Cappuccinos and True Happiness: The Economics of Love
(1) Entering adulthood with a syrofoam cappuccino
It was 1996 and Sex and the City and Friends was a thing.
London was a different place.
The middle class hadn't yet started talking with a faux working class accent.
The BBC hadn't yet realised it's dream of being cool (BBC radio DJs were crap).
The guy selling the Evening Standard at the tube was a Geezer.
At the time, Starbucks was just taking off.
And in the heart of the City were family run Italian cafe booths making a hard-working and good living.
Cappuccinos were a thing
And they became my thing, too. Every day.
I was 22 I was working in the City.
Every day I would walk from the Underground to the trading floor. The economy was crap. I was relatively rich.
As a student I'd been very poor.
With a play slip came the opportunity to define myself as an adult.
One pound every day for a styrofoam cup of milk cappuccino from the Italian cafe booths at the Underground.
(2) Cappuccino as a way of life, but few can afford to live, circa 2018
Cut forward to today.
I'm sitting by the window of a cafe which probably serves the best cappuccino in this city.
There was some milk foam left over. A lady in the queue behind me gave me a judgemental sideways glance as she caught me swiping the inside of the empty cup to grab the foam.
I spend a hell of a lot of money on cappuccinos and croissants. I do enjoy them but I also binge read Mr Money Moustache.
Say $6 a day for 250 says a year. $1500 a year.
These indulgences are robbing me of a proportion of my health. I'd have lower cholesterol, less belly fat. $1500 is a week's holiday in Georgia or somewhere else nice and not far off. Or a luxury annual gym membership. Or a monthly massage.
I know, I know. Stay frugal.
I'm lucky. I bought a flat the same year I started buying cappuccinos. Got my foot on the property ladder. It's true I waste the equivalent price of a new air conditioning unit every year on gluten and caffine, but I also own the roof over my head.
Yes I enjoy the cappuccino and croissant.
But not that much.
(3) The price of the Cappuccino on the soul
So the price I pay for my cappuccino is a lost opportunity to purchase things that would being me better quality of life.
Fine.
But there is another price too, and here I'm not talking about the cappuccino per se.
It's anything we invest time or energy in to increase it's value beyond the intrinsic. What it does.
I'm standing in the queue in the cafe and behind and in front of me are millennials.
Earning decent hi tech money in this economy. Enjoying life. But very little prospect of owning a house, the most basic building block of Maslow's heirarchy, unless they get benevolent assistance.
And of course, they spend money, fritter it away, just like I did.
Today compared to 1996, drinking cappuccino every day doesn't come from Friends or some
other sitcom fantasy of friends who role model for urban happiness.
No it comes from consumerism. And consumerism is everywhere.
It's hard to live in the city, participate in a good job even whilst living in some delapidated appartment with flatmates ages 30, without breathing consumerism.
(4) Irrationally Rational and Toiling away
Do you know behavioral economics?
I'm going to take some ideas from it.
######My request- if you develop or quote these ideas, please directly refer to my Steemit account. I'm bypassing doing a PhD but I very much want to be identified with my ideas, even if anonymously via my Steemit name .#####
Kahneman and Tversky's Comparative Ignorance Hypothesis - and they jointly won a Nobel Prize in Economics- showed essentially that if we feel we are somewhat familiar with a topic (through we are in fact ignorant) we will be willing to take a risk on our opinion of it. Whereas, if we're equally as ignorant but unaware of this ignorance... Well, we will then not place any bets on it.
This sounds super trivial but it's not. Keep in mind that rational economics had us all postulating that humans behave rationally. Along comes this hypothesis and bang! Proven to be not so. Which means, essentially, that the entire hypothesis of economic systems in equilibrium is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It doesn't work.
Let go back to what Kahneman and Tversky actually said.
They were saying that our opinions about ourselves..if we feel knowledgeable is the real currency. This is the actual commodity that we bet in when we risk capital.
To me, this explains why Facebook, the media so powerful in society. They are the means by which we circulate the thing that motivates us to take risks in the first place- that is, feeling familiarity with a subject.
Note that I use the word feel.
It's it as if the hypothesis is talking about us truly being familiar with the subject. Very definitely, we are actually ignorant.
Because it's a feeling and it's not related to another person, it's not emotional, this really is about ego.
The Comparative Ignorance Hypothesis is saying that the more we invested our ego into believing we understand a topic, the more we believe we do understand it.
This is a theme that is found elsewhere in multiple sources, modern and ancient.
The later behavioral economist Dan Ariely has proved experimentally that it is investing in our work that gives it value to us.
But is that not also what Karl Marx thought as the integral part of the human condition?
And if we go back to archetypes, what of the expulsion of from the Garden of Eden and Adam's punishment that he should toil the earth? We cannot taste the sweet fruits unless we work.
Is this not saying by extension that the more we invest in an asset the more the value of the asset inflates for us? In economic and emotional terms. Because if we work on something that gives it value.
So really the more energy and attention we give to things that don't matter, the more the unimportant grows in value to us.
Those poor millennials. So much time and money invested in cappuccinos. No money invested in housing.
There's a double effect.
We only have limited energy. Each time we invest in the unimportant the value of the unimportant grows in our perception. And the energy we invest in the unimportant takes away from the pool of energy we can devote to the important.
So, in a passive way, we increasingly value less the important. And, we devalue the truly important.
And playing life right is an important game. We'd better invest in that pursuit. We're only here for a while.
I have a whole theory on mapping sociopolitical Economic systems to value changes on Maslow's pyramid. Will post more in future. But briefly, capitalism works works, seductive marketing works, by interchanging an asset on one level of Maslow's pyramid with another.
Drink Coca Cola? Maybe you're thirsty. But hey, water would do. What really happened? You saw an advertisement for happy people drinking Coca Cola. So you executed a value exchange in perception on two different levels of Maslow's pyramid.
The collective sum of this systemic dynamic is that the more we - you me, never-having-hope-of-owning-a-home-yet-moral-productive-society-members- is that over time the price of the unimportant goes up and demand for trying unimportant goes up because we value it more, the more we consume it.
And this is why we're so unhappy.
And the biggest joke?
And yet the thing that draws it all together?
The best things in life are free.
Of course they are.
Love. To love is to give without expectation of return.
It's an Economic system that doesn't compute on the material Economic system. De facto, it's ilogical.
But this I tell you is the economics of love.
Sure none of us are perfect. We love imperfectly. Conditions tucked away or out in front.
But if you want more love, give to what's important.
Find a moral system that speaks to you as to what's important.
Because it's easy to get led astray.
More to come...
END
I write as often as I can, so forgive any typos and errors, I'll edit later.
Please quote this Steemit account if you use any ideas in it.