Widening Access to Oxford
Welcoming visitors to a Balliol Open Day (image stolen from Balliol website!)
Here’s a little piece I wrote for Balliol’s in-house magazine about our Access work, in case anyone’s interested. We’d especially like to put these messages across to a) unhelpful media types (I’m looking at YOU, the Guardian), and b) rich potential funders of Access work!
*Ahem…:
If one had doubts about the value of Oxford and Balliol’s outreach work, they could quickly be dispelled by conversations with current undergraduates, or visitors to a Balliol Open Day. Oxford and Balliol’s access schemes play a crucial part in preventing potential applicants being overwhelmed by the false negative stereotypes that abound, and replacing these with positive, accurate messages: that Oxford/ Balliol is a centre for excellent, exciting learning; that most students at Oxford are friendly, academically interested, and ‘human beings just like you’; and that, since these students are ‘just like you’, you have a chance too- go for it! To so many of us (especially those who, like me, hailed from state schools with low records of sending students to Oxford or Cambridge), all this makes all the difference: we wouldn’t have applied without it.
There are, however, still barriers to Balliol’s capacity to successfully encourage applications from the hardest-to-reach students. The key focuses for Balliol at present are:
1) To change negative perceptions of Oxbridge amongst those teachers who dissuade excellent students from applying.
2) To attract more women to Balliol, and thus address the gender gap in the sciences and PPE.
3) To do all this and more with a very small budget, which is missing the external funding boost that has empowered other colleges to step up their outreach work in recent years.
I was sceptical about the force of teachers’ negative stereotypes until I helped at two Balliol Open Days and an interview period. My own experience of applying left me no doubts about the influence of teachers, but I couldn’t imagine such influence would be anything other than encouraging. Sadly, conversations with students from across the country revealed this wasn’t the case, and although many teachers do an excellent job (and I’ve insufficient evidence to speak about what is ‘typical’), again and again, negative stereotypes learnt from certain teachers (and the media) poured out: “Is it right that if you’re from a state school, they’ll try and catch you out by asking about really sophisticated books they know you won’t have read?”, “My teacher said there are lots of private school students here, and that I might feel like I don’t fit in. How do you cope with that?”, “Do you know anyone here from the North?”
It’s so important that school students, and those influencing them, understand the truth and the lies in such stereotypes. For example, a truth: the percentage of private school students at Oxford far exceeds proportionality with the UK population as a whole. The lie: this is because Oxford tutors favour students from private schools. The explanation? Students from state and private schools have exactly the same success at gaining places at Oxford, once they apply. The discrepancy arises because a smaller proportion of state school students are applying. Investigations into Balliol’s ‘gender gap’ have revealed a parallel picture: female applicants have the same success rate as men once they apply, but again, in many subjects, fewer women than men are applying.
Given that Oxford and Balliol are treating all applicants with an even hand (and pouring thousands into Access every year), what is deterring so many promising potential candidates? No doubt the new costs and confusion over tuition fees isn’t helping, but this factor is a new one, while the Access problem has a much longer history. Conversations with students at Open Days (so with students who’ve even made it that far!) do suggest that ironically, tragically, those teachers and journalists who do spread discouraging misinformation about elitism and exclusion at Oxford bear considerable responsibility for the statistics they bemoan.
Once here, one rarely notices (or even knows!) which friends are from state or private schools, and a small imbalance in a year’s gender mix will make no, or next to no, difference to one’s social life in an college of over 800 students. Having seen Oxford and Balliol’s access work from the inside, I can also confirm that we already work very hard to widen access. However, Access issues haven’t lost their importance. For the sake of giving hard-to-reach students the best, fairest chances, and in order to further boost Balliol’s own academic flourishing, we must, and will, do more.
Given the challenges Balliol faces, our approach to access has the following core tenets:
- Target talented students likely to be discouraged from applying (though never neglect or turn away interested schools).
- Open and sustain dialogues with teachers.
- Combine visiting schools with welcoming students into Balliol.
- Keep all activities highly interactive.
- Give students an honest and inspiring glimpse of life at Balliol, putting current students at the forefront of all our access work.
Looking at the tangible activities carried out by Balliol Access, we achieve a great deal with our small budget! Balliol has particular responsibility for outreach in Hertfordshire, and in 2011 Balliol visited Hertfordshire schools, held open days in the county, and ran a particularly successful Hertfordshire ‘Women in Science’ day. We also continue work beyond Hertfordshire, maintaining links with Old Members who teach and responding positively to all schools’ requests for visits to college. When school groups visit Balliol, our current students provide tours of the college, admissions tutors give a short talk, and maths and philosophy tutors have even volunteered free master-classes to give a taste of life at Oxford. This Easter, Balliol will be hosting a ‘UNIQ’ study day for maths, targeting students in schools that send few students to Oxbridge, or even university. Several Balliol students already partake in e-mentoring schemes, or have spoken about Oxford and Balliol in their old schools. And all this is not to mention Balliol’s headline access events: the Summer Open Days, which this year saw over 2000 visitors to the college over three days.
This hubbub of effective activity is sustained by student volunteers and the tutors and staff who work tirelessly to organise opportunities for them to represent Balliol and university in general. Unlike many Oxford colleges, Balliol has not been able to source external funding to employ staff to work full or part-time on outreach, and this has meant that almost all outreach work is achieved in the (elusive) “spare time” of tutors and students. This has really limited what we’ve been able to achieve through the enthusiasm and thoughtfulness of those on board with Balliol Access, and has left a marked gulf between our outreach activities and those of many other colleges.
We intend to do better. We are rightly proud of what we are achieving, and see Balliol Access’ ‘success stories’ every Michaelmas term in the new cohort of ‘freshers’. But it’s not enough, and neither Balliol, nor talented state school students and young women, must be allowed to fall behind. Therefore, we’ll keep pursuing ways to satisfy our great ambitions for Balliol’s outreach work, to ensure that more of the most exceptional students make it to what we know is our rather exceptional college.
Students on Balliol Quad. ... A quad is a lawn. Did I just destroy my entire thesis?
Female Genital Mutilation
A bit of an odd topic to choose. I’m just reading an article about it in sociology, and I didn’t realise quite how bad it was. I’m not posting about it to ‘gross you out’; I simply think it’s such a serious thing that we should all probably roughly know what it is and involves. In 1996 in Sudan, 99% of females have some form of FGM, and 83% its most complete form, infibulation. In Somalia, it was 99% and 76% . FGM in various forms is a practise mainly centered in Islamic North East Africa (from the West coast savannah land above the middle jungle, up to Egpyt and down to Kenya in the East). So here’s the explanation of its most complete manifestation, infibulation (from Gerry Mackie, 1996):
Infibulation/Pharaonic circumcision:
Clitoridectomy and the excision of the labia minora as well as the inner walls of the labia majora. The raw edges of the vulva are then sewn together with catgut or held against each other with thorns. The raw edges of the labia majora are
sutured together or approximated so that the opposite sides will heal together and form a wall over the vaginal opening. A small sliver of wood is inserted into the vagina to stop coalescence of the labia majora in front of the vaginal orifice and to allow for the passage of urine and menstrual flow.
The operation takes place from a few days after birth to before the birth of the first child (depending on local custom), but mostly seems to be performed on girls around age eight, safely before puberty. It is usually done among women, in private, with little ceremony; only rarely does it have the trappings of an initiation rite. The girl is held down amid singing and shouting, which drown out her screams. Except recently among the affluent, the operation is inflicted without painkiller or antiseptic precaution. Then the girl lies with her legs tied together for several weeks. Urination and (later) menstruation are difficult because of the pencil-point opening left by the operation. After marriage, penetration takes two weeks to two years to accomplish, or is facilitated by knife; it is traumatically painful for the female, and some men feel guilt and revulsion at the cruelty involved. Childbirth requires introcision and resewing of the genital area. Virtually every ethnography and report states that FGM is defended and transmitted by the women. The mothers who have this done to their daughters love their children and want the best for them (Assaad 1980).
Health consequences are severe.
Immediate: Pain, hemorrhage, shock, acute urinary retention, urinary infection, blood poisoning (septicemia), fever, tetanus, and death.
Intermediate: Delay in wound healing, pelvic infection, dysmenorrhea, cysts and abscesses, keloid scar, and painful intercourse.
Late: Haematocolpos (vaginal closure and accumulation of menstrual fluid), infertility and miscarriage, recurrent urinary tract infection, difficulty in urinating, calculus and stone formation, hypersensitivity, and anal incontinence and fissure.
Intercourse: Difficulty in penetration, painful intercourse, and use of misplaced deinfibulation wound as false vagina.
Delivery: Prolonged and obstructed labor, hemorrhage leading to shock and death, perineal laceration, uterine inertia, and stillborn or brain-damaged infants.
Postnatal: Urinary and rectal fistula causing odor and miscarriages, and prolapse of uterus and adjacent organs. Sexual problems: Lack of orgasm, anxiety, depression, and frustration (summarized from headings in Koso-Thomas 1987:25-28).
Why is this happening? Why are loving mothers imposing this on their children?
FGM is mainly carried out because it is seen as necessary to allowing the girl child to get a husband, or at least a perceived ‘good husband’.
Firstly, it becomes a sign of ‘something desirable’ such as chastity, virginity, membership of the right ethnic group, something that enhances sex, safety in childbirth, etc.
Thirdly, it seems that it’s become so prevalent (70-100%) in some areas that most women now don’t know that the above problems they face are caused by the FGM, rather than simply standard occurences. For example, one researcher was asking women who’d been infibulated how long it takes them to urinate, and they were all replying that it didn’t affect them, their urination was normal. She began to ask more descriptive questions, “How long does it take you?” and they’d say, “Normal- about 15 minutes”. Also, myths about non-FGM don’t get busted through experience (and no one’s willing to take the gamble), such as the myth that if the baby’s head touches the cliterous in childbirth, the baby will die.
In China, foot-binding ended very quickly, and Mackie explains this by reference to an education campaign that showed that this practise was harmful and an out-of-date embarassment to China, and helped parents organise into groups that pledged to neither footbind their girl children, nor allow their boy children to marry foot-bound girls. Together, the education and joint action created communities of non-footbinding large enough to make the costs of footbinding outweigh the benefits, and the practise ended in a generation. Perhaps something similar could work with FGM. There may be a reason it wouldn’t, but I can’t see what that reason is.
Real Women Do Not Have Curves
So, for starters:
“Amen sister!”, we cry!
Though perhaps we should give Keira some credit for that six pack.
And it’s slightly unfair that the top photos are taken by paps and the bottom ones staged for professional photographers.
But now, for main course, a word from Hanne Blank (at http://www.hanneblank.com/blog/2011/06/23/real-women/ ) :
real women
Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better.
Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing.
Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever.
Real women start their lives as baby girls. And as baby boys. And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions.
Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them.
Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards. Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change. Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo. Real women have hair so long they can sit on it. Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides.
Real women wear high heels and skirts. Or not.
Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to.
Real women have ovaries. Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed. Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above. Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced.
Real women are fat. And thin. And both, and neither, and otherwise. Doesn’t make them any less real.
There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla:
There is no wrong way to have a body.
I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body.
And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap.
You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis. All human beings are real.
Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem. Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me.
Here’s a funny thing
My revision efforts are firing on all cylinders, and last night, even my dream-producer stepped in to help me solve a question in Aristotle revision that has been playing on my mind: IF we love our friends for the sake of “the noble” (sort of, doing beautiful, noble things), can it be that we also love them for themselves? Also, can it be that both motivate us to be kind to them?
I should warn you that after I recounted this dream to a friend and running partner, his immediate question was, “Have you ever had therapy?” I can see why, but (perhaps more worryingly!) I didn’t find it at all disturbing, and it’s here for your amusement!
Dream:
So, I’d been meant to talk to some children about Africa during their school trip, but I hadn’t brought the pen drive I needed, so was being driven back home to collect it in quite a rush by one of the teachers at the school. As we turned a corner on the road, we saw a line of traffic moving very slowly down the country lane. Once fully around this corner, we saw why the cars had been slowing (the cars had now disappeared):
There were lots of dogs on the road. The dogs were all quite small breeds, and various shades of sandy, honey-brown. And they were all unusually cute and often fluffy. We manoeuvred around them, but it was a single track road, and it was difficult. The dogs were largely not moving. They became increasingly hard to miss and the driver wasn’t slowing much; eventually, I saw that in many cases he was almost certainly just driving over them. Why?! He seemed like a perfectly nice guy! But he’d spotted what I hadn’t, which was that the previous cars had killed most of the dogs, and they couldn’t be killed twice! That was why they weren’t moving.
Then we looked more closely, and I saw that one dog (former-dog) had been skinned, and it’s sandy-fluff-covered skin had been roughly cut up into patches and was scattered around the carcass. Something was seriously up.
We looked to a lane on the right, and there were two Japanese teenagers, a boy and a girl. They looked to be around 19 years of age. Their hair was medium length but very coarse and scruffy, coming slightly over their faces. They were wearing cheap-looking clothes: faded jeans, and the girl wore a white t-shirt with a messy red sprawl on the front. And they were wielding machetes, using them to continue hacking and killing the dogs around in front of them on the road.
“It’s a massacre”, said one of us.
And the perpetrators had seen us, and clearly did not want to be seen. They began the chase.
My driver, rather than heading back down the road, took the odd decision to turn into a nearby field with incredibly long, thick grass, and to his but not my surprise, the car couldn’t keep driving. We got out and ran across the field, the machete-wielding students only metres behind us.
We made it to a Boots. Civilisation! Inside the four walls, around many onlookers and lots of CCTV: we were safe. We explained to the other shoppers that a massacre had happened and the perpetrators were hot on our heals- lock the doors. The doors were already locked. The other customers listened. And then, as one, they turned to look straight at us. And began moving towards us. Each with their own, rusty machete. Whatever spirit had taken the Japanese pair, it obviously had control of these bodies too.
We dodged and fought back and begged. The man attacking me, who seemed to be a sort of leader, said, “You kill animals.” It was a reference to the dogs that had been killed, but somehow, this was also a sort retribution for the dog-murders, and all the animals who’d deaths we’d caused. He then said, “Humans too. You treat humans like instruments, tools for you, just like animals. Human beings only have instrumental value to you. You don’t love them for themselves.” And here he was, therefore, not loving me for myself.
He said, “We won’t stop trying to kill you until you love us for ourselves, not for intrumental value.” Well, this was a sticky situation. I looked at his face as he attempted another hack with his rusty machete, and I wasn’t feeling the love for him in himself. How was I meant to muster up anything other than weak instrumental love for these guys who were trying to hack me to death in a crazed, cultish sort of way?
But his face was human, and somewhere underneath, I perceived or imagined a human being. Then I realised: I could love him for himself as well as loving in instrumentally- in fact despite strongly disliking him instrumentally! I cared about him, a little. Success!
“I can love you for yourself as well as loving you instrumentally!” He listened, as did my teacher-partner, while dodging the blades. The killer seemed to be thinking about this. It seemed he was going to be convinced and the violent attempts would end. The lesson would have been taught to us, and we’d ‘wake up’ and continue as normal, and it would all feel like it had been just a dream.
And then my alarm clock went off.
If I had a choice, I think I’d rather my dreams took less violent approaches to assisting my revision, though I’m sure they’d laugh at that and say, “Oh come on, it was all in good fun!”
Be a Friend (Start a cafe!)
I like the sound of this place: http://christainnewyork.com/2011/05/22/beginning-building-a-space-from-love-heidis-house-on-the-side-of-the-road/#comment-5041
“Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” ~ Robert Frost
“Let me live in my house by the side of the road and be a friend to a man.” ~ Sam Walter Foss
That will be all!
Happiness
“You’ve got the toys you asked for, so WHY aren’t you happy?”
Or, as an essay-setter might (…did) put it:
Why does economic growth fail to improve the human lot?
Here’s my little potted answer, written for a sociology tutorial then edited a bit:
The economies of Western democracies have grown substantially since the end of the Second World War, yet the average happiness of their citizens has hardly improved, and signs of misery (from depression to psychosomatic illnesses) have increased. On the other hand, the average national happiness of countries are positively correlated with their GDP/capita, while within countries, individual income correlates positively with well-being1. Is this a paradox? Does, or does not, income correlate with well-being in industrialised societies?
According to current evidence, this puzzle is best resolved by reference to countries’ and individuals’ rankings‘ in the income distribution (“relative incomes”). Although absolute incomes matter for well-being, by far its greatest determiner in industrialised societies is relative income- that is, how the subject’s income compares with the incomes of those with whom the subject most strongly compares their lot (their “reference group”). The relative incomes of most have remained stagnant or deteriorated due to increased inequality since WW2. For this reason, economic growth in industrialised societies has not improved the human lot as might have been anticipated, as it has not improved the relative incomes of most people. It is too simplistic, however, to say the human lot has not been improved at all.
…
Measuring The Human Lot
There is no agreement as to what constitutes “the human lot”, and what changes should be considered improvements to it. Just ask a philosopher. Then an economist. Then a sociologist, a feminist, a psychologist, a second philosopher… Should we measure hedonistic experienced utility- the emotions people feel throughout their day? Or people’s expressed satisfaction with their lives? Their prosperity? Personal freedom? A rich intellectual and aesthetic life? Virtue?
Two principal measures in the sociological literature are “Life Evaluation” (LE, henceforth) and “Experienced Utility” (ExU, henceforth). LE and ExU measures track different aspects of the human lot: ExU data gets as close as is currently possible to recording people’s lived experiences of happiness (and other positive or negative emotions), whereas LE data shows how people actually rate their lives, for reasons of the happiness that permeates them or any other features they consider valuable.
ExU measures are increasingly popular in attempts to measure the human lot. Because brain scans cannot be carried out on people while they go about their daily business, respondents in ExU studies are instead either prompted, or asked in retrospect, to report the emotions they feel (joy, worry, anger, enjoyment, sadness, etc., rated for intensity from 1-5) at different points in the day. Researchers take averages of the emotions recorded, or record the amount of time spent feeling negative emotions or emotions at either extreme, or make similar analyses, to produce overall descriptions of respondents’ ExU.
To gauge the part of the human lot expressed by life evaluations, by contrast, respondents to a survey are asked (usually) one of the two following questions:
- “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” (Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Scale, used by Gallup)
- “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” (General Social Survey, GSS)
The first, Cantril, question is good as an LE measure, as it allows people to rate their lives according to whatever qualities matter to them, distinguishing it from ExU studies. The second, GSS-type, questions are less helpful as measures of LE, because they presuppose that people assess their lives according to the happiness they contain. This is problematic because:
a) In such surveys, people seem to treat “happiness” as ExU. Answers about happiness correlate with likely indicators of ExU such as activity in areas of the brain where positive and negative affect are experienced, friends’ reports on the subject’s happiness, psychosomatic illnesses, likelihood to initiate social contact, depression levels, and so on.2, 3
b) Most people’s assessments of LE are affected by factors other than ExU: ExU and LE measures diverge at certain points. Deaton and Kahneman, for example, show that for incomes above $75,000, trends in LE (according to the less presumptive Cantril Scale) and experienced utility are totally different.4
Thus, the GSS is more reliable as a measure of ExU, and should not in fact be used as an LE indicator. I shall therefore use only data from Cantril studies to assess the human lot-as-life-evaluation.
…
The Evidence
Many studies into the relation of absolute income levels to ‘the human lot’ allow us to posit a positive correlation between one’s absolute income and one’s human lot-as both ExU and LE:
The higher a person’s absolute income, the higher their life evaluation tends to be. This correlation is no weaker at higher income levels iff proportional, rather than absolute, income differentials are compared: i.e., a 10% income increase for someone living below the poverty line lifts their LE, on average, as much as a 10% income rise boosts the LE of a millionaire (ceteris paribus), and a similarly proportional relation is found for the relationship of GDP/ capita and average LE across countries. Thus, when LE is plotted against the log of income, a continuous, fairly straight, line with a positive gradient best fits the data. 5,6,7,8
Absolute incomes also correlate positively with experienced utility. Again, the returns to proportional income increases do not diminish- until earnings reach circa $75,000. Above this level, however, little effect of absolute income on ExU is found.9 Thus, the absolute growth of a person’s income up to $75,000 (on average) has a positive effect on the human lot-as-experienced utility, but from this point, further income rises should be expected to improve the human lot only as LE, not as ExU.
Considering all this, it might seem surprising that the post WW2 economic growth of many Western democracies, which took most domestic incomes closer to $75,000, has not brought higher average ExU or LE levels to these countries. The explanation for this phenomenon lies in factors beyond absolute income – in relative incomes, and our competitive consumption and income comparisons.
The absolute income effect on LE and ExU has, in industrialised countries, largely been counterbalanced by the negative relative income effect. Through this effect, the poorer one is relative to one’s “reference group” (the people with whom one primarily compares one’s lot – be they colleagues, neighbours, co-nationals, etc.), the lower one’s life evaluation and experienced utility. Economic growth has, it is posed, failed to substantially improve the human lot in industrialised societies because, despite raising absolute incomes, it has also raised the incomes of others in people’s reference groups, to an extent sufficient to counterbalance the positive effects of higher absolute incomes on LE and ExU.10,11,12
Schor (1999) and Bowles and Parks (2006) enhance support for the relative income hypothesis by showing a mechanism by which this “relative income effect” may be worsening in developed societies. Bowles and Parks show that people more strongly compare their consumption with that of people higher up the “income ladder” than themselves; with each person “looking upwards” to those richer than themselves, and wanting to emulate the consumption of those they see, the consumption of the richest in society has strong “domino effects” that ripple down through the income hierarchy (a phenomenon called the “Veblen effect”).13 When the incomes of the richest rise disproportionately, as has been seen in most industrialised countries since WW2,14 conceptions of necessary and aspirational consumption are thus raised faster than average incomes. Schor adds that the expansion of marketing and mass media has exposed, and made increasingly aspirational, the consumption levels of the super-rich (celebrities, footballers, traders, etc.). Her data shows that with the exponential expansion of mass marketing and mass media, our aspirations for conspicuous consumption have risen faster than our incomes15 (though the attribution problem facing her data is insufficiently resolved). Both phenomena seem to be making it harder for our spending to satisfy us. Our tendency to measure our material ‘lots’ against the ‘lots’ of others, especially those higher up the income ladder, is exerting negative pressure on our subjective ‘human lots’ of a magnitude similar to the positive pressure exerted by our higher absolute incomes.
Frank (2004) helps to complete the picture, not by further elucidating the relative income effect, but by revealing another, related, reason why higher absolute incomes have not improved the human lot as far as economists would have expected. Frank highlights that higher absolute incomes do increase our capacity to control, and hence improve, our lives: there are things we could spend our new money on that would make us happier. But we spend too much on things that don’t make us happy, and too little on things that would. Our tendencies to compare and compete (outlined above), lead us to spend most of our newly disposable income trying to “catch up” with or “out do” the conspicuous consumption of those richer than us, when in fact we adapt very quickly to most objects of conspicuous consumption, so that our purchases fail to make us happier in the long run (Frank does not say explicitly, but implies he’s referring to happiness as measured by GSS-type surveys, and ExU data- so “happiness” here should be read as ExU). For example, many wish to purchase bigger houses or more fashionable clothes or cars, but in the long run, such purchases are not associated with greater happiness.16 Even lottery winners generally report no higher levels of happiness (again, measuring happiness through ExU and GSS-style data) a year or so after their wins.17
Economic growth could improve the human lot, Frank argues, could we overcome this practice of competitive consumption. There are purchasable goods (and “bads” we can avoid through purchases) to which we don’t adapt. For example, time spent socialising is one such good, while commutes to work, unemployment and household poverty are some such bads.18 The implication is, if happiness is our goal, most of us are very inefficient at using our resources so as to maximise it. The good news is, this means that despite relative income effects, were personal spending (or government actions) directed to maximising and minimising our consumption of goods and bads (respectively) to which we do not adapt, the human lot relative to GDP/capita should be improved.
Whether economic growth can improve the human lot thus depend partly on how “hard-wired” these tendencies of comparison and competitive consumption are, and whether, if they are erodible, conditions contrive to so erode them. It may seem we have evolved an ineradicable social competitiveness and jealousy, but most “genetically-evolved” tendencies rely on conducive environmental conditions as well as genes if they are to be realised in phenotypes. Our social competitiveness may, alternatively, be less irrational or short-sighted than some imagine, arising from the rational choices of people who value the maintenance of social status and associates. If competitive consumption is malleable but functional in this way, it seems to arise from a collective action problem, and thus to be eradicable through coordination. Schor, for example, suggests that parents in neighbourhoods collectively agree to limit their spending on fashion goods (etc.) for their children, and that people in a particular sectors collectively commit to limit industry working hours.19 If social competitiveness is malleable but not socially-functional, individuals may be able to simply overcome their aspirations for conspicuous consumption through greater awareness and reflection; such awareness is already seen in those who reject high wage jobs for less well-paid alternatives that are more “rewarding”, and Inglehart (1990) offers convincing evidence that younger generations are successively less materialistic and increasingly value job satisfaction over high wages.20 There are, then, ways in which economic growth could more significantly improve the human lot in future. The grounds for expectations (rather than hopes) of such achievements are, however, not forthcoming.
It is clear that economic growth has failed to improve the human lot to the extent that economists – with their models of self-concerned, rational, informed homo economici – would have expected. We know this is in part due to relative income effects. We do not know exactly which factors determine how far one’s relative income affects one’s experienced utility or life evaluation; how far, and how, the impact of relative income on the human lot can be eroded; or how far people, governments and other organisations can have the power and incentives to distribute resources in ways that really will realise the gains to the domestic human lot made possible by the national GDP. In finally concluding whether, and how far, economic growth does improve the human lot, then, we should want to assess such likelihoods as well as observing historical patterns. A far greater body of research is, therefore, needed.
Footnotes
1. Easterlin, R. A. (1974).
2. Layard, R., Mayraz, G., and Nickell, S. (2006).
3. Frank, R. H. (2004).
4. Deaton, A. and Kahneman, D (2010).
5. Deaton, A. (2008).
6. Kahneman, D. and Krueger, A. B. (2006).
7. Luttmer, E. F. P. (2005).
8. Easterlin, R. A. (2001).
9. Deaton, A. and Kahneman, D. (2010).
10. Easterlin, R. A. (1974).
11. Easterlin, R. A (2001).
12. Luttmer, E. F. P. (2005).
13. Bowles, S. and Park, Y. (2005).
14. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009).
15. Schor, J. B. (1999).
16. Frank, R. H. (2004).
17. Brickman, B., Coates, D. and Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978).
18. Frank, R. H. (2004).
19. Schor, J. B. (1999).
20. Inglehart, R. (1990).
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“Cor! Look At The Mountains On That!” (From my hilly adventures- I hope you enjoy gawping at them too!)
- Lake District, Looking South West from Helvelyn
Secondly, it’s believed by Mackie to be especially high where there was historically a lot of hypergyny (women marrying into higher social class) due to hence polygyny (many wives) at the top levels of society. The many wives of those at the top have to really make their fidelity obvious to their husband, because of the martial competition, and because it’s harder for the husband to monitor many wives’ fidelity. This practise then spreads from the top of society downwards as women from increasingly lower levels compete for upwards social mobility.