Eventually, the client let out a breath and looked around the room. When her eyes landed on mine, she smiled a little guiltily.

“Anyway,” she said a moment later, “what I really want to talk about is...”

I’ve been a therapist for ten years now, and this opening is a lot more common than you might think. So common, in fact, that as clients move on to the “worthy of therapy” part, I’ve begun to wonder: Wait a second. Why have we all agreed that the first part doesn’t count?

It’s not always the first part, of course. Sometimes clients frontload this stuff before moving on to the “real” problem, but other times it reappears throughout their stories like a minor character, present in scene after scene but never quite entering the spotlight.

Part of the reason this material never takes center stage is that therapists are biased against it. We tend to look inside our clients rather than at their environment, and we’d much rather discuss repression, trauma, attachment, the unconscious, meaning, purpose, childhood, and existential concerns than a broken printer, car inspection, or missing Tupperware lid.

The trouble is that a surprising number of my clients never quite get to the profound personal stuff. Life keeps whittling them down to a nub with things that need to be fixed, returned, updated, charged, maintained, replaced, or reorganized. Indeed, many of my clients wish they could have a deep problem—or at least the mental capacity to discuss one—but cannot seem to escape the gravitational pull of their material environment first.

This hiding-in-plain-sight problem is what I’m calling material stress: the stress created by having and managing material things.1

As a simple example, a friend recently had to leave breakfast after receiving an app notification about a possible water leak in his basement. Fortunately, it turned out to be a false alarm—one that nevertheless robbed him of an hour of his life and my joyful company.

This counts as material stress because it arises from having stuff: not only a phone with an app, but, more to the point, a house with pipes running through it and expensive possessions a leak could damage.

I am coming to realize that a substantial portion of my clients’ psychological distress can be attributed to problems like this. Much of their misery consists of thousands of small demands on their time and energy that they do not recognize as belonging to the same general category. A Ring camera alert, busted pair of shoes, expiring license, HVAC filter replacement, and dress return all seem like unrelated little annoyances. Taken together, they resemble death by a thousand cuts.

There is another reason we tend not to take material stress very seriously. Much of it is, as you have no doubt clocked, a “first-world problem,” almost certainly overrepresented in my relatively affluent caseload. Material stress occupies a low position in the social hierarchy of suffering, far below trauma, poverty, severe mental illness, grief, and so on. It also hides in plain sight because each individual burden seems too ordinary and too small to warrant serious attention. A clogged drain here, a missing charger there—neither seems like much. Only in aggregate does the problem become unmistakable, and perhaps only therapists see it in aggregate.

Plus, even if we acknowledged material stress as a bona fide problem, doesn’t it have an easy solution? If you’re struggling with how much you own, just own less.

The Hidden Costs of Ownership

Owning less, however, is easier said than done.

Since 1929, the inflation-adjusted value of consumer durable goods owned per American has increased roughly fifteenfold.

While this does not mean that Americans own fifteen times as many things, it most likely means we own both more and more valuable things than we used to. What it unquestionably means is that we have far more material wealth to manage.

So why do we keep acquiring more? The simplest big-picture answer is that humans evolved in a world of scarcity and remain strongly inclined to accumulate anything that might be valuable, whether energy stored as body fat, money stored in bank accounts, or material possessions stored in our basements.

A more proximate answer is that we consumers tend to consider the price of acquiring things but not the price of having them. We evaluate a possession at precisely the moment when its benefits are most vivid and its future costs least visible. We understand what the thing will do for us now and typically factor in only the money required to acquire it; we rarely account for the rest of its life cycle, from setting it up and maintaining it to repairing and eventually replacing it.

However, even this diagram understates the problem, because a material thing rarely arrives alone. It usually travels with an administrative entourage that reveals itself slowly, sort of like when Gandalf introduced thirteen dwarves to Beorn two at a time so as not to overwhelm him. Furthermore, one possession often requires (or at least entices) the purchase of others.

For example, buying a house means, on the administrative side, setting up a mortgage, managing utilities, purchasing insurance, paying taxes, changing your address, and keeping track of a small bureaucracy’s worth of paperwork. Owning a house also tends to generate more purchases: furniture, lawn equipment, security systems, cleaning supplies, leak detectors, and all the stuff that eventually fills the basement.

Keep in mind: none of this includes the hours per week spent on the house’s actual upkeep—cleaning, mowing, repairing, and so on. That is already captured in the life cycle.

How about a car? Its administrative burdens include registration, inspection, insurance, parking permits, E-ZPass, and whatever app the manufacturer now wants you to download. Depending on how you use it, the car then pulls other purchases into orbit: SiriusXM, a phone mount, a roof rack, perhaps even a garage.

Even an app designed to warn you of a leaking pipe comes with an account, a password, permissions, notifications, data storage, and perhaps a subscription. And once you have it, the app has a new way to reach you: advertisements and push notifications for other ways to protect the things you own.

If only we could insure our time against tedium!

Now, you might object that an app is a small lift, and you’d be right. You might also point out that individual possessions are often easier to deal with than they once were. When shoes wear out, for example, it is easier to replace them than to visit a cobbler to have them repaired, and often not much more expensive. But whatever burden we have shed at the level of the individual possession seems more than offset by the sheer number of possessions we now have to manage. And the more we acquire, the more likely it becomes that one of them will knock our day off course.

But sheer number is not the only factor. Complexity matters, too. As I argued in The User Manual of Mental Disorders, the more complex a thing is—the more jobs we ask it to perform—the more ways it can malfunction.

One of my favorite accounts of how quickly the costs of a possession multiply with complexity comes from Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life, their 1954 account of leaving New York City for a self-sufficient homestead in Vermont. Discussing their decision to stick with a hand-operated concrete mixer rather than a powered one, they write:

(1) We saved the time, labor, capital outlay, upkeep and replacement costs incident to the operation of all power tools. (2) We saved the outlay for gasoline or electricity. (3) We avoided the anxiety, tension, frustration and loss of time caused by mechanical breakdowns… (4) Turning the mixer with first one hand and then the other, we got balanced muscle-building, invigorating, rejuvenating physical exercise in the fresh air… (5) We had the satisfaction of participating directly in the project, instead of wet-nursing a machine and inhaling its oil fumes and carbon monoxide.

“Wet-nursing a machine.” What a lovely phrase for the frequent role reversal of material ownership. We acquire a thing to serve us, but often find ourselves serving it. Thoreau, of course, identified the same reversal a hundred years before the Nearings—and 75 years before the durable-goods graph above—when he observed in Walden that “men have become the tools of their tools.”

Woof.

Another reason we so often inflate the benefits and discount the costs is that the people selling us stuff have little incentive to show us the whole picture. It makes no sense for someone pitching me a lawn mower to mention the annoying necessity of getting the blades sharpened every year, or that the company’s customer service might eventually be outsourced to an AI bot who will make me want to use those newly sharpened blades for a purpose other than mowing the lawn. Better to let me discover all that after I’ve bought it.

So, the equation presented at the moment of purchase is lopsided. The benefits are immediate, concrete, and advertised. The costs are delayed, diffuse, and often hidden. As a result, stuff piles up. Civilization becomes, in the words of Mark Twain, “a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.”

Moving and Leaving

Most of the time, we’re unaware of our relationship to the things we own. Familiarity and habit push them into the background. (After enough time in a new place, I can unload the dishwasher in my sleep—although it seems to take longer with every move.) But there are two occasions when our material life is cast into sharp relief: when we move and when we vacation.

Moving forces us to confront the sheer quantity of what we have. Only when every object has to be put into a box, carried somewhere else, and taken back out do we really get a sense of how much we own. This process also reveals how personalized the arrangement of our possessions is. We can hire someone else to pack and carry our boxes, but only we can really reconstruct our material life in a new home. Our possessions are arranged according to a logic that, to a surprising extent, only we understand.

After discovering how much we have, we next discover how little of it we need. This is partly because we encounter things we once thought we needed but have since forgotten we owned. And it’s also because, while a certain percentage of our stuff is in boxes, we get by surprisingly well without it.

For example, when my wife and I sold our house and moved back into an apartment (#crushingit), we left about 20 percent of our possessions at my in-laws’ house and didn’t go back for them until we bought another house three years later. When we went to retrieve them, I remember realizing that I had no idea what the boxes contained. Apparently, a substantial portion of our possessions could disappear from our lives without us even noticing they were gone.

Did we use this as evidence that we should take the boxes straight to Goodwill? Of course not. Moving also reveals just how bad we hairless apes are at letting stuff go. We find things we haven’t used in years—a pretty solid indication that we don’t need them—and still hesitate. Well, I might use this…

Finally, moving reveals how much work the aforementioned familiarity has been doing for us. After a while in a place, we know the physical arrangement of our possessions so thoroughly that navigating our surroundings becomes largely automatic. Disrupt that arrangement, though, and suddenly we have to think about it again. Where did we put the can opener? Did you already pack my winter boots? Ugh, I forgot we moved the trash can…

I’ve seen client after client become mentally bogged down during a move. I think a big reason is that, suddenly, a significant portion of their attention is consumed by hundreds of tiny acts of orientation that ordinarily happen automatically. Even our pets can become visibly unsettled when familiar surroundings are rearranged. When I finally write a much better DSM—one built around distressing situations—I’m going to call this material disorientation, F45.8sjal.

Once we’ve settled into a new place, most of this sinks below consciousness again. We rebuild routines and muscle memory that make a complicated material environment feel simple. But let’s not mistake compression for deletion. A compressed file still takes up space. It is reasonable to wonder whether our experience would be noticeably lighter if some of those files were deleted entirely—if we were surrounded by far fewer possessions.

That’s only a theory, of course, but I think the experience of vacation supports it. Vacation clarifies our relationship to our possessions from the opposite direction: instead of confronting everything we own, we temporarily escape almost all of it. If moving exposes the burden, vacation reveals the relief.

I mean, doesn’t a hotel room feel so liberating in large part because there’s so little in it that we’re responsible for? If an appliance breaks, it’s not our problem. There’s no expiring cream cheese to use up, no dishes to wash or laundry to do. Our guitar isn’t hanging from the wall, silently plucking our strings of guilt. There’s no package by the door waiting to be returned. No nick in the wall we’ve been meaning for months to patch.

Vacation is usually thought of as a form of abundance: more food and drink, more leisure, more novelty. But part of what feels luxurious to me is the deprivation. For a few days, I have only a fraction of my possessions.

“When I have met an immigrant,” Thoreau writes, “tottering under a bundle which contained his all—looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his neck—I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that to carry.”

Perhaps, when I’m on vacation, it’s less about where I am than what I’ve left behind.

Attention Frittered Away

The deepest cost of our possessions is that they fritter away our attention. Each possession asks for only a little, but across everything we own, the demands add up. When a person wakes up to a phone update or flat tire, or comes home to a broken lock or malfunctioning garage door opener, what more pleasant or elevated things might they have been thinking about instead, including nothing at all?

Return to my friend’s leak detector. Financially, it is probably a sound investment: spend a few dollars a year to protect against tens of thousands in damage. But attentionally, the calculation is less obvious. By acquiring the detector, he also acquired one more thing capable of unplugging him from his present experience.

Personally, I feel deeply impoverished by my possessions. What I want is for them to work quietly enough that I can forget about them, because when the material substratum of my life remains steady and simple, my attention flows outward—to ideas, nature, other people, or nothing at all. But it is rarely steady or simple. Something is always raising its hand to be fixed, replaced, updated, or otherwise attended to. So I spend more time than I would like as a wet-nurse instead of a philosopher.

The irony, of course, is that we often buy things for the express purpose of saving ourselves time, to create more room to pursue what we say we want, yet despite making this bargain again and again, many of us feel more squeezed than ever. But I suppose that’s a topic for another time—or, perhaps, a book.

Stop Digging

Material stress is one of the most important and least discussed issues I see in my admittedly WEIRD practice.

The bigger picture is that modern life makes too many claims on our attention, leaving precious little room—in our minds or in a therapy session—for anything else. In this article, I emphasized material possessions because they seem to be the least discussed source of those demands. Other parts of the problem—the attention economy, the 24-hour news cycle, the erosion of work-life boundaries, and constant connectivity—receive far more attention.

Our response to material stress, to the extent we acknowledge it, is to tell ourselves that we’ll get to the important stuff once the tedium is cleared away. The problem is how much of life we spend clearing it away.

“Our life,” notes Thoreau, “is frittered away by detail.” He’d be floored by the amount of detail we’ve managed to create.

Pre-order (Kindle)

1. Overlooking the Obvious

Therapists tend to overlook two kinds of explanations for clients’ problems: situational ones and simple ones.

• Example of the first: A therapist attributes a client’s low mood to a depressive disposition rather than to the stress of having just begun graduate school. This tendency to overattribute an outcome to the person while underestimating the situation is known as the fundamental attribution error.

• Example of the second: In Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, Peter Attia describes how, with the help of mental health experts, he began conceptualizing his anger as the result of childhood trauma—specifically, as “helplessness masquerading as frustration.” A simpler explanation is time pressure: he sounds like he has too much to do and too little time to do it. Preferring a more complex explanation when a simpler one will do violates Occam’s razor.

• Better practice: Begin with situational and simple explanations. Move toward more personal and complex ones only when they add explanatory value.

• Further reading: What do therapists do with problems they can’t solve?; Mental Illness Is Not in Your Head by Marco Ramos; Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences by Paul Meehl.

2. Mistaking Diagnosis for Explanation

Psychiatric diagnoses can be useful ways of describing recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. But therapists often mistake naming a pattern for explaining it.

• Example: Why does he avoid social situations? Because he has social anxiety disorder. How do we know he has social anxiety disorder? Because he avoids social situations. Nothing has been explained. In The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind, Rob and Jason Weeden call this DERP Syndrome: Direct Explanation Renaming Psychology.1

• Better practice: Treat a diagnosis as a description of what is happening. Then ask what caused it and what keeps it going.

• Further reading: How the Psychologist Got Confused

3. Mistaking Adaptive Responses for Pathology

Therapists often assume that because a response is painful, disruptive, or socially disfavored, something has gone wrong. Shame is painful, hypervigilance is disruptive, and jealousy is socially disfavored, but each can still serve an adaptive function.2

• Example: A therapist treats a client’s jealousy as evidence of insecurity or possessiveness without considering that jealousy can serve an adaptive function: detecting and responding to threats to an important relationship.

• Better practice: Before intervening, determine whether the client’s response is adaptive, miscalibrated, or genuinely malfunctioning. Each calls for a different response.

• Further reading: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph Nesse; Toward an Evolutionary Taxonomy of Treatable Conditions by Cosmides and Tooby; The User Manual of Mental Disorders

4. Taking Clients Too Literally

Psychotherapy is conducted through conversation, and case studies and supervision often reduce that conversation to a literal exchange: the therapist said this, the client said that, and then the therapist said something else. But people use words not only to convey information, but also to do things—to thank, appease, test, resist, reassure, or ask for care. By focusing only on what clients say, therapists can miss what clients mean.

• Example: A client says that a tool the therapist provided made a big difference. The therapist accepts this as a literal report of efficacy, overlooking the possibility that the client may be expressing gratitude for the therapist’s care and attention. Instead of simply accepting the thanks, the therapist replies, “If you liked that one, you’ll love this one.”

• Better practice: Consider both the statement (“That tool helped”) and the potential signal (“Thank you for caring enough to provide it”).

• Further reading: Listening with the Third Ear by Theodor Reik; Finding the Right Feeling by Paul Geltner.

5. Overestimating the Power of Insight

Therapists often assume that once clients understand why they feel or behave as they do, change will follow. Unfortunately, knowing the source of a problem is not the same as solving it. A client may understand exactly why they avoid conflict, choose unavailable partners, or drink too much—and continue doing it anyway. Insight can help, but change usually requires something more: practice, exposure, support, altered incentives, changed circumstances, or some combination of these.

• Example: A client discovers that he is holding himself back at work because he fears that as soon as he earns enough money, his wife will want to have children. The insight explains his behavior, but it does not resolve the problem his behavior has been helping him avoid.

• Better practice: Treat insight as one step toward improvement: a guide to intervention, not usually the intervention itself.

• Further reading: Why Insight in Psychotherapy Does Not Always Lead to Behaviour Change by Dariusz Kuncewicz, Kinga Lachowicz-Tabaczek, and Jacek Załuski; and Association Between Insight and Outcome of Psychotherapy by Simone Jennissen and colleagues.

6. Overestimating the Benefits and Underestimating the Harms of Intervention

Because clients tend to begin therapy during unusually bad periods, some improvement will reflect regression to the mean. Other gains may result from natural recovery, maturation, changed circumstances, support from friends and family, help from other professionals, and changes clients make on their own. Yet therapy ends up getting (or at least taking) much of the credit, while its potential costs and harms—including financial and opportunity costs, dependency, and the effects of suggestion—are largely ignored. The result can be an inflated estimate of psychotherapy’s value.

• Example of overestimating benefits: A client begins therapy in the immediate aftermath of a breakup. Six months later, she feels substantially better, and the improvement is attributed to the therapeutic work—overlooking the passage of time, support from friends, and the simple fact that she is no longer in a bad relationship.

• Example of underestimating harms: A therapist routinely helps a client make difficult decisions. The guidance provides immediate relief, but over time the client becomes less confident in his own judgment and increasingly reluctant to act without consulting the therapist.

• Better practice: Humility.

• Further reading: The Psychotherapy Myth by Bo and Ben Winegard; Psychological Treatments That Cause Harm by Scott Lilienfeld; Returning to Ivan Illich

That’s it! I’d be grateful for any additions or pushback.

In many ways, it wasn’t a natural grouping. While all of them worked from a cognitive perspective, they disagreed about a great deal and studied very different topics.

By the time I left, the psychology department had been reorganized. Now, Leda was in a group called DEVO, standing for DEvelopmental and EvOlutionary psychology. (Whip it!) To be candid, a big reason for the reshuffling of the areas and faculty had to do with the personalities involved. Leda and Daphne Bugental, a developmental psychologist, got on quite well. Leda and Russ, well…

All of that is to say that there were a few years during which we had to explain why Leda and Russ were, on the one hand, in the same group and, on the other, so frequently in disagreement about relatively fundamental matters. Leda thought the mind consisted of a large number of specialized “modules.” Russ liked to say that the mind wasn’t specialized, but did have “grooves.”

The way Leda put it was this. She studied natural competences. Her work on cheater detection is the exemplar. People are weirdly good at detecting violations of social contracts. They are naturally—in the evolutionary sense—competent. Russ studied tasks people weren’t that great at, often having to do with abstract logical reasoning.

I’ve been thinking a bit about how humans have all these natural competences—I have in mind abilities such as detecting cheating, reasoning about frequencies, recognizing faces—and how, conversely, we humans have all these, well, natural incompetences. The big literature on heuristics and biases should come to mind.

But it has recently seemed to me that some incompetences aren’t exactly heuristics or biases.

One thing I have been thinking about could be called something like Second-Order Blindness. It goes like this.

Someone proposes a policy, and the policy focuses attention on the very basic—first-order—good that it does. In prior posts, one policy I’ve discussed is rent control, a topic that has been in the news, though there are many similar policies one might use.

It seems to me that many people think about only the good that it does. There’s somebody out there who is going to pay less for rent than they otherwise would have. That’s good! When most people think about rent control, they think about the person paying the rent, rather than the person receiving the rent, and from that perspective, the policy seems good. Maybe they think about the landlord, who will obviously now have less money. But maybe you don’t think that’s a bad thing because you are bigoted when it comes to landlords. Ok.

But there are second-order effects.

What about developers? If developers believe that they can’t charge the price they want for a new construction project, then they won’t build it. The person who sells them lumber won’t make those sales. Policies have second- and third-order effects, but we humans don’t seem to consider them when we reflect on policy. I’m not saying the correct policy in this case is intrinsically obvious. I’m saying that discussions of these policies often seem to omit second-order effects.

My sense is that bans are similar. Some people think that doing something is bad and that the remedy is to ban it. Maybe the thing is abortion. Maybe it’s prostitution. So they see a ban as a good thing because they focus on the first-order effect: I don’t like X and the policy bans X so that’s good. But what else does the ban do? Maybe it drives the market underground, which is worse for everyone involved. Maybe it drives the price up, which makes people who run the trade better off than they were before.

And I want to be clear that I’m not saying, at all, that this is a phenomenon unique to one side of the political aisle. My sense is that tariffs, another topic I’ve discussed before, illustrate the same general phenomenon. That is, advocates point to the first-order effects. The steel tariff keeps the mill in Ohio open, and those workers keep their jobs. Great! The second-order effect is that all the businesses that need steel have to pay higher costs, leading to higher prices for the goods they produce. And this is to say nothing of the costs of retaliation. So the steel tariff leads to the soybean tariff, which hurts the farmer who now can’t compete in the foreign market.

Before concluding, let me just drop in some primate research. In a series of studies beginning in the 1990s, Sarah Boysen and colleagues gave chimpanzees a deceptively simple choice. Boysen showed the animals two piles of candy. The task was to point to one of the piles. The plot twist was that the pile that the animal pointed to was given away. The chooser got the one that they didn’t point to.

The obvious strategy is to point to the smaller pile, thus winning the larger pile. Given this task, the animals couldn’t help themselves. They consistently pointed to the larger pile, getting the smaller pile as a consequence.

However, in a second version of the task, these chimpanzees, who had learned Arabic numerals—the symbols 0 to 8—were given the same task, but with those numbers instead of piles. Now they reliably pointed to the smaller value, winning the larger prize.

The so-called “reverse-reward paradigm” was subsequently run with other primates, including orangutans, bonobos, gorillas, and capuchins, and the results were similar across species. Animals in these studies found it difficult to override the attraction of the bigger reward. As experimenters made the reward more abstract—with symbols or tokens—subjects were able to choose in a way that got them the better outcome.

This reminds me of the squirrel! bit from Up. Dogs are, eh, naturally competent at detecting and attending to squirrels. They can’t not do it. Some of our primate relatives can’t not point to the bigger thing, unless given a way to distance themselves from the tempting larger pile. But faced with a big pile and a little pile… squirrel! I want that big pile of candies!

We see a policy and—squirrel! That’s good for someone so I’m for it! Give me the candies!

I’ll just mention one other idea, drawn from research in economics.

Rosemarie Nagel used a game called the p-beauty contest (also called the “guessing game”) to look at how humans naturally reason. The task for subjects was to pick a number between 0 and 100. In the study, the subjects all knew that 100 people were playing the game. The winner was the person who came closest to two-thirds of the average of all the guesses.

Before continuing, think about what number you would choose.

You might start by supposing everyone will pick randomly. So that puts the average around 50. Two-thirds of that is 33.

But you just worked that out. Maybe everyone else will too. So, hold the phone, you should say two-thirds of that, which is 22.

But wait another tick. What if everyone is thinking the same way? Followed to its logical conclusion—the equilibrium, an economist would say—the right choice is… zero.

Pretty much no one picks zero. (And there is a sense in which they are “right” not to. The winner is the person who correctly forecasts how many iterations others will go through and chooses two-thirds of that.)

In fact, if you run this in the lab, you get a bunch of people not far from 33 and a bunch of people not far from 22. People manage to go one step, maybe two, and then they exit the loop.

The reason this is called a beauty contest goes back to John Maynard Keynes. He was thinking about how to win in the stock market. A good investor will choose the stocks that other investors will be drawn to. That is, you don’t want to choose the “prettiest” stock to you, but rather the stock others find attractive to buy, leading to a higher price.

The results of the p-beauty contest give a little window into how many iterations people go through in a very stripped-down setting. My former colleague at Caltech, Colin Camerer, estimated that when you give people these games that require iterated thinking, on average they go about one and a half steps. Not terribly far.

In the laboratory, these games are stripped of all context and content. There are no landlords, no tenants, no squirrels grabbing the subject’s attention. People just… stop. They go one loop, maybe two, then that’s it.

I have two thoughts about why this might be, neither one of them compelling even to me. I’m open to any ideas, and readers should feel free to drop them in the comments.

The first has to do with my ideas about the notion of effort. Iterated thinking in these games is effortful, probably because doing so uses the part of the mind that can be used for many different purposes, so there’s an opportunity cost to thinking about the game, which is felt as effort, an unpleasant sensation. This motivates most people to exit the loop, ending the unpleasant sense of effort. I suppose that one prediction of this proposal is that as the reward for winning goes up, more subjects should be willing to reason iteratively. I don’t know if that’s the case. This possibility also seems a bit odd in the context of public policy. Surely the huge stakes of policy should motivate people to expend the effort of considering second-order effects.

Second, and probably related, my guess is that we humans are simply not designed for a world in which policy is so complicated. This is a mismatch between current and ancestral conditions. I imagine that, of course, there were decisions to be made by people in groups. Should we hunt for peccaries today or fish for salmon? My hunch—and, yes, this is totally speculative—is that ancestral decisions generally didn’t have complex consequences because society didn’t have so many moving parts. Today, we have webs of interlocking institutions, and everything affects everything else. So maybe our minds are designed to assume that just looking at the first-order consequences is sufficient, especially because there are other issues to think about. So it’s not really a natural competence to work through all these downstream consequences. We have to learn complex ideas about political science and economics to shed light on what the consequences of various policies will be.

Again, I’m not saying that second-order thinking always settles the matter.

All I’m saying is that it seems to me that people focus on the first-order effects—whether from the right or from the left—and just don’t see the second-order effects.

And my guess is that the explanation for this is that, unlike cheater detection, higher-order policy analysis is not a human natural competence.

But the other day I checked, and it’s actually between a quarter and a third. The rest are virtual, mostly over Zoom.

This surprised me because, if anything, clients express more interest in in-person therapy now than before COVID. They usually say either that it gives them an excuse to get out of the house or that in-person therapy is somehow better—a view I share, despite the lack of evidence to support it.

I should also mention that I have a beautiful office, centrally located. I even offer free water! So why aren’t more clients coming in?

I think the answer lies in a basic principle of human behavior: our judgments are often relative, not absolute. When commutes were the default, they were a cost everyone had to pay. The absolute cost might have been high—an hour a day, say—but relative to what people expected, it felt lower. It was simply the cost of doing business.

Now that many people don’t have to commute, the experience has changed both for those who can avoid it and for those who can’t. For those with a choice, a commute becomes a potential inefficiency—something that must be justified. Once something can be cut, one must defend why it stays.

I think this is why many of my clients want to come in but don’t. They can spare the extra hour, but once Zoom makes that hour optional, they struggle to justify spending it. Choosing the less efficient option can seem irresponsible, indulgent, inconvenient, or simply unnecessary.

On the other hand, now that commuting is no longer a widely shared expectation, it feels more burdensome to those who still have to do it—even if nothing about the commute itself has changed. The absolute cost has stayed the same, but the relative cost has increased. “I can’t believe I still have to commute when none of my friends do.”

In my opinion, one major and mostly undiscussed cost of technological and cultural change is the way it “unbundles” experiences, turning what once came as a package into a series of separate choices. Commutes weren’t great—nobody is arguing that—but having no choice made them easier to tolerate. Zoom, together with the cultural shift brought about by COVID, separated commuting from work for many people. For all the benefits this has brought, it has also created conflict—between people who have this flexibility and those who don’t, and within people who must now decide whether an optional commute is worth it.

Similarly, therapy used to involve both the costs of commuting and the benefits of physical presence. But once virtual therapy became an option, clients had to decide whether the latter were worth the former—to weigh the hassle of riding a city bus against the healing powers of my office incense.

These comparisons are tiring and, at a certain point, absurd. How much is my voice worth compared to my face? How do we price my lower body? What dollar value do we assign to the healing associations of a place? These questions aren’t rhetorical: clients must answer some version of them—however implicitly—when choosing among in-person, video, or phone sessions.

Speaking for myself, I can never make heads or tails of these calculations. Plus, the more control I have—the more precisely I can shape an experience to my desires—the more the downsides of any tradeoff feel like my fault. My clients seem to experience something similar. Toward the end of a virtual session, many will admit that they made a mistake by not coming in.

“I will next time,” they promise.

But most of the time, they don’t.

I think many people, including Rob, would argue that, at the end of the day, people vote with their feet. If clients have the option to come in person but rarely exercise it—sorry, I had to—then they must not really want to.

My response would be that in a modern world whose technology has so badly carved up our experience, I don’t think people’s preferences are all that straightforward. Instead of weighing whole experiences, we increasingly weigh their component parts against one another, loading the scales with finer and finer weights until sometimes the calculation itself becomes paralyzing.

Before Zoom, therapy came as a bundle: one either took it whole or left it whole. In some respects, its tradeoffs were easier to bear, both because there was no way around them and because everyone else bore them, too. Now technology has split off certain elements and begun offering them à la carte. We generally assume that this is an improvement. I’m not so sure.

Field Notes

• Field Note #1: Why is therapy so expensive?

• Field Note #2: On the Origin of Duties

• Field Note #3: The Cost of Doing Business

I also like the comic book universes, both Marvel and DC.

None of this will come as a surprise to people who know me. And let’s not talk about what’s “geeky” or “nerdy.” Both are in now. Neurotypical is out.

I’m also interested in morality.

This post is about what I think is a contradiction between two categorical imperatives, one in the Star Trek universe and one in the Marvel universe.

The fans of both of these franchises being as they are, I am confident that if my analysis has erred here in some way, I will be gently informed.

A duty is typically defined as an obligation, something that one must do. I find it easier to put it the other way. A duty is something you will be punished for not doing.

In Marvel world, an animating idea, drawn from the Spider-Man origin arc, is that with great power comes great responsibility. This is a claim about a duty. Look, if you have superpowers, then you have an obligation to use them for good, which usually means protecting the innocent and bringing the guilty to justice.

If you can help, you must help. For superheroes, this duty has the implicit notion that, look, you’re super so it’s not as risky as it would be if you couldn’t web-cast out of harm’s way or whatever.1

And then we come to the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek franchise. In the original Star Trek series—yes, still my favorite despite what you young folks say—we learn in an episode called “The Return of the Archons” that Starfleet has a Prime Directive: it may not interfere with other civilizations. The underlying justification is that each civilization is entitled to autonomy, a right to develop naturally. The rule is supposed to be absolute, but the crew are especially wont to take it into account for civilizations that have not yet achieved space travel.

Now, hold on a tick. If Spider-Man were in charge of Enterprise, he would say he had a duty to help these planet-bound primitives. After all, he would have great power with space travel. Does responsibility not follow?

It is difficult to see how one can have it both ways. Either great power entails a moral duty to help, or the prime directive to not interfere must be respected.

Thankfully, we do not have to worry about any of these lofty issues embedded safely in science fiction and fantasy. They’re not relevant since we don’t have superpowers or warp drive.

Ok, well, I’ll just get on with it and have a look at the mundane world of the news…

Note: Image credit-ChatGPT

Field Notes

• Field Note #1: Why is therapy so expensive?

• Field Note #2: On the Origin of Duties

• Field Note #3: The Cost of Doing Business

Why is therapy so expensive?

The short answer is that most therapists cannot see more than twenty to thirty clients a week because the product they sell—the kind of attention they provide—is both capped and unscalable. A therapist has only so much presence to give, and each session requires another full measure of it.1

That presence takes its toll. Use me as an example. I’ve always been a hard worker with a decent supply of energy. I exercise regularly, sleep well, and am still relatively young. I am completely exhausted after seeing six clients in a day. Not emotionally devastated. Not struggling to keep stories straight. Not snowed under by logistics. Just plumb out of attention.

But wait a second, you might say. Even with six clients, you’re still only working four and a half hours. That’s barely more than half the average workday. What gives?

This objection confuses hours spent at work with hours spent working. Much of the ordinary workday is cushioned by meetings, interruptions, coffee and bathroom breaks, phone-checking, staring out the window, and the thousand small evasions by which humans avoid sustained focus.

Indeed, there is a reason some software teams cap pair programming—two programmers working together at a single workstation—at three or four hours a day. Pair programming is harder than ordinary programming not because the code is more difficult, but because the attention is continuous. When I was first introduced to the concept—I forget where—the person describing it said that newcomers often go home and take a nap.

Point is, I’d be willing to wager a fat wad that four and a half hours of maximal focus is much more than most workers achieve in a typical eight-hour workday. But I’d be curious to know what you think:

The rest of a therapist’s week is not empty. Email, notes, billing, scheduling, consultations, marketing, supervision, continuing education, and the general maintenance of a small business all have to happen somewhere. But, at least for me, these are not the real constraint. Attention is.

Without a doubt, that attention is worth something. Indeed, one-on-one, nonjudgmental, good-faith attention is becoming one of the scarcer resources in the world. I suspect this is mostly due to the modern proliferation of things designed to capture it.

The growing scarcity of whole-milk attention is one reason why, for all my criticism of the field, I still find something wonderful in the simple fact that therapy exists. In a society so often organized around efficiency, practicality, and the bottom line, I find it almost touching that we have preserved this strange little practice in which one person pays another for the privilege of reflecting openly and honestly on their life.

Nor are therapists just anyone. We are a particular kind of someone often especially worth talking to. Because we are not part of clients’ lives, we can usually listen with less defensiveness and respond with less self-interest. Because we are accustomed to sitting with people in difficulty, we don’t always have to solve their problems to relieve our own discomfort (unless you’re a CBT therapist). Because we get paid, we can make the time all about the client.

Therapists are not, as many people want us to be, doctors of the mind. We do not possess reliable technical knowledge of the psyche comparable to what physicians know about the body. At our best, we are nothing more and nothing less than experienced and paid listeners to the human condition. Still, that is worth something.

The question is: how much?

At $200 per session, therapy may still be worth it for some people. For someone in crisis, someone with means, or someone who happens to find exactly the right therapist at exactly the right moment, it may be money well spent. But at that price, therapy is not broadly accessible and therefore cannot serve as a primary answer to public mental health. At that price, we have to call it what it is: a luxury good.

I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that therapy is a luxury good. It doesn’t help that while therapy is increasingly priced as a luxury, it is also increasingly moralized as a necessity—something everyone can, or even should, do. It is becoming yet another sine qua non of modern life, alongside laptops, cell phones, headphones, and a skin-care routine.2

I’m also not particularly comfortable with how much I charge. Currently, my average session rate is $125, while new clients pay $150.3 Lately, I have been considering raising that to $175. I could use the money, with a child now and a home renovation underway. And I could almost certainly get it.

But at $175 a session, weekly therapy costs $700 a month. At $200, it costs $800. That is roughly half the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the U.S.

At Pennsylvania’s minimum wage, which is still somehow $7.25 an hour, a single $175 session costs about twenty-five hours of labor before taxes. A client who sees me after work on Wednesday has just spent their entire week’s labor so far.

Who can afford these prices? By that, I don’t mean: who can put it on a credit card and worry about it later. Who can actually afford it? A country in which more than a third of adults cannot cover a $400 emergency expense with cash or its equivalent is not a country in which private-pay therapy is broadly accessible.4

Here’s the kicker, though: therapy is both wildly expensive for clients and not an especially lucrative career for therapists. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual pay is about $59,000 for mental health counselors like me, $61,000 for social workers, and $64,000 for marriage and family therapists.5 Those aren’t terrible salaries, but you might expect more from a profession that requires an advanced degree and charges so much.

To be fair, those salary figures lump together therapists working in agencies, institutions, and private practice. The much higher session fees I have been discussing apply primarily to private practice, where clients pay more and therapists generally earn more. But even there, supporting a family usually requires building an unusually successful practice and working near the limits of one’s clinical capacity.

When I think through my friends and colleagues in private practice, the vast majority are subsidized in some way: by a spouse who earns more (or whose job at least provides benefits), by inherited money, by a second job, by institutional employment, or, frankly, by prioritizing the health of the business over the health of their clients or themselves.

All this supports something my supervisor—who, by now, you must think a very wise man—told me early in my training: “If you want to build a successful therapy practice, marry someone with a good job.”

Fortunately, I’ve always been a good listener.

Meanwhile, the economics of therapy help explain the perennial fantasy of scaling it: turning it into a measure, workbook, app, manual, or course that can reach thousands of people without requiring thousands of hours of a therapist’s attention. Occasionally, these efforts produce something of genuine value. Most of the time, they produce absolute trash. This is because, at least for the time being, therapy cannot escape what it is: an unrepeatable conversation built out of sustained attention and a particular relationship.

That neither presence nor relationships can be mass-produced is both a blessing and a curse.6 Therapy is expensive because it requires one person to devote sustained, compassionate, and curious attention to another—and there are only so many hours of that any one person can provide. This limits a therapist’s earning potential, often requiring some other source of support, while also making the cost untenable for many clients. Therapy is a precarious business on the one hand and a luxury good on the other.

Which brings me back to the question underneath all this: what should I charge?

I am a licensed professional counselor with ten years of experience. My colleagues in this zip code charge around $200/session. The machines tell me I should charge at least $175. I want to make a living and be a decent person: someone who does not mistake what the market will bear for what he ought to charge.

What do you think?

Field Notes

• Field Note #1: Why is therapy so expensive?

• Field Note #2: On the Origin of Duties

• Field Note #3: The Cost of Doing Business

I did nothing at all with all I learned from Jeff in 2012 until, well, I guess now.

And the reason I’m doing something about it now goes back to 2020, the year I joined a small non-profit organization and got to see up close how it, and other similar organizations, ran their fundraising auctions.1

While most people think of auctions as the sort of thing at Sotheby’s, with paddles and an auctioneer, that’s just one kind of auction. Economists know a fair bit about the properties of different auctions, thanks in part to the scholarly work of Jeff Carpenter and others. I’ll summarize a few to give you a sense of the variety.

A silent auction, the central topic of this post, is familiar to people who go to fundraisers for non-profit organizations. Usually, there are a bunch of prizes—a bottle of wine, a custom portrait of your cat, a trip to Bermuda—and people bid on the item until some fixed time expires, typically right before the event is scheduled to end. Each bid must be higher than the previous bid and the winner is the person with the last and necessarily highest bid. (Economists will talk about this as a close neighbor to an “English Auction.”) A silent auction does tell you a bit about preferences. People who value the object more will bid higher. In such cases, the bidding continues until no one wants to go higher.

A second price sealed-bid auction is a mouthful, but it just means that all bidders write down their bid for the prize (sealed-bid) and the winner is the person with the highest bid. But they pay the number written down by the person who wrote down the second highest bid. Economists call this a Vickrey auction, after William Vickrey, who worked out its properties and earned a Nobel Prize for his troubles. This mechanism is what an economist would call “truth-revealing.”2 If the signed picture of Mark Ruffalo is worth $100 to you, then (according to theory) you’ll bid $100. This mechanism is also efficient. The person who values the prize most is going to wind up with it.

A raffle is a close cousin of the auction. Everyone pays a (small) price and has some chance of winning. An important feature of raffles is that you get almost no information about how much ticket-buyers value the good up for auction. You don’t get visibility into bidder preferences. (A little. Someone who buys a lot of tickets probably values the prize more than someone who buys one.)

There are a few key features that you want to know when you’re choosing what kind of auction to run. One is efficiency. By efficiency I mean that the item goes to the bidder who most values the item. (This is very different from revenue-maximizing, getting the most money from the auction.) Why should we care about efficiency? Well, suppose you’re the government and you decided that you own all of the frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum that companies might use to provide phone, television, or internet service. Because you are acting in the public interest—as of course the government always does—you want to sell the rights to use the spectrum to the company that will produce the most value from it. The company that can make the most money from it should be willing to pay the most money for it. So you use some sort of auction that is efficient. You would not want to just hold a lottery because then the spectrum might go to a company that can’t do much with it. In fact, they’ll likely just sell it to the company that can make use of it, so they capture all the value instead of the government.3

Ok, back to terra firma.

When I began working in the non-profit space, I noticed that many organizations used auctions to raise funds at their fundraising events and nearly all of them used the same mechanism, the silent auction. There were exceptions, of course, but that was easily the most popular method.4

I wondered why.

Before I share my anecdotal discoveries, let’s take a brief diversion into gasoline prices. When I was a postdoc at Caltech, I saw an excellent talk by an economist who was interested in gasoline prices in Los Angeles. Pricing was complex. The cost the station paid for their product fluctuated almost daily. The market was pretty dense, with some intersections having a gas station at each corner. Demand fluctuated seasonally.

So, the scholar had built a model to predict gas prices. If I recall correctly, it had about seventeen parameters5 and had more Greek letters than there are Greek letters. His model was complicated and did a good job predicting prices, but it raised a new puzzle. How were the people who set the prices at the gas stations—unlikely to be Caltech level economists with modeling skills—figuring out the correct price to charge?

So, he went into the field—by which I mean, he sent graduate students to gas stations in Los Angeles—and asked them how they set prices.

He got a very uniform set of answers. It will probably not surprise you to learn that the owners did not, in fact, run a complex multivariate regression to determine the profit-maximizing price. Each station owner, more or less, used a fairly straightforward heuristic: “Well, I pay for gas by the gallon in the big trucks. They sell to me at some price. I add a few cents to that and put the number on the sign.”

I had a number of conversations with people about why they used the silent auction mechanism at their fundraising events.

I always got the same answer.

It turns out that organizations did not study the literature on auction theory, carefully evaluate their respective strengths and weaknesses, and make a rational choice based on this analysis. It turns out that they used a pretty straightforward heuristic: That’s what we did last year…

Here are two points about non-profit auctions.

First, unlike the government auctioning off slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, no one cares how efficient it is. Do we at the non-profit care that the person who most loves the signed jersey of Bryce Harper gets the signed jersey of Bryce Harper? As someone who was a beneficiary of funds raised at the auction, I can assure you that we did not. Silent auctions are reasonably efficient in the technical sense of that term (though deadline sniping and bidders juggling a dozen prizes at once can gum up the works), but who cares?

Second, auctions differ in how much revenue they raise. Now, theory in economics—see the Revenue Equivalence Theorem—says that, as long as certain assumptions hold, the English auction, the sealed-bid formats, and even the exotic everybody-pays varieties all raise the same revenue for the seller, on average.

But those “certain assumptions,” as often is the case in economics, are doing some heroic work. One key assumption is that bidders care only about their outcome, not the seller’s revenue. At a charity auction, this assumption is violated: bidders are there because they want the organization to raise money. So when I outbid you at a silent auction, I’m reducing your contribution to the non-profit to zero for that item, which works against me because I want you to contribute to the cause as well. In contrast, in an all-pay format, such as a lottery, when I buy a ticket I don’t reduce your contribution, just your chance of winning. For this reason, in theory, all-pay auctions should raise more money than winner-pay auctions. A recent paper by Jeff Carpenter and colleagues confirms this emphatically, in the lab and in the field.

More concretely, people at a non-profit auction are usually very different from folks at a Sotheby’s auction. The Sotheby’s bidder typically wants very much to pay the lowest price for the item, having no particular love for the auction house or its bottom line. At a fundraising event, people are there, at least in large part, because they do care about the organization’s bottom line. They are there to support the cause. People at a non-profit are already sort of over-paying, often buying tickets to some event that they know isn’t “worth” the price of admission. It’s a fundraiser. They are helping to raise funds.

I wound up running the auction at my organization’s fundraiser a couple of times. I am embarrassed to say that, yes, I used a silent auction format, mostly because that’s what we did last year, but it did give me a front row seat to such things. Here are some observations.

Most importantly, there was a lot of money left on the table. Some prizes sold for well above their fair market value. And we know that there were multiple bids above this value. Each of these bids is saying, more or less, I’m willing to make this much of a donation, in the form of the “extra” money I’m ready to spend. The winner does, in fact, overpay. But the bidders who lose take all of their money out of the event with them, despite having been willing to donate it.

Less importantly, some prizes sell for less than their fair market value. This might seem to contradict the prior point, but I observed some sorts of prizes behaving this way. Typically, services went for greater than their value. If the prize is a painting of your cat, for whatever reason people seem happy to shoot past the market value. For a bottle of vodka, people seem to want a deal, and seem reluctant to bid its true value. My guess is that this is something to do with signaling. I signal I’m a generous patron of the arts in the catportrait case, but you can’t send the same signal with the vodka case. (I should be clear that this is all based on my anecdotal observations rather than systematic data-gathering.)

All of that made me wonder, why the heck are non-profits using this kind of auction? Yes, they did it last year, but they don’t have to do it this year.

So I decided to take on a side quest.

At the University of Alaska, Jeff talked about a “bucket auction.”

It goes like this.

You and nine of your friends come to an event and you have a very large number of one dollar bills. (No, it’s not that kind of event.)

There is a prize up for auction. For this purpose, it is a $30 bottle of wine. Let’s say it’s a merlot. There is also a physical bucket, currently empty. It has a picture of the bottle of wine on it, in case you forget what you’re bidding on.

Now, if you want to enter the bidding for this auction, you must deposit $1 in the bucket. Please pause one moment as you are reading to digest the following crucial part of the way this auction works. You have now spent that dollar. It is gone. You will never get it back. With the dollar, you “bought” the opportunity to get into the running to win the wine.

I emphasize this because this part of the auction has proven to be very difficult for me to explain.

Ok, now all ten of you have put a dollar into the bucket. The person running the auction—let’s call them Capy—randomly chooses one of you. Capy chooses you. Now, if you want to stay in the bidding for this prize, you put another dollar in the bucket. Just like the prior dollar, that dollar is now gone. It is the price of staying in.

Now, you are all in a circle around the bucket and it’s the turn of the person to your left. They have the same choice you had: stay in for $1 or exit the bidding. Play proceeds, one person at a time.

As you can imagine, dollars are accumulating in the bucket.

Eventually, bidders will choose to exit.

The winner is the last person to put a dollar in the bucket.

Imagine that all ten people stay in three rounds. That’s $30, what the wine is worth. Then people fold, in the 4th, 5th, 6th round, whatever. I’ve made a little animation of the action on this page, at the top right.

This kind of auction is a little like a lottery. It’s an “all pay” auction because everyone has paid (something) for the prize, even though only one person wins the prize.6 In fact, in this scenario, if the person was the last one standing after six rounds of play, they spent $6 for the $30 bottle of wine.

Now, the other people have spent some money, putting their dollars in the bucket, but they didn’t get the wine.

Are they sad? I don’t think so.

After all, they are at a fundraising event. They are there to spend money to support the cause.

I might be wrong. Then again, I might not be. As it happens, Jeff and colleagues have continued to work on this topic, and they published a banger of a paper just last year, linked above. They wanted to see how well different auction mechanisms worked, and they were able to gather data both in the controlled environment of the lab and, impressively, in the field, at 95 Rotary club meetings across eleven states.

They were able to get data from 1,700 Rotarians, an accomplishment in itself. (Not because they are Rotarians. Just in general that’s a lot of field data.)

In the lab, they ran a horse race among ten different auction mechanisms: English auctions, Dutch auctions, silent auctions, and so forth. Then they took four of the formats (plus a hybrid) on the road to the Rotarians: the English auction, the raffle, a sealed-bid all-pay auction, and, yes, the bucket auction.

Out of those ten different kinds of auctions, the kind that raised the most money was… drumroll… the bucket auction. As they had seen in prior work (with less data and fewer different auction competitions), Carpenter and colleagues found that the bucket auction raised about three times as much as the English and silent auctions. Yes, this held both in the lab and among our Rotarian friends. In fact, the bucket exceeded expectations, delivering a very robust haul.

Now, it’s true that bucket auctions had more variation. They could do great or they could fizzle. It was a big effect. The revenue variance of the all-pay formats was an order of magnitude larger than that of the familiar winner-pay formats.

But more or less, they were the winner. (See Fig. 3 of the paper for the revenue race, and Fig. 6 for the variance.)

I want to take a moment to clarify that Jeff doesn’t think the reason that non-profits use silent auctions instead of bucket auctions is the reason I suggested above, that it’s the way they did it last year. Instead, he points to risk aversion. In the paper, the choice of auction format is framed the way an economist would frame the choice of asset. A non-profit that counts on its annual event to make payroll cares about the worst case, not just the average case.

There is a second, related strand: bidders know how silent auctions work, so they are more likely to participate. Unfamiliar formats risk people sitting out entirely, which shrinks the take no matter how clever the mechanism is. Still, I have to say, connecting up to the gas station story above, when I talk to people about why they use the formats they use, they just never say that “well, our organization has relatively little tolerance for high variability in auction revenue.” They say what I say they said.

Now, finally, let’s talk about me and my side-quest.

I wanted to give charities a way to run a bucket auction.

In general, most platforms that non-profits use run silent auctions. The reason for this is straightforward: that’s where the demand is. Charities are used to this format. It’s what they used last year.

Thus was born, as I call it, CapyBidder. (The website is here and you can make an account on the app here.)

Because of advances in artificial intelligence, I was able to write software that runs a bucket auction.

As of this writing, it is fully functional. It runs as a web app and it runs on both iOS (Apple) and Android devices. So you could build an auction with real prizes and people could bid using their phones.

Where is CapyBidder now?

Well, I’ve run a bunch of tests, and I have made some discoveries, some good and some bad.

On the plus side, testers find the auction fun. I have a nifty countdown dial that shows how much time you have left to bid on the prize you’re registered for. You can see how many other people are left in for each prize. The action feels tense, but in a good way.

The big hurdle I’ve run into is that I haven’t been able to find the right way to explain how it works. When I run my tests—so far only for fake money, nothing real at stake—people are confused that they have bid on an item, didn’t win it, and still see that they owe (fake) money. My sense is that people have in their mind the usual way that auctions are run. You bid and if you win you get the thing and pay for it. Of course, the bucket auction is more like a lottery. You bid, but you don’t necessarily win.

So now I think there are five possible reasons that non-profits don’t use bucket auctions.

• Risk aversion. Jeff might be right. It’s risky.

• Momentum. Or maybe status quo bias. No one wants to change what they did last year. We’re still around this year, so whatever we did must be working.

• Software. Until the advent of CapyBidder, to the best of my knowledge there was no bucket auction software designed for non-profits.

• Irritation. Bidders who don’t win the prize pay into the pot but don’t get anything.

• Confusion. It’s just too hard to explain a bucket auction, so no one wants to use it.

Do you know a non-profit—preferably a small one—that might want to try out a new way to run an auction? CapyBidder is free in beta.

Do you have ideas about how to explain how the thing works? Drop me a line. I’m open to new ideas.

I’ve set up a little test auction called Coins for Camels, if you want to check out the interface. (You have to make an account to see the auctions.) Got ideas to improve it? Send them along.

As you saw in my prior posts, I’m curious about why people use different kinds of allocation mechanisms. Why does Taylor Swift sell her tickets at a price that is so much lower than what people will pay, allowing third parties to swoop in and make a bundle? Why is there always a line at that one cookie place in downtown Philadelphia… shouldn’t they just raise their prices? And just to add this little nugget, why does Amazon want me to pay not to be able to rewatch a movie?7

From my point of view, it sure seems like charities are using auctions that don’t raise as much money as they could.

Bucket auctions hold real promise for doing better than what they did last year.

But it was also a lot of work, not only for us but for you. We’ve heard from some of you over the years that 3,000 words a week is, well, more than enough. At the same time, plenty of good ideas fell by the wayside because they didn’t have 3,000 words in them. Finally, Rob is just finishing a book—now slated for release in October of this year—and Josh is just starting one. A little extra time for those would be nice.

So, going forward, we’re making a change. Our new plan is to publish one feature-length essay each month, along with some shorter “field notes.” The longer pieces will remain what they have been; the field notes will be looser and shorter—around 500 words—drawn from everyday observations, stray thoughts, and clinical experience. We’ll do our best to keep the weekly rhythm intact, posting something every Wednesday morning.

As always, feedback is welcome. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you—sincerely—for continuing to evolve with us.

Subscribe now

There are tradeoffs, too, in accepting cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as the gold-standard psychotherapy. The benefits hardly need repeating, as CBT proponents never stop talking about them. The costs, however, are not only that core components of CBT theory are wrong, as I argued in Part I, or even that CBT is lame, as I argued in Part II. The larger cost may be the opportunity cost: CBT’s dominance crowds out alternative ways of understanding pain, leaving us with a narrower and more fragile therapeutic imagination. This “imaginative foreclosure” is the focus of Part III.

Every dominant therapy teaches a culture not only how to treat suffering, but how to conceptualize it. CBT has taught us to understand psychological suffering as:

1. internal

2. diagnosable

3. measurable

4. avoidable

5. treatable

The implication is that if suffering persists, something has not yet been properly identified, measured, treated, or practiced—pretty much the opposite of Charlotte Joko Beck’s sentiment that “what makes [pain] unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.” Yet this way of understanding suffering must be seen for what it is: a frame, not a scientific finding.

CBT’s frame of suffering is winning, however, not because CBT’s methods have been shown superior to those of rival orientations, but because CBT best accommodates the pressures to package, manualize, study, sell, and scale mental health treatment. Alongside rising psychiatric-medication use, psychotherapy has become, as historian Marcos Ramos puts it, “more pill-like itself: standardized, quick, corporate, and cheap.” In other words, McTherapy.

In a world desperate for better mental health faster, CBT has the obvious advantage. It can say: “Your bad feelings are the result of irrational thinking, which can be fixed in around ten sessions.” Meanwhile, the psychoanalyst, existential therapist, or interpersonal therapist hesitates and says, “Well, it’s complicated, and it depends.”

Decision over.

But it’s not only other psychotherapeutic orientations that are being displaced. Over the past century, psychotherapy itself has increasingly crowded out older traditions for interpreting suffering, including religion, philosophy, and literature. The same current that has brought CBT to our shores has pushed the English major out to sea.

Yet the question of how to find meaning in an inherently painful and frustrating life has been addressed for thousands of years. It would be one thing if our current science were so far ahead of these older traditions that we could discard them alongside flat-earthing and geocentrism. But it isn’t. So I see no reason to rush past what these traditions have to say, especially when what they have to say is often so much better than CBT.

To be fair, I was an English major, so perhaps you’ll think me biased. But I tend to think the opposite: my quick transition from literature to clinical psychology made the comparison unusually clean. I could place, almost side by side, the descriptions of the human condition I had encountered in novels, plays, and poems beside the descriptions I was being offered in treatment manuals, diagnostic categories, and graduate lectures.

My conclusion was strong then and has only been confirmed since: writers usually understand the human condition better than psychologists do. When the day finally comes that we are able to formalize psychological insights, I’ll eat my hat if there aren’t more to be found in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe than in the volumes of Aaron Beck.

But as my English teachers always advised: show, don’t tell. So, in what follows, I’ll give three literary examples to show what art understands about suffering that CBT, and much of the mental-health culture around it, tends to miss.

Example 1: Edith Wharton on What Defenses Defend

McTherapy distortion: defenses are obstacles to authenticity, openness, and growth.
Literary correction: defenses are structures that make the unbearable bearable.

In Chapter 30 of The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer, who is in love with his wife’s cousin, finds himself dwelling on small household mysteries—such as why his wife is late to dinner—“as a means of tying his thoughts fast to reality.” He wonders whether his father-in-law’s “absorption in trifles” has a similar origin: “perhaps even Mr. Welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions, and had conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to defend himself against them.”

Every time I read this passage, my heart stops. Even now, my fingers hover over the keys, reluctant to strip Wharton’s prose for its psychological parts.

A certain kind of therapist would see Newland’s absorption in trifles and urge him to open up, be vulnerable, “speak his truth,” and quit “repressing” his underlying emotions. Perhaps some of that would even be right; as a reader, I am certainly screaming at Newland to follow his heart. But Wharton has much more pathos than that of our contemporary therapist-cheerleader. She understands both why Newland cannot follow his heart and why, afterward, he needs to dull it. His absorption in domestic trifles keeps him from agonizing over the choice he could not make.

Wharton understands that what looks like deadness, distraction, or avoidance from the outside is often preserving life on the inside. Some people must lop off branches, at least for a time, to keep the trunk alive.

This brings us back to Chesterton’s Fence, a point from Part I. CBT therapists can be too quick to see a defense and start tearing it down before understanding what it protects. Yet a defense is often the mind’s way of surviving what it cannot face directly. In Newland’s case, the danger is, at first, the temptation to follow his heart, and then later, the torment of knowing that he didn’t. His absorption in domestic trifles protects him from that knowledge.

The point is not that fences should never come down. It is that you had better know what they are holding back first.1

Example 2: Herman Melville on the Primacy of Situations

Common therapeutic distortion: distress is overlocated inside the person.
Literary correction: the situation might be the pathology.

In Bartleby, the Scrivener, Melville presents one of literature’s strangest tragic heroes. Bartleby, hired as a legal scrivener—someone paid to copy legal documents by hand—does not rage against the world or his place within it, as a more conventional hero might. As he slowly withdraws from every aspect of life, and eventually life itself, he does not make a scene. Instead, to more and more things, he simply says: “I would prefer not to.”

As you might imagine, Bartleby’s refusal to work eventually begins to grate on his boss, the story’s narrator. But the boss checks his “nervous resentment” by recalling another office conflict that ended in tragedy:

I remembered the tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently permitting himself to get wildly excited, was at unawares hurried into his fatal act—an act which certainly no man could possibly deplore more than the actor himself. Often it had occurred to me in my ponderings upon the subject, that had that altercation taken place in the public street, or at a private residence, it would not have terminated as it did. It was the circumstance of being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations—an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance;—this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt.

This is basically situationism before psychology had the word for it. Melville understands that behavior does not emerge from the person alone. It is summoned, shaped, and sometimes deformed by circumstance. How else are we to understand Colt being “unawares” about committing an act that “no man could possibly deplore” more than himself? Indeed, the narrator seems to imply that the situation was almost wholly responsible for the shooting.

In Bartleby, Melville takes this further by giving us a character with no biography or personality, leaving the environment to do all the explanatory work. In the opening paragraph, as he prepares to introduce Bartleby, the narrator tells us, “I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man.” The first time Bartleby refuses work, the narrator explains that “had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors.”

Without past or personality, Bartleby functions as a perfect medium for his surroundings—surroundings which, Melville wants us to understand, are deadening. Bartleby copies legal language for a living, pretty much the opposite of writing as expression. He sits behind a “high green folding screen” in his boss’s office, beside a window that “commanded at present no view at all.” He works “mechanically” on whatever “trifling thing” his boss wishes.

Even his refusal, like the rest of him, is without color—gray. He does not say “I won’t,” or “Do it yourself,” or “Go to hell.” Only: “I would prefer not to.” Yet, by the end, this refusal is all Bartleby has.

There is undoubtedly some awareness of situationism in therapy, but it tends to appear in one of two stunted forms. The first is a kind of therapeutic Mad Libs, in which every client’s suffering is traced back to the same handful of large, approved villains: capitalism, racism, patriarchy, neoliberalism, or whatever else happens to be trendy. These words refer to real forces, but when treated as the key to a client’s suffering, they often become a distraction from circumstances that are much more salient and addressable. Even evolutionary mismatch is no exception to this rule.

The second form is more common. Situationism often functions in therapy the way “work-life balance” functions inside companies. The phrase is invoked frequently to make employees feel warm and safe, even when the company has neither the ability nor the interest to make it happen. Likewise, therapists often reassure clients that their suffering is not all their fault, but because therapy still takes place with the individual client in the room, treatment defaults back to the individual anyway. Like a billboard on the highway, the situation is acknowledged and then left behind.

For the most part, the field is trained to investigate the client in one situation: therapy. What do they talk about? What symptoms do they report? How do they carry themselves? What transference do they enact? How do they reason? In and of themselves, these are not bad questions, but they become aloof if not paired with simpler Melvillean ones: What kind of life has this person been placed inside? What room do they sit in every day? What work are they expected to perform? Who do they have to deal with? What arrangement of space, money, status, family, noise, loneliness, and obligation makes up their daily lot?

“The situation” becomes all the more salient when we consider the evolutionarily novel world we all inhabit. I am sure many readers recognize elements of Bartleby’s life in their own: doing fake work, hunched over, under bad lighting, for too many hours, in rooms with no views, while the sun rises and sets.

Melville would not have been surprised by the despair that follows.

Example 3: James Baldwin on Bearing Witness

Therapeutic distortion: suffering is a problem to solve.
Literary correction: sometimes listening is the intervention.

In James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues, the narrator spends much of the story trying, and failing, to understand his younger brother Sonny. Sonny is an addict, a musician, and a source of worry and incomprehension. The narrator loves him, but mostly from a moral high ground. He wants Sonny to be safe, respectable, intelligible—like he is. He wants him to stop being such a problem.

This is the basic temptation of much psychotherapy: to fix the client. What’s the diagnosis? What’s the treatment plan? What distorted thoughts or maladaptive habits are maintaining the symptoms? What skills should be practiced before next session? Why doesn’t the client seem motivated to change?

But Sonny is a stubborn one. He can’t seem to be reasoned, managed, persuaded, corrected, or exhorted into becoming more like his Boy Scout older brother, who is a schoolteacher. He insists on being a musician, which his older brother thinks is “beneath him, somehow.”

The Boy Scout mindset reappears when the narrator talks to his mother about Sonny for the final time. “Don’t you worry,” he tells her. “I won’t let nothing happen to Sonny.”

His mother “smiled as though she were amused at something she saw in [his] face.” Then she said, “You may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you’s there.”

The narrator does not fully understand this until the final scene, when he stops trying to correct his brother, or live his life for him, and instead listens to him. When he goes to hear Sonny play piano in a nightclub, he finally understands that Sonny’s music is not an escape from his suffering, but a way of shaping it.

Music doesn’t cure Sonny. It does not erase addiction, grief, family history, or the darkness Baldwin has been circling the whole story. But it makes the suffering intelligible, even shareable. It lets other people take part in it. Only an approach hellbent on cure—on solving Sonny’s blues—would be disappointed by this.

Officially, “bearing witness” is so widely endorsed that the phrase has become cliché. Every therapist knows they are supposed to listen to their clients. Every therapeutic orientation gives at least ceremonial respect to empathy, attunement, and “being with.” But much of the time, the field is not actually organized around it.

As Kenneth Fisher says in The Iconoclast’s Notebook:

Training programs in psychotherapy rarely focus upon the immediacies of the process— looking, listening, sensations, feeling, empathy, imagination, intuition, and speech. Instead, what occupies center stage are diagnosis, transference, interpretation, resistance, and personality change. Therapy, therefore, is taken to be, not a many-sided human interaction, but a guided process, an elaborate manipulation.2

The pressures behind this are easy enough to understand. Managed care wants efficiency. Clients want to stop feeling bad. Graduate programs want methods they can teach, supervise, and test. Therapists, after years of training, want their expertise to amount to more than unusually careful listening.3

None of this is mysterious, and much of it is reasonable. But taken together, these pressures pull therapy away from the immediacy Fisher is describing and toward the posture of Sonny’s older brother: being too busy knowing what should happen to hear what is happening.

Baldwin reminds us of something therapists should probably have taped to the wall: sometimes listening is the intervention. Listening does not mean contorting your face into a compassionate tableau, or softening your voice to prove you are “holding space.” It begins and ends with genuine curiosity about what someone else has to say. “The greatest compliment ever paid me,” Thoreau says, “was when one asked what I thought and attended to my answer.”

This is what art often knows better than therapy. It does not rush to solve pain or make it productive. It does not insist that suffering justify itself by becoming growth. It simply attends. In a letter to Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov writes: “You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.”

The same is true for a therapist. Therapy is “not to solve [the client’s] problems,” Fisher writes, “but to make them colorful and worthwhile.”4

One of my colleagues embodies this better than anyone I know. She laughs, cries, becomes curious, holds her breath, and all but eats popcorn as clients tell her about their week. At the end of session, rather than reaching for homework, dispensing an interpretation, or offering advice, she sighs like an ancient Greek at the theater. Then, standing up and holding the door for the client, she says, “I can’t wait to hear what happens next.”

Against Scientism, Not Science

A clarification before closing.

I’m not saying everyone should do bibliotherapy. I’m not saying every therapist needs to be trained in the classics and literature, although it wouldn’t be the worst idea. And I’m definitely not saying we should give up science and do whatever feels right. The best science we have is still considerable, and therapists who ignore it aren’t being deep; they’re just being irresponsible.

The problem isn’t science. It’s scientism: the misuse of scientific authority when the method is too crude for the object. CBT, along with much of modern therapy, has foreclosed too early on the question of what suffering is, where it comes from, and how best to meet it—not because it found the answer, but because it was pressured to produce one.

Science works beautifully when used for the right job. It is excellent at reducing complexity when reduction is possible. But when reduction is not possible, and we reduce anyway, the important things do not get explained. They just disappear.

To my immense relief, they can still be found in the arts.

Series Conclusion

It’s normal, when trying to fix an imbalance, to swing too far the other way.

The mental health industry has a long history of being almost hopelessly unscientific, its course charted by charismatic leaders and compelling theories. CBT is the overcorrection. It made therapy more transparent, teachable, measurable, respectable, and science-seeming. But the price of this respectability was premature reduction. A meaningful conversation became something to manualize. Experience became a symptom checklist. The therapeutic relationship became a delivery system for interventions.

More broadly, the strange and shifting experience of living a life—a miracle by any honest account—became something to squeeze into goals, worksheets, symptom scores, treatment plans, and reimbursable units, while its improvement was increasingly likened to going to the gym for the mind.

The problem isn’t only that CBT is overhyped, shallow, and sometimes wrong. The deeper problem is that CBT has helped install a cramped picture of human suffering. It has taught clinicians and the public to see pain as internal, diagnosable, measurable, treatable, and, in many cases, avoidable.

Fortunately, the writers discussed above preserve a larger picture. Wharton understood that defenses form for a reason, which is why we should not dismantle them before we know what they are protecting. Melville understood that actions are shaped by situations in ways treatment manuals simply cannot accommodate. Baldwin understood that people are often helped not when someone finally figures out how to fix them, but when someone stops trying long enough to listen.

My hope for the field is that practitioners learn to use the best science we have, which is still considerable, while also accepting its limits. Beyond those limits lie perception, judgment, imagination, relationship, and art. In this, I am mostly parroting my supervisor, who likes to say: “To become a better therapist, travel, learn new things, have conversations with strangers, and above all—read fiction.”

Our motto might be: science to its limits, art beyond them.

The Contra CBT Series

• Contra CBT (Part 1/3)

• Contra CBT (Part 2/3)

• Contra CBT (Part 3/3)

• Contra Contra CBT (1/3)

There’s a time and place for evidence wars. I don’t think psychotherapy research, at its current stage of development, is one of them. The replication crisis has provided ample reason to be cautious about findings across the social sciences, and psychotherapy research has always been especially tricky.

The solution isn’t to abandon science, of course. It’s to do science better. Still, that doesn’t help a person right now. If, as Lee Jussim argues, ~75% of Psychology Claims Are False, how is a person to know if CBT is effective? Meta-analyses can help, but only so much. To paraphrase Eysenck: if you put garbage in, you get garbage out.

Even if we were dead-set on relying on the research, we’d be able to find evidence arguing for nearly every position: CBT is more effective than other psychotherapies, but only for certain conditions; it is not less effective than other psychotherapies (lol); it is no more effective than other psychotherapies; it is less effective than other psychotherapies; and it is statistically superior in ways that are neither robust nor clinically meaningful.

In fact, the only position I cannot seem to find supported by a meta-analysis is the one CBT’s reputation would lead you to expect: that it is clearly better than other psychotherapies in general.1

Usually, I am a fan of data over anecdote. But when the data are this unreliable, I fall back on experience and judgment. I also think that, at a certain point, too much emphasis on the head can dull the stomach. We can become so preoccupied with what can be proven that we forget what can be sensed.

A more straightforward way to judge CBT is to watch it work. What kind of conversation does it produce? What does it focus on, or hurry past? What sort of person does it imagine the client to be? What kind of therapist does it train someone to become?

If we approach CBT this way—not as a stack of studies to be litigated, but as a human exchange to be observed—I think it becomes obvious what it is.

It’s lame.

A Model Session

So, what does CBT look like in practice?

The following example comes from Chapter 3 of Healing by Tom Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Insel presents this case favorably—as an example of the kind of care our mental health system could, but too often fails, to deliver.

The client, Sophia, seems to be depressed. She is struggling to meet basic responsibilities and has recently become self-critical. She begins working with a CBT therapist, Dr. Chou. Here is how their work is described (emphasis mine):

In the first session with Sophia, Dr. Chou asked her specifically about problem areas and focused on ways Sophia perceived the world, what Dr. Chou called ‘negative thinking.’ For instance, Sophia mentioned that she had failed to get the girls to day care on time twice in the previous week. Dr. Chou asked her about the verb ‘failed’ and questioned whether she could imagine delaying taking the girls to day care as a chance to spend more time with them. She also challenged Sophia’s sense of being ‘useless’ because she was on the sidelines during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Dr. Chou described the importance of looking at this pattern of negative thinking, loaded with self-judgment and blame. She gave Sophia a homework assignment to track these kinds of thoughts in a daily journal. Her task each day was to challenge this tendency to see herself only as a failure, unable to meet her own unrealistic expectations.

Is it just me, or is there something pathetic about this exchange? Many words come to mind—corporate, medicalized, dismissive—but none captures it as cleanly as this: if I knew nothing about Sophia, I would assume she was a child. Because I would only talk to a child like that.

Notice what happens when Sophia describes “failing” to get her children to daycare on time. Dr. Chou doesn’t explore why it happened, whether it matters, or what it means in the context of Sophia’s life. Instead, she moves quickly to soften the language—treating the word failed like a stain to be wiped off the counter—and then offers a more palatable interpretation that, personally, I would find downright insulting: that being late is an “opportunity” for Sophia to spend more time with her children.

Is Sophia speaking to a motivational poster or a person?

The session proceeds in a familiar direction: identify the unhelpful patterns of thinking, track them, challenge them, replace them. The subtext is: “Your interpretations don’t seem to be helping you. Try more useful ones instead.”

Not once does Dr. Chou seriously engage Sophia’s underlying concerns. The interaction stays on the surface, as if polishing a few words and reframing a few thoughts can lift the fog from someone’s soul. Sophia’s session amounts to a pat on the head and a “there, there, everything will be all right.” All that’s missing is the lollipop on the way out.

If I were Sophia, I might leave the appointment feeling more alone than before. Is this what passes for two people speaking authentically about the dilemma of being alive?

CBT’s tendency to reframe rather than understand is a problem because, in therapy, being understood is not a warm-up act before the real intervention. Sometimes it is the intervention. Often, as Camus says, “we merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen.” We wish to be seen and sat with; to take a breath and look at our lives with someone else; to tell our story to someone who isn’t too busy, or too overwhelmed, to hear it.

I know this may not sound like much, but trust me: it is often enough to make the difference. The client leaves a little lighter, a little less tangled in whatever had been holding them down. That, really, is the magic of therapy: the thing so hard to explain. But when a CBT therapist rushes to correct a client’s thinking, the client can understandably feel as if they have been handled, not heard.

CBT’s reframings are a problem for a second reason. As discussed in Part I, they often teach clients to look away from important information. Sophia’s self-criticism, for example, isn’t something she is conjuring out of thin air. It is tied to real pressures: her responsibilities, her children’s outcomes, her reputation. Discomfort is the cost of taking these pressures seriously—a discomfort Dr. Chou seems unable, or unwilling, to tolerate.

Part of the reason CBT’s reframings don’t receive more criticism is that people are unwilling to admit how judgmental they really are. Fortunately, I suffer from no such inhibition, especially when the reward is knocking CBT down a peg. So here’s what went through my mind as I read the vignette:

Think me too judgmental? That’s a judgment.

But unless I am uniquely mean, my first reactions show why self-criticism exists. Humans are judgmental creatures. If you don’t judge yourself, others will happily do it for you.

The point of self-judgment, of course, is not to suffer forever. It is to notice what needs to change—and act. If Dr. Chou understood this, she might have asked Sophia what her self-criticism was trying to tell her, and what was preventing her from acting on it. Instead, Dr. Chou tries to fix the feeling rather than listen to its message.2

At best, this kind of intervention offers temporary reassurance. A professional voice, standing in for the broader community’s judgment, tells the client, in effect: “You’re okay. You can relax.” But that is not the same as healing. Even if Sophia had felt relief after her work with Dr. Chou, it would not necessarily mean she had discovered a better way to think. She may have simply been granted a social permission loan.

Unfortunately, Sophia experienced no such relief. “For Sophia,” Insel writes, “the weekly visits, the homework, and the expectations of improvement proved too much. She discontinued CBT after four sessions.” Yes, it sure sounds like the weekly sessions were the problem.

I was surprised to see this from Tom Insel, whose book I otherwise enjoyed. It made me wonder what kind of person, if any, would be drawn into psychotherapy by an example like this. The exchange between Sophia and Dr. Chou reads less like an authentic conversation about complex human problems than a scripted exercise in therapeutic hygiene.

If therapy is headed in this direction, it should be handed over to AI.

The CBT Type

Of course, one can always object that this is only one example. Then again, it was a favorable example—CBT in its best light—and it was still lame as hell.

But we don’t need to rely on one example. As a practitioner in the field, I’ve had plenty of run-ins with CBT—anecdotal experiences which, under the circumstances, I hope you’ll allow me to admit as evidence. For background, I got my master’s at La Salle, which had more or less adopted CBT as its main orientation, and did my internship at a psychoanalytic institute. So I got to see Godzilla versus King Kong up close.

Wanting to be an even-handed critic, despite the lopsidedness of my experience, I sometimes wonder how much of my disdain for CBT comes from the introductory class I took on it in graduate school. Among the many boneheaded things my teacher suggested, one stands out. “At the end of the first session,” she advised, “ask the client how much they trust you on a scale from 1 to 10. If it’s not already a 10, ask what you can do to get there by the end of next session.”

I’ve remembered this advice for over a decade, mostly because it is hard to imagine a more revealing misunderstanding of human nature. A client who reported complete trust in me after less than two hours would alarm me far more than one who did not. Trust must be built—I can’t believe I’m having to type this—slowly, over time.

This is what I mean by “hygienic.” CBT all too often approaches the messiness of life with a spray bottle and cloth: we’ll get that taken care of for you right away. Don’t trust me yet? What could possibly be getting in the way? Think you’re no good? Where’s the evidence? Keep ruminating about the future? Stop it.

Clients are not being met as much as moved along: toward cleaner thinking, better habits, and improved outcomes. And many of them can feel it.

The most common complaint from clients who have tried and disliked CBT is that it felt disrespectful toward them and their problems. It treated them as if they were stupid, and their problems as straightforward and easily fixable. They experienced it as patronizing, procedural, shallow, and obvious.

Granted, I advertise myself as someone who “works best with those who think they are too smart for therapy,” so my caseload may be particularly sensitive to being patronized. But still.

A few clients have gone further, saying the method itself seemed to prevent them from forming a genuine connection with their therapist. In CBT, you see, conversation is kept on topic. The number of sessions is often capped. Progress, or the lack of it, becomes the organizing concern. Hell, the treatment is often manualized, the point of which is to make therapy less dependent on the particular person doing it.

Isn’t this odd in a field where the relationship itself is supposed to matter so much?

I do not mean to paint every CBT therapist with the same brush. There are gifted therapists and hopeless hacks in every orientation. But orientations do not randomly attract people, and CBT offers a very particular role: the active, structured, correcting, scientifically-minded guide. That role can bring real virtues—focus, practicality, accountability—but also characteristic vices: impatience, hubris, and a faintly managerial attitude toward suffering.

Nor does a method merely attract a type. Over time, it can cultivate one. Another writer whose work I otherwise respect, Abigail Shrier, says that “a good therapist should do what cognitive behavioral therapists do: prove to a patient that rumination is an unproductive mode of thought and train them to stop.”3

Are we talking about dogs or people here? And what kind of therapist does one become after twenty years of this?

In the end, perhaps the most damning thing I can say about CBT is that it’s entirely possible, in a CBT session, for the therapist to do most of the talking.

Doesn’t that just seem—wrong?

Why Does CBT Exist?

Believe it or not, I don’t think CBT is entirely useless. I can sympathize with it on three fronts.

First, CBT’s basic frameworks can be genuinely clarifying. What sounds insultingly obvious to one client may be helpful to another. I might find CBT’s core premise—that thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are interconnected—too obvious to belabor, but I work with this stuff every day. Not everyone does.

Second, CBT is a response to legitimate criticisms of psychotherapy. Therapy has long been expensive, opaque, and difficult to evaluate. If you want to provide mental health care to more people at lower cost, you’ll naturally be tempted to isolate the active ingredients, simplify the method, manualize the treatment, measure the outcomes, and make the whole thing portable. Some kind of McTherapy will likely be the result.

Finally, and annoyingly, CBT does get some things right. Identifying the belief beneath a feeling can be useful. If someone cuts me off in traffic, my anger is usually supported by some assumption: that people should not drive this way, that I have been disrespected, that I am being taken advantage of. Even if I do not abandon the belief, it helps to see that my anger depends on it. More generally, CBT can help people interrupt habits, test beliefs, and find something solid to do when they are drowning in vagueness. Structure, all by itself, can help.

But this is also the problem: CBT is too pleased with its clever little programme. In identifying a few true and useful things, it tends to miss the bigger picture: therapy is more about process—a big part of which is the relationship—than content. As Ivan Illich warned back in the 1970s, the modern doctor “prides himself on the knowledge of pain mechanics and thus escapes the patient’s invitation to compassion.”4

In short, clients deserve better from the best my field has to offer.

Why Does CBT Persist?

If CBT is so lame, why is it still here?

In Walden, published in 1854, Thoreau observed: “I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that is which appears to be.”

That is precisely the problem with the session between Sophia and Dr. Chou: it appears helpful. It seems legitimate. An insurance company would trip over itself trying to reimburse it. Indeed, the reason I settled on the word “lame” to describe CBT is that there isn’t a more obviously damning adjective. On the surface, at least, it has all the trappings of scientific authority and professional credibility you could want: it is evidence-based, measurable, expert-led, and rational. What’s the issue?

The issue is that these are just words. What matters is whether there is any substance behind them.

For example, in Where Is the Evidence for “Evidence-Based” Therapy?, Jonathan Shedler argues that the term “evidence-based,” in the context of psychotherapy, may be “a perversion of every founding principle of evidence-based medicine.” He claims the evidence actually shows that such therapies, including CBT, “are ineffective for most patients most of the time.”

Measurement has a related problem: it is only as helpful as the measure is valid. The ability to measure something tempts us into thinking we are measuring what counts. This is how a client can get through ten CBT sessions and still feel there is plenty of work left, only to be told that, according to their Beck Depression Inventory scores, they are much better now and ready to be discharged.

Expertise, too, is not always as foolproof as it seems. As my favorite therapy writer, Kenneth Fisher, puts it: “No doubt, the therapist is a specialist; still, considering what he is faced with—the complexity of life itself—can there really be any expert?”5

Then there is rationality itself. In Part I, I argued that CBT, despite its emphasis on rationality, reasons quite poorly about it. But the deeper problem is that reason is not the whole of wisdom.

Even in Western thought, there is plenty of recognition of this—that “the height of reason,” as Fisher says, “is to know when it no longer serves, when some other response is called for.”6 Josiah Royce makes a similar point in Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (1908): “As a professional reasoner, I have a profound contempt for deliberate excesses in the work of reasoning.”7

Evidence, measurement, expertise, rationality. None of these are bad things. That is what makes them dangerous. CBT reminds me of that student—God bless him or her—whose essay satisfies every criterion on the rubric, forcing the teacher to come up with another way to say: “Yeah, but it still sucks.”

Likewise, CBT hits every point on our culture’s rubric. It masquerades as the hero we asked for. It belongs to a society increasingly suspicious of whatever cannot be reduced, explained, proven, scaled, operationalized, measured, or, in many cases, monetized. The result is not the old nonsense psychotherapy was once awash in, but something much harder to criticize, much harder to dislodge: a professionally respectable way of missing the point.

Of course I worry sometimes that I’ve gone too far—that I’m waterboarding a perfectly decent approach that helps plenty of people make better sense of their thoughts and emotions. But then, invariably, I return to a novel, play, poem, or short story, and am reminded that if I could teach CBT one thing, it wouldn’t be the evolutionary perspective. It would be the depth found in the humanities. We’ll turn there in Part III.

The Contra CBT Series

• Contra CBT (Part 1/3)

• Contra CBT (Part 2/3)

• Contra CBT (Part 3/3)

• Contra Contra CBT (1/3)

1. Claims to be rooted in reason, science, and evidence, but misunderstands human reasoning, neglects the best available science, and overstates the evidence for its effectiveness (Part I).

2. Can be superficial in ways that diminish or overlook client suffering (Part II).

3. Crowds out richer ways of understanding and addressing distress (Part III).

There are dozens of therapeutic orientations—over seventy currently listed on Psychology Today—and many of them are pseudoscience. So why spend three posts critiquing just one of them? Because while there may be seventy-plus approaches in theory, functionally there is increasingly only one. Like an invasive weed, CBT is taking over the field.

CBT may not have won the game of discovering the best therapy, but it has undeniably won the game of convincing everyone it has. It dominates training programs, treatment guidelines, research funding, and public perception. Hell, my guess is that the average reader can name two kinds of psychotherapy: CBT, which they would identify as the gold standard, and psychoanalysis, which they would regard with a healthy dose of suspicion.

Convinced of its supremacy—or at least unaware of alternatives—the average person thinks: “CBT or bust.” And that’s a problem, because CBT is not what it has so successfully advertised itself to be.

False Advertising #1: CBT is the therapy of reason.

Here is an AI summary of CBT, with my emphasis italicized:

CBT is a relatively modern form of psychotherapy, developed in the 1960s and 70s by figures like Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis. At its core is a simple idea: that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are tightly linked, and that psychological distress is often maintained by distorted or unhelpful patterns of thinking. By identifying and correcting these patterns—challenging irrational beliefs, testing assumptions, and replacing them with more accurate or useful ones—CBT aims to reduce symptoms and improve functioning. It presents itself as a structured, goal-oriented, and above all scientific approach to therapy, one that prioritizes evidence, measurement, and rational analysis.

Oh boy. Where to begin?

Let’s start with CBT’s “core belief,” if you will. CBT is organized around the belief that much of human suffering is caused or maintained by faulty patterns of thought and can therefore be relieved by better ones. If that premise is wrong, then CBT’s approach is wrong.

That premise is wrong.

It’s wrong because it proceeds from an incorrect assumption about what these patterns are and why they exist. As much as CBT might wish otherwise, human beings are not formally or academically rational. We are ecologically rational instead. Our minds evolved in ancestral environments where decisions had to be made quickly, under pressure, and with incomplete information. That means relying on “fast and frugal” mental shortcuts—heuristics—that are often more adaptive than accurate.

Just because an evolved heuristic does not always produce the response a therapist—or even a client—would prefer does not mean it is “irrational,” “distorted,” or, God forbid, “maladaptive.” Often, the issue is not the heuristic itself, but the task, environment, or framework being used to judge it.

Now, a defender of CBT might reply: “Fine, some heuristics are useful, but others are exaggerated, misapplied, or harmful in the client’s present circumstances.” Fair enough. But that concession changes the whole frame. The question is no longer whether the client is thinking rationally or irrationally, but whether an otherwise useful system is calibrated to its current context. That is a very different posture from identifying “distortions” and correcting them.

Without understanding why certain patterns of thinking, from overgeneralization to catastrophizing, might have evolved, CBT has no reliable way to locate the source of a client’s problem. Is the client distressed because their situation is genuinely bad? Because previous experience has made them more sensitive to this particular threat? Because a once-useful heuristic is being activated in a mismatched modern context? Because the mechanism itself is impaired?

Without asking what these patterns are for, CBT falls prey to Chesterton’s fence: trying to remove something without first understanding why it was put there. Most of what CBT calls distorted, illogical, or irrational has a perfectly intelligible evolutionary rationale. This is indeed what the phrase “cognitive distortion” betrays: a failure to distinguish design from dysfunction.

For example, take a look at the list of cognitive distortions below, variations of which can be found on CBT websites and training materials:

Cognitive distortions like these are CBT’s basic unit of analysis: the “errors” it is trained to detect and correct. Much of CBT’s value comes from helping clients identify these patterns of thought and replace them with better ones.

Let’s focus on two: mental filtering, or focusing more on negatives than positives, and mind reading, or assuming you know what others are thinking.

A client does not need a “negative script,” a gloomy childhood, a chemical imbalance, or low self-esteem to over-attend to negatives. They only need to be human. People over-attend to negative information because it often carries more informational weight. “Susie was offended by something you said” calls for a response. “Susie seems to like working with you” doesn’t.

As for mind reading, might there be a reason humans routinely hypothesize about what is happening in other people’s heads—especially when it concerns them, and especially when it might be negative? Might such a running calculation, uh, help us maintain a good reputation, which is pretty important for one of the most social species on earth?

To be fair, CBT is not usually warning against social inference as such. It is warning against treating guesses as facts. Many CBT sources label mind reading a distortion because it involves making assumptions without evidence. But when do we ever have full evidence? People do not typically announce their negative thoughts about us. Social life requires us to form theories with limited information. While these theories might not always be accurate, that doesn’t make the habit of forming them maladaptive.

This is the recurring problem: CBT sees the inaccurate output but often misses the functional process. It pronounces defects before understanding design. For a therapy whose central promise is to improve how clients think, that is no small problem. In answer to one of the client’s most basic questions—“Why do I think this way?”—CBT’s answer all too often seems to be: “Don’t worry about that. Just think this other way instead.”

False Advertising #2: CBT is the therapy of science.

Ok, someone might say. Let’s call these patterns of thought heuristics rather than distortions. Problem solved?

Not quite. Once the question shifts from “How is this thought distorted?” to “Is this heuristic useful in this context?”, we have to think more carefully about what “useful” means. This is where several findings from the scientific literature become relevant:

1. Bad feelings are often functional.

2. Evolved systems track cost, not probability alone.

3. Many heuristics remain remarkably effective, even in modern contexts.

In other words, a thought pattern can be painful but functional, inaccurate but protective, simple but effective.

These are not obscure findings, by the way. They are hiding in plain sight—in the science CBT so often invokes.

Bad feelings are often functional.

Just because something makes us feel bad doesn’t mean it’s malfunctioning. Often, quite the opposite. One of evolution’s more common tradeoffs is bad feelings for adaptive outcomes. For example, there aren’t many feelings worse than a deep and searing shame. Then again, shame motivates us to make amends, repair our standing, and avoid similar actions in the future.

A therapist who tries to remove shame without understanding the role it is playing risks treating a fever as the disease.1

Evolved systems track cost, not probability alone.

If Possibility A is no more likely than Possibility B, but much more dangerous if true, an adaptive system should lower its detection threshold for A. “Better safe than sorry” is not a cognitive error. It’s a design principle.

It is also the basic logic of signal detection theory, which has been available to psychologists for decades.

For example, have a look at the image below. What do you see?

If you saw a snake, what did it cost you? A brief flicker of fear, probably gone by now. But if you saw a stick, and it was actually a snake—and could somehow jump through the computer—you might be dead before the end of this article. That’s why the mind would rather mistake a stick for a snake than a snake for a stick.

Isn’t personalization, or “making everything about oneself,” a social version of this? A client might be overestimating the probability that someone else’s behavior is about them, but not necessarily the cost. The cost of a false positive is some distress; the cost of missing that someone is annoyed, offended, disappointed, or pulling away is far greater.

A therapist who focuses on probability alone, rather than probability × cost, may not be correcting distortion so much as disabling judgment.

Many heuristics remain remarkably effective, even in modern contexts.

Evolved heuristics are not necessarily crude leftovers from a vanished world. Many outperform more complex, deliberative models built with far more information and computational power. Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, for example, have shown that the recognition heuristic can perform extraordinarily well: subjects with less knowledge of a domain, such as tennis, were better able to predict tournament outcomes than those with more knowledge, often by favoring the more recognizable player.

A therapist who tries to replace one of these heuristics should remember that it has been tested over a very long time.

***

The points above are not speculative. They are findings from psychology and related sciences that have been available for decades. If CBT is going to position itself as the most evidence-based, scientifically grounded approach, it should at least avail itself of, you know, the scientific literature. By and large, it hasn’t.

If anything, CBT seems to be moving in the wrong direction. Over the past fifty years, it has gone from calling these patterns of thought illogical, to irrational, and most recently, maladaptive. So much for incorporating the evolutionary perspective.

Let’s bring the last two sections to a head. What would a reasonable, scientifically literate person conclude about what CBT has called “cognitive distortions”? That they are better understood as heuristics—fast, frugal, context-sensitive shortcuts—which means they are often:

1. Not unique to the client in question.

2. Calibrated to expected cost, not mere probability.

3. More effective than they are given credit for.

4. Hard to replace with something better.

Taken together, doesn’t this cast serious doubt on CBT’s central project of “correcting” them?

False Advertising #3: CBT is the therapy of evidence.

At this point, the CBT advocate, heavily under siege, pulls out their strongest defense: CBT’s track record of success. “To hell with your academic arguments,” they say. “The proof is in the pudding. CBT works better than pretty much everything else.”

My reply? It doesn’t.

Across meta-analyses, differences between bona fide therapies are often small, inconsistent, or disappear over time—hardly the decisive advantage CBT is said to have. In many cases, CBT performs roughly on par with other structured therapies, suggesting that its specific theory of change may be doing less work than advertised.

The main way CBT has consistently and indisputably outshined its peers is in the number of studies it has run—in the number of times it has beaten its chest and shouted from the rooftops that it’s the best. Unfortunately, as Leichsenring and Steinert point out, “more studies do not necessarily imply that a treatment is more efficacious.”

Keep in mind: CBT is effective. It’s just not more effective than other psychotherapies most of the time.

However, let’s say for argument’s sake that it is. Even then, its success would not necessarily prove that its theory of change is correct. It could instead be an unusually compelling placebo. Two reasons make this possible. First, conventional wisdom says that CBT is the best, and placebos tend to benefit from shared belief. Second, CBT is active. Its practitioners tend to be confident, focused, and generally scientific-seeming. They have plenty of jargon and credentials. Odd as it may sound, the mere appearance of rigor, knowledge, and competence can be helpful even when the theory behind them is wrong.

So, to me, the conclusion is hard to avoid. Rather than calling CBT the most evidence-based, we should be calling it the most effectively promoted. I’m more inclined to hire a CBT therapist for my marketing department than for my mental health.

End of Part I

CBT’s core promise is that much suffering can be relieved by improving the way people think. But this promise rests on a flawed understanding of thought itself. In many cases, we are not built to reason the way CBT wants us to.

In other cases, we shouldn’t. CBT does not fully appreciate that bad feelings can be functional, that evolved systems track expected cost rather than mere probability, and that many heuristics perform remarkably well even in modern contexts. What CBT calls distortion may often be ecological rationality viewed from the wrong angle. All too often, CBT is trying to improve or fix what it does not understand.

Finally, when all else fails, CBT appeals to its strongest refrain: “Evidence is key! CBT is the most evidence-based psychotherapy available!” Under closer inspection, however, this claim is not supported by the evidence.

To be fair, CBT deserves some credit. Not only did it stick its finger in the wind and divine the direction the field was headed, it helped define that direction. In large part, we owe it to CBT that psychotherapy is now so obsessed with science, evidence, measurement, and the concrete question of what works. Much of the field beforehand was a wasteland of speculation—a bunch of “anything goes”—dominated by charismatic leaders and compelling theories.

CBT pulled the conversation forward, but in the process, it overstated its understanding of the mind, its command of the science, and its evidence of superiority. Psychotherapy remains a complex, noisy domain, and we are still far from clear, decisive answers about what works best.

My sense is that the main counterargument from the ranks of CBT will be some version of: Have you looked at this recent meta-analysis? What about the work of so-and-so? Have you seen the results for phobias? Eating disorders? Past a certain point, I confess to finding this evidence-swapping tiresome and unproductive. In the next article, I’ll argue that we would do well to heed the words of Potter Stewart, the Supreme Court justice who, when asked to define obscenity, said: “I know it when I see it.”

In a similar way, I think we can just look at a typical CBT session and call it for what it is: it’s lame.

The Contra CBT Series

• Contra CBT (Part 1/3)

• Contra CBT (Part 2/3)

• Contra CBT (Part 3/3)

• Contra Contra CBT (1/3)

First, bottlenose dolphins don’t trade. As far as I know, there is no case in which one dolphin gave another dolphin a mackerel in exchange for some sardines. Also, as far as I know, there is no record of a dolphin who gave another dolphin a mackerel today expecting to get a mackerel back tomorrow. These creatures don’t have, as humans do, the “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.”

Second, bottlenose dolphins do form alliances. The males of this species will cooperate with one another, repeatedly, to aid one another in sequestering females for mating.

I think these two observations are important because they tell us why dolphins have friends. They don’t have friends so that they can reap gains in trade. Their friends aren’t exchange partners. Their friends are allies. Dolphins use other dolphins to increase their chances of mating.

The available evidence makes the answer to the question of what dolphins friends are for pretty clear.

In contrast, observations in vampire bats (D. rotundus) raised the possibility that they were using friends as exchange partners. Early work suggested that a bat who was successful in the hunt today gave blood to another bat, who would return the favor when they were successful in the hunt. Vampire bat exchange remains an area of some controversy, but for my purpose, the key point is that the long-term relationships among bats—friendships—are, putatively, for exchange but not for alliances. Assuming that this proposal holds up, the answer to the question of what bat friends are for seems pretty clear.

In humans, there is still disagreement about what friends are for. Alliances? Trade? Something else?

Early in my career, many wrote about this question as if it were already solved. There were two reasons people had friends. One was that humans help relatives (because of kin selection) but sometimes we treat friends as family. The second reason drew on the logic of reciprocal altruism developed by Robert Trivers, who suggested that humans play Tit-for-Tat, responding to cooperation with cooperation, as in the bat case.

In 2003, anthropologist Joan Silk, writing about the literature in evolutionary approaches to human behavior, noted that “[w]hen friendship is mentioned, it is usually assumed to be the product of kin selection, which is misdirected toward nonkin or Tit-for-Tat reciprocity” (p. 46, my italics for emphasis).

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides proposed an alternative to the conventional wisdom, using the “banker’s paradox” to illustrate their idea. If you are a bank, you want to lend money to those most likely to repay it. The “paradox” is that the people in the best financial shape are least likely to be in need of money. Tooby and Cosmides argued that a key problem humans faced over evolutionary time is that we sometimes fall on hard times. How do we convince others to lend us a hand? The key is to have made yourself irreplaceable, to have some skill or resource that your friend cannot easily do without. Friends are, according to this view, insurance, helping you to buffer against the risk of a sharp downturn in circumstances.

So there are at least three possibilities. Friends might be exchange partners, as early scholarship mostly assumed. Friends might be allies, as with our bottlenosed friends. Or friends might be insurance policies, a la the banker’s paradox.

And, of course, friends might be a mix of these and more.

My former student, Peter DeScioli and I, were surprised to find that the allies hypothesis was not widely discussed. (Peter included this idea in his doctoral dissertation.) Our sense is that Joan Silk’s remark was just right: whenever people talked about friendship, they talked about reciprocity.

Generally, we thought there were some problems with the idea that friends are exchange partners. I’ll just give two.

First, people certainly don’t seem to behave as if they are. If I have you over for dinner and you pay me $100, our friendship will be damaged, not improved. When it comes to friends, we humans make a big deal about the idea that it’s not an explicit exchange relationship. We eventually get irritated if a friend doesn’t reciprocate, but we also don’t keep close score. It is “cooperation without counting.”

Second, people get jealous about friendships in a way that echoes jealousy in romantic relationships. It’s fairly clear at this point why romantic jealousy exists. Other people can threaten one’s certainty of paternity or the investment one is getting from a mate. If friends are trade partners, then why are others a threat? In other contexts, it’s actually better for someone if their exchange partner has other trading relationships. Those ties provide more opportunities for gains in trade. See Jamie Krems’ work on friendship jealously for more.

None of this is to say that humans don’t trade. Of course they do. But trade relationships are different from friendship.

Suppose that human friendships are not, as many assume, like bat relationships—reciprocal exchange—but are, as I believe, like dolphin friendships—used for alliances. Further suppose a conflict emerges and your friend has to pick a side. If they are (just) a trading partner, you might not be that irritated if they side against you. The U.S. trades a lot with China, but doesn’t expect that country to take our side when we fight with, say, Venezuela or Cuba. But if friends are allies, then you will probably be irritated if they side against you when a fight starts. After all, the whole point of allies is that they side with you.

That idea brings me back to the topic of a prior post, about loyalty, and the results of a new paper just published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. Landers and colleagues—I’ll use LDMS to refer to the authors—were interested in the tension I discussed, loyalty versus morality. They begin their research report with a simple question: “How do we judge someone who must decide between loyalty to their friends and adherence to moral principles?”

Notice, first, that implicit in this framing is that these two things—loyalty and morality—are ways to choose sides. (Loyalty is not, as some would have it, a kind of morality.) Their main prediction has to do with this view. If morality is for side-taking, then there might be one particular circumstance in which someone excuses their friend (and putative ally) for siding against them: when they have committed a moral wrong.

LDMS conducted a series of studies, and this pattern is exactly what they found. Suppose John takes credit for an idea at work, but he actually got the idea from Casey. When John tells his friend David about this, David says, “I think you were in the wrong. I’m with Casey on this one.”

When subjects were given this vignette, they rated David as less disloyal compared to control cases in which John hadn’t done anything wrong. That is, you’re seen as less disloyal if you choose sides against your friend when your friend did something wrong.

If that’s confusing, here is the basic idea, drawing on the time that the Unabomber’s own brother turned him in:

Humans expect their friends to join their side when disputes arise because friendships are alliances. So when someone isn’t loyal to a friendship, they need to justify it. This justification is often to do with morality, the other way humans choose who to back.

In some ways, it’s weird that there is still debate about what friends are for and what morality is for. For dolphins and bats, the explanations aren’t necessarily universally accepted, but the debate is narrower. Shouldn’t the social sciences have made more progress on this question for humans?

I don’t really know why they haven’t, but here are some guesses.

First, to be fair, humans are complicated. So figuring people out is more difficult than figuring dolphins. And probably the answer will be a mix of different explanations, with some other ingredients thrown in.

Second, it’s easier to think about trade, a two-player game, than about alliances, which is a game that requires more than two players. Multi-player games are just harder to think about, so social scientists gravitate toward the easier, two-player games.

Related, there’s something of a primacy effect. Trivers’ work in the 70s was paradigm-changing. He offered one of the earliest accounts of the evolution of cooperation and science has a great deal of momentum. To return once again to Joan Silk’s remark, Trivers and reciprocal altruism became the default explanation for cooperation, and that has carried through for decades.

So, are your friends more like bats, ready to give you a blood meal when you’re hungry, or more like dolphin buddies, ready to stand next to you when you need an ally?

My sense is that while of course a friend will give you some food when you’re in need, their real value lies far beyond exchange of goods and services over time. The work by LDMS, to my eye, adds evidence in favor of this view.

Before concluding, I think it’s important to add a somewhat subtle point.

You might be tempted to think that when someone betrays a friend on moral grounds, that indicates a certain kind of integrity or virtue on that person’s part. Surely we want people to stand on principle, even if it means siding against a friend.

I would resist that temptation.

The excellent film A Man for All Seasons tells the story of Sir Thomas More and his eventual execution on the order of Henry VIII. More refuses to take the Oath of Supremacy, endorsing the king’s assertion to being the Supreme Head of the Church of England. He refused on the grounds that Jesus Christ had established that the Pope, not a secular ruler, was the head of the church. More’s refusal to take the oath puts him at odds with the king’s desire to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.

More is careful. He never actually says why he won’t take the oath, and he argues that because he is simply refusing to act, rather than taking an action, he can’t be prosecuted for treason, taking a stand against the sovereign. (More was an early proponent of the act/omission distinction.)

In the movie—which tracks the real history reasonably well—More’s younger protégé Richard Rich has an opportunity. If he betrays More, claiming that More did, in fact, deny that the king was the true sovereign, then he can gain the king’s favor, allowing the king to condemn More to death. Rich does exactly this, claiming, falsely, that More made the treasonous remarks in a private meeting. Rich gets a fancy title as a result—Attorney-General for Wales— leading to More’s famous line, “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?”

Siding against a friend who did wrong might be the tough-but-heroic thing. Certainly, it’s easy to respect David Kaczynski for his role in catching his brother.

But this misses the subtle and vexing aspect of morality. In the case of More’s remarks, there was no evidence for Rich’s claim other than Rich himself. This circumstance is frequently the case regarding moral disputes, when evidence is scarce or invisible. This fact means that people can often easily assert moral wrongdoing or go along with others’ assertions of their friend’s wrongdoing. If one claims to believe that the Jews are responsible for the country’s woes, for example, it’s easier to watch as your Jewish neighbors are collected by the SS. A key feature of the work by LDMS is that people excuse disloyalty when they judge their friend to have been immoral even if the friend themselves didn’t think that they did something wrong. People use their own beliefs about wrongness when excusing themselves from being disloyal.

So, claiming to believe that a friend did something wrong can be a powerful way to act in one’s own interest—pleasing the king, avoiding the gaze of the gestapo—and, in addition, avoid the cost of being seen as disloyal.

Not every case of disloyalty in the name of morality is like the Kaczynski case. As with all human behavior, seeming virtue is often driven by darker motives.

The Argument, in Brief

• User manuals catalog the characteristic ways a product can break down. These breakdowns are not random; they follow from how the product is designed.

• The same is true of the mind. Its mechanisms create its characteristic routes to dysfunction: simulation can become rumination, attachment can become grief, orientation can become disorientation.

• Designed systems tend to break down in three broad ways: malfunction, deprivation, and misuse. Each requires a different kind of repair.

• The DSM is best understood, for now, as an error log. But that’s not nothing. These errors can help us reverse-engineer how the mind was built.

Users Manual

Not too long ago, my wife and I bought a house, which resulted, among other things, in my reading a bunch of user manuals—for smoke detectors, water heaters, washing machines, and the other machinery of domestic adulthood. You can imagine how discouraging this was to someone who has long spent his morning hours with “the noblest recorded thoughts of mankind,” but I consoled myself that the change was temporary, and it was. Plus, it taught me something about the human mind.

A common takeaway from user manuals is that there are more ways for things to go wrong than right. An oven can burn us, poison us, crush us, or blow our house up. It can get dirty, lose a part, or disconnect from a power source. In the best-case scenario, it simply cooks our food.

But these failures are not random or infinite. An oven cannot give us a gambling addiction or sprain our ankle. Its failures are the shadow of its success—an inescapable part of its design.

To understand how something is designed, one must ask two basic questions:

1. What is the thing trying to accomplish? This is its function.

2. How is it trying to accomplish it? These are its mechanisms.

The function of a washing machine, for example, is to wash clothes—aren’t you glad you’ve subscribed to this brilliant Substack?—and its main mechanism is agitation, powered by electricity and aided by soap and water.

Already, the possible failures begin to suggest themselves. Because it uses water, a washing machine can leak, flood, rust, or grow mold. Because it uses electricity, it can short-circuit or catch fire. Because it relies on agitation, it can stretch, tear, or mangle clothing.

The function of a thing tells us what it is trying to do, and its mechanisms tell us how it tries to do it—which also suggests how it might fail.

Meanwhile, if you know what a thing is trying to do, you can often make a decent guess about the mechanisms it will use. If something is meant to wash, it is a good bet that water will be involved because water happens to be very good at loosening, dissolving, carrying, and rinsing dirt away. Water is, as Daniel Dennett would say, a “good trick” for cleaning, just as the wheel is a good trick for transporting or unlimited vacation policies for keeping people at work.

In biology, when the same trick appears in unrelated species, it is called convergent evolution. The wings of bats, birds, and insects evolved independently because flight is a useful way to exploit a niche: to escape predators, reach food, find mates, and occupy places otherwise difficult to reach. But the same wings that make flight possible also bring falls, injuries, failed takeoffs, and collisions into the picture.

Every mechanism opens a path through the world—and every path has its edges.

The Manual of Mental Disorders

Generally, the more something tries to do, the more complex it has to be. It used to be that refrigerators only cooled food. Now they make ice, filter and dispense water, connect to the internet, and berate you when you’re out of milk. Each of these new functions creates a new point of failure. There’s a reason the manual for my washing machine is longer than the one for my daughter’s night-light.

If user manuals get larger with complexity, what should we expect from the “manual” for the most complex thing we know of? Yes, I’m speaking of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a title that hopefully sounds less strange than it did a few minutes ago.

Now, the DSM isn’t strictly a user manual because it contains only one of the usual sections: the troubleshooting section, which tells us what can go wrong and how we can try to fix it (usually some combination of therapy and medication). It lacks the parts section, which would explain how the brain is pieced together, as well as the operating instructions, which would tell us the conditions under which the mind works best. In that sense, it is less a user manual than an error log. These errors have names like major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, trichotillomania, anorexia nervosa, and post-traumatic stress disorder. For billing purposes, they are given convenient shorthands like F43.11.

The DSM is an enormous document for many reasons, but one of the more forgivable ones is that the human mind is trying to do an astonishing number of things. It has to perceive the world, interpret threat, regulate emotion, pursue status, attract mates, maintain friendships, raise children, remember the past, imagine the future, detect betrayal, infer intentions, respond to pain, follow norms, tell stories, worship gods, make jokes, and grieve the dead. As William James argued, humans are not exceptional because we lack the instincts found in other animals. We are exceptional because we have more of them.1

This robust functionality has obviously served us humans well. (It seems that every time I turn around, I see another one of us.) But it comes at the cost of more routes to failure. Because we can simulate, we can also ruminate. Attachment comes with the tradeoff of grief. The capacity for orientation means we can occasionally become disoriented. Without threat detection, there would be no anxiety.

The very capacities that allow the mind to function also create its characteristic routes to dysfunction. And for every function, we should expect not one possible dysfunction, but many. Success is a narrow path, after all; failure is an open field.

However, not all failures are of the same kind. User manuals are usually careful to distinguish between problems with the machine, problems with the user, and problems with the conditions under which the machine is being used. That is another way the DSM differs from an ordinary user manual: it does not reliably preserve these distinctions. Its disorders are mostly presented as if they belong to the same general class.

Three Ways Things Fail

Let’s say the touchscreen on your washing machine isn’t working. Explanations will fall into three broad classes. First, something inside the machine might have failed: the screen, the wiring, the control board. This is malfunction. Second, the machine itself might be fine, but something it needs is unavailable: the power is out, the outlet is dead, or the circuit breaker has tripped. This is deprivation. Third, you might be using it wrong—perhaps your fingers are too wet for the screen to register them. This is misuse.

At the level of function, these distinctions hardly matter. It’s just not working. This is why, when standing in front of a useless appliance, one does not typically say, “Ah, good, the touchscreen itself is intact, but one of its external dependencies has failed.”2 One says something less printable. But at the level of troubleshooting, these distinctions matter a great deal because they call for different solutions. If the touchscreen is broken, you call a technician. If the power is out, you check the breaker. If your fingers are wet, you dry your hands.

So, our three categories of failure are:

1. Malfunction: an internal part or process is not working.

2. Deprivation: a necessary input or condition is absent or unstable.

3. Misuse: the thing is being used outside its intended range.

Does the mind fail in the same three ways? It is no less designed than the washing machine, so I see no reason why it wouldn’t. But you’d never know this from reading the DSM.

Let’s take malfunction first. A person might suffer because some part of the mind, or some interaction among parts, is not doing what it is supposed to do. This is the category closest to the traditional disease model. For example, in Rob’s review of Sociopath, he argues that sociopathy may arise when certain social emotions—fear, guilt, shame, empathy, and compassion—fail to develop properly.

Then there is deprivation: failure caused not by something broken inside the mind, but by the absence or instability of something the mind needs. The mind relies on sleep, safety, belonging, status, movement, energy, sunlight, agency, meaningful work, and so on. As these supports disappear or become unstable, functioning tends to decline. For example, children raised without adequate exposure to human speech do not acquire it normally, even if the underlying machinery is otherwise intact.

Finally, there is misuse: failure caused by using the mind outside its intended range. Does this not describe the modern experience, with its infinite comparison, endless feeds, global moral emergencies, relentless task-switching, ultra-processed food, engineered stimulation, chronic sitting, and so on? Something optimized for one environment should be expected to behave strangely when run in another. This is the basic idea behind evolutionary mismatch, and you can find a useful discussion with examples here.

Are these not critical distinctions, pointing to radically different solutions? The DSM—and the field of clinical psychology more generally—doesn’t seem to think so. The industry appears content to call many different kinds of failure by the same name: mental illness.

To me, “mental illness” should be reserved for malfunction: conditions such as schizophrenia, intellectual disability, dementia, and some neurological or developmental disorders. Deprivations and misuses warrant different names. This is why I rarely use “mental illness” as a catch-all. Terms like “mental distress,” “misery,” or “suffering” are often more accurate, because in practice, I see all three kinds of breakdown.

Of course, the most common thing I see is not failure at all, but adaptive functioning with painful emotional byproducts. Has the mind really failed when it feels claustrophobic in an elevator? Depressed after a breakup? Socially anxious before public speaking? Miserable when isolated? Distracted by a device engineered to hijack attention? Disoriented because science has demolished so many former sources of meaning? Humiliated after being ranked against thousands of strangers?

As Randy Nesse would say, there are often good reasons for bad feelings. A bad feeling is not necessarily a broken one.

The DSM is good at describing dysfunction once it appears, but not so good at distinguishing where that dysfunction originates. This means it is also not especially good at prescribing solutions. Its go-to treatment recommendation of therapy, medication, or both is the equivalent of a user manual saying “call technician” for every conceivable failure of a washing machine. A better method would be to troubleshoot the source of the problem and proceed from there. Otherwise you might pay $100 for a technician to hand you a towel.

The DSM has a hard time troubleshooting problems because it lacks the operating-instructions section of a typical user manual: an account of what the mind was built to do, the conditions under which it usually works, and what kinds of demands fall outside its intended range. To be fair, science doesn’t have all of these answers, but it has far more than the DSM seems to realize. Much of this information would have to come from fields like anthropology, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and neuroscience. Indeed, one way to understand the project of Living Fossils is as an attempt to contribute to these operating instructions.

Without an operational understanding of the system whose errors it records, the DSM cannot reliably tell us what kind of failure we are seeing, where it comes from, or what kind of repair it requires.

Function from Malfunction

User manuals are useful documents because they indicate both how a thing should be used and how it should definitely not be used. This often makes them unintentionally hilarious. “Do not place child inside appliance.” “Do not use hair dryer while sleeping.” Civilization really is a struggle against human stupidity.

Unfortunately, the DSM isn’t nearly as funny—nor, in its current form, nearly as useful. But with a slight adjustment in perspective, it could be.

So far, we have been moving in one direction: from function to mechanism to failure. A washing machine exists to clean clothes. It does so with water, soap, and agitation. Those mechanisms create characteristic ways for it to fail. But inference can also move in the other direction: from failure back to mechanism, and from mechanism back to function.

Imagine you had to reverse-engineer a washing machine without being allowed to open one up. All you had was the complaint log from the customer service department: reports of leaks, mold, rust, torn clothing, short circuits, doors that won’t lock, and so on. You could infer a lot from that list. The machine probably uses water. It probably uses electricity. It probably moves clothing around. It probably has a door, a drum, a pump, seals, and hoses. A thing’s characteristic failures are clues to its design.

In a similar way, the DSM could have enormous value—neither as a medical map of natural diseases, nor as a clean taxonomy of mental illness, but as a collection of recurring symptom clusters. Properly understood, the DSM is not a parts diagram. It’s a complaint log.

That is not to say it can be entirely trusted. Many entries are based on self-report, which is not always reliable. After all, patients do not usually diagnose themselves with high blood pressure. Nor is the DSM a neutral transcript of human suffering. “Experts” decide what gets in, what stays out, what gets renamed, split, merged, or quietly buried in a footnote. That process involves science, yes, but also politics, fashion, bureaucracy, professional incentives, turf wars, and ordinary human error.

Still, the DSM is based on a great deal of observation across an enormous number of people. It is a fairly reliable record of the characteristic ways the human mind fails. And those patterns are clues to how it was designed—clues we might never discover if everything always worked properly.

Take auditory hallucinations. They may reveal something about how the mind tags its own contents.3 A thought is not just a thought. It is also marked, implicitly, as mine, yours, remembered, imagined, spoken aloud, believed, doubted, feared, wished, dreamed, and so on. If those labels fail, something generated inside the mind may be experienced as coming from outside it. The voice in one’s head becomes—just a voice.

The ordinary experience of reality, in other words, may depend on hidden tagging systems working properly—a possibility we might never have considered without the strange and terrifying error of hearing voices.

The path toward a better DSM begins with a retreat into modesty. Before the DSM can explain the mind, it should settle for accurately recording the mind’s recurring failures. That’s not nothing. A reliable record of breakdown is often the first step toward understanding design.

For example, rather than organizing disorders mainly around recognizable symptom clusters and clinical traditions, a better DSM might eventually organize them around the mechanisms involved. PTSD, phobias, social anxiety, and panic disorder, for example, might be grouped together not because they present identically, but because each involves some disturbance of the threat-detection system.

A better DSM would also include operating conditions. In addition to asking, “What symptoms does this person have?”, it would also ask, “Under what conditions do these symptoms appear?” The situation is not background information; it’s part of the diagnosis. Intense sexual jealousy, for instance, means one thing if someone’s partner is faithful and reassuring, and another if the partner is plausibly cheating or openly interested in someone else. The same feeling may be evidence of function or dysfunction. And if it is dysfunction, the situation helps determine what kind: malfunction, deprivation, or misuse.

Misery’s Silver Lining

Before ending, let’s return to the thought experiment about reverse-engineering a washing machine. If you had your druthers, wouldn’t you want as many customer complaints as possible? Wouldn’t you want the machine to have been used in all sorts of improper ways? You might not know it depended on electricity until someone tried to run it during a power outage. You might not know water could escape through the door until someone tried to run it upside down.

The modern world is doing something similar to the human mind. It is running ancient mechanisms under strange conditions and producing a thickening complaint log of distress. To me, this is one of the few silver linings of evolutionary mismatch: it can illuminate the design of our minds in ways a better-fitting world might not. Our failures may be among the clearest evidence of what we were built to do. People of the future, if they learn from us, may thank us for the misery required to obtain that evidence.

But one distinction must be kept firmly in mind. Washing machines and human brains were both designed, but they were not designed in the same way. My washing machine was designed intentionally, by humans at Samsung, over the course of a few years. My mind was designed blindly, by natural selection, across deep evolutionary time. Among other things, this means we have far more power to change washing machines than to change brains, at least for now.

Which means that if the people of the future want to act on the lessons our suffering provides, they will have an easier time changing the environment than redesigning the mind that has to operate within it.

The idea is a bit juvenile, but there’s a truth in it. We humans have certain appetites. When the environment allows us the opportunity to satisfy one of those appetites, we try to take advantage of it. So the environments we create for one another—such as the tools available to players of Mythic Quest—really matter.

My previous posts explored this idea when it comes to some peculiar ways we allocate stuff, including all-inclusive resorts, theme parks, and parking. If the environment allows people to reserve a lounge chair by the pool, they’ll do it. People like sitting by the pool. If the environment (of a video game) allows players to make a penis, they’ll do it. (I leave unanswered the mystifying question about why this creative impulse exists. I have no doubt finer minds than mine will have insight into this human peculiarity.)

This post explores cases in which some new ingredient was added to a society, looking at how human nature, often sitting latent, expresses itself in response.

Of Monsters and Men

In the 1980 film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a member of the San tribe in the Kalahari finds a Coke bottle, discarded from an airplane. It turns out that this new object is useful for many of the San’s tasks, creating demand for the object. There being more demand than supply—just the one bottle—not to mention no price system to allocate it, conflict ensues. The solution is to throw the bottle off the edge of the Earth, launching the quest that animates the rest of the film. In this case, a new tool plugs into humans’ appetite to make life a little easier. The strategies the characters used to get access to the new tool were latent until the bottle arrived.

To take a second example from fiction before moving to the real world, the creation of The One Ring and the other rings of power—e.g., Nine for Moral Men, doomed to die—represents a similar case. Sauron took advantage of the appetites of the dwellers of Middle Earth. Of course men were going to slip the magical rings of power on their fingers, allowing Sauron to spring his trap, since he himself kept the “one ring to rule them all.” [SPOILER: It didn’t work, all thanks to the heroism of a rag-tag band of hobbits and their friends.] Of the three species—elves, dwarves, and men—we humans fared the worst, each ring-wearer becoming servants of the Dark Lord.

Ok, now back to reality.

Let’s start with fish.

If you were to watch piranhas, much of the time they are simply swimming along peacefully. But add some food, and their behavior changes dramatically. The ferocity is always there, waiting for the right conditions in the environment to bring it out. In this case, the right conditions include something they can eat nearby.

For humans, a crucial part of the environment is the set of rules that govern behavior.

In the first half of the 13^th century, religious conflicts were flaring across Europe and the relationship between the power of the state and the power of religious organizations was being negotiated. In Spain, the government used the Inquisition, authorized by the Pope, to assert its power.

In this context, new practices arose. For example, up to that time, if I accused you of heresy and I did not make my case, I faced potential punishment. With the advent of the Inquisition, officials were allowed to make accusations based on hearsay or circumstantial evidence, after which the accused would be encouraged to confess, using methods as well-known as they were barbaric.

The price of accusations was, under the Inquisition, sharply reduced, and the means used to “inquire” were such that once someone was accused, it was reasonably likely that they would confess or be killed. These new circumstances made the potential benefit of accusations much greater. This favorable cost/benefit ratio had the predictable effect. In Spain, estimates are that as many as 150,000 souls were prosecuted by the Inquisition. Evidence from the period suggests that accusations were an especially nifty tool favored by those of lower classes against the wealthy. Cheap, effective accusations could be used to settle old scores, compete with rivals, and so forth. Often, when property was confiscated from someone found guilty, the accuser sometimes stood to share in the bounty. The pattern repeated in witch hunts in Europe and, famously, Salem, Massachusetts. Again, leaders created an opening for attacks on rivals, leaving the accused defenseless because the charge was holding invisible beliefs or performing activities that left no physical evidence. (I like the Monty Python bit in which a character accuses a woman of turning him into a newt. Clearly being a human, and not a newt, he explains, I got better!)

In the case of the Inquisition, normal everyday psychology was sitting around, latent, until the environment changed. As Tolkien explored, humans are greedy and they crave power over others, to say nothing of our nearly insatiable appetite to accuse others of wrongdoing and revel in their ordeals of punishment. When ideas spread, they become like Coke bottles, a new part of people’s environments, potentially bringing to the fore previously latent appetites.

In some cases, these appetites are literal. Consider what happened as people developed animal husbandry and then factory farming. Throughout human history, animals have had no powerful lobby working to guard their rights, and the cost of eating animals dropped precipitously. The result is the 75 billion chickens slaughtered every year.

The results of other cultural innovations are more difficult to predict. If you haven’t watched it, I recommend The Social Dilemma, a documentary available on Netflix. It focuses especially on the innocent-looking-at-first “like” button. What happens when humans, with their appetite for attention, have a tiny new incentive to broadcast ideas others will like? The answer is the social media landscape we are all living in.

The introduction of new ideas does not always have such disastrous consequences. As the Enlightenment unspooled, an idea spread: people might have these things called “property rights,” which states might enforce. This idea got written down in places like the 4^th and 5^th Amendments of the United States Constitution and lots of people started believing it.1 The adoption of this idea led people who were living in places where the fruits of their labor could be protected to create things other people wanted. This practice had the happy consequence that more and more people can clothe, feed, and house themselves.

Along similar lines, about 2,500 years ago some people in Athens and then Rome thought that it might be fun if leaders were chosen rather than born. This idea, in various (and often imperfect) incarnations, leads people with power to do the sorts of things that are good for the people they rule rather than just themselves. Yes, that’s a naïve way to put it, but in theory democratic republics bring to the fore humans’ appetites to be liked, even loved, rather than feared, Machiavelli’s musings about this notwithstanding.

When I was a post-doc at UCLA, I was housed in the Anthropology Department, lucky to be around talented scholars such as Rob Boyd, Joan Silk, Susan Perry, Joe Manson, and others. I met with a certain amount of resistance from the University’s Institutional Review Board, which I discussed with my colleagues. It turned out that they had also had some difficulties—as have many others at various institutions—and from them I learned about an objection to their research methods I had never previously encountered.

Some anthropologists would go into the field, often an area where hunter-gatherers lived, to conduct experiments. People in these groups had very few material possessions. If an economist were to compute their per capita income, it would be less than one dollar a day. Hunter-gatherer participants would be compensated for their time taking part in the study, sometimes with tools such as fishhooks, which were in demand, and sometimes in currency that could be used in town.

The Institutional Review Board rejected proposals for some of this work in cases in which they judged that the compensation for participating in the research was too big. The argument was that the temptation to earn that much money was simply too great for their potential subjects to resist. Therefore, because the transaction was irresistible, it was coercive.

Up to that point—and, to be honest, still today—I was persuaded by Robert Nozick’s view about how to define and understand coercion, and I thought that coercion was a sort of conditional intended to undermine someone else’s will. In the classic case, I might impose a conditional on you of the form, your money or your life! What I mean is that IF you do not give me your money, THEN I will shoot you. Such conditionals are threats. They change your behavior, causing you to choose something you would rather not do and would not do if it weren’t for the threat.

Subsequent developments in philosophy extended and revised Nozick’s view, which some have seen as too narrow. There are arguments that certain kinds of offers, as opposed to threats, can be coercive. And Nozick’s view doesn’t exactly capture a dog on a leash: leading Fido here rather than there—keeping him out of striking range of the discarded chicken bone—seems coercive, but in a more straightforward physical way than the threat Nozick identifies.

Notice a big difference between the sorts of coercive threats the mugger makes and the allegedly coercive offer that the anthropologist is making. In the threat case, the target winds up doing something they otherwise wouldn’t want to do. In the offer case, with the intervention of the Institutional Review Board, the target winds up not doing something they would rather do. They are, from their perspective, worse off.

Why do administrators at universities want to prevent these “large” payments of six fishhooks rather than a single fishhook?

Think about the idea that offers can be coercive like the Coke bottle, a new idea to play with. In the case of the Institutional Review Board, with the framing that offers can be coercive, they can dictate the decisions made by people thousands of miles around the world, exercising their will over them from the comfort of their air-conditioned offices in Los Angeles. (If you think that this practice is acceptable, please let me know when your next job offer comes and I will decide what the maximum amount they can pay you without the offer being coercive.)

For these bureaucrats, this feeds several appetites all at once. First, Institutional Review Boards live in perpetual fear that their numbers will be culled if the people who propose research projects submit proposals that conform to all the rules. In such cases, there’s little for the staff to do, putting jobs at risk. Requiring revisions because it builds job security.2 Second, I can say from experience that the reports back from the Board often contain at least some aroma of moral superiority. You’re going to give them six fishhooks!? You monster! This sentiment is conveyed in standard bureaucratic language, but one can feel the finger-wagging.

And, of course, for at least some of them, there is the warm feeling of protecting those poor, vulnerable adults in Asia, Africa, or South America, who lack the bureaucrat’s sophistication and willpower to resist the siren call of a wage of six fishhooks per hour. The bureaucrat goes home feeling satisfied that she has chastised the powerful Principle Investigator and protected the hapless adult human being from whom she has removed the opportunity to choose whether or not to answer some survey questions for the wrong number of fishhooks.

Notice the theory of human nature that underlies this approach to policy. In prior posts, I’ve discussed the work of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who gives sharp insight into the rules that govern certain practices in the religion in which she was raised, Islam. If you think of adult males as simply powerless to choose to behave when they see a whisp of a woman’s hair, then you might feel justified in draconian rules ensuring this temptation is never visible. According to this perception of people’s will, people making certain clothing choices are subject to stern punishment because they are being as coercive as compensating hunter-gatherers too much to complete a study. This view is a deeply paternalistic one, justifying why the few and powerful should choose for the many and powerless.

Don’t get me wrong. It is right and proper that Institutional Review Boards—and businesses and governments, and so on—try to prevent coercion in the sense of threats. A core ethical principle is that one person should not, and should not be permitted to, coerce another. And, of course, there are some people who aren’t able to choose, and are in need of paternalism. One prominent class of such people are called “children,” and we actually don’t want them choosing what’s for dinner, or every meal would be chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. We give people the vote at 18 in the United States, drawing a line about when we think their opinion about governance should count.

Humans like to make moral attacks. Expand the notion of “coercive” to include offers, and that’s what they’ll do. The “time to attack,” just like the time to penis, is vanishingly small.

Before concluding, I want to be clear that of course these matters are more complicated and it’s not quite as simple as saying that coercion by threat is always bad and coercion by offer is always fine.

Some threats are implicit. Nice bar you have here. Shame if something happened to it. In that case, there is no explicit threat, but the Nozick conditional—if you don’t give me protection money, then my gang will torch your bar—is in the mind of the speaker. It’s invisible, as all human thought is, but it’s also real.

The invisibility of these conditionals and the fact that they might be implicit can lead to much misunderstanding. Suppose a patron literally was just remarking that it was a nice bar and how sad it would be should it burn to the ground. When the owner serves the patron free drinks, we might ask: has the owner been coerced?

This ambiguity leads to a problem. Someone might believe a threat to be present when the speaker has no such intention in mind.

Shared understanding of what is coercive varies over time and from one community to another. This variation is inevitable because norms change over time and the topic is inherently fraught, to do with lots of stuff going on unseen in people’s heads. In one cultural moment, it might be just fine to say “it’s cold outside” as a way to persuade someone to stay inside, where it’s warm, a bit longer. In a different cultural moment, every offer by someone understood to have power might be able to be labeled coercive, and therefore subject to moral attack.

A very nice man saw that my partner and I were lost in downtown Istanbul. He offered to help us, and he provided impeccable directions to the Hagia Sophia, which turned out to be as beautiful as its reputation promised. The man invited us to have a look at his carpets for sale, just nearby. He had his young son serve us tea. He explained the care the women took in weaving the carpets and the dire conditions under which the women lived, on pennies a day, refugees from war-torn Syria. He explained that he would let these carpets, here, go for a steal of just 400 dollars, U.S., and which one did we like best?

Anyone who has been in such a situation knows how difficult it is to say no. These merchants are experienced and have enjoyed success for hundreds of years in their trade.

We walked out feeling a little bad, but with no merchandise and all of our money still in our wallets.

Did we feel coerced? I suppose we might have used that word if we had bought a carpet. Maybe. Certainly the merchant tried to persuade us. That seems like the right word.

But, in the event, we said no.

We had one powerful force on our side.

We’re adults.

If the ultimate goal of the 9/11 terrorists was to slow America down, to waste as much of our collective time as possible, they succeeded. Americans now spend, conservatively, hundreds of millions of hours per year in TSA lines, removing shoes, redistributing laptops, and explaining that the suspicious-looking item in the scanner is, in fact, a sandwich.1

In the midst of one such indignity, I had a thought: What if you could buy a “security-free” ticket? You could show up and proceed directly to your gate, arriving—just like in the old days—half an hour before departure. Of course, you’d be flying with other people who had also skipped security. Other modern safety measures, such as locked cabin doors, would remain in effect.

This is a hypothetical meant to convey a point, so don’t get lost in its feasibility. The important follow-up is: would you buy that ticket?

At first, my response was—Yes, by all means, now and forever yes. (These are the words Annie Dillard imagines the male praying mantis saying when asked whether he will mate at the cost of his head.)

But my second and final answer is—No, probably not. Especially not now that I have a daughter.

However, my becoming a dad is not the most significant factor here. 9/11 is. The events of that day showed that planes could be dangerous. Not that there was ever any real doubt beforehand, of course. We knew, in some abstract sense, that a plane in the wrong hands could become a weapon. What we lacked was a vivid example, something concrete enough to force a change. We lacked, as a psychologist would say, availability. So we did nothing—until something happened.

But here’s the thing: the risk on 9/10 was the same as the risk on 9/12—setting aside the impact of 9/11 itself2—yet we tolerated it without a second thought. Had anyone given it a second thought, we likely would have prescribed them therapy and medication for their “irrational” fear of flying.

Consider trains in the present-day United States. We “know” they could be used as weapons, but because, by and large, they haven’t been, we haven’t done much to prevent it. If something does happen, security will beef up overnight. (I can only assume nothing’s happened yet because even terrorists would prefer to avoid traveling on America’s trains.) So, for now, we buy security-free train tickets without a second thought, just as we bought plane tickets before 9/11.

The point is that we are often unaware of the risks we tolerate until some event changes our perception and renders what was once acceptable intolerable. This holds not only when the underlying risk remains stable, but even as it declines. After all, planes have become much safer since 9/11, independent of TSA security measures, yet my guess is that far fewer people would purchase a security-free ticket now than twenty years ago. Likewise, child abductions are far less frequent than they used to be, yet parents are more reluctant to let their kids roam.

Let’s get graphic for a moment. All else equal, as the world becomes safer, we should expect people to require less protection. Travelers should become more willing to forgo TSA security as planes become safer; parents should become more willing to allow independence as child abductions decline.

The graph should look like this:

Instead, it looks like this:

The difference between what we should see and what we do see arises because objective risk and perceived risk can move in opposite directions. The world may become safer even as it feels more dangerous.

What might cause this divergence? Availability, or how easily a danger comes to mind. And what tends to make dangers of all kinds readily available? The modern global news infrastructure.

News, as we know, tends to focus on tragedy—it has a “disaster bias.” As more of that tragedy is brought to our attention, two things happen:

1. Objectively, the world gets safer as people work to reduce the likelihood of similar tragedies happening again

2. Subjectively, the world feels more dangerous because people now have vivid examples of danger lodged in their minds

You’ll notice that technology is responsible for both sides of the coin. It makes pools safer while also bringing us stories of pool disasters. So how do we solve the problem of perception and reality being out of sync? You guessed it: more technology!

The Let Grow website, for example, tries to restore the parental confidence that several decades of true-crime television helped erode. It gives parents what they now need—research, pamphlets, even legal backing—to feel comfortable doing what a parent two generations ago would have done without a second thought: let their child go outside and play.

There’s even a Kid License!

Availability isn’t the only factor shaping our tolerance for risk. Returning to my own answer about whether I’d purchase a security-free ticket, another factor is changing stakes. Now that I have a daughter, I have more to lose and less to gain by taking risks. I am also not as young as I once was, so it may take me longer to recover from a loss. Finally, as Jean Twenge notes in Generations, it’s rational to tolerate less risk as the world becomes safer. It was one thing for pioneers to tolerate rattlesnakes when greater dangers were afoot (sorry), but it’s now foolish for someone to wander among rattlesnakes when they don’t have to.

So there may be two forces at work: some risks feel larger because they are more available, while others become less worth taking because we no longer have to take them. The open question is whether, in reducing risk, we have also reduced reward.

I’m so tickled with polls that I’d like to end with one more. When I first drafted this piece, I assumed a security-free ticket would be less expensive because security is a value-add. But then my wife made a good point: many people experience security as pure inconvenience and would happily pay to skip it. What do you think?

Party Polarization—RK

Here is the way that human political psychology doesn’t work.

I go about my day and learn this and that. I listen to my parents, I read books, I take classes, that sort of thing. As I get older, I choose an Ideology with Principles, with capital letters and all that. So, you know, my Ideology is Conservative and I believe that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and that the best thing the government can do is get out of the way. Or maybe I’m a Liberal and I think that the government is the solution to helping the least among us and that’s what really matters.

Or whatever.

Now, whenever someone asks me my position on a specific political issue, I consult my Ideology and take the position consistent with it. If I’m a Conservative and someone asks me if I believe that that government should distribute wealth from the rich to the poor, I say hell nah.

In this world, which doesn’t exist, we would see predictable patterns in data. Take, for instance, the General Social Survey, a poll that has been conducted with similar questions since the early 70s. The key pattern we would see is that people’s positions on a variety of different questions would be correlated. So, for example, people who are Ideologically Liberal would give the same answers to questions about, say, affirmative action and income redistribution—yes please to both—and people who are Ideologically Conservative would give the same answers—no thank you to both.

If ideology drove views on particular issues, we would see nice big correlations across different issues.

My former collaborator Jason Weeden over at his Substack, Charty Arps, explores such datasets and how things have changed over time.

Consider this graph from this post:

In 1996, the correlation between people’s views on abortion and income redistribution wasn’t just small, it was zero. Prior to that, it was a little bit negative. In 1996, if you asked someone their view on abortion, you would get no insight at all about their position on income redistribution. These two policy views were completely unrelated.

Here is the way that human political psychology actually works.3

When I have to take a position on some particular policy, whether because it’s put to a vote, a pollster asks me about it, the topic comes up in a conversation, or whatever, I ask myself two questions.

1. How does this policy affect my interests, understanding my interests to include my income, my wealth, my reproductive success, my freedom, and so forth?

2. What will people around me think if I adopt one position or the other?

Sometimes these two questions will point in the same direction. I’m a rich White person in Alabama in 1985 and someone asks me about my position on government wealth transfers. These transfers (1) reduce my wealth, and (2) people around me don’t like the government very much so I’m agin’ it!

Now, if I’m a poor White person in Kansas, say, then maybe that policy would help me in terms of my wealth, but I know that my neighbors oppose it. Then I have to balance the strength of the forces pulling me in opposite directions.

The power of these two considerations changes depending on the issue and the context. In some cases, I might be relatively unaffected by an issue—say I’m retired and affirmative action doesn’t really affect me one way or another—and in some cases other people might not care much about the topic in question—the trans issue in 1996, for instance.

Now, back to the graph. For some reason, starting around 2014, the correlation between people’s positions on abortion and income redistribution began to shoot up.

What might explain this?

One possibility is that ideology started driving people’s opinions. Remember that in the hypothetical world that I think doesn’t exist, people derive their specific positions from general principles.

That’s possible.

Here’s a different explanation. Around 2014, the second driver of people’s opinions—what others think about me for my positions—increased because social media made these opinions way more visible. In 1996, you couldn’t post a black square or a green circle to show which way you leaned on a topic because in 1996 people didn’t have Twitter accounts.

So, as the cost of having an opinion that differed from that of one’s community increased, the correlation between different opinions increased. More generally, as the second force—the importance of sharing the same view as others in the community—increases relative to the first force—the power of self-interest—we should expect to see more and more homogeneity in people’s political views.

Subscribe to Charty Arps for more.

Bone Shard Collections

• Bone Shard Collection #1

• Bone Shard Collection #2

An easy mistake is to judge them by today’s standards, a practice sometimes referred to as presentism. I find presentism naive because it forgets how much courage it takes to swim even a little against the current. For example, how many psychology undergraduates, when prompted by their textbook, actually face the wrong direction in an elevator? My guess is: not many. Even violating this low-stakes social norm is too uncomfortable, let alone something with real moral weight.

In today’s moral climate, it has even become fashionable to condemn those who moved in the right direction for not moving far or fast enough. (You’ll have to imagine how hard I’m rolling my eyes.) Thomas Jefferson is a common target. Sometimes his slaveholding receives more attention than his role in articulating ideas later used to undermine slavery itself.

Another easy mistake is to veer in the opposite direction and maintain that morality is purely culture-bound and therefore beyond judgment—a position known as moral relativism. “It’s their culture,” the argument goes. “If it involves female circumcision, infant sacrifice, or human trafficking, what kind of moral superiorists are we to say it’s wrong?”

Fortunately, we needn’t take the moral relativists that seriously. In a sense, they do not even believe what they’re saying. Out of one corner of their mouth they claim we cannot judge cultural practices like female genital mutilation, yet would you ever catch one admitting that the South was just as moral before the Civil War as after it?1 There is something strange—by which I mean hypocritical—about the moral relativist position.

So how should we judge people of the past? One useful technique comes from sports. To answer how good a player from a previous era really was, analysts now rely on “era-adjusted statistics.”

Before era-adjusted statistics, people could get away with saying something like: “Sidney Crosby is great, but he’s no Wayne Gretzky. Hell, Gretzky scored 92 goals one year. The closest Sid’s ever come is 51!” (These are hockey players, by the way.) Of course, this barstool observation ignores the fact that during Gretzky’s prime—the 1980s—the average goals per team per game was 3.83, while during Crosby’s prime—the 2010s—it was more than a goal lower, at 2.75.

The claim that Gretzky was a cut above Crosby overlooks another fact: Crosby skates faster and shoots harder than Gretzky ever did. The All-Star Skills Competition’s “Hardest Shot” event, for example, shows the winning shot speed rising steadily by decade—from 98.3 mph in the 1990s, to 101.7 in the 2000s, to 105.8 in the 2010s.

If Gretzky was the better player, why didn’t he skate faster or shoot harder? Granted, skating faster and shooting harder don’t necessarily make someone a better hockey player—Gretzky was known primarily for his ability to anticipate the play—but the discrepancy in raw skills still weakens the claim of his superiority.

The answer, of course, is technology. Crosby has access to better equipment and better science than Gretzky did.

So how do we compare the two? Against the average of their era. A better metric than “Gretzky scored almost twice as many goals as Crosby in their best years” is that during the 1980s, Gretzky’s goal production accounted for roughly 20% of an average team’s scoring, while Crosby’s accounted for about 17%. So, as goal scorers, they weren’t too far apart.2

Can we apply the same logic to morality? I don’t see why not. The question isn’t whether Jefferson met today’s standards, but how far he rose above—or sank below—the moral average of his time.3 I would say he rose above it by helping articulate a vision of greater freedom than had previously been imagined. He advanced the moral baseline not by freeing slaves, as we might now wish, but by crafting language that later generations would use against the institution of slavery. Indeed, the idea that every person should be treated equally under the law is such a fixture of our moral understanding that we feel comfortable skewering Jefferson for not getting there faster—even though pushing the idea further in his own time might have consigned both him and his ideas to obscurity.

Meanwhile, what are the moral equivalents of better equipment, training methods, and sports science? Technologies that make moral transgressions costlier and moral signaling more rewarding. Social media, for instance, makes violations of prevailing morality more transparent and increases the status one can gain by seeming righteous. Such technologies do not necessarily make people more moral so much as they alter the payout structure, making virtue more lucrative to signal and vice costlier to display.

“Moral progress,” then, reflects not nobler souls, but different incentives made possible by new technology. Rediker hints at something similar when he notes that abolitionism gained decisive force only after the Brooks slave ship diagram made the horror easily visible. Before then, abolitionism lacked, as Rob would say, a coordination point. In short, we should no more assume we are morally superior to our predecessors than assume Crosby is a better athlete than Gretzky.

“Era-adjusted morality,” then, allows us to honor Jefferson’s achievements and contextualize his shortcomings. Not only does this approach help us judge past figures more fairly, it can also help us take more realistic moral stances today.

Which brings us to one final question: why judge the dead at all? They certainly don’t care. We must do it for ourselves—either to jockey with one another for status or, more loftily, to calibrate our society’s progress and ask what direction it should take next.

Rediker, for instance, uses his moral accounting of the slave trade to argue for reparations. The next step in moral progress, he suggests, is to repay those whose families were ripped from their homeland and forced into servitude.

To me, this is right in theory but wrong in practice.4 Such a policy would likely divide the country even further, setting us back in the same way that Jefferson’s premature attempt to abolish slavery might have stalled the nation’s founding altogether. This is, of course, a position I hope those of the future judge me fairly for, as someone who still hasn’t faced the wrong way in an elevator.

This post continues along the same lines.

Why am I so focused on prices?

Two reasons.

First, I believe prices often make people better off. And I’m in favor of that.

Second, I think prices contain a lesson about consciousness.

Let me start with a story.

When I was working on my Master’s of Public Administration (MPA) at the Fels Institute of Government, I was lucky to meet another student, named Adam.

Adam worked in the non-profit sector. He directed a facility for young men who were charged with a crime and, instead of being incarcerated, were diverted from the criminal justice system. The facility received money from the government—mostly the City of Philadelphia—and the facility provided the kids in the diversion program with the necessities of life and services designed to support them. These services included activities, group psychological counseling, and individual therapy.

The Master’s program was small and intense, so we all got to know each other pretty well. Adam frequently shared his frustration with the system surrounding juvenile diversion.

His frustration wasn’t that these programs lacked funding. There was a steady stream of money from City Hall.

But the kids didn’t have great outcomes. The key measurement for kids in diversion is whether they were arrested again. And, indeed, many of them became involved in criminal activity not long after leaving the program. Further, tragically, more than one of the kids Adam came to know would be killed as a result of violence. A worse outcome there could not be.

The weakness of the diversion program was mysterious. If you talked to the people involved, most of them had good intentions. The people in City government genuinely wanted to help kids and spent money to try. They were motivated if for no other reason than they wanted to be able to point to policy successes when they ran for re-election. Similarly, the people who ran the programs had good intentions. You had to have a certain public-spiritedness to work in the non-profit space, which was often frustrating and less remunerative than the for-profit sector. Why were all of these good intentions and funds not turning into good outcomes?

I got the chance to watch Adam analyze the system in which he was embedded as he worked through the coursework in the MPA program, especially the courses on economics and program design.

Here’s how he started to view the problem.

You have kids who receive services. These services might or might not be useful to them. But if the services aren’t useful to them, they have no way to convey this—by, say, choosing a competitor’s services. The City, or other entity, makes that decision for them. So the feedback loop from consumer to seller is broken. Organizations are selling to the government, but the government isn’t consuming the service.

As a consequence, the service providers are not incentivized to provide the best service they can for the money they receive because they have a, well, captive audience. Instead, they have two other key incentives. The first is compliance. To keep getting money from the City, they must follow many rules: employees have to have certain certifications, a certain number of hours must be spent per child, that sort of thing. The second key incentive is to keep costs down. They don’t earn more money by having high-quality services that make kids want to go there because the kids aren’t making the decisions. They can’t improve their top line by increasing consumer demand. But the providers do improve their bottom line by keeping costs down.

This set of incentives is, of course, very different from the set that businesses face. Let’s take the example of a new paint-your-own-pottery studio that everyone in the greater Philadelphia area should absolutely visit. At the studio, we care a great deal about the quality of the experience that we deliver (4.9 out of 5 stars on Google). Everyone who comes to our studio could, instead, consume leisure time elsewhere. We have made adjustments over time as we’ve learned about the market. Further, just like other sellers, we update prices of specific items depending on demand as revealed by customers. Unicorns are popular. We raised the price. Chickens are not. On sale now! By looking at sales data, we have a window into what customers want. Their purchasing behavior reveals their preferences.

Adam came to believe that the diversion system was failing kids in part because their preferences are invisible. No one knows what the kids prefer because they can’t choose one service versus another. The consequence is programs that, excuse my French, suck. Service providers aren’t punished by the market in the way that our lagging demand for chickens in the pottery store caused us to lower our chicken prices.

After the all-inclusive and Disney posts, I spoke to a reader about how much I liked prices and they said, “Do we really have to extract every dollar from consumers?”

And that’s fair. Pricing is generally designed to maximize profits.

But that fact doesn’t mean that only sellers are better off with prices.

As we saw in the prior posts on all-inclusive resorts and theme parks, when goods and services aren’t allocated with prices, you get weird results that make consumers worse off, too. Poolside chairs go to the people most willing to break the rules about reserving chairs. Slow service plagues those at the swim-up bar.

Back in the real world, away from luxury travel, one of my favorite examples, thanks to the late Donald Shoup (see his book The High Cost of Free Parking) is the more mundane case of street parking in the United States. Parking on the street is often free and, if not free, then well below the market-clearing price.1 Shoup pointed out that the result of low or zero prices is cruising. Drivers circle, looking for an open spot, sometimes creating 30% of the traffic in an area. Everyone pays an extra cost in time, fuel, and frustration, rather than in dollars. And the parking authority learns nothing. When San Francisco ran an experiment and let meter prices vary block by block to target one open space per block, while some prices climbed, prices on many blocks fell because demand had been overestimated. Cruising dropped, drivers got their spot reliably, and reported being better off. They had been paying for parking all along. They just weren’t paying in a currency that told anyone anything because their frustration and cruising was invisible to the people setting the prices.

Concert tickets illustrate a related but distinct pathology. Ticket prices are often listed far below what people would actually pay. Many people express warmth about this. Isn’t it great that artists are letting their less-well-off fans enjoy their music? Well… When Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tickets went on sale at a face value of around $400, the market-clearing price for good seats was several thousand dollars. And that’s what the tickets ultimately sold for. But people didn’t buy them from Taylor Swift. Instead, these margins went to scalpers, and the resale platforms everyone hates, including StubHub and Ticketmaster’s “verified resale” operation. True fans either paid the premium through a middleman or watched bots clean out the inventory in the first thirty seconds and didn’t get in at all. Now, that’s not to say that Swift didn’t do very well, only that third parties captured a lot of the profits. (To her credit, Swift generously distributed the bounty to staff). The tickets ultimately sell for what people will pay; the only question is who collects it.

To return to Adam, his stories about his experience in the rarefied world of non-profits bounce between comedy and tragedy. He told me about the time he attended a juvenile criminal justice conference. The gathering ranged from law enforcement to politicians to judges to therapists and more. When his turn came to speak, he began with a question for the audience. Raise your hand, he said, if you would run your company, department, or program just the way that you currently do if you were paid based on how well it worked, keeping people out of prison a second time. Not only did no hand go up, but he was met with raucous laughter.

Something is rotten in Denmark.

Adam is developing workarounds because the system as a whole is very difficult to reform. Here’s one idea: how about asking people in the system what they need? People in the justice system generally can’t vote with their wallets, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get a vote. He has piloted a program in which—gasp!—he asks people what they need to stay out of trouble down the road. If you are going to be released in six months, what do you need to get a job, find a place to live, support yourself? What is your biggest pain point? How can the resources available be used to solve this problem?

Adam’s efforts are not exactly a vindication of pricing. But they point to the general idea that the absence of prices in many contexts presents problems, and not just for one side of the market or the other. The fundamental reason is that information isn’t available. When you see our unicorns cost $25 and our chickens cost $20, you infer something about the demand for unicorns.2 Prices in markets represent the way that sellers have responded to the information they get from consumers.

Adam’s surveys, like prices, also capture information. As do reviews on platforms such as Google and Yelp. People who produce goods and services meet demand best when they have information about that demand. Often that’s buying choices and prices, but not always.

When you think about prices, it’s easy to get stuck on the transaction, the amount of money. And it’s easy to think, hey, if now there’s a price that wasn’t there before, stuff got more expensive. But to focus on prices per se is to miss the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that the situation overall often gets better, for everyone. The problem with services to youth offenders in this case might not be how much—or how little3—we spend on it. The real problem is information. All of the frustration these kids feel with their services is lost to the system.

As Adam did, we can try to solve this problem is to make the information visible through surveys, but surveys present their own problems. One is that people lie. Another is that surveys cost money to implement. A third problem is that some people in the system might have a stake in hiding the information they might reveal—think about low-quality service providers. Yet a fourth problem is that good survey design is hard.

Not to take anything away from Adam’s efforts. It’s just that the price system is a really clean way to elicit people’s true preferences. There are others, but all of them, including voting, have their drawbacks.

What are some other areas in which price information is absent? In the prior post, I talked about healthcare. I’m not saying prices will solve the many problems of that complicated space, but consider all the information that is lost because people don’t pay healthcare providers directly. If you are skeptical that medical care can be a normal everyday market with prices, have a chat with a veterinarian.

I live in Philadelphia, a city known for “eds and meds,” the two sectors that make the local economy spin. There is no shortage of institutions of higher learning or medical providers. I recently wanted to book an appointment with a specialist and contacted the big players in the area. The first available spot was three months away. As I was writing this post, a friend of mine told me about her need to see a medical specialist. She wasn’t able to book an appointment at all, but is now on waiting lists to get one.

I am reluctant to get into another market in which consumers don’t pay prices, but public education is another. The research in this area is complicated—the linked paper finds that a 10% increase in spending yields a 0.07 standard deviation improvement on educational metrics. This finding reminds me of what Adam described. There’s lots of money washing around the system, but there’s no systematic benefit—or not much systematic benefit—to throwing more money at the problem. Could this be because there is a loss of information, with students having no way to vote with their feet and parents having limited ways to vote with their wallets?

Related, as someone taking care of taxes and compliance for a small business, I can tell you one additional area in which there is deep, profound market failure. The various web portals that businesses must use—I have in mind Pennsylvania’s MyPATH system and especially the state’s unemployment insurance management system—are, in a word, an abomination, an offense against god and nature. I have lost years of my life simply trying to log in to these sites,4 never mind trying to satisfy all of the requirements for filing and paying all the fees and taxes. My displeasure cannot be voiced by opting out of using these systems—the state will take away my property and freedom if I do—and I cannot use another provider, as the state claims a monopoly. I have bountiful information I would love to convey to the designers of these platforms, and I hope to meet them in a dark alley someday to share my thoughts.

/rant

What does all of this have to do with consciousness?

Aristotle, in On the Heavens, wrote that “a man, being just as hungry as thirsty, and placed in between food and drink, must necessarily remain where he is and starve to death.” What is a person—or a donkey—to do?

Let’s suppose that Marvin Minsky more or less got it right when he suggested there is a Society of Mind. Imagine that there are all these different little systems in your brain—whether you call them “modules” or something else is up to you—and they go about their business all day, tending to their little domains of responsibility. One little system is designed to make you want to eat, one wants you to run away from that bear, one wants you to sit back and relax… but, ultimately, you can’t pursue all of these goals at any given time.

How is that decision to be made?

Somehow, there has to be some way to compare how urgent it is to eat and how urgent it is to flee the bear. If the predator-evasion program and the get-food program both say, yeah, my thing is important right now, what’s an organism to do?

This problem is why these different systems all need to have some sort of common currency. It’s 57 units urgent to flee, but only 8 units urgent to eat. My guess is that, somehow, all of our motivational systems need to express their urgency with some kind of currency that can be compared. In our experiences, this is felt as the intensity of a feeling or an emotion.

The dollar in your wallet can only be used to contribute to the payment of one thing. You can use it to buy a Big Mac, a ticket to Reno, a new laptop… The reason that modern economies work as well as they do is that we have found a common metric—currency—to price these varied goods and services. You can only do one thing at a time and your dollar can only be put to one use.

Prices tell us which things are more valuable than others and the intensity of feelings tells us which priority is more urgent than others. Consciousness is the currency of decision making.

In Walden, Thoreau writes: “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.” By now, it won’t surprise you that I feel something similar about my own field: most of what my colleagues call true I believe in my head to be false, and if I repent of anything, it will be apparently be keeping my mouth shut about it.

I sometimes wonder which is stronger, though: my instinct for critical thinking or my appetite for rebellion. Nearly everything I’ve thrown myself into, I’ve eventually torn down. My disillusionment with psychotherapy today mirrors my disillusionment with the academic study of literature ten years ago and may well mirror my disillusionment, ten years from now, with writing itself. (God help me then.)

Of course, underneath this criticism and disappointment is an abiding passion, otherwise I would just leave these things alone. My feelings echo those of Paul Minot, who wrote of his field of psychiatry: “I’ve been practicing psychiatry for 38 years. I love my job, my peers, and my patients. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m participating in the biggest intellectual scam of this era.” Similarly, despite believing less and less in the basic tenets of my field, I still love my work and my clients, and still cling to the promise at the center of therapeutic work: of finding the good life for myself and my clients.

Anyway, the reason I’m navel-gazing at this particular moment is that I recently read two books by Stephen Grosz—The Examined Life and Love’s Labour—which cemented two truths that had been forming in my head. The first is that the portrait of human life suggested by psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies is often beautiful and compelling. Grosz’s pages are filled with stories from more than forty years of practice, stories capable of softening even the most hardened reader. I hope never to become so dead that I am unmoved by such writing.

The second truth is that much of it is wrong. Psychotherapeutic narratives, in general, don’t seem particularly concerned with being true—despite a good deal of chest-beating to the contrary—and are often closer to stories than to scientific explanations. Grosz’s interpretations of his clients’ predicaments are filtered through a distinctly psychoanalytic lens, one that frequently renders reality more profound and complex than it is.

Here are a few examples.

In Love’s Labour, Grosz interprets a client’s preference for older men as an unconscious attempt to find “a man who will be the mother I never had.”1 A more straightforward explanation is the evolutionary one: women tend to be attracted to status—which older men typically have more of—because over our long history, status tracked a man’s ability to provide resources and protection.2

In another section, Grosz writes: “To make sense of how and why we have sex the way we do, we must look closely at our personal history, especially our earliest relationships… In a way, our sex lives can be thought of as a solution to the problems given to us by our earliest fears, longings and animosities.”3 Here again, personal history is privileged over current situation—a default focus I have challenged at great length.

More to the point, wouldn’t it be simpler to say that to make sense of how and why we have sex the way we do, we must look closely at our species’ history? Our sex lives are, first and foremost, solutions to the problem of genetic transmission—to the evolutionary imperative of passing our genes into the next generation. Early relationships and experiences can shape the details, of course, but they don’t set the terms. I see no reason for prioritizing them over the most fundamental driver of sexual behavior across the animal kingdom.

Grosz describes another client, Emma, who began seeing him “because she’d become acutely depressed after beginning a Ph.D.”4 More interesting than the interpretation Grosz eventually offers is a different question. Is there currently any room, in the field of psychotherapy, for explanations like this:

As Shani says, “Being a graduate student is probably one of the worst ratios of stressors to coping skills. When you’re a grad student, you’re poor, ignorant, stressed, and still immature.”

In discussing another client, Grosz writes of the common tendency to resist change: “We hesitate, in the face of change, because change is loss.”5 Not really. It would be more accurate to say that change is risk. Conservatism in behavior and morphology is widespread across the animal kingdom for the simple reason that there are far more ways for things to go wrong than right. People are loath to abandon something that is working well enough because, on some level, they recognize that it’s already a hell of an exception in a cold, unforgiving universe trending toward entropy.

Let’s spend another moment on this point. Therapists are often confused about why clients don’t change, overlooking that the client’s situation—which seems, and is often presented as, unsustainable—is actually working well enough. A therapist might wonder: “Why does she insist on working herself so thin that she keeps getting sick?” The client might even ask the same. But much of the time, the answer is that this is the client’s best available option, given the full set of constraints and tradeoffs.

Another of Grosz’s clients is boring. Grosz writes of boredom:

Boredom can be…a sign that the patient is avoiding a particular subject; that he or she is unable to talk directly about something intimate or embarrassing. Or it can mean that patient and psychoanalyst are stuck; the patient is returning again and again to some desire or grievance that the psychoanalyst is failing to tackle. A boring person might be feeling envious, and might kill a conversation…because he cannot bear to hear a helpful or compelling idea coming from someone else. Or the boring patient may be playing possum—just as there are beasts in the jungle that survive by playing dead, some people, when frightened, simply shut down. It’s also true that psychoanalyst and patient will sometimes unconsciously collude to desiccate the atmosphere between them because they fear things becoming too emotionally disturbed, or too exciting.6

Counterpoint: Some people are boring. Others are short, near-sighted, uncoordinated, or extremely sensitive to noise and light (nice to meet you). Boredom more likely reflects ordinary variation than hidden meaning.

As a final example, one of Grosz’s patients, Elizabeth, continued going out and living her life while her husband was at home dying. Elizabeth also

…found it more and more difficult to touch her husband, let alone have sex with him. Frightened of his death, reminded of her own mortality, and angry about being left to someday face her death on her own, Elizabeth found herself rejecting her husband in his final months.7

Or—Elizabeth didn’t want to have sex with a dying man. Sadness and grief—let alone the signs of death and decay—are often enough to extinguish desire.8

Now, Grosz’s interpretations in these cases could certainly be correct. I don’t know these clients; I haven’t worked with them. Then again, Grosz is attempting to describe human behavior—a subject studied by many disciplines. And while those disciplines don’t stop applying in the therapy office, they often stop being applied. In Grosz’s pages, there is a clear preference for the assumptions and narratives of psychotherapy, and a corresponding neglect of other explanations.

By “other explanations,” I mean not only the evolutionary and situationist perspectives I have advocated, but also simpler, common-sense, and statistical ones. Isn’t it much simpler to say that a boring person is boring because people vary on every observable trait than to presume that the client is playing possum? Doesn’t common sense suggest why someone might not want to have sex with a dying partner? And doesn’t a statistical approach—Bayesian reasoning—lead us to presume that, all else equal, the graduate student is depressed because she is a graduate student? Why are these interpretations so often overlooked?

“All else equal” is the key phrase. Grosz’s interpretations are not so much wrong as unlikely and indirect. My reaction to many of them is: “Could be…but probably isn’t. And even if it is, there’s a more direct explanation.”

To be fair, psychotherapy often deals with outlier cases—otherwise clients would not seek such an involved process—and no one writes about typical clients. So, the simplest explanations are less likely to apply to the cases Grosz selects. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. The bigger issue, I think, is that Grosz is wedded to a particular version of reality—in his case, a psychoanalytic one—which inevitably shapes what he sees.

Of course, this is a human tendency, not a Grosz one. In order to make adaptive decisions, we must attend selectively and interpret quickly. Everyone has some bias, then—some built-in way of seeing. But it’s possible that my field has a particularly skewed version of reality. For whatever reason, psychotherapy is full of interpretations that are compelling, profound, and largely wrong.9

If I am right that Grosz is wrong about many of the causes of mental distress, you might expect this to undermine his effectiveness as a therapist. I am sure that it hasn’t. Indeed, I’d be willing to bet 100 subscribers that Grosz has helped his patients tremendously. Nor do we need to guess: a large body of research suggests that psychotherapies of all stripes produce broadly similar outcomes, despite having widely varying foundational assumptions and techniques.

In my view, this is because the content of a particular therapy matters far less than the process of someone listening and caring. Grosz’s books themselves are a testament to how well he listens and how much he cares. At the most fundamental level, an interpretation is a signal to the client that the therapist is trying to understand, and that alone is often enough.

But even at the level of content, comforting explanations are typically more helpful than truth. Clients don’t want an accurate description of their misery as much as one they can use. And the same goes for therapists. The client gravitates to what will heal them, the therapist to what will make them the healer. Therapy becomes an attempt to arrive at an explanation that satisfies both. A diagnosis, for example, can legitimize a client’s otherwise confusing or unacceptable behavior and, at the same time, bring their healing more firmly under the guidance of the therapist’s expertise.

Just like that, both can heal.

Seen in this light, the interpretations Grosz arrives at begin to make more sense. He and Emma can do more with an explanation that locates her depression in early childhood dynamics than with one that points to the practical struggles of Ph.D. programs. He and his boring client can work with the idea that the client is playing possum—they can ask why, for example, rather than shrugging their shoulders and muttering c’est la vie. An actionable interpretation, whether true or not, solves one of the most difficult parts of suffering for both client and therapist: not knowing what to do/not being able to do anything.

The same dynamic takes place at a larger level. Not only the therapist and client, but clinical psychology and culture, collude to arrive at stories that serve them both. While these stories are not science, presenting them as such makes them more effective. Psychotherapy is less a science that occasionally uses stories, then, than a storytelling system that occasionally borrows the language of science. Movements like “evidence-based therapy” are simply part of the performance, part of the ritual of healing, which benefits from the appearance of rigor and expertise. That is why, to an extent, it doesn’t matter what the evidence is—or whether it exists at all.

So, therapeutic explanations work not because they are true, but because they are useful.10 Yet we often treat them as true to preserve their usefulness. If we expose therapy as a kind of useful fiction, we risk breaking it. But if we don’t, we continue pretending it’s something it’s not. Perhaps we can’t have both: a field that heals and is honest about why.

I think this explains the sometimes jarring duality of my writing and practicing lives. In session, I have little difficulty deciding whether to communicate my stance that, for example, ADHD isn’t real. It is usually clear whether the client will benefit from that perspective or not. But when I write about ADHD to a broader audience, it’s a different story. There, I want to be as truthful as possible; I have a responsibility to do so. Yet readers may be using ADHD in a variety of ways, some of which will be punctured by my little javelin of truth.

Which brings me back to navel-gazing. Despite how it might seem, I am partly ashamed to be writing this. I am not wholly comfortable exposing my field. It makes me feel like the sort of person who turns off the music at a party and asks whether anyone has actually been listening to the lyrics. For many, if the beat’s alright—if the story works—people will dance all night.

I’d like to dance, too. Hell, I got into this field because, while unemployed, I became enraptured by the writings of Freud and Jung. I was reluctant to admit that early on, partly because Freud was passé and partly because everyone else seemed to have chosen the work for more practical reasons. But the truth is, I wanted to see the world the way these original masters did; I wanted my working days to be like theirs.

Not only did I want them and their descendants, like Grosz, to be right—I wanted to be one of those descendants. I wanted to carry the flag forward. Their versions of reality were richer, deeper, more meaningful than the one I now find myself describing.

It’s only that they were, by and large, wrong.

• A key relationship pattern is brought into awareness and resolved (transference)

• Unconscious dynamics are made conscious

• The therapist provides the client with tools and techniques to better manage their thoughts and emotions

• Insight, or self-awareness, leads to maturational change

A simpler explanation is that the client (a social animal) forms a meaningful social relationship with their therapist, one that conforms to an unparalleled degree to the client’s wishes.

Ignoring emotions is harmful because:

• They won’t go away until they’re brought into the open and fully processed. Until then, they may cause you to act out in unproductive ways.

In reality, ignoring emotions can sometimes help. They often pass on their own and aren’t always worth trusting—especially in the modern world.

People are self-critical because:

• They’re insecure

• They’ve internalized critical voices from early relationships

• They judge others and assume they’re being judged in return

A simpler explanation is that it’s better to beat ourselves up than have the world do it for us.

You meet the criteria for the following diagnosis: [insert].

A simpler explanation is that you vary across psychological traits—gullibility, impulse control, empathy, conscientiousness—and live in a world vastly different from the one in which humans evolved.

Now that we’ve discussed your diagnosis, you’re starting to notice how true it is. That’s a sign we’ve gotten it right.

A simpler explanation is that suggestion and confirmation bias are a powerful combination.

Love’s deepest motivation is:

• To find the opposite of the love you received as a child

• To recreate the love you received as a child, for better or worse

• To resolve unfinished business from early relationships

A simpler explanation is that love motivates us to pair up with someone of equal or ideally greater mate value. Mate value is based on different things for men and women—typically status for men, beauty for women.

People struggle to find love because:

• They don’t love themselves

• Their early relationships were inadequate

• They are afraid of losing themselves

A simpler explanation is that even for those of moderate to high mate value, finding a long-term partner is difficult because of the duration and intensity of coordination required.

People who pursue sex actually want:

• Connection

• Power

• Validation

• Excitement

A simpler explanation is that an animal whose ultimate evolutionary purpose is to procreate occasionally takes measures to do so.

Men who sleep around do so because:

• They’re insecure or compensating for something

• They are afraid of genuine connection or commitment

• They were taught a form of toxic masculinity growing up

A simpler explanation is that males across many species pursue multiple partners when they can.

These two events happened together for a reason.

A simpler explanation is that not everything that happens together means something. It might be coincidence.

Dreams are meaningful.

A simpler explanation is that dreaming likely has a function, but we don’t know what it is. The content may just be noise.

In 1993, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, referred to her trip on the Space Shuttle Challenger as an “E-Ticket ride!”

The background for this reference dates back to 1955, when Walt Disney opened Disneyland in California. At that time, the current pay-one-price for all-you-can-ride model would be more than 25 years away. Instead, guests could buy tickets or books of tickets—labeled from A to E—for different attractions. The more mundane attractions required an early-alphabet ticket. An A-Ticket got you on the Horseless Carriage (oooh!) or the King Arthur Carousel. Rocket to the Moon or the Jungle Cruise required a precious E-Ticket.2

When the normal price system isn’t being used, another method for allocating scarce resourced must be. There are only so many guests who are going to ride Dumbo in any given hour—about 400—and only a few of them are going to get the exit row seat on the aisle on the right side of the plane, my personal favorite. Just like everything else in life, spots on attractions are a scare resource that must be allocated somehow.

In the 80s, Disney in the U.S. moved to an all-you-can-ride system for the attractions. (The ticket system persisted at Tokyo Disneyland all the way to 2001.) Spaces on the attractions were allocated by order—first come first served—rather than just money. Now, different attractions had different time costs instead of money costs. If you really wanted to ride Space Mountain, you had to pay the long wait cost of standing in the line. In contrast, you often could just walk on to It’s a Small World.

For me, the golden era of attraction allocation was between 1990 and 2021, when Disney theme parks used the FastPass system. Kiosks outside the popular attractions dispensed paper tickets with a time window on them, say 10:30-11:30. When you returned to the attraction after the start time of the window, you could use the express line, which usually meant a very short wait. FastPasses were like reservations and they were limited in number.

A key element of the FastPass system was that you could get a new FastPass a few minutes after the window from when your prior FastPass opened. So if you got a 10:30 FastPass for Big Thunder Mountain, you could get another FastPass, for Space Mountain, say, at 10:35. This was the case whether you used your FastPass for Big Thunder Mountain or not. A second key element, not widely known, was that the window wasn’t really a window. A FastPass for 10:30-11:30 could be used any time after 10:30, all the way to the close of the park. The time was less a window and more like a threshold.

These two elements meant that careful planning was rewarded with fistfuls of FastPasses. When my friends and I visited the parks, we would organize our time to be at a kiosk to get a new FastPass as soon as we could, and accumulate them. We never had the chance to get a new one without taking advantage of the opportunity. I also knew that occasionally the kiosks would malfunction. These were gold mines. When a kiosk malfunctioned, Disney employees would hand out FastPasses without checking if you were eligible to get one. (How could they, really?) In this way, you could get a “free” FastPass, one that didn’t change your eligibility for a new one.

The FastPass system was more or less egalitarian. You couldn’t buy faster access to attractions. Having said that, yes, there was a subsidy for planners and a tax on the disorganized. As a planner, I loved this system.3 Again, all allocation systems lead to winners and losers. This has to be true for any scarce resource.

Times have changed once again.

The new system Disney uses is complicated, with multiple options including Lightning Lane Multi Pass, Lightning Lane Single Pass, and Lightning Lane Premier Pass. For a price, you can skip the line, as in the Fast Pass system, for one or more attractions. The prices depend on when you visit, but can be as high as $449 per person. Note that this price is in addition to the price of admission, which might be as high as around $200 for a single day. A family of four that doesn’t want to wait in lines might conceivably pay north of $2,500 for their day at the park.

In sum, different regimes created different winners and losers:

Tickets – Money cost and time cost. Some benefit for wealthier people.

All-you-can-ride – Time cost only. Egalitarian, holding aside the fact that getting into the park in the first place is expensive.

Fast Pass – Time cost only.4 Favors planners and people with knowledge of the system.

Lightning Lane – Big money cost and small time cost favors those willing and able to spend more money.

Let’s turn from Disney back to psychology.

I’ve discussed this before, so this is a reminder of a study I conducted with my former student Peter DeScioli.

We were interested in people’s perceptions of the “fairness” of different allocation regimes. To get at this, we developed a simple laboratory study in which subjects were randomly assigned to one of two tasks. One task was easier than the other, so I’ll just refer to them as the Easy and Hard tasks.

Money to compensate people for doing the tasks was allocated in two possible ways. The person doing the Hard task could get more than the person doing the Easy task—they had to work harder, after all. Alternatively, the money could be divided evenly—the tasks were assigned randomly, after all.

We asked subjects how they felt about the two ways to allocate the rewards before they were told whether they would do the Easy or the Hard task. How fair and moral was each one? We asked them the very same questions five minutes later, after the roles were assigned and the tasks were complete.

Imagine, if you will, a rational, principled subject whose opinions about allocation regimes isn’t biased by which regime happens to benefit them. Their answers will be the same both times.

Now imagine a fallible, biased human being, whose mind is designed to try to suppress allocation regimes that are disadvantageous to themselves. Before they know whether they’ll do the Hard or Easy task, they’ll be indifferent about how the tasks are rewarded. But after they have done the task, the person who did the Hard task might decide it’s more “fair” if hard work is rewarded with more money. Symmetrically for the person assigned the easier task.

That’s what we found: people’s views about which system was fair and moral changed, in mere minutes, as their position changed.

The real world provides many such cases. Two anecdotes from my experience illustrate the point.

When I was in college, nearly everyone was politically liberal. There was one lone dissenting republican. After graduation, she found herself in the Bay Area, doing well but faced with the brutal reality of the sky-high prices of the rental market. Suddenly, she found herself in favor of rent control.

When I was in graduate school—also a bastion of political liberalism—I met one student who was a socialist, with big ideas about the importance of huge wealth transfers from the rich to the poor. He would go on to get a job at the Columbia Business School. Next time I met him, he patiently explained to me that taxation was actually theft.5

Indeed.

Theme parks aren’t the only place where allocation regimes change. It used to be that airline tickets came with a baggage allowance that was sufficient for most people. Now, people who want to bring more must pay for the privilege. Generally, various industries have moved toward such disaggregation, separating goods and services that used to be sold together. And while it’s true that many people dislike the fact that they have to pay more for their luggage, plenty of other people are pleased that they don’t have to pay for a luggage allowance they don’t use.6 Similarly, lots of people like being able to pay for a better seat, valuing the marginally improved experience more than the cost.

These debates get heated. In some cases, people judge allocation systems harshly, expressing outrage.7

Now, some moral intuitions are more or less universal. People everywhere condemn cheaters and murderers.

But there is also moral variation. If we suppose that people use moral arguments to try to persuade others that the rules that benefit themselves should be in place, then it makes sense that some people can look at an allocation regime and judge it “fair” while others judge it to be “unfair,” sometimes in the extreme.

If you are ever wondering if one of your own moral judgments about what’s fair or not is really just your self interest in disguise, change “fair” to “good for me and people like me.” If you’re a graduate student, allocating goods based on prices is “unfair” in the sense that it’s not good for you. You’re poor. If you’re a professor in a business school, taking from the rich to give to the poor is “unfair” in the sense that it’s bad for you. You’re rich.

When the rules affect everyone equally—everyone must start at the same time in a footrace—then it’s genuinely unfair if someone takes a head start. The notion of fairness applies best to rules that affect everyone the same.

In that Reddit post that I linked to above, user plurmeow writes, “I miss FastPass. Capitalism is so awful.”

I find this interesting because Disney theme parks themselves are in many ways the quintessential result of capitalism. That user likes capitalism well enough when it produces a theme park that they can enjoy because they can afford it—allowing them to have an experience that so many other people can’t—but hates capitalism when the prices rise to the point that others can purchase an advantage they can’t afford.8

This explains the point in the tagline. Lots of people love the extra pile of fries they can get for a small cost because they can afford that small cost. The premium for skipping the lines, however, is “unfair” because most people cannot afford it. To make matters worse, the people in the standby queue have to watch others walk past them. The unfairness is visible—and makes guests worse off—in a way that the upsized fries do not.

Again, it’s worth noting that these on-the-ground important differences in terms of who wins and who loses under different regimes lead to predictable differences in policy preferences. It’s equally important to note that the discussion about many of these differences is often framed in moral language.

Simplifying tremendously, modern political conflicts have been and still are about allocation regimes, writ large. One way to think about the cold war is through this lens. On one side is capitalism, a system in which stuff is allocated with prices. On the other side is a system in which stuff is allocated by a central planner, “to each according to their needs.” Other political debates have a similar flavor.

And, of course, these debates often take on a distinctly moral tone. Ayn Rand, in The Fountainhead, gives voice to this idea, that the pursuit of profit is moral and virtuous and free riding is the opposite. Participation in industrial creation is valorized. Compare this view to the message of, say, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, in which capitalists are “takers,” to be condemned rather than praised. Rand’s readers see themselves as productive creators; Quinn’s readers see themselves and others as victimized by industrial civilization. Each philosophy flatters its adherents.

There’s a reason one never meets a poor libertarian, as the saying goes.

It’s not surprising that people favor regimes that favor them and people like them. Even more interesting is that people’s favoritism is delightfully nuanced. Some people want just enough capitalism to get them (but not others) in the gates of the park, but just enough socialism once inside others can’t buy their way in front of them.

Are we all Goldilocks Capitalists?