A stubborn paradox puzzled me when I was a kid: I wondered whether
one could legitimately call Big Macs "good". On one hand, I had been
told again and again that they were unhealthy, designed to be addictive
and environmentally suspect. Nevertheless, they tasted delicious and
people flocked to buy them. At least according to the market, I
concluded, Big Macs had to be "good". But was that the whole story?
After the issues shown in movies like "Super Size Me", was it not best
to see them as more ambiguous, a kind of "guilty indulgence"?
I
gradually realized that a vast variety of similar products existed on
the market, and the list grew to include everything from cigarettes to
Facebook. In college, it became clear that the paradox had much to do
with what economists call "time preference".
It is a
truism that people smoke cigarettes despite knowing that
they cause a considerable decrease in life expectancy. At first
consideration, this behavior seems illogical. But if you care much more
about the "now you" versus the "you in twenty years", then the behavior
actually starts to make sense. Even more striking is if you don't know
what the cost of consuming a service will be in the future, for that
ignorance will have you discount the future threat even more radically,
leading to short-sighted decisions (just think of Facebook, where for
now it's fun, tomorrow you may realize what the cost of having been "the
product" was).
The problem is that McDonald's
hamburgers, Facebook and cigarettes aren't some strange anomaly.
Instead, products exploiting our "temporal ignorance" are the norm, a
"low-hanging fruit" for any business, a type of economic "externality"
that they can have us, the consumers, pay for.
But this
is just the tip of the iceberg; it becomes more ominous when you dig
deeper. Ultimately, capitalism provides an ideal vehicle for selling
off your future in exchange for the present. Consumption instead of
education, entertainment instead of news and insight, the superficial
instead of the difficult and profound, gradual resource depletion
instead of conservation -- seen through this lens, we recognize many of
the issues plaguing contemporary society. Companies are selling us an
"easy way out", namely what we want in the "hedonistic", "dopamine rush"
short term, and we are addicted to buying.
What is the
price of this Faustian bargain? Environmental degradation, unhealthy
lifestyles, a decline in education and a worship of questionable idols
(people who deliver our "fixes": hedge fund managers, venture
capitalists, programmers of socially problematic, but addictive apps)
are just a few. The greatest cost, however, is a personal one, in the
form of an "unexplored life". We are born, we are entertained, we die.
This, in my opinion, is the ultimate cost of the nearsightedness of our
current system: by buying our cheap, prepackaged thrills while failing
to grow as people, we become hedonistic, sick and powerless and we may
not even realize why.
So what could be done to help
this situation? The answer is not, in my opinion, to jump on the
bandwagon and call for "the end of capitalism". But regulation certainly
helped with cigarettes, and it should be considered for Facebook as
well. Pleading for government regulation may sound ominous to the libertarian in us, but really ,
it's just finding consensus on what we as a society believe is an
acceptable degree of control over our data by a corporation, and
unfortunately, such decisions cannot be made on a solely individual
level, because of the network effects (i.e. in some contexts, we cannot
avoid using Facebook, if all our friends are using it to communicate and organize). Ultimately,
however, government can't solve the entire issue. Indeed, it is up to
each of us to be aware of the transience and "cheap high" of many of the
products on offer, and to get better at passing what psychologists call the "marshmallow test", or "delayed gratification".
Understanding
the concept of "time preference" and building a resilience against
dependency on short-sighted goods and services is a more profoundly
moral exercise than it may first seem. In many ways, it is akin to the
disciplining force of some religions, with a hell or heaven, informing
our actions today through the threat of damnation, or promise of redemption, in a not-too-distant future.
