who is richer: the person who just wants an apple with an apple, or the person who wants an apple and a BMW with both.
The answer is that there are 2 types of wealth at play here:
(1) Personal Wealth is like your favourite music. You may like a song by Ariana Grande.
(2) Social Wealth is like the music that is cool. You may feel more comfortable saying to some people you like Mozart.
The two can often be in conflict. It may be cool to like a certain band. They may be in the media all the time, everyone may be very excited by them, and it may raise your social status to say you like them. However if you actually enjoy listening to another type of music then you have a conflict.
But it is more complex. I'll call this the Magic Lamp. eBay is like a magic lamp in that we can order almost anything. But a true Magic Lamp would mean you can ask for anything even things that you never even heard or thought of before. When the genie gives you a wish you might say I want a sea food pizza. But suppose there was a vegetable called a 'wonnunk' that was more incredible than anything you had ever tasted, yet no one had ever tasted it because it was unknown (anagram!) to everyone. It had no name, and no one knew what it tasted like. How would you ask the Genie of the Lamp for it? Perhaps you would just ask for a vegetable that is more amazing that anything I have ever eaten before. Then you call that a wonnunk. And refer to it like this again. (Altho we are in Perry Paradox territory because after you have tasted it, if you were to ask for a vegetable "more amazing that anything I have ever eaten before" (call that Handle1) the genie couldn't give you a wonnunk cos you have tasted it now. Handle1 is self referential so it is flexible and changes what it refers to each time.) But whichever way we go asking directly or indirectly Magic Lamps depend on our experience, and our experience is both Personal and Social.
Personal and Social Experience
We may have travelled and found a thing we really like in a market abroad. This becomes our new personal favourite thing. Mine is karela. However where I live karela is unknown, and is not something I would serve to my friends as it is quite unlike anything in the West. My society prefers quite bland flavours, while I personally like very distinct and strong flavours. When a dinner party comes if I was to serve karela with no consciousness of my society I would be very unpopular, and would spoil the evening. The same as someone who likes chilli serving lots of chilli, it would make people very uncomfortable and they would actually dislike you for it. This is all social. I'm sure in a society that uses chilli a lot, like Mexico, people would be more tolerant and understanding if you served it at a dinner party.
So our tastes are actually influenced a great deal by what we know and expect. And the types of experiences we have and what we expect are informed a lot by our society.
I would imagine that if there was such a thing as a wonnunk that was unknown to all of human history it would actually not taste very pleasant because it would be a taste quite unknown to us. Now we might develop a taste for it like karela but it would take time. I always feel that bitter beer is like this too. I did not like it when I first tasted it. But because my society likes it, I tried again and again until I developed an expectation and tolerance for it. Now I quite like it.
There are only 5 tastes and the examples I give of karela and bitter beer are both bitter which is famously not as palatable as sweet, salty or MSG. Nevertheless bitterness is crucial to things like chocolate (especially 90% dark) and coffee but it takes some time.
Conclusion
So the length discussion again arrives at a complex picture of how our desires are a mixture of our societies expectations, and how we fit into those. There is a strong social element to our desires. I am likely to like the things that people I respect like. However there is under this personal taste too, which sometimes rejects the expectations of the society. It is funny how coffee has taken the place of tea as the drink of the empire not least because of the Boston Tea party where it became a political statement. I really do prefer tea but is that because I am British?
So when we speak of wealth it does depend very much where we are, it is relative. In Papua New Guinea I would feel very wealthy with a headdress like this:
However this is not to say that things are fixed. Things change continuously. I may like karela today, but come back in a year and I do not like it any more.
This is why free markets are so important. Feather headdresses may be very fashionable for a while and anyone with one is very wealthy. But fashions change and the person with a warehouse of headdresses may suddenly find that they are worthless. The value of things ultiately is simply how the society values it.
This also illustrates the unsolved problem of modern economics and the environment. This beautiful bird is a New Zealand Huia and is unfortunately an artists impression because they are now extinct due to feather collecting for hats. All those hats are in the bin now as the fashion has changed, but we are left with the extinction of this species. Markets based just upon the relative and conditional whims of human likes and dislikes are very dangerous.
So within a market model we cannot just have personal desire (as my current models have). We need "fashions" to full reflect the social element of desire. Research suggests we like the music we hear the most often. This is why people from different cultures like different music. Do people like Punk music or Dance music because they like the music or the culture or both? Advertising must works to mould desires else companies would not spend millions on it. Desire it seems is a social thing and yet we don't entirely learn all our desires. Perhaps differences in our individual experiences and genes are enough to account for differences between people (a discussion of individual choice to be had there! how do we chose if what we chose from is based on our experiences - we can be creative in creating desires and change the culture in so doing).
Differences are also at different scales, we can be instrumental in forming a sub-culture which grows in popularity. The sub-culture informs our desires, and we inform it. As it grows uniformity between a growing number of people makes the culture more rigid. Perhaps this is why in the West we eventually break out of mainstream culture because we wish to feel that we are instrumental in the tastes of the culture again, rather than just passive recipients learning what to like and dislike. Which raises the question can we actively develop what we like and dislike?
So Schopenhauer says : "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants." (This is SRH again.) But is this true? I may want to like Ariana Grande so that I can enjoy going to concerts with my friends. But what if I just don't like her music? Or I may want to like the girl I am dating, but what if I now prefer someone else. Or my friends all like meat, but I don't. This is all possible because there is the social side to desire, the need and wish to conform, that is quite separate from the actual experience of likes and dislikes.
On an aside in Buddhism freedom is accepting our circumstances. If we find we have been given tickets to an Ariana Grande concert and we just don't like the music, it's no great struggle to go along and just experience what we experience. Perhaps we might like one song, but even what we hate just experience it peacefully - at least be creative... perhaps its a funny story for your spocial group of classical music fans. Likewise if we don't get tickets to the concert we were really dying to go to, that may feel horrible but we sit with it and just experience that too. Like and Dislike are not the only things in the world, and getting what we want isn't that important. Even the best economics cannot give everyone what they want all the time. Accepting that fact is actually even more valuable than having a good economic system!
So how do I conclude this long blog entry? Individual desires are currently modelled in my models by random real numbers. But in fact what we desire is almost learned from the market itself. A new product turning up may take a long time to becomes popular, or maybe not at all.
So we should have a "social desire" for each product, and then define individual desires as relative to this. Individual variation is built upon the social movements. Current mdoesl are effectively saying that "social desire" is just an epiphenomenon of individual desires. But Papua New Guinea tribes people all wanting feather head dresses and the people of Indonesia mostly liking Gamelan music is not a coincidence. Being brought up in a society gives us the basis from which we have individual variation.
We also need to allow for desires to change. But perhaps ignore this as we're supposed to be testing which is the best economy.
It means then that satisfaction can still be measured on an individual basis, but that the social element is built into our "desire profiles."
Not entirely happy with that. Perhaps "Satisfaction" should explicitly include two components. The personal and the social. So that wanting things that are not wanted by the society has a social cost on satisfaction.
Now this is all mirrored by the economy. Because wanting rare things is difficult. No one is making them and they are expensive. As a result we make compromises and buy less ideal more popular things at lower prices. The result however is similar to the existing models: we expect to get some level of satisfaction for a unit of money. We make choices so as to maximise the satisfaction that each unit of money gives. I can see this in myself, if I have a long run of very satisfying cheap purchases then my expectations of the £1 are high, and I see something less satisfying for a £1 as not worth it. In my own case because I get a lot of satisfaction from walking, thinking and other free things £1 must do a lot to be worth it. However if I have an expensive night, and have been buying £5 drinks all night, then I will buy a £1 packet of rubbish crisps and not feel ripped off. Expected satisfaction levels per unit of currency are relative to our history. Note the current model equates satisfaction and currency.
Current model also does not allow for substitution. Every entity is different, and we have random desire of it. In reality if we can't afford a BMW we can buy a Vauxhall. An interesting example because actually they do almost the same thing. A bit of acceleration and upholstery is not worth the extra £30k alone. The £30k comes from social satisfaction. BMW advertising has made the car socially desirable, and we buy BMW not because we particularly want it, but because society wants it and then as a result we want it.
This is getting complex, and I have run out of time and energy to continue this. But in conclusion it is interesting how our desires are not very much ours and belong to our society. Markets may make wanting rare things hard, so we are more likely to go for more common cheaper things. But there is a parallel system where our desires themselves are built from social norms, and being part of a social group and proving that by what we want is part of desire itself. We are very likely to share our parents tastes.
Now just to raise one question. Is social membership itself a desire. In which case we make compromise over what we want like say Ariana Grande in order to "belong". Or is desire itself socially constructed? Lots to think about after this post.
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