Sunday, July 14, 2013
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Book: the Challenge of Affluence by Avner Offer (2006)
While on my trip to Russia and the Baltic states, I read the book "The Challenge Of Affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950"
The reason for buying this book was my belief that obesity is a strange problem given the tremendously strong forces that would seem to push against it, namely avoiding major health problems and the social norms of body image. This would suggest that individuals lack self-control, and that perhaps the broader obesity problem is related to a gradual reduction in people's self-control. But why? In particular, I notice for myself that when I am in a bad mood or depressed, I have less control over my eating and I am less motivated to exercise.
I found this book quite instructive in exploring this notion. The book explores the economic, social, and psychological research related to self-control and myopia across a number of problems, including obesity and smoking. At a general level, self-control is difficult and so people tend to act myopically, but to help us we impose "commitment strategies" to force ourselves to act in a longer-term self-interest. As an example, in Canada, in provinces where cigarette taxes were imposed smokers reported to be happier as compared to in provinces where they weren't, indicating that they are not "rational addicts".
In the case of obesity, then, the biggest explanatory variable for its rise was the increase in restaurant density -- I.e. a decrease in the barriers between oneself and the food that you crave but is bad for you. This indicates that the key component for self-control is delay. As a simple example, a reasonable commitment strategy is to purposefully expel all junk food from your house, since if its fit in front of you, you will eat it.
Offer finds that within a given developed society, the affluent have more resources available from which to develop and implement commitment strategies, and thus tend to be less obese. This is in contrast to poor societies, in which the very poor simply cannot afford enough food to become obese; furthermore, in such societies obesity is often a status symbol of affluence.
Meanwhile, across societies, affluence is defined as an abundance of choice, yet the ability wisely choose among those choices and to develop commitment strategies for them, a concept he calls "prudence", takes time to develop. Since prudence lags affluence, affluent societies struggle to maintain self-control. In this way, offer argues that "affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being".
Though a compelling argument, this perspective only tackles the external and aggregate aspects of the relationship between affluence and self-control. Offer only briefly touches on how self-control may be modulated by other factors, such as depression and broken homes. He notes that mental health problems are strongly linked with broken homes, which themselves have risen substantially in recent decades as well. He also briefly mentions materialism as connected with lower personal well-being and depression, and notes that the capitalist marketing world encourages such materialism and feelings of insecurity. However, he does not go into detail on research exploring this connection more in depth, including research directly connecting depression with a loss of self-control, as well as potential commitment strategies that people may employ and the efforts of advertisers to subvert those strategies. The modern Internet era adds an additional, major element to all of this, but of course the book was only written in 2006.
The reason for buying this book was my belief that obesity is a strange problem given the tremendously strong forces that would seem to push against it, namely avoiding major health problems and the social norms of body image. This would suggest that individuals lack self-control, and that perhaps the broader obesity problem is related to a gradual reduction in people's self-control. But why? In particular, I notice for myself that when I am in a bad mood or depressed, I have less control over my eating and I am less motivated to exercise.
I found this book quite instructive in exploring this notion. The book explores the economic, social, and psychological research related to self-control and myopia across a number of problems, including obesity and smoking. At a general level, self-control is difficult and so people tend to act myopically, but to help us we impose "commitment strategies" to force ourselves to act in a longer-term self-interest. As an example, in Canada, in provinces where cigarette taxes were imposed smokers reported to be happier as compared to in provinces where they weren't, indicating that they are not "rational addicts".
In the case of obesity, then, the biggest explanatory variable for its rise was the increase in restaurant density -- I.e. a decrease in the barriers between oneself and the food that you crave but is bad for you. This indicates that the key component for self-control is delay. As a simple example, a reasonable commitment strategy is to purposefully expel all junk food from your house, since if its fit in front of you, you will eat it.
Offer finds that within a given developed society, the affluent have more resources available from which to develop and implement commitment strategies, and thus tend to be less obese. This is in contrast to poor societies, in which the very poor simply cannot afford enough food to become obese; furthermore, in such societies obesity is often a status symbol of affluence.
Meanwhile, across societies, affluence is defined as an abundance of choice, yet the ability wisely choose among those choices and to develop commitment strategies for them, a concept he calls "prudence", takes time to develop. Since prudence lags affluence, affluent societies struggle to maintain self-control. In this way, offer argues that "affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being".
Though a compelling argument, this perspective only tackles the external and aggregate aspects of the relationship between affluence and self-control. Offer only briefly touches on how self-control may be modulated by other factors, such as depression and broken homes. He notes that mental health problems are strongly linked with broken homes, which themselves have risen substantially in recent decades as well. He also briefly mentions materialism as connected with lower personal well-being and depression, and notes that the capitalist marketing world encourages such materialism and feelings of insecurity. However, he does not go into detail on research exploring this connection more in depth, including research directly connecting depression with a loss of self-control, as well as potential commitment strategies that people may employ and the efforts of advertisers to subvert those strategies. The modern Internet era adds an additional, major element to all of this, but of course the book was only written in 2006.
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