Wealth and Time, Self-control and Satisfaction
Avner's third major project, The Challenge of Affluence, shifted ground in both the time periods studied and techniques applied. It also reached for an economic as well as a historical audience and was very widely read, reviewed, praised and criticised.
The subject was the affluent and hedonistic consumer society that emerged in the United States and Britain after 1950. The book kicks off with the core argument: ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being' (Offer 2006: 1). Avner here took aim at the core assumption of neoclassical economics that people were the best judges of their own good. The criticism went beyond the usual behavioural and game- theoretic qualifications of expressed preference utilitarianism, viz. that bounded rationality and coordination problems could impede the instrumental attainment of goals. Avner was more interested in the plentiful social- psychological and survey evidence where people reported stagnation or decline of their happiness levels even as they satisfied their wants. This observation has long been a staple of moralising literature and psychology; Wilde quipped in his 1892 play Lady Windermere’s Fan that it was a much worse tragedy to get what you want than not; Freud in Studies in Hysteria three years later suggested that the task of psychoanalysis was to help modern man attain merely common unhappiness, and there is certainly a tradition in utilitarian ethics of identifying higher and lower forms of well-being (Gintis 2007). Could a rigorous social science of the relation of want-satisfaction to happiness be charted? Avner advanced a new testable hypothesis: that the flow of abundant and novel material and experiential pleasures of late capitalism can undermine the quality of life as evidenced by the indices of reported levels of subjective well-being. Consumption in the affluent society strains the consumer’s capacity to assimilate, enjoy and attend to meaningful life experience, with deleterious effects on intimacy, health and life satisfaction. Material abundance and overexposure to marketing intensified the intrinsic preference for immediate satisfaction, and consequent surges of over-stimulation swamped the capacity for enjoyment. The key to well-being was to bring stimulation into alignment with the capacity for enjoying it.Avner deployed models of hedonic experience and consumer and household decision-making in a series of original test cases examining sources of pleasure (and pain) as varied as advertising, car ownership, dissemination of consumer durables, body weight and self-control, occupational status, inequality, sex and family life. Key to his approach was the problem, being worked out in behavioural economics, of hyperbolic discounting, a form of hedonic myopia that makes temporally distant but significant rewards far more difficult to build into a calculus of decision-making than immediate pleasures or avoidances of pain or effort. Modern affluence had diffused compelling but potentially harmful consumer satisfactions through society, promoting poor-quality foods which caused an obesity crisis inimical to health and self-esteem, and particularly afflicting the poor whose futures were much more uncertain than those of the wealthy. Two chapters examined the frenzy for bigger and gaudier automobiles; Detroit had preferred to manipulate desire by means of unremitting but superficial novelty over investment in durable engineering and safety. The advent of mass auto-ownership contributed to congestion, pollution, suburbanisation and the breakdown of community; a private good generated public bads. Another chapter, co-researched with Sue Bowden, examined the temporal diffusion of domestic consumer durables—cleaning, cooking and entertainment devices—and found that “time-using” entertainment appliances, television and radio, diffused more rapidly than “time-saving” ones, which reduced the workload of housewives. The time saved from housework was transferred into watching television. Consumption was promoted by highly proficient and manipulative advertising that wore a “mask of intimacy”, but ubiquitous commercial speech ultimately undermined trust in all information in the public space and debased the public good of truth and sincerity, of mutual expectations of honesty.
An important bridge between instrumental theories of rational choice and a secular concept of the good life was found in the work of the psychologist George Ainslie. In Picoeconomics (1992), Ainslie modelled the individual as involved in a constant process of bargaining between inter-temporal states of motivation, setting up “commitment devices” to enforce internal deals prioritising future states over near-field pleasures, and repressing self-cheating. Avner demonstrated how the historian and social scientist could expose the cultural inheritance of commitment devices that stinted and gave savour to experience, that afforced the Ainsliean internal deals; and conversely, one could measure the negative impact on utility when such commitments were weakened or abandoned. The temptations of myopia were traditionally countered by social commitment devices like table manners, education, mortgages, marriages, insurance and pensions. Heightened consumer choices and stimuli undermined communal and institutional commitment devices that had slowed down consumption, delayed satiation and maintained appetite and anticipation. The old curbs had constrained immediate pleasures and maintained a more sustainable sense of well-being.
Avner charted changes in family structure, as the patient staging of courtship, sexual initiation and marriage gave way to impatience and restlessness in relationships, with women and children the main victims. Another source of ill-being was the rise in inequality and extension of status ladders. Much wellbeing is generated by being able to compare oneself favourably to others, and to one's past self. Modern consumer capitalism set up a privatised acquisitive arms race that diminished a rough equality of basic goods and made people at the bottom feel like losers, even though they were consuming more than generations past.
The book's chapter on obesity (based on Offer 2001) explicitly treated the condition as a challenge to the rationality assumption in economics.
People regret the overeating that makes them obese even as it happens, and then strive to undo the result by means of slimming and medical treatment. A follow-up analysis demonstrated that English-speaking countries have much higher rates of obesity than European welfare states and shows that overeating is a response to the competitive pressures of market liberalism, to economic insecurity rather than (as argued by others) to inequality (Offer et al. 2010).Avner's achievement in The Challenge of Affluence was to apply a novel combination of behavioural, decisional and welfare models across a varied historical canvass composed of carefully gathered and measured data: ‘I have woven the argument from the whole range of evidence: this is both social science and history' (Offer 1989: 11). The book could also be read as a sustained attack on much of modern economics and the public policies that economics supports or justifies. Data showed that economic growth and increased GDP per head did not promote subjective happiness. Indeed, efforts to increase prosperity measured in material terms might actively undermine the capacity for well-being.
What, then, was the appropriate measure of happiness? Myopic limitations on rationality and the unmanageable abundance of information prevented the self-referential individual from properly assessing all available options across any longer period of time; in modern economic theory, everything was driven by individual choice, but social science had also generated plentiful evidence that meaningful maximising of utility over time was impossible. Instead, Avner embraced an older political—or better, moral—economy. In an influential article (Offer 1997, developed in Offer 2006: Chapter 5), he introduced the concept of “the economy of regard”, in which aspiration was guided not by self-interest but by a quest for approbation. Exchange was started by a unilateral gift which elicited a discretionary response, starting off a cycle of mutually beneficial reciprocity.
The idea originates in Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. In another article, Avner showed that the concept of “sympathy” was an intrinsic capacity which was required to establish a social order driven by our concern for the good opinion of others (Offer 2012b).Avner's arguments were criticised by many economists, reasserting their well-rehearsed intuitions that more was not less, that choices were empowering and the meeting of needs and wants was generally pleasant (Gintis 2007). Such critics may have missed that Avner was really cleaving to an adapted utilitarianism, expanding the measures of happiness to include inter-subjective experience, self-esteem and approbation derived from mutuality and obligation. He also, in effect, displaced instrumental rationality, the efficient adaptation of means to reach discretionary goals. Instead, he preferred a model of judgement and taste guided by culture as a good in itself, and also better suited to deal with the decisional challenges of time discounting and future uncertainty. Friendly critics (Oswald and Powdthavee 2007) suggested that there was a sting in the tail of such social measures of well-being and reason: in an affluent society of impatient, over-consuming, miserable and ill individuals, one's self image and canons of judgement, born of comparison to others, might settle into a low equilibrium, normalised by one's social surrounds and expectations. This insight has been supported by later research on the flaws of contemporary capitalism, especially with the decline of meaningful work, the fraying of community and the unavailability of decent health care causing increased “deaths of despair” in contemporary America (Case and Deaton 2020).
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