Mind Scalpel

We now know why the Presidential races are attacking the nation like an aggressive mallet to the nose — they’re just trying to perk up the economy.

See, a recent study conducted by four universities – Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and … Pittsburgh? (cue Muppets singing “One Of These Things is Not Like The Others”) — shows that when people are unhappy, they tend to buy more stuff.

This is amazing! It’s essentially proof that the economy is a robust, self-compensating system. Forget monetary policy, trade imbalances, interest rates, tax cuts — that’s all irrelevant. What this study shows is that as soon as the economy starts tanking, infusing people with misery, they’ll be compelled by atavistic impulses to run out and spend, spend, spend.

Unfortunately, it appears that the converse also is true — as soon as people start feeling good again, they’ll hang out at home, living the simple life, weaving their own clothes, and composting. This explains why we’ve been acculturated to keep up with the news and listen to NPR — so we’ll always be haunted by a vague sense of impending doom, and therefore be on the verge of running out and buying another billboard-sized television, thus supporting the economy and ever-expanding government programs. Don’t believe me? Must I remind you that NPR is government-subsidized? I rest my case.

Unfortunately, we still haven’t discovered how to maintain a steady state of sadness — behavioral scientists have observed that in spite of the heroic efforts of reality TV show producers, lawyers and telemarketers, we still suffer from the occasional burst of inexplicable happiness, and if that happens to enough people at the same time, there’s an upward spike of overall societal well-being, which of course is always the precursor to a recession or stock market crash (remember Alan Greenspan’s hysteria about “irrational exuberance”? That’s what he was worried about, not unreasonably high stock prices). So there’s an entire governmental conspiracy bent on ensuring that we never have a pure, unadulterated good thing happen — for example, when an underdog sports team wins a long-denied championship, the conspiracy hires morons to start rioting and burning stuff to “celebrate.”

So societal ill-feeling (and in parallel, the economy) fluctuates in a relatively stable sine-wave, like a roller-coaster ride you didn’t buy a ticket for and can’t get off. Needless to say, this in itself can be quite fatiguing. It’s as if one of my friends had succeeded in his quest to invent an airplane engine that runs on fear (think about it — “Oh my God! We’re out of fuel! We’re going to crash! Wait, wait…everything’s fine, the engines have started up again. Phew!…Oh my God! We’re out of fuel! [etc.]“).

I’m pretty sure this could be the Unified Field Theory of behavioral economics. But it won’t be accepted in the community of economists until I can explain the one massive historical anomaly — if unhappiness spurs economic activity, why weren’t we in a position to buy the rest of the world after a year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency?

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