Fatalism, Polling Data and Experimental Philosophy

I think this has been studied, and cross-cultural differences have been found to exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_Control

For what it is worth, my personal experience is that there are very significant differences between Europeans and Americans on this issue. Consider how difficult it is to get most Americans to accept social explanations for common events. I think many Americans don’t even intuitively understand social explanations.

When the housing bubble burst and economic collapse hit it was very easy to get people to believe that it was due to some sort of personal behavior. Yes, they saw it as collective but many assumed it was due to particular people having houses that were too large for them, etc. Individual Americans had become too greedy and charged up their charge cards–that was the first meme out of the block. Even now, many people don’t get that larger social and economic causes played a role. When there is 25% real unemployment you have people insisting that every unemployed person should get a job. And I think these are well meaning people–but they honestly believe that since there are actual jobs open in the country, each person should get one and it is their own fault if they don’t. This kind of thinking is so much less common in Europe. It honestly seems to me as if Europeans tend to reason differently than Americans about social and economic events and are more willing to regard others in their society as at the mercy of those events.

I’ve often thought that what I’m referring to as the European view is much more true while the (somewhat distorted) American view has the potential to be advantageous to the individual. There is a sense in which believing you are the master of your own fate makes you willing to try things and take chances that can lead to better outcomes. Fatalism saps motivation. At the same time, the European view makes people better citizens since they are less likely to blame their fellow citizens for their misfortunes and more likely to see their fate as shared with others.

It may be that Americans willingness to accept a punitive (or retributive) perspective toward fellow Americans is due to this different emphasis on the person’s total responsibility for their fate–but I think I’ve wildly speculated enough for one blog comment.

I’m intentionally answering before looking at the links in the last two comments. although I think having read them and thinking for 39 seconds has already biased me.

I would call my circumstance about 50% personal initiative, 40% circumstance, 10% random factors. I’m an outlier, in that by economic measurements, I’ve gained an order or magnitude over my last generation (modulo feedback mechanisms based on quaint notions).

I have a relative who is a generation older than me, and who hasn’t done well. He has his problems, including self-caused health issues that are catching up. I asked him some questions a while back that were, although not like this, and informal (and this is anecdata, of course) and he was happy to cop to 95% personal responsibility for his plight.

It would be interesting to try to test the extent to which U.S. Americans privatize personal failure and socialize success stories (Steve Jobs: The Movie is apparently in the works). I’m on the professional side of the divide, I have no idea how to go about asking that in a rigorous way.

69/31, which explains my political philosophy quite nicely: very sympathetic to libertarians, yet frustrated when they don’t acknowledge the role of luck and circumstances on personal outcomes.

a punitive (or retributive) perspective

The trouble is, it’s both. A coherent retributivism would pay due attention to cardinal as well as ordinal proportionality – not just making the determination “is crime A a bit worse than crime B?” (something which the US justice system has off to a fine art) but also anchoring the scale at a low enough point to match the triviality of the least serious crimes, while leaving enough headroom for the most serious crimes to receive the most severe sentences humanely possible. It seems to me that the retributivism of the US system is distorted by the unstated assumption that just about everyone who comes through the door needs punishing good and hard – and the worse offenders, why, they need punishing even harder.

It also seems a bit strange to treat divergent judgments as different character traits or personality types

Yes, this is one of the things that makes psychology look silliest. As you might imagine, I see this kind of problem a lot in dreadful research about ‘belief in conspiracy theories’.

One might think this especially odd since another thing I also see in literature of the CT-WTF-LOL genre is a good deal of mention of the supposed ‘fundamental attribution error’.

@Khan, the first problem for a libertarian in acknowledging the role of luck, is it usually a precursor to picking his pocket. It’s considered polite to attribute one’s success to luck but if the chap is going to follow that up with “therefore you owe me half your money” he will get a defensive response instead.

The second problem is that oft times people will try to tell you that native talent is a matter of luck. If you count native talent as a one’s birthright, and restrict “luck” to things outside of oneself, you can begin to have a conversation. If you consider native talent to be luck, you are having a political disagreement with your interlocutor, not an empirical one.

Of course luck has a large role – but as Hayek pointed out (Constitution of Liberty), it’s impossible to tell in general whether someone’s success is largely luck or whether it is largely talent and work. The person best placed to know is the man himself and he will find it difficult to acknowledge the opportunities he missed if he is intent on mooching! So if you try to redistribute the benefit due to luck you will also redistribute the benefit due to hard work and talent, discouraging both to the detriment of society as a whole.

Finally of course the whole argument assumes that opportunities are rare, such that only a few ever get them. But if chances are common enought that everyone gets several, while they may individually be due to luck, overall life success is not. How many chances do you get? I am not really sure but I know people who could be comfortably off and successful but instead are drifters and moochers, because they throw away chance after chance, and squander their obvious talents .

As Jefferson said “I am a great believer in luck – and I find the harder I work the more I have of it”.

Turn this question around: to what extent did the Columbine killers do so because of circumstances, or because of their own will? As Claudia Strauss showed [article in Current Anthropologist], this question raises a huge debate, and demonstrates how variable and varying opinion is in the US. It might be better to ask, ‘what rhetorical work is being done when blame / responsibility is being attributed to a person or to circumstances?’

Strauss places in evidence a campaign in her child’s school, which has a substantial population of kids bussed in from the inner city. Posters were put up with the messages ‘Make good choices’ and ‘you choose to make good choices’. When a kid did something objectionable, a note was sent home saying ‘X had a time out today. He chose to … [throw a rock, run in the hallway, etc.]’.

Sure, this inculcates that idea of personal agency and responsibility in spades. But note too that, in that atmosphere, you could never just be a kid. You could never just do something because of high spirits. You would have that embarrassing judgment laid on you from the outset. Powerful and, to my way of thinking, damaging rhetoric.

I find that the more my parents have good genes, feed me well and provide me with a stimulating environment where worries about shelter, heating, stability etc do not arise, send me to a good school and take an interest in my education, in a society where there are good schools and medical care, and I don’t suffer from easily curable diseases or bombs dropped on my head by well-meaning foreigners… the more native talent I have.

I’m busy feeling disturbed by what seems to be the implication of the psychological studies that what matters is one’s individual balance between internality and externality, with the nature of the external forces being entirely irrelevant to this. In other words, a belief in the existence and importance of social and economic structures, or on environmental constraints and the ‘limits of the possible’ in Braudelian terms, is really no different from a belief in astrology, and hence it’s little more than chance that someone with a predominantly external locus of control should fixate on the movements of the stars rather than the forces of class society or vice versa.

Ben – happily, we don’t have to go back in time, because there are new people being born every day. And we can make sure all of these new people are provided with food, shelter, medicine, and education, regardless of how lucky they were in the parents they were born with or country they were born in. (which won’t eliminate luck entirely, but would go quite a long way)
Then the hard workers will have the reward of knowing that their success has less to do with luck, and more to do with virtue. So everyone is happy.

@Mandos:
“This is, of course, the standard propertarian slight of hand, to limit the discussion of luck by defining a concept of “birthright” beforehand. ”

This is, of course, the standard communitarian sleight of hand, to limit the discussion of luck by denying the concept of birthright.

In each case the foundational assumption drives the conclusion. Of course it does: How could it be otherwise? It’s a logical argument, so the conclusions can only be different if the axioms are different. So it is a political question at root: Are people entitled to their very selves, or are they chattels of the state?

“I’m very much in favour of the state picking the pockets of such people.”

Of course you are.

I’m pretty high on the “it’s my own fault” end of the scale. Having a bit of a tendency towards depression inclines me to a degree of objectivity regarding my own life, (“Depressive realism”) and as Orwell said, “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” How can I attribute my present circumstances to fate, when I can clearly identify a series of decision points where I screwed up my own life? Even in some cases knowing quite well I was making a mistake…

I also wonder where the utility is in attributing one’s circumstances to fate. Very few people are actually in situations where they have no control at all over their lives; We may live like ships at sea, unable to control the wind, but it’s up to us whether we run with it or tack. In the short run this may not mean much, but it has a powerful long term influence on your life.

Accordingly, it’s not terribly useful to discount the effectiveness of one’s own choices.

Evidently the French have a low opinion of themselves as people, because I find it difficult to imagine that they’ve suddenly stopped believing in the superiority of their culture.

On the main topic, why are we forced to choose? “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

A couple of links in, you find Charles Blow declaring The Decline of American Exceptionalism.

bq. Perhaps even more striking was that, among young people (those ages 18 to 29), the percentage of Americans who believed that their culture was superior was lower than young citizens of Germany, Spain and Britain … We are settling into a dangerous national pessimism … We have to stop snuggling up to nostalgia, acknowledge that we have allowed a mighty country to be brought low and set a course to restitution. And that course is through hard work and tough choices. You choose greatness; it doesn’t choose you.

Which brings us back on topic, I guess.

I agree with you.

Further, I am teaching a module on research design, and I am bringing this one to the lectures, see what my students think about it. Thanks!

Given how subjective the meaning of these questions are, it would make sense that different countries would register different interpretations, and thus different answers – even though they may actually have similar philosophies or theories of mind.

For instance, in John’s quiz, I answered that I believe 100% in fate, as I see the physical universe as completely determined. But that’s quite different than an idea of fate as being directed by a supernatural force. Moreover I clearly make recognizable choices in my life. It’s juts that those choices, arising from prior causes, will have always been set.

Also, I believe that people have no ultimate freedom of will. Yet I believe we have will, and that consciousness can be greater or lesser. So we can be aware of different options, and have more choice. But that choice will always have come out of a determinative process, thus not ultimately free at all. However many people, in complete agreement with my intuition, would describe the situation quite differently.

@chris:

“So if you try to redistribute the benefit due to luck you will also redistribute the benefit due to hard work and talent, discouraging both to the detriment of society as a whole.”

I think you just palmed a card there—talent IS due to luck. But even leaving that aside… true talent isn’t in it for the money anyway. The really great scientists, or writers, or inventors who really contribute to the advance of society are doing what they do because it’s what they want to do.

I didn’t palm the card – it was explicit in my first comment “If you consider native talent to be luck … you are having a political disagreement [with a libertarian]”.

Bully for the really great ones? Beethoven, probably. Einstein, definitely. But your average plumber, mechanic, physician? He can easily get into the top income tax bracket. Yes, he will enjoy his work – it is possible to enjoy almost any job, particularly if you have the pride of being good at it. But do you really think he has nothing he would rather be doing? I don’t think so.

Even if talent is something which is undeserved and should be appropriated – which I don’t agree with since to me it is an intrinsic part of the self – it still needs to be developed by hard work. Appropriating the value of talent will discourage it from being developed.

I didn’t palm the card – it was explicit in my first comment “If you consider native talent to be luck … you are having a political disagreement [with a libertarian]”.

That *was* the card-palming.

“I find that the more my parents have good genes, feed me well and provide me with a stimulating environment where worries about shelter, heating, stability etc do not arise, send me to a good school and take an interest in my education, in a society where there are good schools and medical care, and I don’t suffer from easily curable diseases or bombs dropped on my head by well-meaning foreigners… the more native talent I have.”

I want to print off this comment, laminate it, frame it and mount it on my wall.

…And, of course, this interacts tremendously with attitudes toward race and especially sex. Girls at some point absorb the idea that girls don’t have the math knack.

Odd that this discussion goes on without any reference to the revolution in the science of brain development over the last 20 years or so, and the linkage to the developments in environmental science. It is now established beyond question that the development and functioning of the brain structures that condition an individual’s capacity for impulse control, concentration, learning, “executive function” generally, are in turn conditioned by the pregnant/nursing mother’s environment and experiences — because such determine the nutritional/hormonal/chemical input to the fetus and infant, which in turn determine levels of gene expression and brain structure development in the fetus/infant.

chris@29 on mistaking success for virtue

If you actually play games of combined skill and chance, you’re probably already familiar with the fact that sometimes you played right and lost anyway. So why is that principle so hard for some people to apply to life?

Very nicely summed up. I have long suspected that what decides how far to the left of the politics line you are is your summed human empathy and understanding of probability.

Yeah, this whole “profligate Greece” thing is nuts. They’d still have been in trouble if they had been paying their taxes. When? Might have been later, for all we know. But you can’t have an overconsuming Greece without having an overexporting Germany…

bert:

Charles Blow: “Perhaps even more striking was that, among young people (those ages 18 to 29), the percentage of Americans who believed that their culture was superior was lower than young citizens of Germany, Spain and Britain … We are settling into a dangerous national pessimism … We have to stop snuggling up to nostalgia, acknowledge that we have allowed a mighty country to be brought low and set a course to restitution. And that course is through hard work and tough choices.”

I was with Blow (as quoted) up until that last sentence. One of our TV stations has been showing “Paladin” reruns, which seem to me to reflect pretty well the American values of the time. Self-sufficiency is important, of course, as is heroism. But so is community. Forging civilization in the Wild West demanded it. There is no shortage of hard work in America. (I don’t know about the people that Blow hangs out with.) Nor is there a shortage of tough choices. But the sense of community is fractured. The Me Generation seems to have led to an every-man-for-himself ethic. But as Red Green says, “We’re all in this together.” The sense of community is what has to be restored, IMO.

OCS@37: I think people who emphasize personal responsibility are paying attention to the tails (a few poor people end up doing well, a few rich people do badly). I tend to pay attention to the big middle and figure it’s circumstance.

I wonder if people are reading “success” as “not becoming a total loser.” It doesn’t seem unreasonable to hold people responsible for, say, not drinking too much. Also, I guess, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for a factory worker to think, “I could have gone to college and become a manager and even a CEO if I’d wanted to boss other people around and work 100 hour weeks, or I could have joined a rock band and played filthy bars every night if I’d wanted to, but I’m pretty happy as I am, and I’m responsible for the kind of success I have.” It doesn’t seem unreasonable to think, “Justin Bieber is successful because he’s talented and works hard and takes care of his skin.” Is what comes to mind that, or whether the CEO of GM got where he was by luck, or by hard work and merit?

Chris Bertram@6:
But Gladwell gives more than enough data to show that the issue isn’t birth date but the unconscious choices made by coaches, and implies that parents, say, could “game the system” by buying their kids extra help, or that younger kids could demand extra help or otherwise show that they’re worth the extra effort. I’m never really sure what his point is (until I read the media coverage and find out what the experts think he’s saying).

Michael@14:
The language used when discussing, for example, middle school kids messaging nude pictures of themselves and one another, is, often: “they lack judgment.” I honestly don’t know if this is supposed to be expected at their age (so the technology should be taken away from them or more closely monitored), or if there’s supposed to be a problem with vast numbers of eleven year olds who lack judgment (who are the ones doing the messaging).

Not being familiar with the term, “dog whistle question”, I did a web search. Here is the best thing I found:

“I bought a silent dog whistle and it says to blow on it and screw the little nut back and forth until you find your dogs frequency. My question is this, it makes a noise the whole time; does this mean i am a dog or wolf like in the movie Teen Wolf?”

;)

From http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070919172637AA3HUMW

…it is possible to enjoy almost any job, particularly if you have the pride of being good at it.

Millions of people people who have worked on the floor at Walmart, Starbucks or a call-center would disagree. (There are more – those are just the fundamentally unenjoyable jobs I have first-hand experience of.)

People believe whatever they are destined to believe. Pollsters poll whatever they are destined to poll.

The “locus of control” idea is interesting, though. Do we think people ought to have a more internal locus of control, generally, or less? Do we think workers ought to have a high l-o-c or low? Do we think rich kids ought to have a high l-o-c or low? Even, do the words “internal” and “external” have the same meaning everywhere (I’m thinking of some theological beliefs, like AA’s, which lays heavy stress on lack of personal control but might seem to use all the rhetoric of strong internal l-o-c.)

Also remember the Stephen Potter insight, from Gamesmanship; if you happen to be ahead at halftime in the match, it’s much more effective to attribute it to luck (“No, I’m a fearful duffer, I just happen to be having one of those inexplicable runs when you can’t do a thing wrong”) than to skill, in that your opponent will then be discouraged and put off his game by the thought that he’s fighting not you but heaven.

Hee. Ben probably would have shown up regardless of what I said, but I can’t help feeling a bit like I trolled him into defending libertarianism against attacks from all sides. That wasn’t my intention. In fact, Ben, I think you read too much into my “frustrated” comment and not enough into my “very sympathetic” comment. I actually agree with you more than most others in this thread. Think of me as being 2/3 on your side. (BTW, I’m also a “Ben”, so this whole experience feels a bit like arguing with myself.)

I believe that if one assumes (as you seem to) that, regardless of childhood circumstances, people entering adulthood must take full responsibility for their talent and good judgment, or lack thereof (others CTers clearly disagree, but I’ll get to that) … If you assume that, then take the sum of all internal and external influences across all the outcomes of the entire population, I believe personal choices account for well north of 75% of the outcomes. Granted, within that overall distribution, some individuals get much more than their share of bad luck, which is sometimes too much to overcome.

Moreover, I truly do think it is fair to judge individual adults without taking their childhoods into account, even if they had very bad luck in the past – be it bad genetics, bad upbringing, or other bad circumstances. Regardless of how they came to be the person they are, you must judge them by the decisions they make in the here and now.

Here’s a microcosm, which serves both as an example and as an explanation of my own perspective: I’ve known two individuals, my best friend and my step-brother, since I was twelve years old. My best friend has suffered from severe health problems his entire life, lost his mother at an early age, and was raised by an abusive asshole of a father. When my friend finally called the cops at the age of 15, he went to live in a group home for the next two years. (Fun fact: abuse cases like my friend typically get thrown into what amounts to a halfway house for juvy, where the delinquents outnumber them by about 10:1.) Despite all of this, my friend is quite successful today, pursuing a career in journalism.

My step-brother didn’t have any health problems, and was never abused. He had access to everything I had, and I turned out pretty well, IMHO. He’s not inherently stupid, at least in conversation. And yet, he was expelled from three high-schools, barely passed the GED, then went to a not-very-difficult college on his mother’s dime but dropped out after less than a semester. All this was overlaid by a string of petty crimes and personal betrayals. By now he has been effectively disowned by most members of the family.

Many CTers clearly think these two individuals are the exceptions and not the rule; however, my general experience with people who regularly receive bad outcomes is that they usually have poor attitudes and poorer work ethics, and vice-versa for the good outcomes.

That’s what I meant by being “very sympathetic to libertarians”.

But.

Three things: First, my friend’s “severe health problems” were caused by congenital birth defects, which required an average of one or two surgeries per year for the first decade of his life. His annual medical bills were regularly in the low to mid six figures; he survived only because the state paid those bills. Some bad luck is obviously independent of choice – even in the eyes of outside observers, whatever Hayek may have said.

Second, yes, if you wish to resolve all forms of bad outcome via direct hand-outs, then you’re certainly conflating bad luck with bad choices. However, accident and illness can usually be attributed much more to luck than they can to choice. As such, I’m okay with the idea of collectivist health care.

Third, I believe that it is in my own rational self-interest – that it is in everyone’s self-interest, whether or not they are rational enough to realize it – to ensure the human race produces the largest quantity possible of well-educated, self-sufficient, self-motivated adults. Doing this effectively and cost-efficiently requires universal services (notably high-quality education and affordable health care), which in turn require universal contribution.

That’s what I meant by being “frustrated” with libertarians.

FWIW, I debate politics all the time with that best friend of mine. This post made it especially clear to me that our biggest difference is one of psychology. He’s much more external than I am (understandably so, despite his success in overcoming external agents); our arguments amount to me trying to talk him out of what I see as fatalism, and him trying to talk me out of what he sees as a lack of empathy.

One assumption that might be questioned is that a lack of belief in personal control will foster attitudes that are not conducive to success. This is a bit too simple – there are multiple, connected beliefs involved.

Classical Greeks and Romans believed outcomes were in the hands of fortuna, Norse thought fate governed what happened, and Calvinists believed the ultimate outcome was God’s predestined choice. But none of these cultures are remarkable for lying back and taking it easy. One can see life as a game one is doomed to lose, but still believe that one should play as hard as one can. And presumably vice versa. And other variations.

And one finding of neuro-science is that our brains do not form unless given all kinds of input from other people – we are all built by and from other people. In some sense, my sense of myself is a cultural illusion. I personally find it hard to credit myself with having invented language, notions of free will and liberty, or a two millenia old heritage of political philosophy. But I think I would make a poor fist of life without them – and the countless other ghosts of the past in my head.

WL@60: “does that really mean we can’t say we are entitled to the resources we are asked to use on behalf of others?”

You can certainly say it, and some will and some won’t. None of them should think they are making a statement of objective fact. These beliefs are more akin to the mythical explanations of religion. They are not scientific, not based on methodical inspection of mechanism and function in the objective world, though they may be, as social and personal psychology, part of the mechanism of social culture. They explain “meaning”. So, of course, many rich people would prefer an interpretation of the “meaning” of their own wealth, which is flattering to themselves. And, many poor people might prefer an interpretation that does not compel them to challenge a social order as unjust, especially an order in which they are relatively powerless, and therefore likely to lose in such a challenge.

I think one can safely say that these beliefs are likely to be diverse, for the same reason that strategies are, typically, diverse: there’s a complementarity advantage.

I believe that we are all inexorably fated to the inescapable exercise of free will.

It’s not some intermediate point between 100% and 0%, it’s both 100% and 0% at the same time. Which is probably one reason people so readily answer either 100% or 0%.

Perhaps it would be interesting to shift to what exactly is meant by ‘success in life’. Myself, I always think of that as a triad – having a full internal life, having good work, and finally being able to love and be loved. Even if I believed that my ego really controls some little piece of real estate in the world, namely me, it does seem that – at least as I am thinking of a successful life – I am way too dependent on others (peoples and structures) to claim that I create that success. For instance, there is no guarantee that the people I love will love me back. Good work (which is much different from hard work – to define work primarily in terms of one’s disinclination to do it strikes me as a good reason to think it isn’t the work for you) may be hard to find, or may become other in the course of one’s life. In facct, we have a folk psychology of ‘mid life crises’ that is about one’s work becoming meaningless. The one thing that seems most under control is having a full internal life – a life of meditation, daydreams, etc. Yet I can’t think of an element in contemporary American life that is given less value or room. That is because, I think, an internal life is not part of any sort of exchange system, and doesn’t really require recognition. Money and fame seem like the surface attributes of a successful life, which are both extremely other oriented and tug against an inner life.

It would also be interesting to slice it three ways: (1) external social forces vs. (2) hard work/free will/choices vs. (3) inborn, immutable genetic qualities.

Fine, but the thing (1) and (3) have in common is that since they’re not voluntary, they don’t respond to incentive structures directed at the individual. That’s why you’re not really losing explanatory power for the purposes of this question by collapsing them into “external causes”.

Also, I’m not sure you can really completely disentangle (2) and (3) anyway. Aren’t there known genetic predispositions to addiction, for example? So is developing an addiction a (bad) choice, or isn’t it?

Or, for that matter, (2) and (1). Who would choose to be athletes if they weren’t lionized by society? Far fewer, clearly. But choosing athleticism as a career goal is quite risky — I hesitate to condemn it outright as “bad” when it worked so well for e.g. Michael Jordan, but there’s lots of other people who try to become athletes but never make the big time and have to try to find something else at the last minute after devoting a lot of whatever time and resources they have to their failed attempt at an athletic career. If they made the same choice as Jordan, does that mean they chose well but were defeated by outside factors? Or Jordan chose poorly but succeeded anyway through talent and luck? Or that the right choice depends on what talent you have, and the failed athletes’ real problem is that they didn’t recognize soon enough that they aren’t talented enough to make it in the big time? (Surely the cultural drumbeat of “you can do anything if you work at it hard enough” has something to do with this… if you *can’t* become Jordan by working at it hard enough, then society lied to them and they believed it; how blameworthy is that, exactly?)

Even if talent is something which is undeserved and should be appropriated

Appropriated? Who suggested that? If you’re defining any tax rate greater than zero as “appropriation” then you *are* having a political argument… with the entire rest of the world.

Taxes are not a punishment and any rate less than 100% is not appropriation. And as long as the marginal tax rate is less than 100%, people with more pretax income will still have more posttax income so that the incentive to make more pretax income is not destroyed.

BTW, I’d like to know how to deserve more talent. And if I do manage to behave in a way such that I deserve more talent, will I get it? I doubt it. (Indeed, since much of a person’s talent allocation is determined before they could possibly have taken any voluntary action whatsoever, to allocate talent according to people’s deserts would require causality violation.) Economic Calvinism is just as much BS as the original. But I guess it’s the destiny of threads like this to have it brought up anyway…

@71:

“That is because, I think, an internal life is not part of any sort of exchange system, and doesn’t really require recognition.”

Oh, dear. Think again.

@Michael: Thanks for referencing the excellent article by Claudia Strauss.

@76:

No, roger, I don’t want to steal your in-f-able day-dreams from you. But I would assume that you know that even your most recondite day-dreams, insofar as they have any coherence, are motivated by a desire for recognition, and that engaging in private activity, such as, say, reading a novel, derives much of its “value” from “systems of social exchange”. O.K., back now to ma fool eener laif.

John, I think the total penetration of recognition into the inner life is, in the Western culture, something that arose as a result of the sort of accidental creation of a youth culture. When the stem-household pattern broke apart in the 16th century in Western Europe, I think it unleashed a certain cultural pattern in which, on the one hand, young men were liberated from the responsibility of raising a family within a paternal household run by an older male, while at the same time burdening them with the responsibility to set up households on their own. I think the competition for recognition gradually expanded over the age groups and sexes, but, in fact, I still think that mostly, people have inner lives that may produce representations that are intended to be exchanged, or for which they expect recognition, but which are certainly separate from that later moment. Granted, we now live in cultures where the circumstances of a young twenty something male just out of college has become assumed as the model self, the self-made man (a contradiction in terms that points to the genesis of the myth as related to age), or the way we really are, in the narratives of economists, policy makers and pundits, but I think that this is a very blind way of looking at the world, projecting as an unchanging state of affairs a set of rather unique circumstances that quickly change in the life span, even as that model – set going in the socius – now pursues everyone up until the time they die.

Considering the question of self agency and external controls is an interesting and fruitful exercise in theory and for self development and understanding.

However, I think the most relevant arena this plays out is in our social-economic sphere, with a great assist from a cultural-media complex overpopulated by bloviating blowhards like Newt Gingrich, leaves us with an essential dilemma: how do these apparently opposing and exclusive world views affect the health of our society?

Of course, self agency and external controls both play a role in our individual “outcomes” (what a despicable term, redolent of business and social service metrics fetishists).

Let me offer an example of a man I know, senior vice president at Bank of America, convinced that his own brilliance is solely responsible for his “success,” who rails against the low-income mortgagees who crashed the economy because of their lack of “personal responsibility,” continually points to the success of the rare homeless person (handing out copies of the loathsome “Pursuit of Happyness), is pleased with Bloomberg’s unprecedented and criminal stop and frisk’s of 600,000 non-white youths in NYC, claiming it’s not racism, it’s “only” because they’re low-income(!), which makes it OK (he’s also black). Has a disabled sister that has lived her entire life in the bottom 5% and offers her nothing but pompous lectures on her “personal responsibility.”

In short, an utterly despicable corporate cog, who takes full advantage of the moral absolution he thinks this self-made man delusion confers upon him, and which is mostly dependent on his relentless disparagement of those less affluent. Not less accomplished, not less generous, kind, just, righteous, moral or simply human, but affluent.

This is the kind of…person…that emerges from the foul dogma of Hayek and Rand and Gingrich and Greenspan, et al.

In the previous post, please replace “person” with “monster.”

There is another area in which the interaction between advocates of the personal choice brigade and the externality folks plays out.

Most of social service, drug treatment and corrections is predicated on the idea that you fix a deficient individual, to the exclusion of creating healthy environment; health, housing, education and meaningful “opportunity” (another loaded concept).

While I’m all for helping people towards self actualization, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, or especially well when punitive stimulus is applied.
And we all know how well fixing the brains of the morally deficient has worked.

I enjoyed the poll. The responses of different groups about cultural superiority are interesting. (p.7) The fact that the Germany spent a large part of the second half of the preceding century either under some form of totalitarianism or under the supervision of external authorities may explain, in part, why so many Germans believe that their lives are shaped by forces outside their control. The breakdowns along age and educational lines provide plenty of fodder for discusssion. All in all a good read. Thanks for the link.

piglet, the existence of talent lotteries shows that rare and large rewards motivate people to a very large extent. Your argument is that people aren’t motivated by the dream of being successful to develop particular skills. While a tenured professor might be underpaid compared to some professions, its not something that people would do for free. The possibility of that motivates people to try. As for the rewarding of rare skills, most people are capable of learning the skills used in the neolithic. That’s not the case for higher mathematics or science: some very smart and intelligent people struggle in calculus because of the level of quantification and abstraction involved.

So in the neolithic world where everyone can do everything we would expect a broadly similar patter of wealth. Once we get to a world where some jobs have to be done by very particular people, that is going to change. A doctor who can save your life commands a higher fee then one who will ineffectively prescribe herbs that will do nothing if you are lucky.

Someone who chooses to be an artist or an athlete is clearly aware that they are gambling on a very rare event. Even if their ultimate success is beyond their control after that, they are still responsible for having made that gamble instead of picking a more certain path. So the choices of what skills we will invest in are motivated by reward and are not simply the result of intrinsic talent. A baby does not wake up with a determinant set of skills.