Last non-fiction book?

Not sure why the italics didn't work - sorry

onmyown: " I am a humanist. I found a talking books reading by Christopher Hitchens of his book "God is not great - How religion poisons everything". "

I haven't read that one, but I've read these in a similar vein:

The End of Faith
Breaking the Spell
Religion Explained
The God Delusion

Gracesgran: "The Spirit Level; Why Equality Is Better For Everyone. A really interesting view backed by useful stats."

Yes I've read that one, it's one of those books that leaves me feeling exasperated that others can't see it. It seems they've got the message in Scandinavia, and are happier for it.

Grannyknot, I find I can remember books better if I have a debate about them.

Does anyone else make notes? I find I'm very erratic, I often start off making notes, and then get weary of keep stopping, so the notes get thinner and thinner as the book progresses.

I did reply crun but seemed to lose it somewhere. What I tried to say was that I think "getting the message" means clear thinking and we don't educate for that; perhaps the Scandinavian countries do.

We do not teach reflective thinking until ordinary degree level and we do not ask students to look at the influences on their judgements until even later. We teach learn and repeat followed by learn and apply up to school leaving age. Some teachers will certainly try but this is not part of their remit. This is the system and not the teachers and the universities are trying to push back into the schools as they have to start from scratch when students arrive at university.

I love marginalia by the way. If you buy books second-hand it is fascinating to see what people have written.

Gracesgran: " I think "getting the message" means clear thinking and we don't educate for that; perhaps the Scandinavian countries do.”

I have been increasingly taken by the idea of status competition as a way of looking at economics recently. I started out reading evolutionary biology, and then moved on to evolutionary psychology.

In essence people compete for status because higher status individuals obtain access to higher status, better quality mates. Now there are many ways of competing for status, but a consumer society is one in which the main method is consumption of goods. People are trying to consume more than their peers because that earns them more status, but the problem is that status is what is called a zero sum game; you only get more at the expense of someone else getting less. The Ford Sierra that satisfied when the neighbours all had Cortinas, looks a lot less appealing when everyone else has a Mondeo. The Smiths are only happy when they have more than the Jones’, but the Jones’ are only happy when they have more than the Smiths, so they’re locked into a competition to consume more and more, and wrecking the environment in the process, when no amount of wealth can ever make them both happy at the same time.

The term conspicuous consumption refers to whether the value of a good is judged in absolute terms or relative terms. Something like a central heating system for example is judged by how well it heats the house, and not whether it’s bigger than the neighbours, so that’s an example of inconspicuous consumption. A house or a car, however, are conspicuous because their value is determined by whether they’re bigger than other people’s. Since it is the conspicuous items which contribute to status, people will always tend to preferentially spend on these in favour of inconspicuous ones, even if it’s not in their objective best interests to do so.

This is why people get so irate about public spending: public spending elevates the wealth of the collective community, whereas private spending elevates your own wealth (and status) relative to that of others.

Conspicuous leisure is another canon of status competition: having enough wealth not to have to spend time on the vulgar process of earning a living is a status symbol, as is the wealth to pay others to do menial jobs for you. This then results in useful jobs and skills having low pay and status (plumber, builder, engineer etc.), whilst less useful jobs and skills assume very high status (pop star, footballer etc.).

Another method of status competition is conspicuous outrage, which derives from the psychology of conformity. In society people are under huge pressure to conform to what others do and expect, the price for not doing so can be dire. Therefore high status individuals can demonstrate their status by doing something outrageous to show that they don’t need to conform. This is what leads to fashion. A social elite will assert their status by doing something that is different, and then people beneath them will copy that behaviour in the attempt to acquire some of that status. However, the name of the game is to look like those above you and different from those below, so as fast as someone is copied, they will change their behaviour for something new. In this way fashions ripple their way down through the social strata from top to bottom, one after the other. The more wealth people have the faster fashions can change.

The problem with status differentials is that if they become too large, they lead to all sorts of social ills as Wilkinson and Pickett show in The Spirit Level. Famous research by Marmot has shown how low status leads to higher morbidity and higher mortality, quite independently of wealth. This is something that the Scandiavians appear to understand, but not us. If Wilkinson and Pickett’s work interested you, try reading some of these:

Marmot
Miller
Pinker
Veblen
Frank
Schwartz
Diamond
Kahneman

Political psychology. Scarcity of money reduces the bandwidth of your mindset. If you are poor you cannot think beyond that. That is how the government controls people.
The Spirit Level is definitely political.

Not everybody is as competitive as you imply, crun. Some of us do think of the common good as opposed to the good of the individual. Otherwise there would be no point in politics.

I think people are every bit that competitive, if you put a group of strangers in a room it won't be very long at all before they're sorting themselves into a pecking order. Perhaps subtle things like judging the car you drive, the fashions you wear, asking what neighbourhood you live in, what job you do, where you were educated, etc. The point of politics is precisely because people are competitive: to subvert the Prisoner's Dilemma that arises in an anarchy. People generally vote for the party they think is acting in their own best interests.

You have to ask why people keep consuming more and more, but not getting any happier, especially now that we can see the environmental damage that is making it contrary to the common good. I think Miller has it about right: a combination of status competition and the denial of habituation.

Habituation
The brain has evolved an ability to adapt to it's environment, therefore the nervous system will generate a response when the stimulus is changing, but not with an unchanging stimulus. A simple example is to hold a tinted cellophane sweet wrapper over your eye, and watch the way that the colour you see gradually fades after a few minutes. Take it away, and you see the complementary colour until that fades too. Or watch this. It's the reason why people may feel suicidal after an accident puts them in a wheelchair, but not after they've had time to adjust, and why people can't smell their own BO, for example. But it's also why an elated lottery winner doesn't still feel elated a year or two later, why people aren't still excited by new purchases a few months after they've bought them, and why the poor aren't impressed when they're told that they're better off than their grandparents were. They judge their wealth relative to that of the peers who live in the society they're habituated to, not that of previous generations.

When you drive to the car dealers to trade your car in for a new one, you are full of excitement imagining how much better your commute will be in the new car, but you have completely forgotten that you felt the exactly the same way about the car that you're sitting in when that was new. Habituation means that the satisfaction of a new purchase doesn't last, which is why increasing wealth produces no more happiness in the long run.