At the end of his journey into the sources of human satisfaction, Scitovsky’s thought circles back to leisure activities carried out for the sole pleasure of doing them, those enjoyed at Rózsadomb and Nőtinc, in the interlude between the two World Wars, and those already identified by the Cambridgean economists. § 2.4 Scitovsky, Fromm and North American culture Drawing on his research in theoretical and experimental psychology, in Part I of The Joyless Economy, Scitovsky purported to show that individual are not always utility maximizers; that their preferences are endogenous; and that their actions are not always durected towards achieving some final purpose. By showing, as we have just seen, that this process is intrinsically pleasurable and that it is triggered or stimulated by cultural and leisure activities, he also concluded that the latter are the principal components of individual satisfaction. Such conclusions, he remarked, clash openly with the North American puritan attitude, which traditionally disapproved of spending on virtually everything beyond the necessities of a sober life, and conceived of work as a burden through which redemption is achieved via the profit motive. These sociological arguments are taken up in Part II of the book, 48 With the description of this incessant process of re-­‐elaboration of signs and supersigns, Scitovsky seems to be indicating a path of evolution of preferences in which complexity and order merge in a gradual process of abstractification of meanings. Here Scitovsky follows Berlyne’s puzzling about Birkhoff (1933), who equated aesthetic measure M with the ratio O (order)/C (complexity). See Berlyne (1960), p. 239. 49 Scitovsky (1992), p. 226. 26 ‘The American Way of Life’, where Scitovsky shows the North American attitude towards culture to be conducive to a joyless economy. Here, Scitovsky abandoned the realm of economic theory to join the chorus of critical sociological commentators on the mass society, such as Simmel (1904), Adorno (1951), Marcuse (1964) and, particularly, Fromm.50 Like Scitovsky, the latter distinguished clearly between comfort, as the feeling accompanying “the relief from tension”, and pleasure, as the sensation stemming from “the productive realization of his [Man’s] potentialities”.51 Like Scitovsky, Fromm too resorted to the experiments by Hebb and Berlyne52 in order to prove the exactness of his theory. Again like Scitovsky, Fromm saw the Puritan ethic as a major stimulus in the search of comfort and conformity. In A Man For Himself (1947), Fromm already distinguished between satisfaction, joy and happiness. “Happiness and joy – he says – are not the satisfaction of a need springing from a physiological or psychological lack; they are not the relief from tension but the accompaniment of all productive activity, in thought, feeling, and action. Joy and happiness are not different in quality; they are different only inasmuch as joy refers to a single act while happiness may be said to be a continuous or integrated experience of joy”.53 Last and most strikingly, Scitovsky and Fromm launched their attack on the American lifestyle with the same introductory question. “Could it not be that we seek our satisfaction in the wrong things, or in the wrong way, and are dissatisfied with the outcome?”, asked Scitovsky.54 While Fromm, opening The Sane Society, writes: “Could it be that the middle-­‐class life of prosperity, while satisfying our material needs leaves us with a 50 The connections between Scitovsky and Fromm are indeed many and are deserving of further exploration. 51 Fromm (1947), p. 192. 52 See footnote 34. 53 Fromm (1947), p. 192. 54 Scitovsky (1992), p. 4. 27 feeling of intense boredom, and that suicide and alcoholism are pathological ways of escape from boredom?”.55 Fromm explains the co-­‐existence of material prosperity and individual unhappiness in terms of the acquisitive attitude triggered by people’s innate instinct to conform which, in turn, is driven by the altogether innate human need for identity. Not having a sense of self except the one conferred by conformity with the majority, Fromm remarked, the individual becomes insecure, anxious, depending on approval and thereby alienated from himself. In order to run away from himself and from the boredom provoked by this alienation, he thus invests his leisure time in “fun”, and consumption of fun.56 The effect of this consumption, however, is merely to repress the awareness of unhappiness. The fact that everyone is doing this gives rise to what Fromm calls “the pathology of normalcy”.57 “[In] the modern society everybody might consider himself happy nowadays”, he writes, quoting Huxley’s Brave New World.58 Scitovsky understands the “joyless economy” as an expression of such pathology. Thus he agrees that individuals have a basic need for the comfort that comes from belonging to a group and being recognised as such: [S]tatus seeking, the wish to belong, the assertion and cementing of one’s membership in the group is a deep-­‐seated and very natural drive whose origin and universality go beyond man and are explained by that most basic drive, the desire to survive. (Scitovsky 1992, p. 115) 55 Fromm (1955), p. 19. 56 Fromm (1955), p. 182.
57 The phrase “the pathology of normalcy” first appears in Fromm (1955), p. 20 and ff. Its controversial premise is that a society as a whole can be sick or insane, inasmuch as it fails to address existential needs that are vital to the growth and development of the individual. 58 Fromm (1955), p. 177. 28 According to Scitovsky, such craving for acceptance is a powerful influence upon the conformity of tastes and, consequently, the conspicuous consumption of goods. Such consumption may even yield no intrinsic satisfaction, bringing about a conflict between what consumers chose and what best satisfies them. Even if partially aware of the satisfaction lost in such consumerist attitudes, people nonetheless keep on conforming because of the addictive nature of comfort: “status and rank are themselves habit-­‐forming: losing status and losing rank can be a source of suffering and the fear of losing them a source of anxiety. Indeed competitive pressures, the tensions of modern society, usually refer to the anxiety due to the ever-­‐present dangers of such loss”.59 Beyond being a critique of economic theory, The Joyless Economy was also a comparison of Mitteleuropean and American culture in pursuit of the art of living well in an age of mass-­‐consumption. The former, sophisticated and, perhaps, somewhat decadent, in which recreational activities are seen a mark of distinction. The latter, puritanical, bourgeois and dutiful, displaying conformity because of its members’ desire for distinction. Stimulated by Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Fromm’s “normative humanism” aimed to overcome the conflict between the needs of humans and the needs of a capitalistic society. With The Joyless Economy, Scitovsky claimed that the free-­‐market economy was in conflict with the human requisites for a good life. His proposal for continuing to enjoy the advantages of economic progress, without being overwhelmed by it, lay in leisure activities to render individual consumer skills part of everybody’s cultural heritage. 59 Scitovsky (1992), p. 132. Scitovsky explains the origin and nature of this psychological phenomenon by means of what is called the “opponent process”: it is not the search for pleasure but the avoidance of pain that drives the victim in the subsequent phases of the process. The theory of the opponent process was developed in 1974 by psychologists Richard L. Solomon and John D. Corbit. Scitovsky was among the first to introduce this psychological law into economics. 29 § 2.5 Tibor Scitovsky and contemporary economic psychology Today, more than thirty years after the first publication of The Joyless Economy, economists have once again become interested in the determinants of subjective wellbeing, the role played by personality traits, habit and adaptation, and other factors that contribute to the violation of simple maximization rules (Bowles and Gintis 2000; Kahneman and Sugden 2005; Kahneman and Thaler 2006). Scitovsky is now cited as a forerunner of happiness studies in economics (Frey and Stutzer 2002; Easterlin 2003; Blanchflower and Oswald 2004; Kahneman et al. 2006) and listed among the forerunners of behavioural economics (Frey and Stutzer 2007; Angner and Loewenstein 2012).60 From their own perspectives, they may all be right, for The Joyless Economy raises issues that are fundamental to the economic understanding of personal and social welfare. Regarding the question of subjective wellbeing, however, Scitvosky was critical of Easterlin’s data, maintaining that people’s ranking in the income scale could not be the main basis of happiness.61 By stressing the importance of novelty and creativity as sources of satisfaction in both work and leisure time, he was closer to sociologists who tended to adopt a broader list of happiness variables.62 Yet, in his emphasis on the dynamics of the arousal mechanism, Scitovsky was much closer to psychologists who, more appropriately, focused their attention how such variables work. 60 Scitovsky is often classed together with the “old behavioral economists”, such as George Katona, Harvey Leibenstein and Herbert Simon, all of whom suggested the importance of psychological measures and bounds on rationality (Sent (2004); see also Camerer, Loewenstein and Rabin (2004)). Scitovsky himself recognized many affinities between his work and that of Herbert Simon and George Katona, Scitovsky (1988). 61 Scitovsky (1992), p. 134 and ff. The data to which Scitovsky is referring belong to Easterlin (1974). 62 Scitovsky quotes the work of Bradburn and Troll (1969) as a comprehensive sociological literature on the topic of subjective wellbeing. See Scitovsky (1992), p. 61. 30 However, it must be said that the appropriation of Scitovsky as a precursor of the behavioural economics movement overlooks significant differences between them. If behavioural economics is understood as “the experimental psychological investigation of human decision behavior, using the behavioral axioms of von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944), Savage (1954) and others as benchmark” (Heukelom 2012, p. 799), then Scitovsky remains far-­‐removed from this orientation, in terms of the psychology used, the research methods employed and the scientific goals sought. Whereas Kahneman sought to modify the rationality axioms in the light of empirically observed systematic deviation, Scitovsky implicitly rejected the edifice of axiomatic rationality. His proposed revision of economics called for an entirely different conception of economic behaviour and purpose – one informed by psychology of a different kind. Furthermore, differently from the behavioural economists, Scitovsky’s recourse to experimentation stopped with his appropriation of the psychological findings: once he had drawn on Berlyne and Hebb, his money-­‐
making theory offered no obvious role for further experimentation. Thus János Kornai sees Scitovsky as neither a behavioural nor experimental economist, and is keen to contrast him with Kahneman: Tibor’s area of interest was broader: he was more interested in the various sources of human satisfaction than the deviations from rationality. His original question was why the good life, however freely and rationally chosen, may yet lead to frustration and a feeling of emptiness. He found the origin of the problem in the boredom of a generation of people that didn’t know how to make good use of their leisure. And he used the motivational psychology’s theory on “arousal” to prove it. Also, differently from Kahneman, Tibor’s methodology of approaching problems was inductive; the theories he developed are based mainly on introspection; he used the psychologists’ findings but he never showed a great interest in experimental economics. (extract from the interview with J. Kornai. In Di Giovinazzo 2012) Kenneth Arrow shares the same opinion: 31 I surmise that Scitovsky was not really that interested in irrational behavior. It was rather a way of saying that individuals really had good (daring) tastes but did not understand how to act on them. (E-­‐mail to author, December 24, 2011) Conclusion A traditional European scholar, Scitovsky belonged to no school or current. Convinced of a gap between economic theory and economic life, he sought to re-­‐
establish the dialogue with psychology along lines quite different from the experimental study of expected utility and rational choice. In so doing, he offered a broad cultural critique. It must also be said that The Joyless Economy owed much of its content to Scitovsky’s own life. For Kornai, “[t]he same leisure skills Tibor indicated as a necessary ingredient for a joyful life in The Joyless Economy he had actually learnt them from his father and mother”.63 Kenneth Arrow, says, “Clearly, The Joyless Economy came from something within him that was life-­‐long and not just the result of the Paris period and his second marriage, but it may be that his release permitted him to express himself more fully”.64 It is not surprising that the first edition of The Joyless Economy was heavily criticized, even by some of Scitovsky’s colleagues and friends.65 Kuhn (1962) has stated that some intellectuals remain obscure because the discipline is not ready for their ideas. Thus, in reference to Scitovsky, Amartya Sen could write: “It was the middle of 1970s. Growing conservatism in social thought (following the radical 1960s) was being accompanied by some hardening of methodological inertia in economics” (1996, p. 481). Also, Scitovsky was a relatively old-­‐fashioned individual, whose social reserve and lack of charisma prevented him from developing a 63 Di Giovinazzo (2012), p. 200. 64 K. Arrow, e-­‐mail to author, December 24, 2011. 65 See Di Giovinazzo (2012). 32 following of graduate students committed to spreading his ideas within the profession. His book’s popular style, too, saw him lose status among academics. By emphasizing art, culture and leisure activities as the principal sources of personal development and satisfaction, and decrying the scant attention they received in America, Scitovsky both scrutinized and scandalized the society in which he had chosen to live. References Adorno, T. (2005) [1951]. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, London: Verso Press Ainslie, G. (1982), ‘A behavioral economic approach to the defense mechanism: Freud’s energy theory revised’, Social Science Information, No. 21, pp. 735–
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