John Kenneth Galbraith, in his classic The Affluent Society (1952) formulated a powerful argument he called the “dependence effect.” In a nutshell, the idea is that capitalist societies create wants in individuals in order to then satisfy them. Perhaps the central tool in this process is advertising. Galbraith suggested that the additional wants generated through advertising might not even lead to additional welfare. People’s level of preference satisfaction before being exposed to advertising can be just as high as after the exposure. Viewed from his angle, advertising is wasteful from a societal perspective, because the costs involved do not generate any tangible benefits. The reason firms engage in it is solely to secure more market share than their competitors.
Month: April 2022
In social psychology, there is a small industry for articles reporting positive correlations between measures of self-control and various measures of socio-economic status and achievement. For example, Tangney, Baumeister and Boone (2008) found that self-control, measured on a self-report scale they devised, is correlated with better grades, somatic and mental health, and stable social relationships such as marriage. Moffitt et al. (2011) conducted a longitudinal study that followed children who had participated in the Mischel “marshmallow tests” to the age of 32 years old, and found childhood performance in that delayed gratification assignment to be correlated with measures of health and economic success, interpersonal adjustment, and with criminal justice outcomes, even after controlling for childhood socio-economic factors.
Studies like these have been widely publicised, and the message in popular science media often leads with the idea that self-control is a stable trait that some have, some don’t. The ones who were dealt a losing hand in self-control got a losing hand overall, ending up with poor health, poverty, unstable relationships, and crime not out of ill will, but because they simply can’t hold it together. In short, the causal arrow goes from poor self-control to socioeconomic disadvantage.
This line of thinking has received plenty of criticism. Some have pointed out that the studies have been designed from a perspective assuming a middle-class lifestyle, and that self-control may not be as adaptive for people from all backgrounds.
This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Lisa Herzog and Albert Dzur
Albert Dzur is Distinguished Research Professor at Bowling Green State University, where his work focuses on citizen participation and power-sharing in criminal justice, healthcare, public administration and education.
This is a guest post by Stanislas Richard. Stan is a research fellow at the Dr. Rachelle Bascara Foundation and is visiting at the Central European University. The post discusses his thoughts on the role of enticements to desert could play in war.
Should we pay soldiers to desert? Should we, for instance, give financial incentives to the Russian soldiers currently invading Ukraine to lay down arms? And what role should such Enticements to Desert (ED) play in peacekeeping and de-escalation policy? This post sketches some answers to these questions.
If you have any experience teaching, you likely have experience grading. Grades are often considered an important part of teaching, for example because they are thought to motivate students. However, while grading, ranking and classifying has become the norm in many places (a development which only really kicked off in the late 19th century), many teachers are trying to move away from crude metrics. Some even go as far as doing away with grades completely. For this post in our series on teaching philosophy, Justice Everywhere spoke to Dr Marcus Schultz-Bergin (Cleveland State University), about his attempts to deprioritize grading and his experience with going completely gradeless in one Philosophy of Law course. He has detailed his experience on his blog, and a version of his reflections on gradeless teaching has also been published in a new book about “ungrading”.