Creative hedonism

The rapacity of the creative can know no satiety.

Back in November, Bill Kaye-Blake was bored by a SciFi story that found the end of scarcity: what's then left to do? I suggested the protagonists could find ever more creative forms of hedonism.

Turns out, this isn't a new suggestion. Arts & Letters Daily points to a nice bit of history:

Petronius, if the historical record is any guide, had every reason to be a snob. In a court full of decadents, he was the most refined of all. This is how Tacitus paints him: "He spent his days in sleep, his nights in attending to his official duties or in amusement, that by his dissolute life he had become as famous as other men by a life of energy, and that he was regarded as no ordinary profligate, but as an accomplished voluptuary [erudito luxu]."

It's the two most incongruous words in that passage that point us toward Petronius' chief insight into pleasure and abundance: "accomplished voluptuary." How can anyone be accomplished at taking pleasure? Isn't that something anyone can do? Yes, under most circumstances. But under decadent circumstances, such as Trimalchio's feast or Nero's court, pleasure becomes cheap. It must, at first, be exhilarating to find exquisite versions of the things we most want—food, sleep, sex—right at hand. But then comes the revelation that even with unlimited means, our capacity to take pleasure is itself limited. The usual enjoyments become repetitious and dull, until we can barely taste them at all, or remember how they once tasted. And it's at that point that Trimalchio and Petronius part ways: One flails to enjoy himself while the other becomes a scientist of pleasure. Under decadent circumstances, Petronius devises ever-more-original varie­ties of hedonism. [emphasis added]

Infovores follow Petronius in taking delight from the now decadent information environment; Trimalchio gets bored after uploading the millionth YouTube cat video.

Droit de Suite

A model of an artist's lifetime earnings is incomplete if it ignores complementary investments by early investors in the artist's works: the curators and collectors who buy early works and who work to make sure that it gets in front of the right people in the cultural elite. Unless you're born into an art family, you're just not likely to have the connections necessary for success.

And so I'm pretty sceptical about Droit de Suite - policies that seek to redistribute portions of realized capital appreciation in artworks back to the originating artist. At the margin, they reduce incentives for gallery owners, curators, and collectors to make complementary investments in new artists. What are the distributional effects?

• A windfall gain in the current period to established artists at the expense of those who made complementary investments in their success;
• A transfer to those artists who become successful from those who never do;
• For a successful artist, a transfer of income from when he's young and poor to when he's old and established.

None of these seem particularly desirable. The first has efficiency consequences as well as distributional effects. The latter two turn art into more of a winner-take-all market. Think of a work from a new artist as a lotto ticket that might or might not pay off if an investor makes a pile of ancillary investments. The value of that lotto ticket is lower if the winning tickets are taxed. So the initial price a new artist's works can attract is lower than it otherwise would be. So all new artists earn less on their early works while those who eventually become successful are paid back with interest. But that's when they're already well off and can supplement their income by doodling on folks' napkins at restaurants.

Note further that none of this requires that investors are only in it for the money; they're just less able to afford to keep making those investments where the returns are taxed. It wouldn't be surprising if the insult given by the implicit devaluation of their role were as motivating as the reduction in forward-looking returns. But budget constraints do bind too.

@CherylBernstein points to a newly introduced American bill that would implement Droit de Suite in the U.S.

The Equity for Visual Artists Act of 2011, would set aside 7% of the price for works resold for more than $10,000 at major auction houses, such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s, with half the proceeds going to the artists and half to non-profit art museums.

If the portion going to non-profit art museums goes into a common pool rather than to the museum that first exhibited the artist's work, or to the museum of the artist's choosing, recipient museums have free-rider problems in making investments in emerging artists. What do I mean? Consider two non-profit museums. The first makes large investments in figuring out which new artists in the community are worth promoting and works hard to help them become successful; the second spends the same amount of money hosting travelling exhibitions from other galleries. The first museum buys a lot of the emerging artists' work and hopes to use earnings from the small proportion that really pan out to help future emerging artists; the second just banks revenues from travelling exhibitions to fund later hosting of travelling exhibitions. The proposed policy takes money from the first museum and gives it to the second, reducing museums' incentives to invest in new artists.

The legislation, as it stands, would only apply to the resale of works at public auction houses “with more than $25 million in sales in the prior year”. Auction houses that operate only online would be excluded, as would private galleries.

Prediction: more sales shift to online and private galleries from public auction houses. I have no sense of how costly that is in terms of sale revenue foregone, but if most auctions are coordination games, and everyone's making the flip, it's probably not that bad. The big auction houses will be lobbying hard against the legislation and might find it worthwhile to flip to online-only auctions.

Update: Consider now the case in which curators and collectors really have no effect on an artist's success. In that case, the policy still results in reductions in the amount those folks are willing to pay for a new risky artwork and so still effects transfers from those artists who never become successful to those who do and from artists when they're young and poor to when they're old and successful. But there's less efficiency consequence as the ancillary investments by others are of less value.

Graduation

I attended the University of Canterbury's graduation ceremonies on Wednesday afternoon. I'd avoided attending each of my own graduations other than high school, mostly because I expected them to be mind-bogglingly boring. I also had the handy excuse of being well out of Winnipeg by the time of my undergrad graduation ceremony, in New Zealand by the time of my doctoral graduation ceremony, and of its being a faux pas for a PhD student in the States to attend his Masters conferment (signals that you think you won't finish).

Don't get me wrong - the speeches from our Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor, and from Ruth Richardson, were excellent. The awarding of the research medal was nice. The pomp and ceremony of the event is also itself important. Getting all dressed up in regalia is great fun for staff and students alike. A graduation ceremony consisting of those speeches, and some abbreviated degree-conferment ceremony with appropriate pomp, would be great. But I struggle to understand the utility function of those who attend graduations as they currently exist: a half-hour of good content interspersed among a couple of hours of watching, and applauding, a bunch of people you mostly don't know walking across the stage to be given their degrees in alphabetical order by degree.

I can imagine, as a student, the value of getting to walk across the stage and shake hands with the head of the University. And parallel benefits for the parents. But is that benefit worth the couple of hours of watching a few hundred^* other people doing the same thing? Can it really be the case that the median student prefers the current form of graduation to one where we keep the nice speeches but forego handing out the diplomas to each graduand?

The first response is that students attend because parents demand it. But that just pushes the problem back a level: why should any parent prefer sitting there for two hours, watching a bunch of people they've no chance of knowing walk across the stage in exchange for the 45 seconds in which their kid gets to walk across the stage? The parents definitely enjoy watching their kid cross the stage, and I can understand getting utility that way; I would too. But at that cost? Surely there are other ways of celebrating your child's achievement: a graduation party at home with friends and family instead of formal graduation, for example. Even more puzzling: parents of international students fly in to attend; the two hours at graduation are a trivial part of the overall cost.

Potential explanations:

• The 45 seconds' utility trumps the time cost for most people; Crampton is a pod-person.
• Note that the second clause can be (is almost certainly) true regardless of the rest.
• The ceremony with public awarding of degrees is a binding enforcement mechanism preventing students from lying about their academic progress.
• But a lot of US schools run graduation with fake certificates because final grades haven't yet been tabulated!
• It's a horrible showing-you-care equilibrium. Parents attend because they want to demonstrate how much they appreciate their kids' having worked really hard to get their degrees; kids attend because their parents want them to and they want to show their appreciation for parents' financial support. Both would be better off if they could agree to a graduation party at home instead, but the one proposing it risks being seen as not caring.
• But then a University could do well at the margin by offering a more efficient graduation ceremony. Maybe they wouldn't really attract more students by it, but they'd at least save the opportunity costs of the stage party. That nobody does this suggests the median student isn't in the showing-you-care equilibrium.
• People attend to feel validated about having purchased this educational bundle. Sure, it's after the fact. But a nice ceremony makes the degree feel more credible both for those getting it and for those who funded it. It's a bit irrational: you should seek quality signals ex ante, not ex post, and I don't know of anybody who decides which school to attend ex ante on the basis of graduation ceremonies. But if it makes appliance buyers happy when their fridge's instruction manual starts out with a friendly "Congratulations on having chosen wisely in purchasing our brand!" maybe this holds here too. The obvious inefficiency of the ceremony, and observing that other parents attend, somehow signals the strength of the brand and the wisdom of their prior investment decision. In this version, waiting through all the other kids is a benefit, not a cost: "Look at all these fine young people among whose ranks my child now stands!"

Best guess: a good quarter of folks are there only because it's a bad equilibrium (as in the next-to-last bullet), another quarter are there because the disutility from waiting through the other graduands for their kid isn't that high, and the rest split either between validation or simply attending because it's the thing to do.

Note also that I completely understand the University offering the event given that parents and students seem to demand it - none of this is meant as critique of Canterbury, or of any University's putting on these ceremonies. And I also understand Faculty attendance as part of the job. I'm struggling to understand the demand side, not supply.

Could somebody who is not a pod-person help explain why they enjoyed attending their graduation or their kid's?

I wonder whether there are testable hypotheses in here. We have records on student characteristics - tons of records. We know who attends graduation and who stays home. Some hypotheses:

• If students from lower-decile high schools are more likely to attend than those from higher-decile high schools, that's consistent with either opportunity costs of time being lower among attendees, or benefits of seeing the kid's graduation being higher where college attainment is less common. 
• I'd predict higher proportionate attendance among those receiving first class than third class honours, mostly on the benefits side of the calculus (being announced to everyone as having first class honours)
• I'd predict higher attendance among those from underrepresented ethnic groups holding constant incoming school decile - benefits of seeing graduation higher where college attainment is less common.
• If the "showing you care" story is right, we expect highest attendance among those departments where "showing you care" is integrated into the discipline's way of being - Social Work, Cultural Studies - and lowest attendance among departments like Economics. 
• Others?

^* Canterbury splits its graduation ceremonies across different days for different faculties to make things tractable. Commerce, Laws, Engineering, and Fine Arts was Wednesday afternoon. Relatively few Econ graduands attended graduation, suggesting their utility function is more like mine.

Drinking culture [updated]

Some sense from Kate Fox at the BBC:

The problem is that we Brits believe that alcohol has magical powers - that it causes us to shed our inhibitions and become aggressive, promiscuous, disorderly and even violent.
But we are wrong.

In high doses, alcohol impairs our reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly. But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules. It does not cause us to say, "Oi, what you lookin' at?" and start punching each other. Nor does it cause us to say, "Hey babe, fancy a shag?" and start groping each other.

The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol.

There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol.

...the variation is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations about the effects of alcohol, and different social rules about drunken comportment.

This basic fact has been proved time and again, not just in qualitative cross-cultural research, but also in carefully controlled scientific experiments - double-blind, placebos and all. To put it very simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.

...I would like to see a complete change of focus, with all alcohol-education and awareness campaigns designed specifically to challenge these beliefs - to get across the message that a) alcohol does not cause disinhibition (aggressive, sexual or otherwise) and that b) even when you are drunk, you are in control of and have total responsibility for your actions and behaviour.

Alcohol education will have achieved its ultimate goal not when young people in this country are afraid of alcohol and avoid it because it is toxic and dangerous, but when they are frankly just a little bit bored by it, when they don't need to be told not to binge-drink vodka shots, any more than they now need to be told not to swig down 15 double espressos in quick succession.

I'm surprised that the Beeb allowed talk about personal responsibility!

Read the whole thing...

HT: Anon.

Update: Harford notes the author has worked for the alcohol industry. Watch for one-sided scepticism, but it's also worth following up on the experiments noted. I'll see whether I can track down the cites.