Reply to Ted and Brad

[Brad DeLong]

>Brad DeLong wrote:
>
>>I'm not sure I buy this argument completely. But it is a powerful 
>>one. Pursuit of profit creates an extremely strong incentive to 
>>display images that magnify people's beliefs about their material 
>>"needs," and they then warp their lives to achieve them. As if an 
>>invisible hand is dealing to the world from a deck full of jokers...
>
>Brad, what do your fellow economists say when you go on like this? 
>And how do you reconcile this with the conventional assumption that 
>needs are exogenous?
>
>Doug

You mean: "Do they stare at me as if I am a dangerous madman who 
needs to be committed, and then find an excuse to be elsewhere?" By 
and large not. They say one of the following:

--Economists should not be in the business of teaching people to like 
being poor...

--That's Matt Rabin's stuff. He's supposed to be very smart. I 
haven't read any of it, but we're thinking about trying to hire him...

--Twentieth century history tells us that to prescribe what people 
"need" is to step onto the road to totalitarianism...

--As you ascend the hierarchy of needs, utility increases. Someone 
who "needs"... dropping down into the Chez Panisse website for a 
second... grilled Hoffman Farm chicken breast with pancetta, garlicky 
chard, and sweet corn polenta has a higher utility than someone who 
"needs" meat, who in turn has a higher utility than someone who needs 
a lower price of tortillas so their children don't cry. Human 
progress is the development of higher and more complicated new forms 
of "need" as the old forms get satisfied..

And then, of course, there was the *priceless* publicity photo of 
Juliet Schor, for her book _The Overspent American: Why We Want What 
We Don't Need_, which showed her standing in front of her large, 
two-story, four-bedroom suburban Boston house...

Damn. I'm hungry. I wasn't hungry before I started replying to this 
email. I was going to skip lunch. I didn't need it...

Brad DeLong