The Joy of Economics:  Making Sense out of Life
 Robert J. Stonebraker, Winthrop University
 

 Consumption Skills

            All human evil stems from one fact alone: man's inability to sit still.

                                                                                                            .....Blaise Pascal

            Charlie Schneider did it.  Charlie lived down the hall in my University of Maryland dormitory¹ and loved opera.  Majoring in French, he also had taught himself Italian and German by listening, libretto in hand, to Puccini and Wagner.

            Me?  I was double majoring in mathematics and sloth, and gritted my teeth at the mere thought of foreign languages.  I did enjoy music, but my tastes began and ended with Dick Clark's American Bandstand -- a sort of prehistoric MTV.  Opera, complete with overweight, melodramatic sopranos and bearded, red-faced tenors, was not for me.  That I had never seen nor listened to an opera did not matter. Opera was not for me.

            I was wrong.  Charlie lured me with the legend behind Wagner's The Flying Dutchman without hinting that it had any connection with opera.²  Once I rose for the bait, he sprung the trap.  Oh treachery.  He began with a single song -- the Sailors' Chorus.   It was accessible, rousing, and vaguely familiar.  I nibbled.  Moving in for the kill, Charlie set his hook with Senta's melodic ballad Traft ihr das Schiff, and reeled me in with the finale: the Dutchman, Erik, and Senta in an exhilarating trio.  It was over.  Opera was for me. 

            I do still enjoy more popular songs.  When flicking through the channels, I still pause at MTV -- especially when Mariah Carey or Jewel flash across the screen.  But, they do not compare favorably.  The emotional range of Michael Jackson's voice pales beside that of Luciano Pavarotti, and nothing that Britney Spears has ever recorded can match the beauty or pathos of Madame Butterfly's Un bel di.  Thank you, Charlie.

The economics of boredom   

            What's my conversion to opera got to do with economics?  Plenty.  Economists assume that consumers try to maximize their happiness or utility.  We often highlight products like food and shelter, goods that create comforts.  However, people cannot live by bread alone -- or even hot fudge sundaes.  We need stimulation; we need excitement.  The real economic problem of our era might not be unemployment or even physical poverty.  The real problem might be boredom. 

            In The Joyless Economy, economist Tibor Scitovsky insisted that we are restless and unable to use our leisure time in a constructive or satisfying manner; that we "are unskilled and unprepared for making enjoyable and socially acceptable use" of the leisure modern civilization has afforded us.³  To him, the challenge of modern society is not to produce more intelligently, but to consume more intelligently.

            Physical activity is one way of relieving boredom, mental stimulation is another.  We need both.  Many of us find ample challenge and stimulation in our day‑to‑day work.  Many do not.  Boredom is most apparent among the unemployed elderly and youth.  Retirement homes struggle to ease the boredom of their residents, a boredom that can destroy the physical health as quickly as the mental health of its victim.  The idle youth of America seem more successful in finding activities that provide excitement.  Unfortunately, as media reports remind us daily, not all of them are constructive.

            Since stimulation and excitement are basic human needs, it behooves us to channel them in beneficial directions.  If we expect people to consume leisure intelligently, we had better start teaching them the necessary skills.  Consumption skills do not occur naturally and, according to Scitovsky, people who are "devoid of those skills tend to restrict their choice to sources of stimulation and excitement that require no special skills, such as sex, rape, drugs, violence, and crime."⁴  That's not a pretty picture. 

 The role of culture

            Constructive and satisfying ways to consume leisure often fall under the rubric of culture.  The contemplation of art, music, literature, history, and even economics, can offer endless hours of potential joy and stimulation.  But, they are skilled consumption activities; they require education.  Those who never have studied painting will not be stunned by the National Gallery of Art.  Those who never have struggled to produce music themselves cannot appreciate the full power and beauty of a Bach Requiem.  Those who  never have progressed beyond pulp fiction will not be moved by the words of Albert Camus.  Those who never have studied macroeconomics will not be able to vote intelligently on deficit reduction plans.

            To be pleasurable, a stimulus must contain the right mix of redundancy and novelty.  Experiences that are too familiar or redundant are boring; we need an element of surprise or novelty to hold our attention or interest.  But experiences can be too new as well.  Those we perceive as totally foreign can bewilder, even frighten.  A film such as Alien III might delight a teenager accustomed to Hollywood horror, yet terrorize a younger child with no prior exposure to movie mayhem.

            Movies are not the only examples.  Scitovsky argues that art cannot fully be appreciated unless it is in a reasonably familiar style, and successful literature must portray characters and dilemmas to which we can relate.  Similarly, conversation, even gossip, must be about people or places we know if it is to hold our interest.  Even jokes are funny "only if the surprise or unexpected twist of its ending follows a familiar and unsurprising beginning." ⁵  Or consider opera.  A neophyte thrust into the audience of Gotterdammerung might be in misery -- too much novelty.  But careful tutelage at each step might supply the redundancy needed to understand and appreciate the performance.  A Charlie Schneider might make all the difference.

            To Scitovsky, culture is "the preliminary information we must have to enjoy the processing of further information;" it provides the redundancy needed to appreciate additional experiences.  Culture is the source of skilled consumption.  The greater the initial cultural background, the greater will be the demand for, and the benefits from, additional culture.

            In other words, to channel our search for stimulation in constructive directions, we need skilled consumption.  To get skilled consumption, we need culture.  And to get culture, we need education.  Do our schools and universities produce the culture we need?  Not necessarily.  The numbers of high school and college graduates has mushroomed, yet no parallel boom in cultural pursuits is apparent.  Recent trends in educational curricula have not pushed consumption skills; they have pushed production skills instead.

Consumption or production?

            On the surface, emphasizing production skills seems reasonable.  After all, growing economic complexity requires ever-increasing technical skills.  Employees without college degrees often are stuck in unchallenging, low‑paid positions with little or no hope of advancement.  With the gap in average earnings between college and non‑college graduates widening, students understandably clamor for "practical" education, something to give them an edge in an increasingly competitive job market.

            Paradoxically, while college degrees are more critical than ever in the workplace, what a student actually learns in college may be surprisingly irrelevant.  Few graduates ever use much of the technical material so carefully crammed prior to exams.  I regularly require macroeconomic students to reproduce sophisticated diagrams that illustrate the impact of an exchange rate appreciation on interest rates and output.  But I have yet to find a graduate who used similar graphs on the job.  And economics is not alone.  Will math graduates ever again prove the Cauchy‑Schwarz Theorem?  Will English graduates ever again deconstruct Beowolf?

            What a student learns in college may be much less important than whether or not a student graduates.  While a college degree raises average earnings by almost $20,000 per year, what a student studies has remarkably little impact.  Over the long run those who major in the liberal arts seem to fare about as well as those in more "practical" majors such as accounting or engineering or nursing.  Real job training still occurs on the job, not in the classroom.

            According to economist Joseph Stiglitz, graduation provides a signal.  It signals that the potential employee has both intelligence and perseverance, qualities of considerable value in the modern job market.  Stiglitz agrees that what students learn in college does make them more productive; but, in his view, the role of college is not so much to teach as to screen people with scarce abilities.  In this view, "colleges simply identify talent."⁶

            Because employers use a college degree to screen applicants, students wanting a shot at the best jobs must attend college.  The result is a glut of graduates.  With the number of new graduates increasing faster than the number of new jobs, many end up in occupations that did not previously require a college degree. One study estimates that 35% of recent graduates will end up in jobs that do not "require" a college degree. Millions of college students struggle to master production skills they will never use.  They can be over-trained, over-qualified, and frustrated. 

            What should colleges teach?  If production skills are over-supplied, what is the alternative?  Consumption skills?  As Scitovsky put it:

            There would be nothing wrong with sales clerks...having, or even being required to have, B.A. degrees if those degrees enabled them to better enjoy the books they read or music they listen to while waiting for customers.  Mostly, however, their diplomas give them production skills which lie fallow and whose acquisition crowded out the education that would have prepared them for the better enjoyment of their increased leisure.⁷

Tis' a pity.

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Notes:

1.         In the 1960's we did not yet know to call them "residence halls."

2.         His choice was particularly effective in that, as a die-hard baseball fan, "The Flying Dutchman" was already a familiar expression.  It was the nickname of Honus Wagner, perhaps the greatest shortstop ever to have played the game.

3.         Scitovsky, Tibor, The Joyless Economy, revised edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992.  The remainder of this section draws heavily on this classic treatise.

4.         ibid., p. 300

5.         ibid., p. 225

6.         Stiglitz, Joseph E., Economics, W.W. Norton, New York, 1993, p. 297-299.

7.         Scitovsky, op. cit., p. 230

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Testing Yourself

To test your understanding of the major concepts in this reading, try answering the following:

1.         Identify groups that are likely to suffer from boredom and explain the problems this can cause.

2.         Explain the concept of consumption skills?  Why must such skills be produced?

3.         Explain the signaling function of colleges and universities.

4.         Explain the disadvantage of stressing production rather consumption skills.

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