Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hey, Robin. So I thought we could talk about consumer culture and the joys of buying stuff and what the best way is to understand that. Recently, I made a list of like things that I want and it was surprisingly easy to like come up with a bunch of things that I want. I want a dress from here. I want like, you know, these cookies, this kind of tea, this toy, this toy that's called a toy. Like I want stuff and it's stuff that I don't need. And stuff where if I don't have any one of those things, my life will go on just about the same. And I don't know where I got these desires from. I look and they're just there. And, you know, I noticed that there are some people who seem to be less consumerist than I am, but those people are kind of anti-consumerist. It's almost like you have to make being anti-consumerist your whole personality in order to avoid this. That seems to be like a bigger cost than just wanting some stuff. And so it's almost like we're trapped in this world where we're fed these funny desires. But even as I put the problem that way, I'm sensitive to something, which is that I'm characterizing it in a negative and moralistic way, or it's very... tempting to do that. And, you know, it's the thing that really strikes me more than anything about capitalism, the word, is how moralistic people are about it. When you hear the word capitalism, you know moralism is coming. Usually it's anti-capitalist moralism. Sometimes it's pro-capitalist moralism. But there is no one, I don't know of anyone, who is capable of talking about capitalism without trying to sell you something, so to speak. And the same thing is true about consumer culture. It's like, It's really hard to get a straight view of it. People like Thorsten Veblen or Kenneth Galbraith who are describing this phenomenon of conspicuous consumption, of desires that are produced by production, there is just this distaste that you can read in the very text. And it's like we have trouble getting the phenomenon in view because we feel like we need to either censure it or praise it.

Robin:

I agree. So it's just important to notice this is one of the most distinguishing features of our world compared to the world of people centuries and thousands of years ago. It's a feature that we individually seem to value a lot in our world that we spend a fair bit of time and energy involved in it. And we seem to treasure it. And it's when people try to say what's good about our world compared to past worlds, the thing people most often point to is the fact that we can be consumerist. And yet we see such a strong disapproval. of it, and that in order to think about it, we need to push that back, as you say, just to pause and just not evaluate it first and just think about what it is before we can maybe come back. And I guess we can at the end of this conversation, come back to it, but we just first need to ask, what is it we're talking about? And so obviously it seems like all through history, humans have always liked stuff. That's not new. They just haven't had remotely as much stuff available as we've had. And they haven't, you know, if they had thought a lot more about what stuff they wanted, it wouldn't have helped them that much because they didn't have that many options and they didn't have that much place to buy stuff. So the thing that's different about us is we can put a lot more time and energy into stuff and experiences and think a lot more productively about what we might want. And we do spend a lot more time on that and. We like it. And then there's this interesting phenomena where we seem to like it more than just the fact that we eventually get stuff from the process of wanting stuff and trying to acquire this stuff. We like the whole search process, the process of thinking about what we want, making lists of what we might like, choosing among different options. going out and maybe, you know, looking more closely at them and finally making a choice and then admiring the things we've got and making a whole shelf and face of the things we got and pointing to people to the things we have and comparing them to other people's stuff when we go to their places. We love all of that stuff. Okay. Which is, it's just obvious. I'd say that, that a lot of people like all that. And then when we discuss it, they're very embarrassed really about it. as if it was a sexual fetish in a society that disapproved of that fetish. They like it, but they don't want to own up to it, and they want to disapprove of it if they can.

Agnes:

Right, like if you contrast the joy, and it really is joy that people take in nature, like people like to be out in nature. They like mountains and hikes and things. Those desires are just thoroughly approved of by society, just stamp of approval over and over again. You can feel very free to say, I just love being out in nature. Nobody's gonna censure you for that. But if you say I love shopping, that's just, you know, that's now a guilty pleasure of some kind.

Robin:

Even notice often people in nature collect. They go out on the hikes and they bring things back and it's a lot like shopping.

Agnes:

Or they have, as I know many people I know who are lovers of nature, have like an entire basement full of nature equipment that they use for going out into nature, you know? Special hiking clothes and tents and things to cook in nature, whatever. So nature is a major site of consumerism and it may be that a lot of the joy being taken in the nature is covertly taken in the purchases that one is allowed to make because of nature. But the faith that will be put forward even on an REI website or something is going to be, oh, look how beautiful nature is.

Robin:

So I read this book a while back on sort of the sacred in marketing. And it had this interesting distinction between people like to draw a sharp line between crafts and art. And so there's this whole art collecting thing where people go out and collect art, and that's seen as high status and the sort of thing to be proud of. But if you go out and collect crafts, that's not so high status, and maybe you should be a little ashamed of that. But they look pretty similar, but somehow some things, even the same thing, it can just be arbitrarily declared as art, and then people think about it differently, and they more approve of collecting it, and they're less gonna criticize you for thinking about it and try to buy it.

Agnes:

But even craft is better than, like recently I saw on Twitter, so Twitter Blue Sky, someone said, Nobody ever gets just one Demitasse cup, you know, like a little tiny Chinese. You have to have like a collection. And I thought to myself, I have just one tiny Demitasse cup that I got once on eBay. Should I start a collection? Maybe I should be buying more of these. I had this thought immediately. I'm like, should I be buying more of these? And I think if I did that and I had this Demitasse cup collection, I would totally post a picture of these cups on eBay. I'm sorry, on Twitter or something. Be like, hey, check out my collection. I'd be proud of it. But I think that's not, I think I would be less inclined, though maybe I'm also a little bit inclined, to be like, here are all my clothes. Or here are all, so I think a collection is already a little bit of a justification. By contrast with, I don't know, a handbag or something. Or another dress.

Robin:

So there's a sense in which when you collect things for leisure, that's more art or more okay than collecting things for use that are valued to you in some more direct way.

Agnes:

Right, right. And when people like, okay, I'm wearing this jumpsuit right now, which people who are watching the video can see, this is my first time wearing it. I just got it and I love it. But if somebody compliments me on it, there's a strong inclination to be like, oh, it's nothing or not make a big deal out of it. want to underplay how important their clothes are. That's a clothes shopping, which is, you know, sorry, a lot, I should say, a lot of my thoughts about this are driven by this novel that both of us have read by Emile Zola called The Lady's Paradise, Au Bonheur des Dames. And and it's a novel about, in some ways, like the birth of this consumerist culture by way of the growth of a department store. And so it's it's about clothing in particular. Something about clothing in particular as a site of consumer mania. And it is also the thing where people will not readily admit to it, except if they can make clear that it is a guilty pleasure.

Robin:

And not useful. That is, you know, it's more of a collector. You're an artistic collector. You may spend money on things, but you're doing it out of this artistic sense, not because they're useful.

Agnes:

So I think that we have come up with so many ways of laundering our love of fashion beyond Zola. In the 19th century, they were babies of consumerism. We've grown up. And so I actually think a lot of the really powerful consumer motivations come from pseudo claims of use. So I'm wearing like a shirt under this jumpsuit that is made out of a very special kind of wool. And it's supposed to regulate your temperature especially well. And I could like talk about, I know a lot about this wool and how it's very practical, right? But I'm a little bit like the people who buy all the nature stuff. I'm like, oh no, it's not like I'm a consumer. I'm just buying like seven different kinds of tents for all the different kinds of camping I do. And so we actually have become really adept at making arguments of usefulness for things that we want to buy. If I look at how many kinds of pens and pencils are in my office and I could tell you the story of like why these are very special kind that really deposits a lot of pigments every time you write with them and you can change red to blue. I'm going to have a use story to tell you. And that's actually how I am justifying this consumerism.

Robin:

Right. So the essence of the puzzle is that we have all these related activities and there's one of them that's most disapproved. and that we're trying to excuse the things we do to distance what we do from that most disapproved example or category, and the puzzle is to understand what's so bad about that category. Because it doesn't look that different from all the things near it that we're trying to excuse by claiming we're doing instead. We claim we're being useful, we claim we are art collectors, we claim Why not just embrace the joy of consumerism? So if we ask, well, what could explain the disapproval? I've spent a bit of time reading today, so I can give you a long list of the things people associate with this disapproval, but I'm not that sure which actually are the main issues, if any.

Agnes:

OK, well, go give us some. Give us what you think are some of the best ones.

Robin:

OK. So, you know, on one hand, you know, where there's profit oriented organizations behind the consumerism as opposed to nonprofits or nature or something, we disapprove of those. Or there's some sort of greed or self-aggrandizement that we're doing through consumerism that we aren't doing through the related things. There's a claim that consumerism is less social. It's less altruistic. It's less community based. It's claimed that it less inspires, it's less spiritual, etc. And it's not clear to me that these other things don't have similar problems. It seems like an art collector can also be very selfish and self-centered and not altruistic and not community-oriented. But these are the words people put along with these disapproved consumerism.

Agnes:

I mean, I don't actually think it's obvious that somehow everyone thinks that art collecting is totally fine, whereas consumerism is evil. I think many people would have some objections to art collecting. But I mean, I think that... So if I just take the first one, which is that the profit-oriented firms, and this is related to the... Maybe it's related to the... No, it's not related to the Green Line. I think it's just that one. So the thing that is really clear in this novel and is also clear in certain writers on the subject like Galbraith is that, you know, whereas in an older world, production may cater to desire and need and preference, In a world of, like, hyperproduction and kind of constant need for turnover and growth, the people doing the production also take charge of producing the desires. So it's the job of the advertiser not just to tell you about the existence of products that would meet your antecedent needs, but of awakening in you desires for those things. And the novel goes through a whole bunch of different ways in which the owner of this store is the kind of conductor of the orchestra of women's desires for fabric. And so I think one thing is that people feel like on some level they are being manipulated or they have desires in them of which they are not the source. And maybe somehow when we think that our desires are in us because they make someone else profit, that we find that especially offensive.

Robin:

So if we compare commercial desire to many other kinds of desires, I think we'll see that in the other kinds of desires, there are also people who try to design and inflame them. So artists try to make their art engaging. Academics try to make their academic talks or writings engaging and make you to create an interest in you might not have. Political activists try to induce you to get interested and motivated by political activism. I mean, even work, your employer often tries to inspire, you know, career ambition in you in order to get you to work there. It seems like pretty much anywhere we have desire, even say sexual desire, you have seduction, where somebody doesn't just, you know, tap an existing desire, but tries to inflame it and shape it and strengthen it. It seems like this is part of desire in general, that desire often comes naturally, somewhat muted, and it takes other people's help to make them stronger. But in general, that's good if we like the desire. So then what's wrong with this desire?

Agnes:

I think that's a great point. And so the key would be to try to see why the, um, you know, externally induced inflammation of this desire strikes us as somehow a bad thing. Whereas when a novel is engaging or when, you know, I don't know, a friend makes you a meal and wants to make it appetizing or whatever, we don't, we don't think that that is a bad thing. So maybe... Maybe we could divide the, um, inflammation of desire into two categories. In one case, it's, um, done for ends that we think are, um, kind of internal to the process of having that desire. I know this is a distinction you don't like, but it's, it's kind of proves important in a lot of places where you don't see a difference. This is the difference. So, so, so it's sort of like, there's something in you that is half grown and the other person is helping it come to full, full, full growth. And the only reason they want to do that is so that it can be in that fully grown state. It seems like in the commercial cases, the shop owner doesn't actually care whether your desire comes to any kind of fruition. He just wants it to grow so that you'll spend money. And if he could somehow make you spend money without making it grow, he would do that. Whereas the friend who wants to get you to eat their food and is trying to make it appetizing, if it turns out you'd be willing to eat it just to make them feel good, that wouldn't be just as good for the friend. They want you to eat it out of appetite.

Robin:

I mean, I accept that many people use this category when they're making moral judgments. I might want to argue them out of that, that is to help them realize that in fact, those sort of motives exist all over the place. So, you know, a teacher at school might try to motivate you to be a student, but that's part of how they have their job and they get paid. And maybe someone making a movie tries to motivate you to be excited and interested in their movie, but that's how they get paid for their movie. An academic gets paid to be an academic. I mean, you know, pretty much all of these other people who are inspiring you have various material interests, including your friend. in your enjoying your experience with them.

Agnes:

So I think we systematically deny that and we accept all those people's roles in our lives insofar as we can deny it. But we cannot deny it in the case of Octave Moret.

Robin:

I think we could. We choose not to. So, for example, think of Disneyland, which I think is a lot like this story about this first department store. A space, more recently, that someone creates in order to inspire people to come there, to have a different feeling when they're there, to have desires. that wouldn't, didn't exist before this sort of desire was created. I mean, there's definitely a sense in which he had to make a profit in order to make Disney Network, but there's also in the sense where somebody like Disney was driven as an artist to create a thing, and that the business was secondary in some ways.

Agnes:

I think many people see Disney World that way, and those people go to Disney World regularly for that reason. And they don't see it as being of a piece with other kinds of capitalism. They think, no, here I'm experiencing the meaning of Disney World, or the meaning of childhood, or fun, or whatever. And they think that Walt Disney was a kind of architect of that, who believed in that. Even say Steve Jobs.

Robin:

Sorry? Steve Jobs, say. If you see him as an artist or a great entrepreneur and inventor, then you can enjoy his iPhone by the fact that it's this innovative product that changes your desires and what you get out of life.

Agnes:

In effect, I'm just agreeing with you that it's possible to have that attitude. towards things that you spend money on. But as a matter of fact, with respect to many of the things that we spend money on, The, sorry, text. With respect to many of the things that we spend money on, we don't see them that way. So all we're trying to do right now, we're not trying to change things, we're not trying to be moralists. I feel you moving in a moralistic direction where you're telling me I'm supposed to view Steve Jobs in the same way as I view the teacher. But let's hold off on that. The point is just that there are these two categories. and that it's not plausible to slot all of your consumer goods into the Walt Disney category as it is seen by the true believers in Disney. And so this at least would partly explain the distaste. The distaste is reserved for the, you know, Octave Moret category.

Robin:

So this book, Ladies Paradise, makes this move that has a special way to try to make this disapproved. One of the other kinds of desires we often disapprove of is when a man tries to inflame sexual desire in a woman, say, outside of some other approved context. And that's exactly what happens in Ladies' Paradise, that it's presented as a man who has this unusual skill of seducing women And instead of just seducing individual women personally, he seduces whole communities of women to come buy stuff from him. And so we are tempted to see it as somewhat illicit by that analogy. That is, it's not just a business person seducing customers, it's a man seducing women in a way that we might be tempted to disapprove.

Agnes:

I don't think the novel much encourages you to disapprove of it. In fact, by contrast, so Ladies Paradise is the second of two novels about the same character, Octave Marais. And in the first novel, all he does is seduce women in ways that are just evidently despicable and you just like, you know, totally hate him. And he's kind of a positive character in Ladies Paradise when he's seducing woman with a capital W as it appears in the novel. So I think that, in fact, the novel sort of says, look, it's fine to seduce women as long as you do it in this roundabout way. And I also think that it's clear that it isn't just. he's seducing women from the beginning of the novel. There is like and women will have their revenge. There's this like foreshadowing and then that sort of happens at the end. I'm not going to get right.

Robin:

But that seems to show a disapproval. Yes. We could only approve of his seduction if he gets his gets his comeuppance at the end.

Agnes:

That's right. I don't think that's right. I think that Zola is displaying the battle of the sexes. And Zola's understanding is that men and women are at war. That's just a fact. It's not like good or bad. It's just the way things are. And when you're at war with someone, you can sort of predict that like you might be winning for a while, but they're going to get back on you. And the ending is not represented as some kind of big triumph of woman. It's just like, this is the way that men and women interact in this world is these kind of tricks or strategies, they don't sort of communicate directly. But I guess I don't fundamentally see the book as taking a moralistic stance against consumerism or against seduction. It describes seduction in very appealing ways.

Robin:

Like many good books that sit on a line, it invites both sides. And basically it gets more and more emotional engagement out of people by inviting both kinds of reactions on both sides of the line. often it just took one side, it couldn't be as engaging as if it sits on the line and lets you pick which way to go. So I think Zola is well aware that there's a way to see this negative and a way to see this positive, and he's setting it up so that you couldn't go either way. But if you want to go negative here, he gives you the ammunition of the fact that It's a man who previously had disapprovingly seduced women, and now he's seducing women again in a different way. And if you want to disapprove of that, of the whole shopping thing, that gives you that ammunition to do so. So I think that's not a coincidence. That's there for a reason.

Agnes:

I guess that's not how I see it. The way that I see it is that Zola is trying to tell the whole of a certain kind of story that most people are only inclined to tell a part because most people are just inclined to be like, how can I get people to be allies to whichever way I'm going? And so let me tell everything that's bad about capitalism and let me tell everything that's good about capitalism. And Zola is not trying to get you to move in any direction or other. He wants to show you this thing kind of this new way of life that's coming into being, it has horrors and delights. And that's just the truth about it, and that's why he wants to show you both of those things. But it's not because he wants to give ammunition to both sides. I think it's just very hard to take either side because he gives you the other side too. I think he just wants to show you what the truth of it is. And that's why he did like meticulous research so as to be able to depict in a realistic way what the kind of rise of the department store would look like.

Robin:

But let me say what I found to be the most thought-provoking part of reflecting on this book, which is that it highlights how constructed desire is, how over centuries we have innovated and created more ways to have stronger, more vivid, more detailed desires about many things. So in the course of this book, this one shop owner, figures out many ways to inflame the desires of customers and get them more engaged and interested. And that, if I think about it, I then notice, well, over the centuries, we've done a lot more of that. And it makes me more grateful, I guess, to the extent I enjoy the desires of the consumer world, to realize it took a lot of work to invent and create.

Agnes:

Okay, there's two things I wanted to ask you about that. Okay, they're totally unrelated. So the first is, this came up in my head when you were describing earlier about just how much delight we take in like making shopping lists and going shopping and all that. So here's something I've noticed in myself, which is like, since I'm working on my computer, you know, and then every once in a while, I'll like get distracted by going over to eBay and seeing whether, is there something from like a brand I like that's on sale? And what strikes me about this movement that I make is that when I'm on that, like when I click onto the eBay site, I feel this sense of relief and inner calm, this kind of peacefulness and safety. that I'm just like, where does this come from? It somehow feels like I've taken a drug. But while I'm working on my essay and I'm making arguments, I'm stressed and I'm anxious and I'm in a dangerous world, but I enter the website of eBay and all of a sudden I feel safe. So what is that? Why does consumption make us feel safe in particular?

Robin:

So I'm struck by the mental comparison between what it feels like to walk through a museum and what it feels like to walk through a shop. It's like many shops are next to a museum. So the items in a museum are far more valuable and striking and important than the items in the museum shop. But there's a special pleasure in the museum shop because each thing you could touch and take it home with you, you see. And there's just a strong pleasure and comfort from the knowing that in this space, you have this power to choose a thing and take it. And then it would forever be wherever you wanted it. At your beck and call, you could show it off to people, you could admire it, it would be yours.

Agnes:

Yeah, okay, good. So, so somehow it feels empowering to think that all of these things could be mine. And that, maybe that feeling of empowerment captures the sense of sort of safety or calm that I feel.

Robin:

Have you ever been into a store that was just so expensive you couldn't plausibly imagine ever buying any of it? It feels a little different, doesn't it? It doesn't feel quite so safe.

Agnes:

So there's something else, which is that here is a world that is utterly dependent on my choice. Right. So it's like, suppose that I have to write an email to someone in which, as I recently did, in which I try to get them to talk to me about Sola. And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry. You must be so busy. Please talk to me. You don't have any reason to. You don't know who I am. But. And it's like awkward and uncomfortable. And it's not just what I want. It's also what they want. And I have to sort of sell myself to them so that they will want to talk to me. And shopping is so not like that. Cause it's like, you're just like pointing to things. You're like, I'd like that and that and that. And you have this, it's all down to you. And so this feeling of autonomy that you have, of being nothing but a pure will.

Robin:

So there's this interesting asymmetry often between buying and selling. So from an abstract economic point of view, buyers and sellers are symmetric. They should have similar influence over the purchase and the price and the ability to say no. But there's a sense in which often buying is quite asymmetric from selling, and we often see this in lab experiments. And so the phrase, the customer is always right, is a reflection there. There's a sense of which what you're doing as a buyer is entering this buyer role, and part of the buyer role is that you will always be right. And the whole point is we are indulging you and the seller is not being indulged here. In the principle, the seller could be being indulged, you know, the buyers could be supplicant. And there are places like that where that's somewhat true. But in most consumerism, there's this strong asymmetry that the buyer is going to be self-indulgent and not very reflective and not very strategic, not very practical. The seller is going to be the opposite of all those things. And the seller is going to be supplicant. It's going to be whatever you want. as they do in the store. You know, anything else, ma'am? Can I help you? Right? And completely at your beck and call, even though in some abstract sense, it's a symmetric relationship.

Agnes:

So, you know, an interesting fact, one of the shopping experiences for me that was, that least had this feeling of safety and calm is when I was, I spent a couple of days, maybe it was as much as a week in Tibet, in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. And my husband's favorite thing was this outdoor market, okay, where everything was haggling. You had to haggle for everything. And if you just looked at something for more than a second, the person would be trying to sell it to you. Now, this was like my husband's favorite thing. He loved this. And he was like, come on, let's just find stuff to buy so I can haggle. Because he really enjoyed the process of haggling. But I, for all that I love shopping, hated it. It made me so uncomfortable. It made me feel like my eyeballs were being watched anytime I looked at anything. And I felt the opposite of the kind of safety that I feel on eBay. And I guess that that's like normally, and this was one of Octave Moret's innovations was fixed prices. Haggling was the norm in shopping, right? Because people would walk into a store already knowing how much money they could spend on some purchase. And then they would, you know, try to negotiate with the store owner. And he's like, no, we're just gonna write down prices and put them on everything. And those will be the prices. And people are like, wow, just, Well, you know, why would you do that? But it turns out that fixed prices make people relax, like people like me.

Robin:

Right. You're not fighting for it. You don't have to be on guard and strategic and planning to, you know, your strategy of how you're going to fight and negotiate. You don't want to be in that mode then.

Agnes:

You might think, well, why don't I feel like I need to be on guard and fighting against my own impulses to buy things that can lead me astray, right? Why aren't I stressed out every time I go on eBay saying, oh no, what if I buy something that I'm gonna regret? But I'm not, in fact. So you'd think I could develop a complex about that.

Robin:

So recently, I've been thinking a lot about fertility and predicting that small, insular, fertile subcultures like the Amish will take over. And that's highlighted for me how much these subcultures tend to be anti-materialist and anti-consumer. And if I look on, say, documentaries about them in the comments, this is like half the comments are saying how wonderful these people are for being anti-materialist. Their simplicity seems to be the thing people most admire about them. So there's certainly an enormous amount of admiration for communities of people that go out of their way not to be consumerist in almost a religious way. It's almost a religious virtue, like monks really. Monks are famously not very commercial, right? Yeah, we seem to enjoy it so much, so it's almost like coded somehow as a selfish pleasure, and these other alternative things are less selfish, I think, some fundamental way. We just coded consumerism as fundamentally selfish.

Agnes:

Okay, so here's a way in which, this was going to be my other question for you, a way in which I think you're, at a personal level, more in touch psychologically with the anti-consumerist attitude than I am. I'm just more of a consumer than you are. And in particular, you have all these principles against allowing your desires to proliferate and against developing refined tastes. Refined tastes is just consumerism, right? It's just like having your, it's like, no, no, I don't want just like any old kind of coffee. I want like the special one with the beans roasted in this place in this way. Like, I have all of these tastes that are the products of this capitalist system that has taught me that I want to desire very, very specific things. And you're like, a plain banana is fine for me, thanks. And you don't want to develop expensive hobbies like skiing. So you, it seems to me, you really kind of have some kind of appreciation for like these self-denying, as I would put it, cultures and the admirers of those cultures, as to why it might be a good thing to try to resist this. Because I think you try to resist it.

Robin:

So I think I feel both ways. So for example, inside me still is the young boy who saw a model of a Batmobile, a little tiny Batmobile, and was in love with that and wanted that. Yeah. For many years as a kid, that was just, wow, if I only could have that. Now, if I thought about what would I do with it if I had it, I don't think I thought it very true. I don't think I could just do very much with it. It wouldn't actually be something I could do much with. But the thought of having it somehow was very compelling to me. So I can feel that lust for the thing in me, even though I can look ahead and see, well, what exactly am I going to do with this thing? And I have bought things like that in the past where I had the lust and I bought it and it sits on a shelf now and I don't do anything with it. So I see that side of the attraction. And then on the other side, as you say, as a teenager, basically, we weren't that rich, and other people that I socialized with were richer, and they went skiing a lot and went sailing and stuff like that. And I looked at myself and I thought, I can't afford that. If I could, it would just break me near the edge of it. I'm just going to go, no, I'm just not going to go there. And so that, in my mind, put the category of kinds of things I don't want to get sucked into because however much I might like them, it couldn't be enough to justify how much it would cost.

Agnes:

Right. But I mean, if it... If the cost wouldn't justify it, then you wouldn't do it, right?

Robin:

But the point is, I might want to do it more if I had done it more. So there's this key idea of addiction more generally, but it applies to most everything we do, which is just that the more you do something, the more you like it, the more you're into it, the more you understand it, and the higher your taste and preference for it. That is, you get sucked into things, and then you get into them. That's true for almost everything that we do.

Agnes:

I'm glad you're an economist and you're granting this thing. Yes, I am. I don't get addicted to stuff. You do.

Robin:

And so we can be aware of the potential for that addiction and ask, should we go down that path?

Agnes:

So your description of like, you know, I bought like, as a kid, I liked toys and then I wanted them, but then they just sat on the shelf. Sounds to me like, it's like you stopped at consumerism 101. Cause I like bought like this shirt made with a special wool and it's not sitting on the shelf, it's sitting on me. And I'm appreciating the specialness of the wool all the time. I make sure I appreciate it. Because in addition to, I have not only cultivated the desire for these things, I've cultivated the faculty for appreciating the sensory qualities of this wool so that I can take pleasure in it. And that's probably necessary in order for me to desire more of it. So I have the whole apparatus. I don't just have to buy the shirt and then it sits in the closet or something. I do that too, obviously.

Robin:

So for example, like most people, I have the set of restaurants I like now that I will go back to. In an hour, I will go to a restaurant I like and get food for dinner. And I have collected those, and that's precious to me, the places that I know that give me a good deal. And that takes work. You have to try different restaurants out in order to find the... places you like best?

Agnes:

Okay, for every time you go to a restaurant, say in your area, what percent of those is trying a new restaurant?

Robin:

Oh, 10%.

Agnes:

Okay, so that's low. Me, it's like 80 to 90%. Because I'm always looking for like, what's the new fun thing, right? And I think I'm the true consumer.

Robin:

And you might be, right? But it's in part of like, where do you invest yourself in your life? So like I said, I read a lot of these criticism of consumerism and what they seem to want to recommend that is instead of getting into consumers, you get into something else. You get into a book club, you get into your church, you get into your job, you get into your children. And that's generally what people have in mind when they criticize consumerism is that you could get into these other things instead. So I did a... Twitter poll in a few hours ago where I asked about consumerism versus social media, which do people admire more? And apparently, now, according to most of the complaints about consumerism, social media should be much better, right? It's more social, it's more altruistic, it's less material, it's less more ecological, it's more interacting with people, it's more highfalutin and high-minded. And yet people actually seem in my poll say, no, social media is a less admirable thing than consumerism. So somehow in the last 20 years, we've really changed our mind about social media.

Agnes:

Something that's even worse than consumerism. But I'm very curious how. How people would respond if you weren't asking the question on social media? Because one of the main things people love to do on social media is talk about how much they hate social media. And so you're just asking the world as a whole. I still think it might fail.

Robin:

If you go to the mall and ask people, do they hate shopping? I think you're not going to hear so much complaint about how they hate shopping at the mall.

Agnes:

So, like, the interesting thing about the theory of the people who say, like, get into books or your kids or instead of consumerism is that they're assuming that they're substitutes. But I, it's just not clear to me they are. I'm into tons of stuff. I'm super into books. I'm really into my kids. I cook. I also like stuff. Like, I just have a lot of energy. And this is like, in the novel, right, there's these two characters. One is Octave Moret, the guy who runs the department store. And the other guy is Paul Valagnosc, his old best friend from school. And Paul Valagnosk was always doing better than Octave Marais when they were young. He always had high grades in school and he ended up succeeding in school in ways that Marais dropped out and then eventually scrambled and slept with lots of women and then slept his way into the beginnings of this department store and then built it up. And Valagnosk eventually got some kind of job in the ministry where he gets some small salary and kind of going through the motions. And Valagnosk is like this show up and harry him pessimist who thinks nothing is really valuable or significant and you almost get the sense that like you have to make a choice between life and not life and the choice of life is the choice of shopping and pleasure and fun and also every other kind of activity and aliveness and then on the other hand there's just like scoffing at all of that but it's like it's somehow like a package deal anyway that's what zola is suggesting i think so uh so i'm struck by the analogy with just

Robin:

language and vocabulary. That is, smaller communities of language have fewer words in their vocabulary and they have fewer words for emotions. And there's a literal sense in which when your language has more words for emotions, you can feel more different kinds of emotions. That is, often you can't really validate a feeling unless you have a word for it. And then you can say, this is how I feel, and then you can feel it and know that you're feeling it because you have that word. And that sense of which a larger vocabulary with more emotional words means you can have more emotions. I think in this commercial world, as the commercial world gets larger and richer, you can just have more kinds of desires or more kinds of feelings you can have with this commercial and more kinds of satisfaction. And I don't think it's like a zero sum thing. I think it's. It's a richer world where you can just be more and do more. There's a sense of which someone who has access to a rich commercial world, they can just have more kinds of commercial experiences, more subtle variations in them. They can know that they have and have more words for them. And this is the thing to celebrate about the evolution of commercial worlds. We've just gotten much better at that. And in our book, Elephant in the Brain, we go to the analog of words in advertising, we say, Advertising lets you express more different things about yourself because what ads do is they associate each product or service with some type of person who uses it. And so when you use that product or services, then you can basically tell the world, I'm this type of person. So the more kinds of ads there are, the more kinds of people you can be and tell yourself you are. And that's a way in which our world is enriched. That is, you can just be more kinds of people to the people around you by having products and services in a world where they have seen more ads, where they have more associations with those things.

Agnes:

OK, but you can talk the talk of this consumer culture, but I want to go back to whether you're walking the walk in terms of the banana philosophy, as I like to think of it, that you have. And so we go back to why you don't want to develop a taste for skiing or all these various things. We have to say, well, look, as you increase your set of desires and all the satisfactions that are open to you, you also increase all the frustrations you can have, right? So you can sort of open this Pandora's box of desires and it comes with it more kinds of pain and suffering that are possible for you. And so when you're deciding whether or not to open it, You can, I guess you're deciding, are the possible upsides worth it to me when I consider the possible downsides? And your answer, by and large, in many contexts, is no, it's not worth it. And you take the approach of the people who are like, why don't you join the book club instead by saying to yourself, look, I'm gonna concentrate my efforts on these things that are cheaper. You're like, you know, it's in effect like joining the book club. And so there must be a case to be made for that, right? I wanna hear that case. I wanna hear the talk that corresponds to your walk as to why one would, what's the justification of having a kind of, of emphasizing the negative.

Robin:

So if you see yourself as in this rich world with all these options, all these things you can get into, and if you think you have some capacity constraint, you really can't get into all of them, then you'll wanna choose which things do I wanna get into. And so I think for me, I have gone hog wild into different intellectual areas. As you may know, I've spent my life switching different intellectual areas. I spend a lot of time reading a lot of different intellectual areas. I am crazy diverse. you know, engaging in consuming intellectual thoughts and analyses in a huge range of areas, and that I think I like that. I like that's how I've specialized. And if it means I don't pay as much attention to different kinds of pasta, or different kinds of perfume, or clothing I go okay I'm okay with that yeah because I'm in my head thinking about ideas and it would be a distraction from that to some extent to pay attention to perfume or or flowers or whatever else it is and I don't mind being in a context where somebody else has paid attention to those things and I can pause for a moment and smell the flowers or taste the food etc but I'm going to spend my marginal efforts in this direction I've gone of all these vast diverse intellectual topics where I just enjoy the vast variety and diversity of them. And I can give you reasons why maybe that would be useful. But honestly, it's a consumption, right? I enjoy it.

Agnes:

It's interesting because I think if I think, well, OK, I also like ideas and I've also spent a lot of my life learning about ideas in different areas. And And I think it's just the same response that I give to the people who are like, why aren't you spending time with your kids and joining the book club instead of like shopping, which is, well, I'm doing that too. I think I just don't see these things so much as substitutes. I see them more as complements. So for example, I am, let's take three things. You know, I'm, I'm reading a bunch of novels by a French novelist. I'm, like, enjoying the texture of my wolf fur. And I am, you know, like, engaged philosophically in a bunch of different issues. And you might think, well, I mean, maybe you could get more philosophy done if you didn't read so many novels. And you might think, maybe you could read more novels if you didn't spend time shopping for wool shirts. But I think, well, the fact that I care about wool shirts helps me appreciate the novel. And the novel helps me appreciate lots of different things. But I would say, more than anything, actually capitalism. I think Zola, amazingly, succeeds in describing capitalism non-moralistically, and it's the first account of that I've ever seen. And if I hadn't read this novel, I would never have had it. So I just see all these things as complements to each other. I guess I do see the possibility that you could do one in excess to the point where it would cut against the others, but it's just less obvious to me that they're substitutes.

Robin:

I think the strongest argument for what you're suggesting is the idea that if I specialize in social science, well, that's about people and their lives and their experiences. And so a complement to thinking about social science is to live lives and have experiences of the sort I'm analyzing and thinking about. And that's a reason why I should make sure I do a fair bit of living.

Agnes:

Right, and I would think as an economist, you'd be like, well, you know, I always have to worry about my margins and am I doing too much of that and not enough of that? But like, you're the master of doing those calculations. So like, I'm someone who, every once in a while, I will just make forbidding. I will do forbiddings of myself, you know, like no going online today at all. Like I make little moralistic rules for myself so that I get enough work done or whatever. But ideally, if I were an ideally rational agent like you are, I would just always be calculating of like, well, I can add a little bit on this front or a little bit on this front, and I would feel totally, I imagine what it'd like to be you, be like, I would feel totally safe all the time that I'm doing those calculations correctly and I'm always adding to my total store of knowledge, you know, wherever I need to be.

Robin:

I think it wouldn't be that hard to just make a long list of things you hardly do at all, right? You're not into model trains and model airplanes or dolls. You don't go to very many rock concerts. Right. You know, there's just a whole long list of things. Other people do a lot of snowmobiling.

Agnes:

I've checked all of those things by the way. Not snowmobiling, but the equivalent on sand, and I crashed the thing.

Robin:

But still, the point is, you have a reason why you don't do so much of it, but the fact is, you pay a lot more attention to clothes than snowmobiles, and that's fine. But the point is, everybody's going to be making those choices.

Agnes:

If I thought I could have lots of fun on a snowmobile, I would totally go in for snowmobiling. It's just that after crashing this ATV in the desert, I was like, maybe snowmobiling's not for me. And in fact, I was really into motorcycling for a while, and I had a motorcycle, and I just had to, you know, it was delightful, but I thought I was gonna die.

Robin:

Okay, so now our story is, early in life, you just try a bunch of things, and whichever things you had fun, do more of that, and then fill a life with the things you had fun doing, right?

Agnes:

That's what the consumerist person like me does, but what the puritan, anti-capitalist like you. I might say, well, first few times I went skiing or sailing, I went, eh. That's a different story. But the thing is, you like the moralistic story. That's the story you've told me until now, the banana story, where you took yourself in hand and you said, no, young man, you will not be developing these tastes, even if you would find them thoroughly delightful, because that's too dangerous.

Robin:

And I think it's a mixture of both, but I think the place I've been most like that, I was probably video games. That is. So when I was, my children were young, uh, it was a family thing to do us guys, me and my two sons to sit and play video game. And I would be the one playing the game and they were young and they would just watch me and tell me what to do next. And so it was a bonding with me and my sons that I'm, we enjoyed video games, but then they got old enough. They wanted to play themselves and they did. And at that point. I stopped playing video games, even though I could see, yeah, they had a lot of appeal. I could get into them. But I also saw, eh, but there's only so far. The sort of person I could become really into video games didn't appeal to me as much as the person I could become who read a lot of interesting books or wrote essays or other sorts of things. But that's a choice of who you become in some sense, which part of yourself you inflame or you emphasize, because you just start to see who you will become if you spend more time at that thing.

Agnes:

Really, this is just the people who market video games are really suck at their jobs, and they have not found a way to create the analog of the nature thing, where people somehow think nature or travel are things where people are like, oh, personal growth. If I go to the forest for a while, add personal growth. You could think people would say that with video games, like, oh, video game personal growth, right? But nobody thinks that, because they clearly have not done that marketing.

Robin:

And we've talked about how similar they are to movies, and people do have the sense that movies will inspire them and make them grow, but video games not.

Agnes:

You watch tons of movies, and you don't pay super close attention about it. So, right, people watch movies, people read novels, people go in nature, people travel. These are all things where people are like, yeah, but that's personal growth. They don't seem to need any evidence that they achieve any personal growth by means of these things. And they very rarely will even have intellectual conversations about them or anything, right? But there's just this kind of, they've put in this category because they had a good marketing team behind them. But video games somehow, I mean, look, I feel like I can speak to this because video games hold zero appeal for me. Most of them, I'm not actually physically capable of playing because they make me nauseous. I don't see the appeal at all, but I mean, but I would think that the people who are designing them and marketing them would try to make them seem like avenues of personal growth. Why hasn't that happened?

Robin:

For me, I see two key differences, say, between movies and video games. One is a video game just takes 10 times as long to get through any one story. TV shows. Right. TV shows are longer, and I like TV shows less than movies exactly because it takes so long to go through a TV show.

Agnes:

But people watch tons and tons of adult, people like me, hey, my husband, we're watching a show called For All Mankind Now. It's got like four seasons, each season has tons of episodes, an episode is an hour long. We're gonna pull ourselves through this whole thing and we're not gonna feel guilty about it in a way that if we'd spent the equivalent number of hours playing a video game, we both would.

Robin:

I think there's a sense in which, say, movies or TV shows, they're integrated into our culture in the sense of they tend to be seen as having morals or at least moral questions you can talk to other people about. And so you can enjoy discussing a movie or TV show from the moral framing of what's, you know, who to approve or disapprove in the story, what actions to approve or disapprove, what would you do. And that's a big part, I think, of the appeal of movies and TV shows is that They structure this moral universe for us of anchor points we can discuss. It's like the larger vocabulary in other ways. They give us this larger vocabulary of situations we can talk to each other about, and what should you do in those situations, or how would you react, or what do you feel like about it. And I feel like video games just haven't been seen as that vocabulary. That is, in fact, video games don't tend to give you moral quandaries so much. They're more often just about like running or shooting or fighting or puzzling. And it's just less interesting to talk about someone else. What would you do at this part of the game?

Agnes:

Right. I mean, if you just looked at, like, how often are people having discussions about what they would do or thinking about what they would do as a result of, like, watching things? I'm skeptical that that's some giant effect. Like if we studied people who watched these shows, the people who didn't, would we see a difference? It's a little bit like how people are convinced that like reading literature makes you empathetic, but when they try to study it, they don't find any big empathy effect.

Robin:

I'm not claiming it has an effect. I'm just saying you like having this shared reference.

Agnes:

But like lots of... Yeah. OK. And so that does also help explain why we tend to want to watch what other people are watching.

Robin:

Right. It gives us the shared reference point. So you can you could tell me something about I mean since I've seen the first season I guess of For All Mankind you know I could mention an example of there and you could echo that and have a reaction to it and we have the shared language for talking about issues by the show.

Agnes:

Kids have like shared jokes and stuff that are based on Minecraft. So actually, kids are totally... And then it could just be a matter of coordination.

Robin:

That is, you know, we coordinate on movies and we haven't coordinated on video games. Maybe we will someday. And it's just as arbitrary as that.

Agnes:

I think, I mean, it's interesting if you think about how it is that buying fabric in the store somehow got classified with like you know, novels and travel and movies and not with the video game. That is, people would go to this store and would be shopping. And the kind of joy they took in the book in buying, in touching these fabrics and buying them...

Robin:

And there's an important scene early in the book where there's a bunch of women at a party looking at some fabrics, discussing them. And you can see that this guy who did the store was building on some existing cultural capacity that women already had to sit and talk about fabrics together. And they're really like that. He didn't have to invent that. He just had to have a place that would inflame it. It was already part of their cultural language. Women would sit around and talk about fabrics and what they thought about.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, somehow the fabric seems to them to be like a door onto real life. Like, this is a real thing. This is, you know, like I'm really going to wear it or something. Even though it's not like the fabric you would use instead if you just didn't put any effort into this at all would be like really similar. But still there's that feel of reality and the video game somehow feels like it doesn't connect up to reality.

Robin:

I mean, it's like a bunch of guys mansplaining automobile repair or something. These women, women splained fabrics because they had a personal pride and knowledge and understanding of fabrics. And that was something they cared about.

Agnes:

Right. But. It also had to. That kind of shared attention and knowledge could only land on some things and not on others, like it could land on fabrics.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

I mean, what the novel suggests is partly because these fabrics were then used by the women to decorate themselves, to make themselves beautiful for men. And so the fabrics played a role in this gender.

Robin:

So it's like today, people are more likely to talk about cars than your couches. And dresses are more visible. Dresses are part of their visible persona to the world. So they were very interested in sharing opinions about the way they presented themselves.

Agnes:

Right. Right.

Robin:

So I think we're about out of time.

Agnes:

Oh yeah. Okay. We should probably stop then.

Robin:

Okay. Well, nice talking.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Bye.