'Why money messes with your mind'

As Mark Buchanan tells it in New Scientist:

Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to make us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others.

And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain ...

It's like a drug

Some people seem addicted to accumulating it, while others can't help maxing out their credit cards and find it impossible to save for a rainy day.

As we come to understand more about money's effect on us, it is emerging that some people's brains can react to it as they would to a drug, while to others it is like a friend.

Some studies even suggest that the desire for money gets cross-wired with our appetite for food.

And, of course, because having a pile of money means that you can buy more things, it is virtually synonymous with status - so much so that losing it can lead to depression and even suicide ...

Darwinian responses

Instead of treating cash simply as a tool to be wielded with objective precision, we allow money to reach inside our heads and tap into the ancient emotional parts of our brain, often with unpredictable results.

To understand how this affects our behaviour, some economists are starting to think more like evolutionary anthropologists ...

Social norms or market norms? Which to apply, and when?

Daniel Ariely of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of them. He suggests that modern society presents us with two distinct sets of behavioural rules. There are the social norms, which are "warm and fuzzy" and designed to foster long-term relationships, trust and cooperation. Then there is a set of market norms, which revolve around money and competition, and encourage individuals to put their own interests first ...

This ability to assess which set of norms applies in a particular situation is important in guiding our behaviour, Ariely says.

It allows you to avoid expecting too much trust in the midst of a competitive business negotiation, for example, or making the mistake of offering to pay your mother-in-law after she has cooked you a nice meal.

"When we keep social norms and market norms on separate paths, life hums along pretty well," says Ariely. "But when they collide, trouble sets in." ...

New Scientist 18 March 2009

In the pursuit of happiness

You visit a supermarket with a list of needs. However, subliminal forces may well add 'wants' created for you inside the store.

Many years ago it was suggested that entering a supermarket can put people into the first stages of hypnosis, and I imagine most of us have had the experience of impulse buying, which is exactly what's required.   [HP]

Corporate advertising has worked hard to press those emotional buttons labelled envy and discontent:  newdream.org.

This can only be assuaged by the latest must-have gizmo which, of course, everyone else is buying.

The latest 'must-have' incorporates life-changing extras, inviting us to ditch last month's life-enhancing model which is now fit only for the local charity shop.

All this is firmly inside the box labelled 'market norms' but it is does not stay there.

Go into any newsagents and you will be confronted - sooner rather than later - with an array of mags about celebrities and their glamorous lifestyles.

Switch on GMTV and it's one of the main topics at several points in the show. Who's wearing what, who's splitting up in favour of a younger model ...

Looked at in one light, it's all harmless stuff: entertainment, and not to be taken seriously.

(It also has a diversionary objective - [CMMC] - but that's outside the scope this page.)

But just as subliminal forces are at work in the supermarket, the celebrity culture invites you to compare your partner to celebrity-of-the-week's partner, and given that s/he has the most expensive gear - the most glamorous lifestyle - and looks utterly stunning, it's highly likely that your partner will fail to measure up. (S/he might be getting the same message about you.)

Your score on the discontent scale swings upwards, and you start to wonder if it's time to move on.

The kids? I'll buy them some new gear.

Result: market norms have trumped social norms. Like the man said: "But when they collide, trouble sets in."

The kids are now confronted with a 'new' mum, or a 'new' dad, and they don't quite belong in the same way as before.

There's trouble ahead, and it matters not how much money is sloshing around, it doesn't quite act as a substitute.

But corporate capital is still making a profit.

The government is drawing up new plans to tackle family breakdown that will promote any stable relationship, not just the superiority of marriage, the children's secretary, Ed Balls, reveals .

His department is due to publish a green paper on the family early in the new year, turning the issue of the promotion of families, parenting and marriage into a potential electoral battleground.

The green paper will assert that children's welfare is not necessarily best protected through marriage, but instead through "stable and lasting relationships between parents". The Conservatives are due to publish their own policy on the family shortly and have said they will recognise marriage in the tax system.

Influential Tory thinkers such as Iain Duncan Smith have explicitly argued that marriage is superior to other relationships.

The green paper is expected to look at why many relationships break up around the birth of the first child, and what more can be done to bind fathers, especially younger ones, into the family at a stressful time. Currently one in three children live apart from their father by the time they reach 16 ...

At a time of pressure on the government's Sure Start programme and childcare budgets, ministers are looking at expanding the roles of health visitors and family nurse partnerships.

Guardian  29 November 2009

The loss of health visitors is a true scandal

Justice Coleridge's reading of the situation – whereby men and women are too keen on sexual adventure, and not keen enough on married life – is too simplistic.

Many things are wrong, but a huge part of the problem is that great emphasis has been put on minimising the difficulties mothers may face in obtaining childcare so that the can stay in the labour market, and little emphasis has been placed on the idea that for families to thrive and be happy, parents generally have to expect to spend quite a bit of time at home, looking after each other, as well as the kids ...

Deborah Orr, The Independent 18 June 2009

Mr Justice Coleridge, a Family Division judge, said the consequences of family break-up for the wider society are now so great it can no longer be treated as a purely private matter.

Action is needed, he said, to achieve a "fundamental change" in individual attitudes and behaviour to re-establish marriage as the "gold standard" for relationships.

The problems are so great that no one political party on its own could resolve them and only a national commission drawn from a wide constituency would have any any chance of success, he said.

Judge Coleridge sparked controversy last year when he said family relationships in Britain were in "meltdown", likening the problem to a "cancer".

In his speech to the Family Holiday Association at Westminster, he blamed unrealistic expectations about relationships for the extent of the disputes and breakdowns which "overwhelmed" the family courts.

"What, I hope in all humility, I am drawing attention to is the endless game of 'musical relationships', or 'pass the partner', in which such a significant portion of the population is engaged, in the endless and futile quest for a perfect relationship which will be attained, it is supposed, by landing on the right chair or unwrapping a new and more exciting parcel," he said.

With many children growing up "scarred" by the effects of their parents' break-ups, he said that it could no longer be seen as just a matter for the individuals involved.

uk.news.yahoo  17 June 2009

Family breakdown is now a national tragedy

We will take over the leadership of a country that doesn’t just face an economic crisis – worse than the one that greeted Margaret Thatcher in 1979 – but also a breakdown of British society.

Across a range of indicators – depth of recession, scale of government borrowing, breakdown of the family, and the level of crime – Britain is in worryingly bad shape.

I established the Centre for Social Justice five years ago. It works with all political parties. It has won credibility by pursuing the very opposite of cosmetic change.

We’ve brought together Britain’s most effective poverty-fighting charities in a national alliance. Within this alliance every kind of social challenge is being addressed.

Drug addiction. Family breakdown. Homelessness. Long-term unemployment. Indebtedness.

We’ve awarded these poverty-fighters with privately raised cash. We’ve befriended them. We’ve fought for them when they have become entangled with government bureaucracy.

The best policy conclusions we have recommended to the Conservative Party – and to Britain’s other mainstream parties – have emerged from what we have learnt from them.

Three years ago we published a report that documented the scale of social collapse in Britain. It was called Breakdown Britain.

A year later we produced Breakthrough Britain. Breakthough Britain contained 188 policy recommendations.

They were based on the idea that a strong family, a completed education, good employment opportunities and freedom from drugs and other addictions were the basis of a life free of poverty ...

For David Cameron – for me – and for modern British Conservatism – social policy is central. What I have argued for some time is that this is not an add on but integral to conservatism and for four good reasons.

First, unless Britain starts to mend its broken society the cost of fractured families, of poorly educated workers and dysfunctional adults will make Britain’s economy uncompetitive.

The recent report ‘Bankrupt Britain’ demonstrates that as the economy turns down this becomes more critical, not less.

In the last ten years alone the cost of welfare spending in Britain has spiralled upwards by close to £100bn. The single biggest component of government spending is the permanently unemployed… the permanently ill… broken families… people with addictions.

Then there are the costs associated with crime. Most of the criminal justice budgets have grown by nearly 50% in real terms. This money hasn’t reduced crime but contained the problem. Although a lot more people are in prison we have seen large increases in violent crime and anti-social behaviour. If you look at the prison population you find young men – mainly from broken homes – addicted to drugs – and with a reading age of 11.

Reforming society is not a soft option but without it big government becomes inevitable.

Second, in emphasising social policy we are rediscovering the conservatism of Edmund Burke.

We are not just against big government but ALL forces that crush the social institutions that lie between the individual and the state. These institutions could not matter more for our future and could hardly have been more neglected in recent times.

There will be no sustainable reduction in the size of the state if civil society doesn’t become stronger – nurturing more self-sufficient and vigorous citizens. There’ll be no possibility of light touch regulation if certain moral values are absent from our culture. There’ll be no competitive economy if families don’t encourage their children to learn and excel.

Third, the cohesive society.

Currently 47% of voters see Republicans as out-of-touch. Only 15% see the party as “in touch with ordinary people”.

The groups the Republicans were seen as closest to are big business, rich, well off people, Christians and the armed forces.

You cannot lecture people about freedom if parents think the life chances of their children are set at birth and that they are set for failure.

Talk of liberty is at risk of being seen as a self-serving arrogance from those who already have everything.

This, surely, is at the heart of the American dream. A cohesive society where every parent really believes that their kids have a chance of a better life than them.

The fourth factor is a by-product of the other three.

In emphasising society conservatism isn’t just seen as the party of the wealthy and the strong – a party that is good for me. It will also become a broadly-based party; meeting that natural sense of decent people that their government should be good for them AND good for their neighbour.

Speech by Iain Duncan Smith to The Heritage Foundation, Washington

Centre for Social Justice 09 March 2009