Encouraging student activism: tobacco

A while back, I wrote about how to use extra credit to motivate students to use their power as consumers to influence those aspects of the economy that are directly harmful to people and/or the world. I believe that this is an essential “closing of the loop” in our teaching: students need to not only learn about the damage that some of our economic activities are doing, but to take action.

I started with an extra credit project in which students send letters or emails to tobacco corporations. I realize that tobacco corporations probably do not care that most people think they are evil—they have an addicted, and very sizable, minority of citizens as customers. But I refuse to totally give in to cynicism on this point. The best effects of this project may be on the students, even if the effect on the market is negligible.

I would like to post a link to updated instructions for such an assignment. Since my original posting, there have been some changes in tobacco corporations. Specifically, the big four will soon be the big three. But the biggest change is that I have added a positive activity. As most of you probably know, CVS Health has decided to stop marketing tobacco products—a decision that will cost them about two billion dollars a year in lost revenue. I would like my students to send them emails thanking them for this decision.

Here is a link to my website, on which I have posted a PDF of the instructions I posted for my students. You may alter it for your students, if you wish to do this activity.

Frugality and the Market

I just returned from a long and wonderful journey through ten states. I saw a lot of ecology and evolution and I want to tell you all about it in upcoming essays. Meanwhile I will post this general essay until I can get the new ones written. On this long journey, I ate out a lot. I was more frugal than most travelers but less frugal than I am when at home. Which leads to the topic of this essay.

I am almost off the charts for being frugal in my use of energy and my consumption of processed materials. I am not a Scrooge; I actually enjoy frugality—I greatly enjoy the few things I spend money on, as well as the free things like taking a walk with my wife.

For example, I just do not eat out very often. Sometimes, as I noted in a recent blog essay, my frugality has made me a target for people who, perhaps with religious motivations, want to disrespect me for the carefulness with which I treat what they consider to be God’s creation.

But when I do eat out, I like having variety to choose from. I will admit that I have a hard time telling Cheesecake Factory apart from Applebee’s, but I wouldn’t want my only choice to be sushi—even though I love the new sushi restaurant in Tulsa (Sushi House, on Lewis near 71^st) very much.

If everyone lived like me, however, the bottom would drop out of the restaurant business. Tulsa would have a couple of sushi places, a Japanese steakhouse, Marley’s Pizzeria, India Palace, and that’s about it. The very diversity of market experiences that I enjoy depends on people living the way I think they shouldn’t.

I’m not too worried. If America goes frugal (which is about as likely as the sun going supernova next year), the loss of market diversity would be a small price to pay for the promotion of a healthy local economy full of farmer’s markets, ecological sustainability, and personal financial responsibility. I find fast food establishments to be useful on rare occasions, but if they all closed up I wouldn’t be too upset. Meanwhile I will continue to enjoy, on rare but memorable occasions, the diversity of restaurant food that is made possible by people who are too busy eating out to read this blog.

Spent. Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, by Geoffrey Miller

Note: In the event that this website ceases to work, please follow instructions at http://www.stanleyrice.com/ to find new blog entries.

Some of you may remember the excellent book, The Mating Mind, which Geoffrey Miller (an evolutionary psychologist) published in 2000. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the evolution of intelligence: as a fitness indicator in sexual selection. Miller’s recent book, Spent. (with the period) Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, delivers just as much creativity.

Miller’s main premise is that much of our consumer behavior is governed by a (usually subconscious) desire to advertise ourselves to prospective mates. Of course, as with human intelligence, this behavior gets used in lots of contexts that are separate from the actual mating game (e.g. by older people). In this premise, Miller goes against the assumptions of many economists (that consumers are rational purchasers) and even against many other evolutionary psychologists (that consumers purchase things to gratify themselves).

In selecting a mate, what does an animal want to know? With the human animal, what a prospective mate wants to know is not just the quality of genes, but the quality of character. Miller says that a person’s character (which has a substantial genetic basis) can be summarized by six features: general intelligence, plus “the big five” that have been an important part of psychological measurement: openness (e.g. to new ideas), conscientiousness (reliability), agreeableness (friendliness), stability (e.g. of character), and extraversion. Miller explains that consumers sometimes spend a lot of money, and a lot of effort, to advertise these characteristics, even to the extent of negating a great deal of self-gratification. The advertisements must be, as much as possible, reliable or costly indicators—that is, difficult to fake. Consider one example: ecological conscientiousness. Rather than just to be unobtrusively green—by driving a small internal combustion car, or by not consuming as much—many people want to advertise their greenness, by buying a hybrid car that may not get much better mileage than a small internal combustion car but which costs a lot more, and everybody knows it. Miller gives many examples.

But sometimes Miller, who seems to be an impulsive writer, goes way too far. For example, he points out that an IQ test, or an SAT score, is a much cheaper measurement of general intelligence than is an expensive college degree. If all that an employer wants to know is how smart you are, why bother with college? A college transcript is also an indicator of conscientiousness: did you show up for class and do the work? Grades of D and F on a transcript are indicators of unreliability in a prospective employee. But surely there are less expensive ways of demonstrating conscientiousness. He even discussed fake degrees as if they might not be just as useful as real ones. I almost felt like I was reading The Wizard of Oz, giving the straw man a diploma and the lion a medal. And that is what Miller, himself an academician, has to say about college education. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t notice him discussing the value of things that you actually learn in college. I don’t want the nurse at the clinic taking a blood sample to be just smart and conscientious; I also want that nurse to know the difference between a vein and an artery! I almost got the feeling that Miller has some unhealed wounds in his academic career, though I do not know what they might be. There I go, psychoanalyzing an evolutionary psychologist! Of course, he was probably joking.

In one case, Miller discusses the “latent prison-gang-rape aggressiveness of many American SUV model names.” He said that you can recognize this if you stick the word [I am not making this up] “anal” in front of model names: Anal Expedition, Anal Explorer, Anal Commander… These are actual examples he uses. After sticking “anal” in front of all of these SUV names, he concludes the very thing he imposed, that SUV names suggest prison gang rapes. Surely a psychologist should recognize the absurdness of this. This must be a joke, although he did not suggest it even subtly. He said he would not be surprised to see an SUV called the Buick Water-Boarder.

He also makes some unrealistic proposals. Once again, I cannot tell if he is joking, although I assume he is. He said we could have numbers tattooed on our foreheads that are measurements of our six characteristics, starting, I assume, with IQ. Tattoos are easy to fake, so he suggests the tattoos should be dispensed only by licensed and reliable tattooers. This would make it easy for us to find compatible mates without having to pay for expensive courtship. And he suggests that income taxes be replaced by consumption taxes, with wasteful consumption being taxed the most. That is actually a good idea but he makes no suggestions for how to even begin doing it.

Geoffrey Miller is brilliant and I learned a lot from this book. But I got the impression that I was reading the Hunter S. Thompson of the evolutionary psychology world. You can decide for yourself whether this is something you might want to read.