The Happiness Industry (21 page)

One way in which Bentham was shaped by the emancipatory social spirit of his age was in his assumption that the measurement and maximization of happiness were a collective venture. There was, in principle, a justification for one man's happiness to be impeded: for another man's benefit. Admittedly, the main
arena in which he explored this was punishment: prison is justified to the extent that non-prisoners benefit from its existence. But nevertheless, the calculus of utility was one that took everyone into account. In economic policy, this could justify transfers of money from rich to poor, if it was clear that poverty was the cause of misery.

The depressive-competitive disorder of neoliberalism arises because the injunction to achieve a higher utility score – be that measured in money or physical symptoms – becomes privatized. Very rich, very successful, very healthy firms or people could, and
should
, become even more so. In the hands of the Chicago School of economics or the St Louis School of psychiatry, the logic that says we have a particular political or moral responsibility towards the weak, which may require us to impose restrictions on the strong, is broken. Authority consists simply in measuring, rating, comparing and contrasting the strong and the weak without judgement, showing the weak how much stronger they might be, and confirming to the strong that they are winning, at least for the time being.

Buried within the technocratic toolkits of neoliberal regulators and evaluators is a brutal political philosophy. This condemns most people to the status of failures, with only the faint hope of future victories to cling onto. That school in London ‘where the pupils are allowed to win just one race each, for fear that to win more would make the other pupils seem inferior' was, in fact, a model of how to guard against a depressive-competitive disorder that few in 1977 could have seen coming. But that would also have required a different form of capitalism, which few policymakers today are prepared to warrant.

Imagine walking into a coffee shop, ordering a cappuccino, and then, to your surprise, being informed that it has already been paid for. This sounds like a pleasant experience, one which might even make the coffee more pleasurable to drink. Where did this unexpected gift come from? It transpires that it was left by the previous customer. The only snag, if indeed it is a snag, is that you now have to do the same for the next customer to walk in.

This is known as a ‘pay-it-forward' pricing scheme. It is something that has been practised by a number of small businesses in California, such as Berkeley's Karma Kitchen, and sometimes has been introduced spontaneously by customers themselves. On the face of it, it would seem to defy the logic of free market economics. After all, the basic premise of the price system, as it appeared to William Stanley Jevons and the neoclassical economists, is that I will exchange my money for a pleasure that I experience privately. Money for the shopkeeper is counter-balanced against satisfaction for me. Markets, surely, are places where we are allowed, even expected, to behave selfishly. With its hippy idealism, pay-it-forward would appear to defy the core tenets of economic calculation.

But there is more to it than this. Researchers based at UC
Berkeley's Decision Science Research Group have looked closely at pay-it-forward pricing and discovered something with profound implications for how markets and business work. It transpires that people will generally pay more for a good, under the pay-it-forward model, than under a conventional pricing system.
¹
This is true even when the participants are complete strangers. As the study's lead author, Minah Jung, puts it, ‘People don't want to look cheap. They want to be fair, but they also want to fit in with the social norms.' Contrary to what economists have long assumed, altruism can often exert a far stronger influence over our decision-making than calculation. If individuals can become seduced into relationships of reciprocity, rather than of selfish calculation, the capacity to influence them is that much greater. As Jung's research shows, so is the opportunity to charge them more money.

Similar research findings have been made in the workplace. The notion of ‘performance-related pay' is a familiar one, suggesting, reasonably enough, that additional effort by an employee is rewarded by a commensurate increase in pay. But studies conducted by researchers at Harvard Business School have discovered that there is a more effective way of extracting greater effort from staff: represent pay increases as a ‘gift'.
²
When money is offered in exchange for extra effort, the employee may be minded to view the extra money as their entitlement and carry on as before. But when the employer makes some apparently gratuitous act of altruism, the employee enters a more binding reciprocal relationship and works harder.

These findings are typical of the field of ‘behavioural economics', which emerged in the late 1970s thanks to a reunion of psychology with economics, following their split at the end of the nineteenth century. Like regular economists, behavioural
economists assume that individuals are usually motivated to maximize their own benefit – but not always. In certain circumstances, they are social and moral animals, even when this actually appears to undermine their economic interests. They follow the herd and act according to certain rules of thumb. They have some principles that they will not sacrifice for money at all. A number of much-hyped policy lessons follow from this, which have been referred to as ‘nudges'.

For example, if some people are repeatedly creating a disturbance in their neighbourhood, how should they be dealt with? Jeremy Bentham would have supposed that the answer involved some sort of punishment: only if the behaviour were associated with pain would it become less appealing. An alternative answer, though with the same logic, is that they could be paid to behave better. But there is a third option, which Bentham might well have scoffed at. What if they sign a piece of paper, promising to change the way that they behave in future? Somewhat surprisingly, it transpires that this can often be the most effective strategy. Making an explicit moral commitment – even under duress – seems to bind people in certain ways that utilitarian penalties and incentives often do not.

It seems that this undermines the cynical, calculative, individualist theory of human psychology, which lies at the heart of Benthamism and orthodox economics. It transpires that we are as much motivated by moral principles as we are by our own selfish interests. Maybe the cold rationality of the market does not have quite the grip on our psychology as we have long feared. Could it be that we are decent, social creatures after all? A great deal of evidence from neuroscience, showing how sympathy and reciprocity are ‘hard-wired' into the brain, confirms this. Perhaps this could be the basis for a new political hope, of a society in
which sharing and gift-giving offer a serious challenge to the power of monetary accumulation and privatization.

But there is also a more disturbing possibility: that the critique of individualism and monetary calculation is now being incorporated into the armoury of utilitarian policy and management. The history of capitalism is littered with critiques of the dehumanizing, amoral world of money, markets, consumption and labour, offered by romantics, Marxists, anthropologists, sociologists and cultural critics among many. These critics have long argued that social bonds are more fundamental than market prices. The achievement of behavioural economics is to take this insight, but to then instrumentalize it in the interests of power. The very idea of the ‘social' is being captured.
³

John B. Watson had promised in 1917 that, in an age of behaviourist science, ‘the educator, the physician, the jurist and the businessman could utilize our data in a practical way, as soon as we are able, experimentally, to obtain them.' Behavioural economics has been true to this mission statement. One of its key insights is that, if one wants to control other human beings, it is often far more effective to appeal to their sense of morality and social identity than to their self-interest. By framing notions such as ‘fairness' and ‘gift' in purely psychological and neurological terms, behavioural science converts them into instruments of social control.

Viewed from a more cynical perspective – as behavioural economists themselves do – activities such as pay-it-forward and random acts of managerial generosity have a pernicious element, which works through never being made explicit. In abandoning the psychology of pure self-interest, these projects shift to a far more invasive and constrictive alternative, namely the psychology of credit and debt. A psychological sense of social
obligation is first manufactured and then harnessed for particular purposes which remain concealed. If utilitarianism is, at its heart, a political logic in which every institution is to be judged in terms of its measured outcome, then the extension of this to encompass our basic moral sensibilities must represent that logic's final triumph.

The money-making ‘social'

Generosity has become big business. In 2009, Chris Anderson, former editor of
Wired
magazine, published
Free: The Future of a Radical Price
. In this rallying cry, Anderson argued that there was now a strong business case for giving products and services away for free, so as to produce a better relationship with a customer. Of course money is not dispensed with altogether in this idyll of gift-giving. Giving things away for free becomes a means of holding an audience captive or building a reputation, which can then be exploited with future sales or advertising, this time commanding a price. Michael O'Leary, boss of Ryanair, Ireland's controversial budget airline, has even suggested that airline tickets might one day be priced at zero, with all costs recovered through additional charges for luggage, using the bathroom, skipping queues, and so on.

When it comes to the free market, all corporations dwell in a paradoxical position. They seek all of the freedoms that the market offers for their vested interests, but as few as possible for anybody else.
⁴
The trick is to maintain maximum autonomy for shareholders and executives while gaining maximum commitment from employees and customers. What Anderson was highlighting was simply the powerful potential of non-monetary
relationships in building closer bonds where they are useful in the service of profitmaking. To put it another way, the last thing a business wants from its customers (or their more valued staff) is for them to remember that they are in a market, with freedom of choice. Freebies are a useful way of disguising what's really taking place.

And just as corporate giving can be used as a way of boosting revenue, so can the magic words that are used in return. Marketing specialists now analyse the optimal way of saying the words ‘thank you' to a customer, so as to deepen the ‘social' relationship with them further. As one expert explains for the benefit of online retailers:

Thank you pages are much more than pieces of virtual real estate on which to display gratitude and order numbers. These pages are an integral part of an optimized conversion system that, when used properly, can continue to boost your revenue.
⁵

The language of gratitude has infiltrated a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. Around Christmas 2013, a number of corporations – notably, those that had suffered serious reputational deficits in recent times – launched advertising campaigns offering general thanks to everyone around them. Naturally this included their customers, but it also extended to a general mood of gratitude for the gift of friendship.

Lloyds TSB, one of the British banks to be most embarrassed by the 2008 financial crisis, launched a campaign consisting entirely of cutesy images of childhood friends enjoying happy moments together, concluding with the words ‘thank you' written in party balloons. There was no mention of money. More
bizarrely, Tesco, a vast supermarket chain whose brand entered free fall in 2011, released a series of YouTube videos with men in Christmas jumpers singing ‘thank you' to everyone from the person who cooks Christmas dinner, to those driving safely, to other companies such as Instagram and so on. Tesco, it was implied, sprays gratitude in all directions, regardless of its own private interests.

The strange spectacle of a corporation attempting to project feelings associated with friendship takes an even weirder turn when businesses seize the affordances of Twitter to grant them a quirky, conversational identity. Brands tweet at each other, in a coy, almost flirtatious fashion. Confronted by the phenomenon of the Denny's diner chain acting cool on Twitter, the writer Kate Losse observed how ‘to become popular and “cool”, brands have had to learn the very techniques we learned as resistant teens to deal with power: our sarcastic humor and our endlessly remixable memes'.
⁶
Corporations now want to be your friend.

There is, of course, a limit to how much of a social bond an individual can have with a PLC. Companies today are obsessed with being ‘social', but what they typically mean by this is that they are able to permeate peer-to-peer social networks as effectively as possible. Brands hope to play a role in cementing friendships, as a guarantee that they will not be abandoned for more narrowly calculated reasons. So, for example, Coca-Cola has tried a number of somewhat twee marketing campaigns, such as putting individual names (‘Sue', ‘Tom', etc.) on their bottles as a way of inducing gift-giving, and even offered a ‘twin pack', with the assumption that the drinks will be enjoyed by two people together. Managers hope that their employees will also act as ‘brand ambassadors' in their everyday social lives and seek advice on how to influence them to do this. Meanwhile,
neuromarketers have begun studying how successfully images and advertisements trigger common neural responses in groups, rather than in isolated individuals. This, it seems, is a far better indication of how larger populations will respond.
⁷

The rise of the ‘sharing economy', exemplified by Airbnb and Uber, and studies such as the pay-it-forward experiment, offer a simple lesson to big business. People will take more pleasure in buying things if the experience can be blended with something that feels like friendship and gift exchange. The role of money must be airbrushed out of the picture wherever possible. As marketers see it, payment is one of the unfortunate ‘pain points' in any relationship with a customer, which requires anaesthetizing with some form of more ‘social' experience. Shopping must be represented as something else entirely.

Yet the greatest catalyst for the new business interest in being ‘social' is, unsurprisingly, the rise of social media. This offers a number of new opportunities and challenges from a marketing perspective. The story of marketing over the course of the twentieth century was one of a gradual disintegration of the mass media, mass market, broadcast model of advertising. From the 1960s onwards, brands were increasingly targeting niche groups and ‘tribes' who had to be understood in a more subtle fashion, through careful observation and focus groups. Social media allows for an even finer grain of consumer insight, allowing researchers to spot how tastes, opinions and consumer habits travel through social networks. It allows advertising to be tailored to specific individuals, on the basis of who else they know, and what those other people liked and purchased. These practices, which are collectively referred to as ‘social analytics', mean that tastes and behaviours can be traced in unprecedented detail.

The most valuable trick, from a marketing perspective, is how
to induce individuals to share positive brand messages and adverts with each other, almost as if there were no public advertising campaign at all. The business practice known as ‘friendvertising' involves creating images and video clips which social media users are likely to share with others, for no conscious commercial purpose of their own.
⁸
‘Sponsored conversations', in which individuals participate in online discussions and blogs with the commercial support of a business, are a slightly less-well-hidden attempt to achieve the same thing. The science of viral marketing, or the creation of ‘buzz', has led marketers to seek lessons from social psychology, social anthropology and social network analysis.