The Economics of Hate

The Economics of Hate

The Economics of Hate Samuel Cameron Professor of Economics, University of Bradford, UK

Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Samuel Cameron 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2008943095

ISBN 978 1 84720 047 1 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

Contents List of figures and tables Preface Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

vi vii viii

Towards the economics of hate The quiet and peaceful world of microeconomics (QPWM) Why is hate like raspberry jam? Hatred in conventional microeconomics Widening the economic approach to hate Applied hate in the material world at the individual level Hate in the air: the economics of psychic possession Phobias, -isms and schisms: group hate Is conflict resolution theory relevant? Is there a policy conclusion?

References Index

1 12 38 58 80 100 120 140 154 167 183

v

Figures and tables FIGURES 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 4.1 5.1 6.1 7.1 8.1

Income and substitution effects for hate as a consumption good Income and substitution effects for hate as a full-time means of support Backward-bending supply curve for hate Edgeworth–Bowley box diagram Hate code market Hate code market: alternative equilibria The hate nexus Dyadic hate functions Psychic production function Hate club membership function Conflict resolution production function

18 20 22 27 55 56 63 89 107 127 141

TABLES 1.1 4.1 4.2

Definitions of hatred and malice Hatred-relevant emotions and actions Hating self and hating others options

vi

7 64 69

Preface There is little literature which directly links economics with hate. Some literature on hate mentions economic factors but it is not usually an economic analysis; rather some factor such as unemployment is brought in on an ad hoc basis when other explanations are found wanting. Paradoxically there is a strong economic basis to many discussions about hate. Hate is treated as a commodity with a price that can be controlled by measures that effectively increase this price, whether these be longer prison sentences or tighter security measures at airports to impede terrorist bombers. In this book, I seek to explore the dimensions of hate as a commodity from a wider economic perspective which draws critically on research in other subjects.

vii

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Matt Pitman at Edward Elgar for encouraging me to write this book. Also colleagues in many institutions who are too numerous to mention for providing relevant material. I have used some small parts of my previous publications, ‘Wiccanomics’ (Review of Social Economy, 2005a), the chapter on suicide in Bowmaker (2005) and The Economics of Sin (2002b).

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1.

Towards the economics of hate

It might not be obvious what economics has to do with hate. Let us begin that discourse by looking at the deliberations in the inner circle of the Nazi Party two days after Kristallnacht. As part of the discussion, Goebbels suggested that Jews might be excluded from sleeping cars (on trains) that contained Germans. He proposed that they might then be forced to sleep in the corridor. The following discussion is then reported to have taken place: Goering: In that case, I think it would make sense to give them separate compartments. Goebbels: Not if the train is overcrowded? Goering: Just a moment. There’ll be only one Jewish coach. If that is filled up the other Jews will have to stay home. Goebbels: Suppose, there won’t be many Jews going on the express to Munich, suppose there will be two Jews in the train and the other compartment will be overcrowded. These two Jews would then have a compartment all to themselves. Therefore, Jews may claim a seat only after all Germans have secured a seat. Goering: I’d give the Jews one coach or one compartment. And should a case like you mention arise and the train be overcrowded, believe me, we don’t need a law. We’ll kick him out and he’ll have to sit alone on the toilet all the way. Goebbels: I don’t agree, I don’t believe in this. There ought to be a law. Further there ought to be a decree barring Jews from beaches and resorts. (Quoted in Fischer, 1998, p. 285)

This leads on to an even more surreal discussion about trying to prevent Germans coming into contact with Jews while wandering through the forest. The allocation of sleeping car slots between two differently privileged groups where one group is thought to incur costs from contact with the other is an economic problem. Interestingly there is no record of anyone proposing higher prices for Jewish consumers, notwithstanding the hefty sequestration of Jewish assets by Nazis during this period. The lack of such a suggestion may perhaps give us an important insight into the essential nature of hate. Here are six statements about hatred: 1. 2.

Hatred is the most extreme emotion (if it is an emotion). Expression of hatred is more likely to provoke extreme social disapproval than expression of other emotions. 1

2

3. 4. 5.

6.

The economics of hate

Displays of hatred exhibit more irrationality than displays of other emotions. (2) is due not so much to (3) as to fear of the consequences of the action of a hateful individual. With respect to (2) and (4) people are generally less likely to dismiss displays of hatred as temporary aberrations that will settle down than they are other emotions such as anger. Once formed, hatred is not easily diffused or deflected into ‘safety valve’ outlets.

Now you have read these you might like to consider the extent to which you agree with them as it provides a frame of reference for what follows. We will return to debate these propositions when we get to Chapter 4. For the moment, let me briefly expound on each. 1.

2.

3.

The claim that hatred is the most extreme emotion is founded on the virulence of its expression in terms of both intention and actions such as murder, mutilation and other forms of ruining or devastation of lives. It might be claimed that love shares this status. However, whichever of the regular five concepts of love (see Cameron and Collins, 2000, pp. 5–6) we adopt, they do not lead to very extreme outcomes unless, by being thwarted, they morph into hatred. We must immediately qualify this by saying that, where hatred is shared in a group (Chapter 7) towards a common goal then it can bring strong approval. Examples of this are attribution of heroic status towards extreme acts of hatred in the form of murder of the hated individuals. Where a specifically focused hatred is deemed non-acceptable it invites more censure than other forms of behaviour. To some extent this is a tautological remark as we define (see Table 1.1 below) hatred as something more than other forms of disliking or non-acceptance of others. As this is a short introduction, I will defer any in-depth discussion of rationality and stick to the idea that non-rational behaviour is that which may be self-defeating. If we want to be blunt about it we could simply call this ‘stupid’. Some would claim, with reference to statement 1, that love inspires extreme displays of irrationality. This is disputed further in Cameron and Collins (2000, Chapter 3) where many apparently strange customs and activities are explained in terms of rational utility-maximizing behaviour. That is not to say that some love-inspired choices might reasonably be deemed irrational. It is difficult to establish objectively, in any empirical way, that hate generates a more substantial volume of self-defeating activity than love but

Towards the economics of hate

4.

5.

6.

3

we can appeal to the casual evidence, such as the fact that love does not promote riots and wars. Returning to the love–hate nexus discussed with respect to statement 1, hate inspired by love may be a potent source of irrationality – for example the jealous lover who murders the person involved with the object of their affection. Economists such as Glaeser (2005) will, of course, claim that hatred is susceptible to rational choice analysis. Fear of the consequences of hate can be explained in terms of rational behaviour. The individual involved in animal-using industries who finds paint daubed on their house by protesters may reasonably take this as a proxy for escalation of behaviour which may lead ultimately to extreme physical violence. Society, collectively, has reason to condemn displays of hatred due to the cost potential of the implied threats. Hence, we have the situation of rolling waves of legislation (see Chapter 9) to protect various groups from the consequence of hate. Some of this is economically based, as expressions of hatred can take forms which are extremely disruptive to trade. To some extent, the issue of the sustainability of expressions of hatred takes us into the distinction between hatred and anger (see Barad, 2004; Zizzo, 2004) which will be discussed later. An expression of anger which is not accompanied by force or credible threats of force might be dismissed as temporary. That is, people will say the person will calm down once they have expressed their feelings. However, what we would normally consider to be hatred we would expect not to abate, as by definition it implies something sustained. The prolongation could be because a person, or group, can not obtain satisfaction by altering the circumstances underpinning the hatred. For example, those suffering under the rule of fascist dictatorship have no reason to stop hating the dictator. If the hatred is embedded as a form of capital in the hater then the hatred may sustain long after the dictator is removed or the individual has removed themselves by migrating. Diffusion of states of emotion into ‘safety valve’ outlets again takes us into the anger/hate interface. The concept of ‘safety valves’ is easily understood. Let us imagine a son has had a vehement disagreement with his father. The father may storm off into a public house and vent his rage verbally with friends in similar situations whilst the son repairs to his bedroom and plays some corporate US rock music of the ‘I hate my parents’ variety. Neither of them goes on to poison, maim or covertly electrocute the other. This might be attributed to the beneficial effects of their safety valves which might thus be deemed to have added to the welfare of society. But of course, we could say this only happened because they were angry and did not really ‘hate’ each other. If

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The economics of hate

they ‘really’ hated each other would any safety valve style commercial product or social institution have worked?

OBJECTIVES OF THIS BOOK This book begins with the idea of studying hate in a general way. We then move to the concept of studying it from an economic point of view. Aside from the work of Glaeser (2005), there is no work in economics with the word ‘hate’ directly in the title although numerous works, which will be discussed in the following chapters, have some more indirect bearing on the topic. Perhaps more surprisingly the study of hate has not been established as a direct concern in other disciplines such as social psychology, sociology or politics. Only in the last five years or so have attempts been made to establish hate as a field of study. During this time two independent networks of scholars have sprung forth – the Wickedness Network and the Hate Studies group. Possibly the events of 9/11 in 2001 have inspired these formations. The formation of the Hate Studies group (centred at Gonzaga University in Washington State) which publishes the Journal of Hate Studies claims a more direct inspiration from the conscious decision of white supremacist groups to settle in areas of the USA where there were few ethnically despised populations. Both of these groups are interdisciplinary in nature. The Hate Studies group explicitly mentions economists in its website introduction although the papers published in its journal seem to come primarily from social psychologists, people of a religious persuasion and some people who would fit comfortably into the longer established field of ‘Peace Studies’, such as scholars on conflict resolution. The Wickedness group seems mainly to consist of people interested in literature, philosophy and religion. Other specialist social science niches of relevance are beginning to spring up such as the area of disgustology and the field of Humiliation Studies as shown in the Journal of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, and research groups on Forgiveness – we might note that the 63-page bibliography of articles on Forgiveness by Scherer et al. (2004) has only one item with hate in the title, by Baures (1996). The two areas of concentrated scholarship most relevant to hate as a general topic are the bodies of work on the introduction of the category of ‘hate crime’1 (discussed in more detail in Chapters 7 and 9) and on modern warfare and terrorism. Discussions in the warfare and terrorism areas do tussle with the relevance of economics to behaviour. For example, a recent textbook on terrorism (Weinberg, 2005) discusses, in Chapter 2, the history

Towards the economics of hate

5

of terrorism in terms of there being three waves. The third wave in which we currently live is depicted as largely arising from non-economic factors, in that it is not inspired by resource conflicts but by primarily religious factors. This issue is pursued further in the highly celebrated work of Stuart J. Kaufman (2001, 2006) who explicitly rejects both rational choice explanations of ethnic warfare and the ‘ancient hatreds’ view, which is said to have influenced Bill Clinton into thinking nothing could be done to ameliorate the problem. Kaufman argues for a shift in focus on to the central importance of myths and symbols. This is a position in keeping with the approach developed in Chapter 4 of this book. The element of ‘conventional’ rationality is still present, however, when we come to Chapter 7 where the issue of entrepreneurial management of myths and symbols is considered. Although Stern (2003–4), in the Journal of Hate Studies, calls for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of hate, there is no sign of such a thing flowering around us. Instead, the main publishing action in the field seems to be on hate crimes. One possible justification for an economic approach of the ‘wider’ economics type taken in this work is that it may provide the bedrock for an interdisciplinary approach. In exploring the contours of an economic approach in this work, I shall at points be drawn into critical reflection on some aspects of the work within the above-mentioned interdisciplinary umbrella groups. First, we need to be clear what we mean by economics. The key elements in economics are the notions of utility-maximizing individuals who are subject to constraints on the basis of resource scarcities which give rise to the idea of costs. Thus the statement above that mainstream economists would find most controversial is number 3, as economics disposes us to think of all behaviour (including rape, abortion, murder, drug addiction) (see Bowmaker, 2005) as rational. The majority of this book is devoted then to exploring the relevance of rational choice economics to the study of hate. I am not claiming that the discipline of economics provides an all-embracing universal theory of hate. It is clearly necessary at times that we engage in cross-disciplinary activity, particularly with respect to psychology. Apart from the determinants of the supply of hate, economics may also bring light to bear on the appraisal of the costs of hatred. An obvious illustration of this is the studies appearing on the monetary costs of 9/11 (for example Bram, Orr and Rapaport, 2002; Bram, Haughwout and Orr, 2002) but there have been studies of other areas such as the Basque region (Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2001). Studies of the costs of war and terrorism will implicitly include economic estimates of the costs of hate although this is likely to be underestimated if the psychological suffering of living under war and terrorist epochs is omitted (see Frey et al., 2007). In everyday

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The economics of hate

commerce we also have such figures as the estimated 19–40 million working days lost in the UK due to bullying (House of Commons, 2003) as some kind of index of the magnitude of hate. The principal objective of this book is to provide input to thinking on a very hot contemporary policy problem – the increasing volume of anti-hate legislation being passed to protect vulnerable and/or outraged groups. This is very wide-ranging, from protection of people persecuted on the grounds of gender, race and religion, and those business or academic activities that lead them to be targets for organized hate groups. Recently there has been considerable debate about the protection of people’s identities from mockery and comedy. Like the combating of pollution, policies towards the regulation of hate are themselves additional costs of the primary activity. One is entitled to question whether any package of hate regulation measures is efficient. In the extreme situation, hate regulation policy might be counter-productive – that is, it could inspire or provoke more hatred towards the protected group. Consideration of this possibility and the general issue of the overall efficiency of hate regulation policies needs to be informed by thought about the underlying nature of hating emotions.

HATE AND ECONOMICS, ECONOMICS AND HATE So far we have not defined hate, choosing instead to proceed on the assumption that everyone knows what we mean. It is time to remedy this. Table 1.1 gives a very brief and selective list of definitions, with the definition of malice (where given) as comparison point. The first definition is from an economist, and the rest are from general reference works. We will refer back to this table later but for the moment it is worth noting that Glaeser and Bierce appear to be defining emotional states other than hate. In the former case, malice and, in the latter case, jealousy/ envy. Dictionary definitions do not distinguish between hate and hatred, instead giving hatred as part of the definition of hate. There is a tendency to represent malice as active, and hatred as potentially only passive, that is not represented in actions towards the disliked entities. The origins of the use of the word ‘malice’ in English are from the word ‘bad’, whilst hate is supposedly from an Old English word ‘hett’ of Germanic origins. For the purposes of this book, we will use a wider definition of hate than that used by Glaeser. That is, we will take hate/hatred to include both the willingness to incur costs to harm others and the expression of violent dislike towards others. In the modern world, the Internet has spawned many virulent expressions of hatred which are not directly consummated. The best example of fully formed non-consummated hatred is

Towards the economics of hate

7

Table 1.1 Definitions of hatred and malice Source

Term

Definition

Glaeser

Hate

OED OED Cassells Cassells

Hate Malice Hate Malice

Devil’s Dictionary (Ambrose Bierce)

Hate

‘willingness to sacrifice personally to harm others’ ‘willingness to pay personal costs to harm others’ ‘extreme dislike or aversion, hatred’ ‘active ill will’ ‘extreme dislike or aversion, hatred’ ‘the desire to harm others deliberately, active malevolence’ ‘a sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another’s superiority’

the ‘idle’ death threat, that is one which is not followed up with any action whatsoever. There are individuals who have received many thousand death threats by email (such as Mike Berry, the English ‘scambaiter’ who exposes Nigerian email conmen by conning them into posing for ludicrous pictures to be posted on the Internet), without the senders making any attempts to do anything which might lead to the death of the person in question. Is economic analysis relevant to any of the manifestations of hate? Let us consider further the non-consummated death threats, via email, experience. A rational choice model of economics would predict that the provision of widespread Internet facilities should lead to an increase in the number of death threats. One could argue that the threatening individuals conform to even the narrowest definitions of rationality as they are likely to be conducting the rest of their lives in an entirely ‘normal’ manner. We can make this same point about many racists, homophobes and suicide bombers. Issuing threats brings them utility in feelings of revenge and the satisfaction of scaring others. The harm to others does then fall within the Glaeser/dictionary definitions. However, the very limited personal cost involved in sending an email in a situation where there are very few likely cost risks (the police are not that likely to seek out and arrest individuals involved in serial hate email campaigns) means that the serious personal sacrifice element is not present. So, we may accept, under our definition of hate, that serial hate campaign emailers are indeed exhibiting hate and not some lesser status negative emotion such as anger. Given this, the prediction of increased non-consummated hate is largely driven by falling costs of production of hate. It is easier to find email addresses of individuals

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The economics of hate

in order to reach them than it would be to send letters. It is less physically and monetarily costly to send an email than it is to send a letter. There are further economies of scale in blanket threatening of a collective of individuals – for example all members of an animal-using corporation or all the known abortion doctors. The wider economic issue is whether the culture created by non-consummated hatred ranging all the way from death threats down to vehement condemnation of celebrities, on websites such as amiannoying.org, creates a form of negative social capital which may breed an increased propensity for consummated hatred in general, that is not just towards those regularly vilified in typical non-consummated hate forums.

METHODOLOGY Mainstream economic methodology has been identified with logical positivism following Milton Friedman’s 1953 essay which diluted and simplified the doctrines of Karl Popper for a wider audience. It is fair to say this is still the dominant core methodology, notwithstanding assaults from an ideologically wide range of alternatives such as Austrian, post-Keynesian (critical realist), Marxist (old style), Institutionalism, social economics, autistic economics and feminist economics. The key to understanding the Friedman version of logical positivism is the role of empirical testing. Empirical testing matters because economics is seen as a science, not a subdiscipline of history or of moral philosophy as it was considered at various times and places long ago. Testing is of course challenged in philosophy of science but the bread and butter methodology of economics persists with the old-fashioned notion of ‘hard’ laboratory science. An empirical test is not to be a mere test of association between variables as that would render it mere statistics and not economics. It would be dismissed as ‘measurement without theory’. Rather, testing in economics is meant to be based on theories or, more usually, theoretical models. Thus we are testing some kind of hypothesis. For example, we have just discussed informally the hypothesis that increased Internet provision will lead to a bigger reservoir and expression of hate in the world. Testing this hypothesis properly requires data. Once the hypothesis has been tested, we look at the results, which are usually based on a number of strong (untested) assumptions about the properties of the data-generating process. The scientific research community then comes to some kind of agreement about how strong support for the hypothesis is based on tests of statistical significance and judgements about the adequacy of the data.

Towards the economics of hate

9

In the worst-case scenario the hypothesis has to be deemed to be rejected in favour of the null of no relationship between the variables suggested by the theoretical model. Friedman’s argument is that we should not reject the theory because of one such instance nor should we accept the theory if the opposite occurs numerous times. The approach is not one of verification or seeking ‘proof’ but rather of seeking out the absence of falsification. In an ideal world this should really involve improvement of the testing apparatus to rule out possibly contaminating factors and improved experimental design. Economists have long been noted for not coming anywhere near this ideal. If we wanted to be cynical we could say they have frequently engaged in data-mining – that is, repeated exploration of the same sort of data in the same sort of way with a deliberate intent to produce supposedly statistically ‘good’ results in order to enhance chances of publication. Despite attempts to improve the validity of data exploration, the discipline of economics still features quite a cavalier attitude to the quality of data. The major break with data analysis tradition in recent times has been the emergence of ‘experimental economics’ where subjects are usually paid and play games subject to instructions given to them by the researchers. Economists have not extended this approach to the study of hate although there are substantial precedents in the ‘laboratory’ style approach in social psychology experiments in the field, starting with the work of Stanley Milgram (1963) (see Harrington, 2003–4 for a review of such literature). Experimental methodology encounters some of the pitfalls in traditional positivist psychology research, particularly the endless exploration of a very limited sample of the population – to wit, students. In theory, research on ultimatum games throws up some relevant issues pertaining to hatred, but given that the study of hate is not the objective of these studies it is inevitable that they do not shed much light on it.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON HATRED How do we get evidence about hatred? Is this information of any use and is it of any use to an economic study? If hate is to be treated as an emotion then one can not reasonably expect there to be series of regular and reliable national statistics, as governments and agencies tend to measure tangible items rather than emotions. Opinion polls, one-off surveys and experimental studies can be used to provide some data on the hate emotion although continuing surveys often only deal with disapproval or anger and not full-blown hate. For example, 10 of the surveys that have taken

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The economics of hate

place between 1983 and 2000, in the British Social Attitudes Survey (see Cameron et al., 2006), contained questions about the rights and wrongs of sexual relations between those of the same sex but nothing stronger than this on homophobia. We could look instead at the manifestations of hate. The statistics on these are, however, usually conditional on the hate activity acquiring the status of a crime, otherwise it is usually the case that no one will bother to record them. The most extreme recorded case of unidimensional hate crime would be the statistics on witch trials and executions which have produced estimates of many thousands of people (usually women) being killed in Europe between 1500 and 1700, especially (pro rata) in Germany and Scotland. The additional details about trials, methods of interrogation, and methods of execution from these records could be used to draw comparisons about the differential hate intensity in different nations. Extrapolating this notion, one could draw on the statistics of time engaged in war, resources put into war and numbers of casualties in war as indicative of hatred. The obvious complication in war is that some of the activity will be defensive, and therefore can be used to measure the costs of hate but not the propensity to hate. Likewise, some individuals will be in a situation where they have little option but to engage in attempted murder of xenophobic or religious origins. The obvious problem with ‘hate crime’ statistics if they are to be used in any serious statistical analysis, is the differential selection rate over time and across areas. Further, there are also differences in the degree to which law enforcement agencies filter out attempts to report such activity or charge the suspected perpetrators. Even within an area where there is official reporting like the case of homophobic incidents in the USA, the statistics have been very problematic. Burroway (2006) reports on the use of FBI statistics by anti-gay activists to claim that gays are not very victimized at all, and goes on to show how malleable these statistics are to manipulation, most notably because of the differing requirements on reporting in different states. One might just want to pause as preparation for Chapter 7 to reflect on the paradox of groups against something using the claim that it is not much of a problem as a rhetorical strategy to deal with it! Given all this, probably the most reliable source of data on hate is the court records of murders that have been attributed to hate origins, the most conspicuous volume of these being in the area of racial murder. Notwithstanding the various reservations just made about the use of data in this area we will at various times find ourselves discussing data and analyses of it (usually econometric). I do not, however, propose to provide large numbers of tables of incidents of hatred nor the detailed numerical results of other people’s statistical work. Engagement with empirical work

Towards the economics of hate

11

will be in the nature of critical reflection rather than attempting to make any use of parameter estimates that have been produced.

CONCLUSION This chapter has introduced the idea of studying hate in a general way and put forward the concept of studying it from an economic point of view. This is a big leap. Economics is not a subject concerned with hate. In order to explore how hate may be situated within it, we consider, in the next chapter, what kind of world view is implied by the discipline of Economics. As the book progresses, more in-depth discussions of the debates opened up above will be provided. The practicalities of perpetuating hate as a lone individual and as a coordinated organization will be explored with respect to such topics as animal liberation, homophobia, terrorism, workplace bullying and witchcraft. Ultimately, in Chapter 9, an analysis will be given of the recent trend, in developed economies, to pass a ‘patchwork quilt’ of specific issue hate legislation.

NOTE 1. What I mean by this is that the crime could not possibly be attributed to some other cause such as random physical violence or monetary crimes which might be attributed to hate because of the identity of the individuals involved.

2.

The quiet and peaceful world of microeconomics (QPWM)

THE CONCEPTUAL IDEAL OF THE QPWM This chapter is a trip into the heartlands of the QPWM – the Quiet and Peaceful World of Microeconomics. It will quickly become clear why we call it peaceful. Quiet is often associated with peace. Quiet is a word which might be given different meanings with respect to the core of microeconomic theory. Quiet is the opposite of noise. Some economists like to use noise as a technical-sounding term borrowed from engineers. They might talk about the share price for stocks in emerging countries being noisy. That is, in the sense of the ratio of ‘signal to noise’ which would be quoted as showing the degree of perfection of an audio system or an information spreading system. Markets send signals, economists like to say, in the form of prices. A sudden rise in the price of oil sends a signal that oil is becoming scarce. If it rises too much too often, or falls too much too often, then the signals are becoming noisy as the amount of incorrect information is too large. Quiet and peace are also words that might be associated with the concept of equilibrium as used in economics. Equilibrium is a state of rest in which there is no force for change unless an exogenous (from outside the system) shock occurs. It is fair to say that economists seem to be almost obsessed with equilibrium. In recent decades as the focus has shifted away from general equilibrium theory and competition, the field of game theory still shows a preoccupation with discovering equilibria that might be puzzling to the lay person. An economist might respond that there has been a lot of work on disequilibrium also but one could counter that this too shows an obsession with equilibrium. On the face of it there seems no reason as to why we might not then proceed to discuss the equilibrium level of hate. In the elementary textbooks of economic theory it is fair to say that one can get through the many hundred pages without finding any reference to anyone hating anyone or for that matter anyone loving anyone (bar the deleted book by David Friedman (1997) which has a chapter on romantic love, and the microeconomics text by Robert Frank (Frank and Bernanke, 2003) which has a chapter on altruism and thus might be said to be engaging with love). The 12

The quiet and peaceful world of microeconomics

13

most obvious reaction to this statement would be to say that this is not very surprising, as love and hate are not what economics is all about. Rather, it is all about interest rates, unemployment, prices, money, stocks and shares, international trade and GNP. This response of course implies that these things have nothing to do with love and hate. Since this is Chapter 2 of a book about the economics of hate, it would seem the claim is being made here that this is not true. To pursue this further, we need to delineate the world view that economists put forward. Let us be clear at the outset that I am to some extent in this chapter expounding a stereotypical or Weberian ‘ideal’ type for the purposes of situating hate in an economic model. Theoretical works, within a social science discipline, say many things by omission. The world view which is implied by the practitioners of the discipline has to be gleaned not just in what they say but how they say it, the context in which they say it and what they deliberately do not say in the process of saying what they do say. For example, it has often been pointed out that economists use words in a way which might appear to be innocuous but can be deemed to be laden with value judgements. Take the notion of ‘perfect competition’. Why is it perfect? The innocuous answer is that it is because it is a perfect state akin to the perfect vacuum – that is it is the ideal of the logical idea of competition. The criticism of this, as ideology, is that the word ‘perfect’ to the normal person means ideal or excellent in a normative sense and thus the accumulated weight of repeated use of the word gives credence to the superiority of the market form of economy. So why would we say that the world of the core economics textbook is one of quiet and peace despite the fact that it is depicting a universe of materialistic striving for profit? As implied above, the quietness of the economics textbook is arrived at by omission rather than design. The bald fact is that there are no emotions, in any shape or form, to be found in the economics textbook barring the very rare exceptions noted above. Even then, we could claim that when economists have engaged with emotions, they are not really doing so in a meaningful sense but just distorting emotions into an unrecognizable form in order to make them fit into the QPWM. In the QPWM, individuals interact in a narrow framework of markets – their reciprocity is thus not social or emotional. It does not matter who sells you your bread, meat or candlesticks. These are what we call goods or commodities, depending on your point of view. To the person in the street, these two ideas are probably equivalent. Most economists talk about goods and might see the term ‘commodities’ as having the faint ring of Marxism, given Karl Marx’s promulgation of the concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ as the driving factor in markets. Commodities also tend to be the word used by people of an anthropological bent. It does not seem to have led to any long-lasting repercussions, but the distinction was addressed forcefully

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The economics of hate

in Gary Becker’s model of the allocation of the theory of time (Becker, 1965). Becker termed items which we buy in the market for a price, such as wood and nails, as goods. If we combine these with our time effort inputs, or those of other people in the family, then we have engaged in household production which generates commodities. Although there is much literature on the economics of the family, and household production, no one has been particularly excited about the use of the word commodities per se. Anticipating Chapter 3, we may note that the basic port of entry for allowing hate into an economic model is to have it become a good or commodity. A person engaged in hate production could buy everyday household goods such as petrol and sugar and turn them into bomb-making equipment to kill an abortion doctor, animal-using producer or politician and so on. Likewise they could buy a video conveying violent racist or sexist content and take the time to consume it. Although the literature of economics says little about hate, it does not give any reason why these products would not exist. Nor does it say that there is any mechanism in markets which should tend to eliminate them. As implied, in the discussion in the last chapter, economic analysis might lead us to expect that there have been increasing volumes of hate displays in recent times. The ultimate object of production, in economics, is to increase the utility of an individual (or family or other group). Utility is a concept that economists first agreed to adopt as a general term, around 1890–1910, during the ‘marginal revolution’ in economics pioneered by William Stanley Jevons (in England) and Leon Walras (in Switzerland). We will have cause to explore utility more deeply, in the context of hate, in Chapters 3 and 4. For the moment, let us state the basics. Utility is an index of the satisfaction or well-being or welfare that an individual derives from their basket of goods/commodities. Originally, economists sought to measure utility in the idiom of weight or temperature. That is, as a number capable of meaningful ratio measurement. This use of cardinal utility reached its zenith in the Marshallian concept of consumer surplus where a money measure is assigned to the gain people get from being able to buy all units of a good at a constant price, rather than the maximum price they would be willing to pay. If we go back to the hateful bomb-maker, then we could suggest that their consumer surplus from petrol and sugar, both commodities being sold at a fixed price per consumer, would be higher than that of an otherwise identical person, as the value of the items is enhanced by the lethal potential unleashed when subject to a suitable process of production. That is, the market prices are determined by the marginal consumer who needs these products for fuel and sweetening, not by the added value as bomb ingredients. As economics became more mathematically formal, cardinal utility was progressively dismissed as ‘unscientific’ and therefore unacceptable

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as economics strove to attain scientific status. Economists have, however, been reluctant to give up the notion of measurable utility despite the obvious problem that it is very difficult to believe that, for example, my utility today can be compared with my utility five years ago or that my utility can be compared with yours or that of a peasant, with bubonic plague, many hundred years ago. Attempts to measure utility keep rearing their heads. At various times we have had (amongst other more esoteric efforts): ● ●

●

attempts to produce ordinal measures based on risk aversion (see Alchian, 1953) inspired by the development of the theory of games; the use of contingent valuation methods inspired by environmental research in the 1980s onwards – basically asking people to nominate losses and gains at different stated bundles of situations; the current obsession with econometric work using surveys on ‘Happiness’ (see for example Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters, 2004; Frey and Stutzer, 2002, 2005) using data and methods that would have been laughed at when economic theory was ‘going hard’ in the 1950s and when it went numerically ‘hard’ as econometric testing swept the profession.

Notwithstanding the above, the usual textbook approach is to present cardinal utility as a helpful heuristic to get across the derivation of the individual demand curve. Then we get told about the cardinal vs. ordinal utility distinction and are left with the impression that ordinal utility (as demonstrated in the indifference curve diagrams to be found below) is the more correct and scientific approach. Vital to this theoretical enterprise is the introduction of the notion that marginal utility, as opposed to total or average utility, is decisive in individual choice. Although utility is deemed to be immeasurable, in the textbook universe, we are given the belief that there is a law of diminishing marginal utility. There appears to be a contradiction here (but it does not really need to be faced) as no attempt is made to empirically validate the law of diminishing marginal utility. Diminishing returns run through the whole of economics. We find diminishing marginal productivities of capital and labour, when we move to the theory of industrial production. If we extrapolate this central proposition, of diminishing returns, then one thing we might expect in the field of economics of hate is diminishing marginal utility of hate, that is, if we proceed to treat hate as a conventional good/commodity and the hater as a rational consumer like all the rest of us. We shall have cause to question this in the next few chapters. For the moment, let us explain how it would be operational in the QPWM. A person sits down, let us say, to listen to the CD they have bought from a musical ensemble formed purely to promote extreme racist

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attitudes (such as the now defunct UK band ‘Dead Paki in the Gutter’). Despite the fact that they approach this with great enthusiasm, they find that each additional minute of the CD adds less to their total satisfaction than the previous minute. This does not mean they will get fed up, toss their racist CD in the bin, go into the next room, and watch Walt Disney cartoons and never consume another racist item. This takes us to the next section on the process of choice in the QPWM.

INDIVIDUAL CHOICE In the real world, an individual faces a potentially bewildering array of options meaning that their decision-making activity might be thought to be very difficult to analyse clearly. The quickest way to cut through this is to make drastic assumptions about knowledge. Specifically, those individuals have accurate knowledge of all relevant items including their own tastes and changes in future prices and likely decisions of other individuals. This extreme simplification removes all issues of risk and uncertainty from choice. So let us visit the well-worn path of conceptualizing choice from an economics point of view. The basic model is that the agent (person, family, manager of a firm, whatever) maximizes their utility subject to constraints. Utility is, as argued above, not seen to be directly measurable in any kind of units. The ‘utils’ of a mathematical economics textbook do not exist. Notwithstanding this, and the textbook tales of diminishing marginal utility, the agent is able to maximize their utility by making an optimum arrangement amongst the options open to them. The dedicated racist thug who has a job, which affords no opportunities for racism as such, will face substitution effects against time spent in racist activities if their wage goes up. This is an illustration of the notion of ‘opportunity cost’. Time is money, and time spent at the weekend beating up the disliked group is forgone earnings. Granted, an individual at a point in time may have inflexible working hours, but over a period of time they could still exhibit their substitution effect by switching to a job which provides more units of ‘leisure’ to input into the hate production function. Substitution effects/ opportunity costs provide the rationale for anti-hate legislation. That is, such legislation will generate the following ‘costs’ to the would-be hater: ● ● ●

direct costs such as fines, prison sentences or curfews; indirect costs such as lost career opportunities; indirect costs of bad reputation due to wider knowledge of the hate attitude.

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Rising marginal costs of producing hatred should lead to substitution away to non-hating activities. There are reservations to be made about the above conclusions. The hater might not substitute away from hate, as such, but substitute to different forms of hate production. Given that much hate in the real world is ‘single issue’ (that is a deterred racist would not usually switch to animal liberation activity against people of their own idealized race to make up for the utility loss), this is likely to mean that substitution is towards other forms of hatred towards the single target. The net benefit from individual acts of hating might be decreased by the imposition of costs on it but this does not necessarily mean that the social costs on others or the volume of hate activity will go down. They may go up. Rises in the costs of hatred will also have an ‘income effect’ on the hate producer. That is, the increase in the cost of producing a standard unit of hatred (if we may imagine such a thing) lowers the effective (real) income an agent has to spend on all commodities. If hating is not a full-time job, that is the person is not actually paid to produce hate, then the income effect should reinforce the substitution effect and lead to decreased supply of hate. However, if hate production is connected to earnings then we have a ‘perverse’ income effect. The net rate of return on hours of hate work has gone down, therefore you need more of them to generate income unless you can substitute to another equivalent non-hate job. This is illustrated in Figures 2.1 and 2.2. Figure 2.1 shows the basis of the derivation of the demand for a hate commodity. The simple indifference curve presentation is used. It is assumed that the individual wants to maximize utility under perfect knowledge about relative prices and their own preferences as we are dealing with a one-period choice where there is then no issue about discounting the future. The X axis shows the quantities of a hate good, such as racist literature, whilst the Y axis is a composite good, representing all other goods which provide no hate content. The budget line (BL1) depicts the assumption of exogenously given prices for the two types of goods. The slope of the indifference curve (IC) represents the marginal rate of substitution between the two types of good. The decision-maker reaches an optimum where the ratio of prices is equal to the marginal rate of substitution – the point E on the graph. This equilibrium shows X1 hate goods purchased and Y1 of the composite good. Let us suppose the government now imposes a tax on the hateful literature. This shifts the budget line to BL2 showing a new equilibrium (E2) where the individual is demanding more of the non-hate good and less of the hate good. We might say then, using criminal-oriented language, that the hater has been deterred. They have not of course been fully deterred. Let us set aside, at this time, the ethical issue of the policymakers gaining income from the existence of hate goods by taxing them,

The economics of hate

Composite good (Y)

18

A Y2

E2

E1

Y1

IC1 IC2

BL2 X1 Hate good (X) Figure 2.1

BL1

Income and substitution effects for hate as a consumption good

as the current framework does not allow us to deal with this. Connected with this, let us ignore the fact that taxing hate goods directly is not a very likely hate policy in the real world. Any alternative to a direct tax which is connected pro rata with levels of hate activity will operate in the same way – that is the form of the policy (whether it is punishment or restriction of freedom) will impose costs on the hater. The shift from E1 to E2 consists of both an income and substitution effect as shown in legions of microeconomics textbooks. Figure 2.1 shows the substitution effect taking place from E1 to A and the income effect in the move from A to E2. The substitution effect of a price rise must always be negative, regardless of the specific mathematics of consumer tastes, so

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a rise in price, ceteris paribus, leads to a switch to the other good. It has been presupposed that the income effect is positive, that is a rise/fall in real purchasing power causes one to buy more/less of a good. This may seem tautologous as ‘a good is a good’, therefore you should surely want more of it the more you are capable of obtaining it, unless one reaches a plateau of satiation where additional units of the good add nothing to utility. Economists traditionally make an exception for ‘inferior’ goods for which rising income leads to less, not more, consumption of the good. The category of inferior goods is really a case of substitution between goods depending on the level of real income. Classic examples, in many cultures, concern the switch from less desirable parts of animals (offal) being deposed by more desirable parts (meat per se) as income rises. The inevitable consequence, in textbook economics, of introducing inferior goods is to lead us on to the idea of an upward-sloping demand curve as an anomaly. This is treated as a rare and non-troubling exception to the rules of the QPWM. This is due to defining a special type of inferior good, the ‘Giffen good’, which is the case where the negative income effect is greater than the positive substitution effect. Could we possibly come to the conclusion that hate goods might be Giffen goods and thereby add them to the ‘potatoes in the Irish famine’ example usually trotted out in textbooks? If we could, then this leads to somewhat contradictory outcomes for the liberal optimist. On the one hand it suggests that rising incomes will lead to declines in demand for the hate good, perhaps as individuals switch to more desirable forms of expressing their need for anger (if this is regarded as an adumbrated form of hate which is what we need to address in the coming chapters). This is then a ‘good’ thing socially. On the other hand, it suggests that punishing the hate good consumption will increase the level of consumption, thereby generating a perverse policy outcome of more hate goods instead of fewer. Let us now turn to the case of working full-time to produce hate. Figure 2.2 shows the basis of the derivation of the supply of hate as a fulltime means of financial support. Again the simple indifference curve presentation is used with the contrived (pre-household production economics) assumption that all time spent not at work is ‘leisure’ and is therefore good in the sense of bringing positive utility. All time at work is a source of disutility and therefore a ‘bad’. The individual faces a fixed wage rate per hour (w) of their hate-generating employment, has no other means of support and can freely choose how many hours they want to work. We continue with the assumption that they have perfect knowledge about all these things and their own preferences and that this is a one-period model to avoid going into discounting and related issues like retirement, pensions and so on.

The economics of hate

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Total time

BL1

E1 → M Substitution effect M → E2 Income effect

BL2 E1 E2

M

IC2

Hours of hate work Figure 2.2

IC1

0

Income and substitution effects for hate as a full-time means of support

The indifference curve, in this instance, represents the marginal rate of substitution between income and leisure. The slope of the budget line (BL1) represents the current hourly wage rate. The initial equilibrium (E1) will be where BL1 is tangent to the indifference curve. At this point the individual

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chooses optimum hours of work in the hate production factory of H1. Let us now suppose that the government introduces a tax on these workers (t) which is in a constant proportion to the wage rate (w), and the employer does not take steps to compensate the punished worker. We now move to a new equilibrium (E2) in consequence of the wage rate decreasing to w2t and the budget line shifting to BL2. The shift from E1 to E2 can again be decomposed into income and substitution effects which are shown in Figure 2.2. Here the income effect (on hours of work) must be negative in terms of the relationship with the wage rate if leisure is a normal good (that is has positive income effects). The corresponding substitution effect must be positive as the wage rate induces substitution of work for leisure. The exact shape of the labour supply curve is therefore indeterminate although there has been a very active folklore promoting the notion that the labour supply curve is backward-bending. The backward-bending hate supply curve is shown in Figure 2.3. This runs on the story that fairly poor people will have strong substitution effects, and weak income effects, as they desperately need goods and can not ‘afford’ leisure. As they become richer, so the story goes, the substitution effects weaken relative to the income effects as they find themselves in a position where a wage rise makes choosing both more leisure and more goods an attractive option. This induces a bend in the supply curve where the transition just described occurs. There is no guarantee this will happen. The shape of the labour supply curve depends on the utility function. It is possible to generate forwardbending or non-bending labour supply curves from plausible utility functions. Let us reflect on backward-bending supply curves in hate occupations for a moment. Figure 2.3 suggests that up to the turning point (TP), a proportionate tax on the ‘hate wage’, which falls completely on the hate worker, will increase the supply of hate as the wage rate is reduced from w to w2t with hours shifting from H1 to H2. The tax will make the volume of hate go down. As previously, we use the term ‘tax’ as quick shorthand to work with the analogy to standard economic policies. Any policy imposes costs which can be seen as equivalent to taxes. Given that the curve bends at TP, we have the inverse proposition that a hate tax, bigger than WT2t, will increase the volume of hate due to the strength of the income effect. As in the case of taxing/punishing hate good consumption we find that, even in this simple model, we have situations where it might be argued that the anti-hate policy may sometimes have the opposite effect of that intended. Here it seems that, assuming an equal taste for hate across rich and poor, the hate policy works on the poor yet may backfire on the rich. Remember, this is for purely ‘economic’ reasons. We make

The economics of hate

Rate of pay for hate work

22

S

Supply of hate hours Figure 2.3

Backward-bending supply curve for hate

no suppositions about what may happen to one’s tastes for negative thoughts/emotions/actions towards others as income rises as there is no place for this in the QPWM framework. Remember too that, not only would we have trouble knowing a priori where the turning point is (that is who is ‘rich’ and who is ‘poor’), we also have the problem that there is no compelling reason to believe in the existence of a backward-bending supply curve. If we had a forward-bending supply curve then the story just told would be reversed, that is the ‘poor’ would supply more hate labour when taxed (or punished) and the rich would supply less. This

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version of events is one that would harmonize with our earlier ruminations about hate being a Giffen good. All of this is speculation, and potentially confusing to the reader. The essential point to be borne in mind is that, even in this ultra-simple world of restrictive assumptions we have the uncomfortable possibility, under less than extreme assumptions, that well-intended policies may backfire. We should at this moment pause to reflect on the ‘hate is in the eye of the beholder’ argument when talking about employment. For example, animal liberationists would argue that animal-using industries are conducive to producing hate towards animals. Feminists might likewise argue similar things about pornographic magazine publishing houses and women. Some would even go so far as to argue that apparent tolerance by women of such activities is evidence of a ‘Stockholm syndrome’ (see for example Hawthorne, 2004–5). This argument is levelled at people in such industries who themselves may be getting no direct utility from the hate production being alleged, such as those who deliver fuel supplies or those who work in factories making wire fences and staples for such firms. This leads to the prediction that such people are more easily deterred than someone who is actively deriving benefit from supplying the product (besides income), suggesting that such ‘peripheral unintended victims’ might face risks of being more suitable targets (than the haters themselves) for the strategies of campaigners. Although it is not so commonly found in standard economics textbooks, there is an extended form of the consumer choice model in terms of ‘characteristics’ which can be used to give additional ideas about hate. In this model utility comes from the characteristics embedded in a good. A car has qualities of ‘blueness’, ‘spaciousness’ and ‘speed’ for example. A commodity could have characteristics of hate utility along with other sources of utility that have nothing to do with hate. For example a knife might provide utility to a hater through being used to strip bark off a tree or from stabbing a hatee. A good which is primarily purchased for the exclusive purpose of hating might provide different sources of hate utility. We will return to discuss the predictions of such an approach in Chapter 7. Thus far we are still largely considering the QPWM. Hate has been used as illustrative material but it is not intrinsic to the discussion. Indeed we could just as well have been discussing raspberry jam (see Chapter 3) in all of the above paragraphs. The remaining sections of this chapter pay less attention to hatred as we are mainly concerned with discussing how the economy deals with the problem of matching the independent choices made by numerous individuals in a world of scarce resources. Specific issues of how the coordination of hatred is dealt with in the economy are handled in later chapters.

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COORDINATION OF CHOICE The over-riding objective of economics is to appraise the operation of markets. If one was being cynical, or ideological, it might be claimed it is to justify ‘free’ (in some sense) markets as superior to highly administered ones. The central question is then ‘do markets do a good job of allocating resources?’ which begs us to define the notion of ‘a good job’. We might take a ‘satisficing’ notion of considering the aversion of major disaster such as persistent shortages of basic goods which threatens social stability. Such contingencies would open the door to describing a world of conflict other than one of peace. Although the typical undergraduate economics student sails through a large part of their study grappling with not much more than simple supply and demand models, the model which informs the perspective of economists is that of the general equilibrium model. The general equilibrium model addresses, in a highly formal mathematical manner, the question of whether a world with millions of disparate and largely unconnected decision-makers can achieve a harmonious state of resource allocation. The underlying idea of a general equilibrium was implicit in much of the discussion of the writings of (the alleged founder of economics) Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Smith did not actually use the term ‘general equilibrium’. Developments in economics after his demise were for a long time focused on partial equilibrium. This was led through his immediate successor David Ricardo and culminated in the first proper widely used (in the English language) ‘professional’ textbook of economics delivered by Alfred Marshall in 1890. This is the source of the work on defining and incorporating the notion of utility discussed above. Outside England, there was much greater interest in looking at the totality of the economy as a system of interconnected parts. This is associated with the work of Pareto in Italy and Walras in Switzerland. Both of these historic figures have had their names pass into terminological fame. Pareto is associated with ‘Pareto optimality’ which is discussed later, and Walras is often appended to the modern exegesis of general equilibrium as it is still frequently termed ‘Walrasian General Equilibrium’. The formal mathematical structure of General Equilibrium was not perfected until much later in the twentieth century, specifically in the landmark contributions of Arrow, Debreu and Hahn. The drive in this work was to establish the conditions under which an economic system, in which there is no state intervention, can solve the matter of matching demands and supplies of households. This then is the world of ‘proof’ in the sense of establishing a mathematical proof. Even more esoterically, the purpose of the endeavour

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was to finally demonstrate the necessary conditions for a general equilibrium which was unique and stable, although there could still be such a state when these conditions do not apply. It is useful to identify what exactly are the connections between perfect competition, Pareto optimality and General Equilibrium, as one could get confused. Are they all just parts of the same thing or can we talk about one without automatically invoking the others? Perfect competition is a set of assumptions about how an economic system will operate. General equilibrium models are a mathematical model of the interaction of how all the markets in an economic system interact with each other to solve the resource allocation problem. Pareto optimality is a very limited form of value judgement about the social desirability of the outcomes of the workings of an economic system. Where these things coincide is that perfect competition is a set of assumptions that massively simplify the business of producing a proof that a unique, stable general equilibrium set of prices can exist in the economic system. If it does, then perfect competition further ensures that the equilibrium will be Pareto optimal. Perfect competition is a state of affairs which could never come to pass in reality. It requires that each producing unit (firm) is infinitely small and that there are an infinitely large number of them. These firms are assumed to be profit maximizers in that they try to make the residual between revenues and costs as large as possible. Costs include, somewhat confusingly, ‘normal profits’ which are effectively the wages to the coordinators of the firms at a level sufficient for them to wish to remain in the industry in the long run. The competitive element of perfect competition is dealt with by assumptions of complete rivalry. Anyone can enter the industry at zero cost other than the costs actually necessary to manufacture the product which (in perfect competition) for a given level of output will be the same for everyone. All firms produce totally identical products and consumers face zero costs of finding and switching suppliers. Consumers are also assumed to have perfect information. The traditional (Marshallian) theory of the firm distinguishes between a short run and a long run although this effectively disappears in full-blown general equilibrium. In the short run there are fixed factors which can not be changed until a certain amount of time has passed which is the ‘long run’, but this is not an actual amount of calendar time. It is only a conceptual fiction. In the long run, under perfect competition all firms will be producing at the minimum unit (average) cost, which is currently technically achievable. Under simple perfectly competitive general equilibrium we ignore the possibility of developing technical improvements for use in the future. Perfect competition would seem to be the ideal state for the consumer as the firm is unable to do anything other than satisfy

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The economics of hate

their needs in the most efficient way possible. This happy state of affairs was enshrined in the phrase ‘consumer sovereignty’, coined by the South African economist William Hutt. The definition of Pareto optimality stems from the proposition that if we can make at least one person better off without making anyone else worse off then we have a Pareto improvement. A rational society will take advantage of all the available Pareto improvements until there are no more left and the economy has settled into its ‘Pareto superior’ allocation of resources. This will mean the economy is now at a Pareto optimum. The use of the Pareto optimum as a benchmark by which to judge ‘social efficiency’ indicates the use of a Paretian welfare function rather than one which makes more allowance for distributive value judgements. It might then seem that hate would never be Pareto optimal as the object of the hate must be worse off. This has to be qualified by the instance of ‘sado-masochistic’ game structures where being hated is enjoyed. Sadomasochism is normally used to denote the enjoyment of suffering in the abstract – either giving it or receiving it. That is, it may not be necessary for hate, as such, to be involved, in order for sado-masochistic pleasure to be derived. In economic terms, sadists and masochists must be receiving utility from the pain exchange or they would not have chosen to enter into it. Clearly, one could conceive of a similar situation with regard to hate in the wider sense. That is, a pair of individuals could enjoy hating each other and so there would be Pareto optimal hate exchanges. If there were a number of such pairs in an economy then an efficient general equilibrium system would optimally match them with each other. One clichéd example of this is the love–hate marriage, depicted for example in the Hollywood movie ‘War of the Roses’, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. In such set-ups the individuals try to separate because they hate each other but find themselves reconvening because they get greater net benefits from being in the conflictual relationship. They ‘love’ the hating too much to stop. Here we are really following a mathematical kind of logic but there is an explanatory hole in the argument in that we struggle to explain why someone wants to be hated and why someone wants to be a hater. Filling this hole might seem to be the job of social psychologists. In addition, there are issues of asymmetry in terms of whether one of these states is more readily explicable, from a (broadly-defined) rational choice basis, than the other. Aside from such fundamental issues, we have more technical matters to ponder. Will the move away from Pareto optimality to a ‘stronger’ (in terms of information content) welfare function and departures from perfect competition mean that there is more hate?

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0

B

3 ICY

2 ICY

E1

3 ICX 2 ICX

1 ICX 1 ICY

A

0 Figure 2.4

Edgeworth–Bowley box diagram

DEFINITIONS OF EFFICIENCY One outcome of the work on general equilibrium was to expand the notion of efficiency. Specifically we had the arrival of the idea of social efficiency (which was Pareto’s major concern) as opposed to the mere private efficiency of a firm or household. If hate displays inflict costs, then individuals have incentives to be peaceful, as it should be more efficient if we ignore the distributional considerations which have been sidestepped by Pareto optimality. The standard elementary depiction of the efficiency conditions of Pareto optimality are shown in the Edgeworth–Bowley box diagram which is reproduced in Figure 2.4. Unlike our previous diagrams, this one is presented without an explicit representation of hate in the graphic display. Two individuals (X, Y) are trading two generic commodities (A, B) which are assumed to be normal goods, in that they provide positive utility and have positive income effects, meaning that, if in the market, they would have downward-sloping demand curves. The amount of these commodities available determines the size of the box. The bottom left-hand and top right-hand corner of the box form the origins for the construction of the indifference curves (IC) of the two individuals. These curves are assumed to be ‘well behaved’. For these two individuals a point such as E1 shows a positon where trading could not make one of them better off without making the other

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The economics of hate

worse off. If we connect all these points then we obtain the contract curve of Pareto optimal points. Without a further judgement about the distributive merits of the two individuals, there is no way of saying which of these points is most socially efficient. This is really a desert island scenario as there are no other people to trade with. Notwithstanding this, the presentation of Figure 2.4 is used to extend to arguments about the operation of markets. One could justify this by assuming that one of the people is a composite of ‘all other people’. In a full mathematical general equilibrium model, any number of people can be incorporated whilst still arriving at the same conclusion if the same assumptions are maintained. Pareto optimality is a minimalist definition of efficiency. That is, it is deemed to be one which would be upheld in all reasonable value systems however much they differ from each other in other respects. Pareto optimality is a very restrictive set of assumptions which economists manoeuvred around for many decades. One strategy of trying to get more out of the model than it seemed to yield was to look at so-called ‘compensation tests’ as a means of judging whether or not a policy, or project, should be enacted. Compensation tests should not be confused with ethical claims about giving people resources for the rectification of past wrongs – an issue which has recently been hotly contested with respect to slavery. The compensation tests of welfare economics are purely hypothetical. Let us take an imaginary example of the operation of the compensation test in a hate context. Say the government introduces a policy that will benefit one group in society at the expense of another. This seems not to be possible, in the Paretian welfare framework, as someone has become worse off and therefore that particular test has been failed. But what if the gain of the gainers was so much bigger than the loss of the losers that they could ‘bribe’ the losers to agree to the change? It would then appear that there is a ‘potential Pareto improvement’. Unfortunately there are serious problems with this, even before we get to hate as such. These revolve around the fact that the situation after moving from pre- to post-policy might be such that a move back to the old position is also a Pareto improvement if potential compensation was to be taken on board. This gives us the problem of ‘cyclical’ outcomes – that is it seems that it is impossible to make any kind of decision. The reason for this is the presence of income effects which alter the level of willingness to pay for a beneficial change and the willingness to be paid, if a loser. If the proposed policy change was deemed to be a cause of hate (we are of course waiving still the issue of exactly why this might be so) then these would be included within standard welfare economics as social costs or externalities. The perfect competition general equilibrium economy will achieve Pareto optimality but we might prefer to impose some

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distributional content on the model and use definitions of social efficiency that the market will not necessarily satisfy even in a world where there is no market failure. It is tempting to ask if anyone really hates anyone in such a world. We shall see that some economists at least are willing to think so. The sticking point that is plain to see is that we have an economic landscape where individuals do not have any emotions as such. They are passive engines of production to satisfy their own needs. Before we move on, let us make the obvious remark about what this implies about hate. The efficient economy features efficient production and consumption of hate goods but these are just goods for which individuals have a taste and from which they get positive utility, and some other individuals will experience negative side-effects, that is negative externalities. At the level of social efficiency the various problems which may get in the way are referred to as sources of market failure. A major one of these is information being of non-zero cost, which is discussed in the next section. Others are monopoly and externalities, both positive (beneficial) and negative (detrimental/costly). The simple textbook treatment of externalities is to propose the use of taxes and subsidies to ‘internalize’ the externalities. Internalization means making the individual who is responsible for generating the externality bear a cost such that they choose to produce the socially optimum level of their activity, rather than the amount emerging from a voluntary market process. We might then seek to incorporate hate in the standard model as a form of externality. It looks as if there is a fairly straightforward way to do this deriving from the fairly voluminous literature on altruism. Altruism is the mirror image of hate if we follow Glaeser’s definition of hate, from an economics point of view. That is, altruism is the willingness to incur costs to benefit others. Collard (1978) modifies the generic Edgworth–Bowley box diagram-type model by including altruistic externalities, that is person 1 cares about person 2 and vice versa (mutual altruism), or there is one-way altruism where one cares about the other and this is not reciprocated. This leads to a set of more complicated Pareto-optimality conditions which include the altruism terms. Here the hate terms would need to be included, being the marginal disutilities each party derives from the other. These may encapsulate schadenfreude and jealousy, as the disutility might come from resentment at the resources obtained by the disliked group and utility may come from seeing them experience misfortune. Certainly there have been economists willing to attach the negative externality label to social activities which they do not approve of. For example, this is what drives the attacks on pornography and fast food in the book by David George (2001). Indeed, so much so, that in his title he refers to people who like these things as having ‘preference pollution’. If

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we wanted to go down this road we could start making noises about how a market-driven competition-oriented economy is fostering ‘preference pollution’ in terms of encouraging hateful attitudes. The fuel for this particular fire will be encountered in later chapters, particularly when we come to the widespread phenomenon of conversational celebrity hatred.

THE FUTURE AND UNCERTAINTY Thus far we have been making the extreme simplification of total absence of uncertainty which implies perfect information. Perfect means perfect – individuals have total knowledge of all prices and qualities of goods and opportunities as well as their own tastes. They may, in such a world, have tastes for hate which we could treat simply in the manner of Becker in his model of discrimination in the labour market. Becker posits that employers, colleagues or customers of firms have a taste for ‘social distance’ (d) which requires compensation for being made to associate with a group whom one dislikes. Individuals know the value of this distance from the hated group and vice versa, meaning that given the existence of a constraint of hating on choice, people can readily optimize their reactions to it. The essential problems of the future are that it may be unpredictable and that one may also inherit from the past quantities of items (capital) which influence decision-making. We shall expand on the diversity of items that have come to be included in the concept of capital when we get to the next two chapters. For the moment we shall just content ourselves with the notion that it is a vague ‘something’ which is left over at the end of a consumption period and thus will influence current decisions – especially if there was more or less of it than had been planned. We then have problems of risk and the need for planning. At the level of the economy, it would appear that the coordination of millions of individual decisions becomes much more difficult. The general equilibrium world might then seem to become a vague and bizarre continent of irrelevancy. There have been schools of thought that go on to argue that the pervasiveness of very complex decision-making has extremely drastic implications. For example, in Austrian economics, it has long been held that this is a justification for not having macroeconomic policies, as a government, itself with limited information, is as likely to make things better as it is to make them worse. On the business decision level, there has been a long tradition of models of ‘satisficing’ which could equally well be applied to the consumer as to the firm. The satisficer is willing to forgo possible gains and thus ends up in a situation where they may, ex post, not be at the optimal situation that could be achieved. Satisficing is an example of a heuristic

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to navigate the problems of complex choice. The individual simplifies the problem of the complexity of choice by using a rule of thumb such as stopping looking for improvements after a certain number of searches. In mainstream microeconomics, if we allow the complexity of decisionmaking to be fitted in as satisficing, or more complex variants thereof, the essential purity of the model has been violated. Marginal calculations and trade-offs go out the window. To prevent this, we can adopt the strategy of making information itself a commodity and therefore essentially a form of capital as it has an expected rate of return. Suppose you want to buy a new car. Let us assume for simplification that you do know exactly what features you are looking for in a car. There are many ways of getting what you want and many advertisements and reviews (not all of which agree) to be scrutinized before deciding. Studying each of these provides you with units of information. An advertisement may supply these at relatively low cost as you have to make little effort to consume it. Let us suppose that instead of wanting to buy a new car, the ‘commodity’ you want to acquire is a new friend. You will find that people are complex commodities, or what some economists have called ‘experience’ goods, that is they have to be used in order to learn fully what their characteristics are. This becomes more so as the expectation of close personal involvement rises (see for example Hirschman, 1987). Information about people can be acquired in the same way as for the car. You could enter into pre-commitment search. The cheapest cue for choice, in terms of resources used in obtaining it, is the appearance of the person when one moves in a society where interaction is primarily face-to-face. This may convey genuine information. For example, if the prospective person is much bigger and stronger than yourself, then you face the risks of domination and injury if the relationship turns sour. On the other hand such a disparity conveys that the friend or partner may protect one from the threat of others. Appearance may also signify the risk of disease in the form of skin colour or blemishes, and missing or disfigured body parts. Moving into more questionable territory one might draw conclusions from appearance about trustworthiness, for example that the person looks like a criminal because of the way their eyes move and so on. It has for a very long time been prevalent in popular discourse to claim that someone is untrustworthy because their eyes are ‘too close together’. In the same vein, apart from sheer disutility itself, the fact that a person smells unpleasant may be a low-cost way of inferring that they are likely to infect one with a disease or pest. When we move out of regular face-to-face search such as in the case of online dating, then stated characteristics have to be used as search proxies. This will operate in a parallel way. If race is stated, then someone who

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thinks that certain races are of weaker biological breeding quality may choose not to pursue a partner from that group. This is a negative association with traits that we would not normally call hate when it is at this level. On another level, people may simply have differential preferences in recreational aspects of a partner (that is they may prefer to look at a certain type of person rather than another). However much one may not like the idea that people use these kinds of cues, they can still be a consistent part of rational choice economic explanations of association between people. They may also contribute to overall efficiency of the economy if they lower the costs needed to sort people into the current sorting frame. What we have just described is an application of the Arrow–Phelps model of ‘statistical discrimination’ which was applied to the labour market. There the choice is over finding the most productive employee from a group of options whose productivity can not readily be discerned without considerable search and assessment costs. A ‘rule of thumb’ satisficing heuristic such as ‘always choose white males unless there is a shortage’ would not be considered as hateful as it has no intent content, that is the individual derives no utility as such from rejecting the groups who fall outside the heuristic. Risk, uncertainty, transactions costs, and lack of information can be made to provide a rationale for the emergence of something more nearly approaching hate from rational choice grounds rather than simply being a taste. Glaeser’s approach is basically an extrapolation of this point into collective supply behaviour by ‘hate firms’. The essential point is that information is costly, meaning that we may not seek to fully explore the ‘true’ nature of those we have negative views of. Comparing people with cars, there is less incentive to test drive a car than another person, especially if the supply of people is fairly elastic. Thus we have plenty of other people to pick from instead, without resorting to anyone from a group with a negative trait. In such a context, full-blown hatred still seems to be exogenous to the system. That is, it would be a very strong version of Becker’s taste for social distance from those one does not like. There would be no reason as such for people who smell and look strange to be hated unless there is some kind of return to developing this kind of attitude which we will be led to refer to as a form of personal capital. At this point we can have models which generate observed hate-type social behaviour that is in terms of groups of people avoiding groups of other people because they are in groups which have attributes which may be linked with negative experiences. Avoidance does not really fit the bill of full-blown hate, so there would need to be some additional reason why people may actively consume hate goods connected with the ‘out’ group, or engage in direct attacks upon them.

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This might be attributed to emotional pleasure arising from increased knowledge of safety from risk. We get closer to hate as the phenomenon we observe in real life if we introduce a ‘positive externality’ from sharing dislike of categories of others (for elaboration of this see Chapter 7). This could be rooted again in an emotional benefit from feelings of increased safety – namely one would feel more confident if one were to encounter an ‘in’ group member than an ‘out’ group member that one would not be attacked or would receive help if it were needed. In a market economy there will be negative externalities for haters, as they may be forced to associate with the negatively viewed group. The classic case of this is the racist individual finding themselves in a town where all the taxi drivers are of an ethnic origin which is to their distaste. The economic model of rational choice would, of course, suggest that this creates incentives to form countervailing firms as the haters should be willing to pay more for ‘untainted’ goods and services. The normal conditions apply with regard to costs of production. One possible outcome of a hate economy is polarization where the groups who hate each other become totally divorced. This is illustrated in marital separation but also in world history where countries split up into separate countries. In the latter case this might achieve a physical separation, but the existence of trade will complicate the picture. At the simplest level, we would have trade aversion and, in the limit, boycotts, because consumers will get lower utility in the host county if they know the product comes directly (or is partially sourced) from the hated nation.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND GLOBALIZATION The model of the efficiency of a market economy is more complicated in a world where countries interact but is not intrinsically different. In pure economic theory, two countries are just two traders in the same way as two firms or two persons. The main difference in practice concerns money, in that countries can attempt to manipulate their exchange rates for goods in general, using their currency. Trade between countries affords potential Pareto improvements in the same way as trade between individuals. Introductory international trade theory homes in on the difference between the notions of absolute and comparative advantage. Absolute advantage refers to one trading partner being more efficient in the production of all commodities than the other. Comparative advantage refers to the differing ratios of such efficiency differentials. This gives us the optimistic conclusion that there may be gains to trade even for those who are way behind in the productivity race even if they are

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not blessed with some natural advantage in terms of climate or resources. They can specialize in the products that they are comparatively less efficient at producing. Gains from trade may mean that hating nations are willing to trade as the gains may exceed the losses from knowledge of provenance of the good. In a world of uncertainty it is also possible for this to happen because consumers do not know the provenance because the supplier either conceals origins of products or conveniently does not promote this knowledge. Free trade might be seen to open up greater freedom in the world in general. If all countries stand to gain from voluntary unrestrained exchange then they have incentives to desist from xenophobia, and in the limit, war, because of the ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’ problem. It may be noted in this context that there have been prolonged cases of trade restraint on the reverse humanistic grounds of quelling manifestations of hatred directed towards, for example, Iraq and pre-reformation South Africa. This could be viewed in terms of sacrificing efficiency for equity – that is punishing one’s own citizens’ economic welfare by causing higher prices and less variety of goods in order to pressure disapproved-of nations into social and political changes. Alternately, boycotts could be strategically beneficial in a game-theoretic context due to the pay-off coming from allround gains in output as the ‘hate inefficiency’ is removed in the long run. The optimistic ‘pro-globalization’ view which is currently very popular in the Western media, and parts of academia, is an extension of the good old-fashioned nineteenth-century universal free trade perspective. This was particularly rife in France. French historians of economic thought, Charles Gide and Charles Rist, go so far as to entitle their chapter on free traders ‘The optimists’. They go on to quote the leading figure Bastiat as follows (Gide and Rist, 1948, p. 337): ‘The general laws of the social world are in harmony with one another, and in every way tend to the perfection of humanity.’ They then make the kind of point being made in the present monograph by saying ‘are we not confronted by rank disorder everywhere?’ (ibid., p. 337) and give his reply ‘Things are not what they seem’, which is a direct quote, and provide their gloss on this as ‘Apparent antagonisms on closer view often reveal harmonious elements’. We thus have the same kind of ‘looking under the surface to reveal the truth’ approach to the construction of social reality as used later by Karl Marx, but with the totally opposite conclusions. The nineteenth century optimistic notions of social harmony emerged from vague and sometimes quasi-theological roots. It would generally be argued that Smith, for his entire ‘invisible hand’ legacy, was not of this persuasion as he went to great lengths to depict obstacles to harmony. Bastiat was frequently represented as someone who ‘bastardizes’, or as Marx would have it ‘vulgarizes’ Smith’s body of work.

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It might be claimed that this is not that far from the relationship between general equilibrium economics and the current pro-globalization bluster. Globalization adds something to the mix perpetuated by the likes of Bastiat. It moves on from this to incorporate the benefits of very rapid technological progress and media in enhancing economic performance through means other than direct impacts on production methods. The rapid speed with which information moves, in a universal vernacular, means that communications between people can be potentially enormously more productive. Looming large in all this is the role of the Internet which has usurped the more traditional television and radio as global messengers. Opportunities to trade are massively increased when the number of traders is rising rapidly. Economic theory extended to the global arena tells us that trade is a good thing. Of course, things can go wrong. The more traders there are and the more diverse is their nature then the more opportunities there are for market failure. The extreme cases of this would be collapses of markets and mass money scams, identity theft and so on. The pessimistic scenario can be made more vivid if we focus on the problem of being ‘locked in’ to a new system of trade which proves to be risky because we can not go back to the old system. Whether the prospects for the globalized economy are pessimistic or optimistic depends on the overall balance of forces at work. The ‘fly in the ointment’ might not be the weakness of technology or markets but the emotions of those who use them; more specifically, the scope for hate to become entrenched in the whole process. This variety of pessimism is coherently argued by Chua (2003). She shows that the development of once comparatively poor economies through opening up to world trade and communications has not significantly reduced the manifestations of hate within those countries or towards the rest of the world. The most glaring expression of this is ‘anti-Americanism’, seen by many commentators to have been exhibited in not just unsympathetic responses to such tragedies as 9/11 but instead outright gloating over the video evidence. One can claim that this is the most simple type of economically-based hate which is hate of the rich by the poor, especially where the poor believe the rich not only do not merit their greater wealth but have actively participated in exploitation of the poor, most conspicuously themselves.

GAMES A key area of modern economics is game theory. This emerged from the work of Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). Its applications are found

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in all areas of economics and it almost completely dominates conventional treatments of oligopoly. The essence of game theory is that players choose strategies in order to maximize their pay-off in terms of expected utility. They may be playing against each other but also against ‘states of nature’. Two nations going to war because they hate each other may find themselves having to react to such factors, for example weather. Economic attention in game theory focuses on outcomes, in particular whether they attain some kind of equilibrium. This is conditioned by the structure of the game. Wellknown games such as the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ and ‘chicken’ are situations where an undesirable outcome is generated by the structure. The crucial factors about structure derive mainly from information and risk. Pareto improvements may be available to participants if they can trust each other. In the hate field, one application would be the Cambodian genocide (see Short, 2004) in which a quarter of the national population was eliminated. This could be seen as possibly the biggest prisoner’s dilemma in the history of the world, the structure of the game being that it was impossible to make social and political changes that would have averted this due to the entrenched strategies of the major players. The main feature here is that there is no scope for cooperation.

CONCLUSION This chapter situated the economic discussion of hate in context for the reader, whether they are an economist or from some other background. I do not claim that standard economics says the world is fundamentally free of hate or that the manifestations of hate in the world are of no great consequence. However, it gives a portrait of a harmonious world in which disruption and chaos are allowed as anomalies that will be rectified in the long run. This is regularly applied not only to markets but to all social systems. Economists increasingly analyse all kinds of institutions as extensions of rational choice. They have been ‘empire building’ following the seminal work of Gary Becker in the 1960s (see for example Bowmaker, 2005) where they seek to explain all human action within the domain of economic theory. So we get a particular portrayal of the individual who lives in the economic model, and if we are to push out into other territories we may need to seek some wider notion of the individual. This is what I shall call a ‘wider economics’ approach to hate rather than using some existing heterodox or alternative tag such as Post-Keynesian, Institutionalist, social economics, feminist economics, post-autistic economics, evolutionary economics or whatever.

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The task of fully situating hate in a wider approach is postponed until Chapter 4, as the next chapter looks in more detail at what happens when economists do interpolate hate into their quiet and peaceful world. Some discussion of this has already been given in passing but we now move our focus to it in a concentrated manner. The major topic to be addressed in the next chapter is the matter of human emotions. Whilst economists have been extremely scarce in their overt discussions of hate, they have increasingly sought to incorporate emotions in economic models.

3.

Why is hate like raspberry jam? Hatred in conventional microeconomics

THE STATUS AND RELEVANCE OF EMOTIONS In the previous chapter we were mainly concerned with giving a view of the underlying philosophy and contents of economics. Hate was introduced occasionally simply as a good or commodity on a par with raspberry jam or hamburgers. We should pause to note that, outside of economics, other scholars (for example Douglas and Isherwood, 1979) see the consumption of commodities not as something ‘simple’ but as deeply imbued with meaning. In the terminology of Leibenstein’s (1950) pioneering analysis of bandwagon, Veblen and snob effects, there may be few genuinely ‘functional’ items of consumption, that is, those that satisfy a ‘basic’ physiological need without additional social elements being involved. One can readily see this issue with respect to hate. For example would Adolf Hitler have happily eaten a Jewish apple pie? Reversing the situation – how many of us would consume an exhibition of his paintings in the same way we would if it was by an anonymous Sunday painter? A related argument has long been made about the music of Wagner. The dominant factor in the non-functional consumption example just given is the presence of a symbolic content to the consumption act which is mediated by thought and emotion. If we are to fit hate into economic analysis in anything other than a prosaically mechanical way, then we have to treat it as an emotion or something which derives from emotions. The QPWM has not traditionally dealt properly with emotions. Indeed most of the time it has not dealt with emotions at all. The issue of emotions has been dismissed in favour of the reduction of all experiences to a single metric of utility even if most economists are not prepared to go so far as saying that there are viable cardinal units of measurement of this concept. As we have observed previously, this reductionism effectively means that there is no difference between ‘happiness’ as understood by economists and utility. Within this paradigm there seems to be little difference between hate and raspberry jam. Both are commodities which bring utility to the consumer 38

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and impose costs on the producer. An archetypal mainstream economist might hark to the negative externalities of hate as a distinguishing factor, but raspberry jam might cause externalities, especially if it is addictive. Its consumers might indirectly consume too much sugar, die young and inflict misery on a bevy of friends and relatives. One would suspect that introducing emotions ‘properly’ into the QPWM renders it a more noisy and unmerciful economic world. The ‘noise’ being introduced is the flesh and blood reality of human beings as opposed to the reduction of action to a corollary of reflective rational decision-making. This may add noise in the sense of making predictions less clear-cut. The role of emotions has been highlighted in a recent issue of the world’s premier organ for the dissemination of economic ideas in a broadly intelligible form – the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which is the companion journal to the more technical American Economic Review issued by the world’s leading professional body in economics – the American Association of Economics. In it, an academic who is both a Professor of Psychology at Princeton University and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, writing in a symposium on cognition, brain science and economics, says: Emotions influence our decisions. They do so in just about every walk of our lives, whether we are aware or unaware of it and whether we acknowledge it or not. In particular, . . . emotions may explain inconsistencies in human behavior and forms of behavior that some have deemed irrational, though such behavior may seem more sensible after a discussion of the functions that emotions serve – or may have served in our evolutionary past. (Cohen, 2005, p. 3)

Contradictory to this chapter’s introduction, it should be noted that Cohen seems to be offering up the hope of removing noise from the QPWM in terms of making explanations of human action tidier. But what kind of emotions are we talking about here? More specifically, where does hate fit in, if at all? In general, the writings which explicitly claim to be about emotion, within the economics literature, tend to focus on emotion in a general sense rather than the common categories of emotion such as love, anger, jealousy and so on. In this context, a non-specific emotion may attach itself to a piece of data. Take share prices. In the standard model with risk and uncertainty added, the prospective share dealer should be weighing up the probabilities of different streams of returns in a dispassionate manner. However, if they were to become emotionally attached in the sense of having a commitment to a certain state of belief, then things would be different. Their emotions could introduce biases into their decision-making. An outcome would be favoured because there is an emotional attachment to it or commitment to it which is not based on the objective data.

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This kind of perspective on the emotions has had a fugitive existence in macroeconomics. Heterodox macroeconomists, especially those of the ‘Post-Keynesian’ persuasion, have been keen to stress the role of ‘animal spirits’ in Keynes’ original treatment of investment and entrepreneurship. This angle was also heavily emphasized in the works written by Joan Robinson in exposition of the General Theory. GLS Shackle, in his review of the crises in economics of the 1930s, put very well the problems surrounding Keynes’ decision to allow emotions to penetrate the theory of investment Keynes in the General Theory attempted a rational theory of a field of conduct which by the nature of its terms could be only semi-rational. But other economists gravely upholding a faith in the calculability of human affairs could not bring themselves to acknowledge that this could be his purpose. (Shackle, 1967, p. 129)

He goes on to claim that Keynes’ General Theory has a dual nature containing both an orthodox economics approach and a more radical one. At this point Shackle makes the more blunt claim that ‘Investment is an irrational activity or a non-rational one’. This is a step beyond his rather vague use of the term ‘semi-rational’. It is rather hard here to see what exactly the difference between irrational, semi-rational and non-rational is. However, it is plain to see that some kind of departure from irrationality is being laid at the door of emotions. This might be as simple as following ‘hunches’ such as in the extraordinary case of broadcasting mogul Lew Grade’s negotiations over his televisualization of the life of Christ. He dreamt that he should ask for a particular amount which was way beyond the offers which came in. Despite sustained resistance to his ‘dream figure’ he refused to be moved and stuck to this apparently exorbitant sum, which he eventually did get. This event could be attributed to a simple quasi-random motor neuron event. For example, if he had gone to bed having eaten different food or had been disrupted in the middle of his dream would he have come up with a different figure? The significant feature here is that foundationless information has been granted extra status and given extra commitment weight because of where it was ‘found’, that is in a dream. That is, emotions enter because information is interpreted differently in one context than in another. This is observed in recent hate episodes such as riots over novels and cartoons where not very much is really being said about the topic in question, but the way in which it is being said has more resonance. In particular, nothing ‘new’ is being said and indeed what is being said may have been said in public arenas with more force in the past. Emotion may be inflamed in these situations because the message is appearing in a seemingly frivolous context which may be mocking the subject in a way that

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a hateful politician, or religious leader, is not doing, however unpleasant their views may be. Modern heterodox literature on macroeconomics has also looked at emotional biases becoming social forces as well as individual events (Earl, 1990; Minsky, 1986). For example, there may be ‘euphoria’ in a market where traders expect to continually make gains, even though it is obvious that this can not go on for ever and that not everyone can be a winner. The specific word ‘euphoria’ has been used in such contexts. Definitionally this is not a fundamental emotional state, such as love or anger. Euphoria implies an interaction between thoughts and emotions where there is joy and altered mental states. The phenomena just described might be seen as irrational and inconsistent, and therefore exactly the type of problem Cohen is claiming that emotions can clear up in economics rather than muddy. The essence of the solution to this paradox is to start to argue that emotions serve some useful instrumental purpose. Thus, although they may appear to be making us choose irrational paths, it turns out that they are leading us to make better decisions. Economists have sporadically flirted with the literature on sociobiology (or its equivalent evolutionary psychology) which is an extension of the theories of Charles Darwin on social behaviour (see for example McCain, 1990). This has a direct link with issues surrounding hate, as some early twentieth century American economic writings on race were grounded in biological explanations of racial differences. Sociobiological/evolutionary economics can, of course, lead us into a tautological cul-de-sac. Once one argues that evolutionary processes select in favour of survival-enhancing traits, then it follows that all traits still present in prosperous survivors are automatically deemed to be efficient in some sense. Emotions can be a survival-enhancing trait if they help us make ‘better decisions’. This can arise because of the problems of risk and uncertainty arising from the lack of perfect costless information. However, I have not come across an economist, in the sociobiological area, making these arguments about hate in social psychology, Fishbein (2003–4) discusses the genetic roots of hate in terms of survival enhancement in a similar way to the ‘finding a friend’ argument I gave in the last chapter. That is, suspicion of the out-group comes from fear of threats to the in-group gene pool and it may be efficient to exercise statistical discrimination against all members of certain out-groups. One should note that the sociobiological approach makes emotions somewhat malleable. They are not fundamental states reflective of a ‘personality’, rather they are moulded by instinctive drives for survival. The instrumental argument that emotions can be efficient and productive is very much the route taken in the best-selling books of Daniel

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Goleman (1995) promoting the notion of ‘emotional intelligence’. Here ‘commitment’ to statistically unsupported ideas can be a good thing because of the motivation it generates. He gives specific examples of experiments on performance of athletes who have had their measured achievement falsified by researchers. The general thrust of this literature is that athletes who disregard this kind of information go on to perform better in adverse situations in actual tournaments than those who do not. The Lew Grade story given above is an example of this in the entrepreneurial field, as the dream may be just a presentational device for his emotional intelligence to assert itself. Going back to riots over cartoons and novels which mock beliefs, one could take the view that the participants lack emotional intelligence.

EMOTIONAL GAMES As discussed in the previous chapter, game theory has been used as the tool to prise economic analysis out of its perfectly competitive general equilibrium cul-de-sac. In particular, bargaining situations have been modelled to take account of commitments to particular outcomes. In current research, the research method is generally to conduct experiments, usually (following the tradition of social psychologists) on the convenient if unrepresentative sample of undergraduate students (see for example Ahmed, 2007). In such experiments the individuals can be located in a hypothetical situation with a particular structure in which there are well-defined optimal outcomes that the participants should choose. We can then vary the composition of the groups in the experiments in ways connected to emotional reactions (such as in the case of Ahmed, 2007). One way of looking at the results on research in bargaining games is to regard deviations from the optimal outcomes as fundamentally due to emotional commitments. A common form of this is to take account of commitments to ideas of ‘fairness’. Thus in some bargaining games we might get sub-optimality from the ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’ situation where gain is sacrificed for fairness but not in an altruistic way. A classic case of this is the workplace where a worker may object to a measure which would be of net benefit to themselves because it would increase the gap between their own welfare and someone in a higher position. If this took the form of industrial sabotage rather than mere obduracy in negotiations, it would bring us closer to everyday notions of what constitutes hateful behaviour. What might take us closer to genuinely ‘emotional games’ is the literature on deluding oneself, as a thread of emotion costs clearly underpins this

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kind of writing even though emotions are seldom discussed explicitly in it. I should also stress that this literature does not use the word ‘delusion’, but instead talks about choosing to have certain beliefs based on information. The rational basis of delusion is that it provides a higher net benefit outcome than being truthful. This is not as simple as blindly believing in any chosen view without any substantial evidence. The core of the problem is that individuals may face situations where there is conflict within themselves. This derives from multiple utility models (Thaler and Shefrin, 1988; Schelling, 1984; Etzioni, 1987) where individuals have preferences about preferences. These argue that individuals have ‘higher’ preferences which lead them to seek additional constraints to incomes and market prices which will reign in the drive to satisfy ‘lower order’ preferences. We can see these added restrictions as ‘utility enhancing consumption constraints’ (Levy, 1988). One strain of such thinking is the ‘mental accounting’ proposed by Thaler and Shefrin (1988). The solution proposed above, of external curbs or routines, is, they say, not available across all the areas where self control may falter. So there also need to be internal rules which need to be habitual in order to be effective. They must also be simple to follow. Complex rules are likely to weaken the ability to exercise self-control. Habits also have the advantage of driving out forgetfulness which can be as serious as passion in driving individuals off their optimal paths. In the case of hate, mental accounting could involve simple budgeting rules like ensuring, for example, that one does not watch television documentaries about lesbians if one has lesbophobia and yet at the same time feels bad about it. In broad economic terms the reason for forgoing the required ‘willpower’ constraints, in the short run, is that these impose costs in the form of psychic effort (Thaler and Shefrin, 1988). Maintaining beliefs that conflict with the environment imposes further costs in the form of the strain of reconciliation. Here we seem to be encroaching on what many economists might consider the psychological boundary with economics. As has been pointed out by Sen (1976–7), economic theory has soldiered on for a very long time in isolation from psychological input other than that acquired when it first firmed up into a ‘hard’ neo-scientific social science. The main contending model for dealing with belief–fact conflicts is that of cognitive dissonance, although noted heterodox economist Peter Earl (1983) favours Kelly’s ‘personality construct theory’. Cognitive dissonance was first propounded by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957. A modified variant of it has been incorporated in economic models by some fairly mainstream economists (see Akerlof and Dickens, 1982; Gilad et al., 1987). Dissonance is the opposite of consonance, or harmony between the elements of one’s life. For example,

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someone who believes racist views are correct but finds little support for them amongst their social reference group will experience dissonance. In their formal model, Gilad et al. (1987) assume individuals will try, as rational homo economici, to reduce the level of dissonance because dissonance causes negative utility. Dissonance is reduced by selective exposure via the deliberate evasion of dissonant information. Individuals may play down the importance of potentially dissonant information or simply make sure that it is not received. Dissonance may be defined as arising from a ‘surprise’ defined as expected minus actual utility at time t. Decisionmakers ignore surprises so long as they fall below a threshold level denoted as k; that is unless a surprise is a sufficiently big surprise, individuals do not change their perceptions of the environment. Dissonance may trigger an information filter which selects in favour of information that confirms the wished-for belief that is otherwise contradicted by the world. It must be stressed that k is a choice variable. Individuals choose a k value which balances the cost of blocking dissonant information against the gain in terms of avoiding mental strain by maintaining an inaccurate view of the choice environment. The literature (cf. Gilad et al., 1987, p. 67) recognizes individual differences in tolerance towards cognitive dissonance. The level may depend on constraints in the decision-making environment. It must be stressed that the economists’ version of cognitive dissonance makes quite a departure from the original work of Festinger (see Earl, 1990). In particular the economic models of cognitive dissonance ignore the issue of prior choice of desired lifestyle. Dissonance reduction in Akerlof-inspired models is through avoidance of information which contradicts an exogenously given image. As Gilad et al. point out, the level at which k is set will depend on the environment in which the decision-maker operates. Variability of k can provide the linkage with the traditional approach. Hence, we can expand the model to allow for personality simply by allowing a new argument in the utility function (k) and seeking to measure it. The gist of the above discussion is that because emotions are painful, an individual might decide to purposefully screen certain information out of their knowledge base. As with a basic mono-utility function micro model, without problems of self-control or information costs, this has universal application. Cognitive dissonance could arise for the individual who hates and would prefer not to be a hater or for the individual who has invested in social capital of hate and would prefer not to be ‘weakening’ into tolerance of the hatees. Likewise it could be experienced by the hatees themselves. In the latter case the victims of hate may find themselves, or their own identity group, to be indulging in emotions and acts of reprisal that they would like to believe do not exist. Such denial might promote a situation where hatred is actually increasing (because denial means that no investment is made

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to reduce it) because of the denial even if the supply of hatred from haters is not itself increasing. This situation may or may not be equilibrium, depending on factors explored further below.

LOVE, ANGER, VIOLENCE We can, for the convenience of economics, treat hate itself as an emotion that arises from no particular precedent place in the person’s psyche. Or, hatred can be treated as derived from prior emotions, most notably anger. This nexus of emotions and the feedbacks between them are discussed in the next chapter. For the moment, let us look a bit more closely at economics of anger/hate/violence in domestic relationships, chiefly marital ones. It would seem that Becker’s programme of empire-building economics has opened up a whole field of economics on specific emotions which might profitably lead us into a rich and satisfying economic model of hate. The literature on love and violence might even be seen as possibly squaring the circle which Shackle was running around in, as it has sometimes been styled as an ‘economic (i.e. rational choice) analysis of irrational behaviour’. Becker’s approach to (supposedly) love was not an immediate hit with students. To wit, Some of my fellow students and I thought it was weird to analyze love with economic theories. I still remember how we giggled when we first read a mimeographed version of Becker’s theory of marriage prior to its publication. (Grossbard-Schechtman, 1995, p. 92)

These theories emerged originally in Becker (1973, 1974) and have been extended to all kinds of societies (Bergstrom, 1996) with different sorts of marital and family arrangements. Not surprisingly there has been criticism of the relevance and realism of such models from economists outside the mainstream (see for example Bergmann, 1995), although this has not been on the neglect of emotions but rather on issues of male hegemony. Unquestionably, growth in research in this field was heavily inspired by the ready availability of demographic statistics. Almost every country in the world has regular series on marriage which can be combined in regression equations with more general data series. This is probably also the reason for the area of divorce being the first major offshoot of the marriage model – see the literature review in Cameron (1995a). Economic models of divorce, so far as I am aware, have never at any time, even in passing, mentioned hate as a reason for divorce although one might forge a connection with the use of alcoholism as an independent variable in some regression models.

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The economics of hate

The nearest the economic model of the family takes us towards the heart of hate is when it shifts towards a specific dysfunctional action in the form of domestic violence. Violence is clearly an action rather than an emotion. Violence is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the quality of being violent’ and violent itself is defined as ‘involving great physical force’ although the definition goes on to involve the idea that violence is an illegal use of force. The illegality aspect has clearly attached itself to the category of domestic violence, as this is the term which has adhered to the increasing amount of police intervention in what were previously more usually called domestic disputes. It might seem obvious to everyone what violence is but there are still problems of definition which may remind us of the words of the Depeche Mode song (‘Leave in silence’) which even contains the seldom-heard phrase ‘emotional violence’. Such terminology invokes the idea that physical force does not have to be involved, although the convention seems to be that we are more likely to refer to the use of mental and emotional force to dominate someone as ‘bullying’ which may of course involve violence but is a conceptual separate category. Bullying is discussed later in Chapter 5. The essence of the idea of violence is then of interpersonal violation, which is fundamentally undesirable and against humanitarian principles. However, there has been social philosophical literature on violence ranging through Georges Sorel (1961) to Ted Honderich’s Violence for Equality (1980) which question the notion that violence is always a bad thing. The economic analysis of such ‘social violence’ is largely in the area of riots, which are discussed later (in Chapter 7). Returning to domestic violence, we can then reasonably ask why someone has married someone whom they hate so much that they can accept being violent towards them, and reciprocally why the victim accepts the violence (this is assuming we do not have a joint consumption of mutually enjoyed reciprocal violence). The economics of domestic violence literature is exclusively focused on male-on-female violence in the context of a marital situation. That is, there is no discussion of child abuse, femaleon-male violence or of gay and lesbian interpersonal violence. The most rigorously formulated recent economic analysis of domestic violence is in the paper by Pollak (2002). He outlines an intergenerational model of domestic violence (IMDV) in which behavioural strategies or ‘scripts’ are transmitted from parents to children. Pollak makes three key assumptions: 1.

The probability that a husband will be violent depends on whether he grew up in a violent home.

Hatred in conventional microeconomics

2. 3.

47

The probability that a wife will remain with a violent husband depends on whether she grew up in a violent home. Individuals who grew up in violent homes tend to marry individuals who grew up in violent homes.

The first of these would seem to be a non-controversial assumption on the grounds of the transmission of behaviour through imitation or what we may term the formation of ‘negative social capital’. The child may come to see violence as normal in the context of their home environment. They may also perceive that it is of net benefit to its perpetrator and therefore want (however subconsciously) to imitate that. The second assumption might be interpreted on similar grounds. That is the victim may have developed a taste for violence through having observed it. Again there may be an imitative transmission of tastes. If the child observes that its victimized parent stays, then it might (however subconsciously) develop the notion that being a victim is of net benefit. The third assumption has to be justified on shared tastes. Put simply, it may be much easier to find someone who understands your problem background. The IMDV calls attention to three features neglected in the domestic violence, literature. The first is the marriage market. If some men are more likely than others to be violent as husbands and some women are more likely than others to remain in violent marriages, then the probability that such individuals marry each other is crucial. The second neglected feature is divorce: ongoing domestic violence requires the conjunction of a husband who is violent and a wife who stays. Third, variables and policies that reduce the rate of domestic violence in the short run are likely to reduce it even further in the long run. One way of looking at the ‘raspberry jamness’ of domestic violence would be to see whether it is contingent on the contractual basis on which a union of two individuals is founded. One of the striking features of advanced economies is the rising share and length of cohabitation as a form of union compared with formal marriage. One of the more consistent findings in this emerging literature (in the USA) has been a higher rate of domestic violence among cohabiting couples. A frequent explanation for this finding is that cohabitees are less responsive to social pressures against partner violence than those who live within marriage. Or, if you like, the price is lower for the violent person who cohabits and so the demand is higher (or the cost is lower and so the supply is greater). Kenney and McLanahan (2006) used data from the USA National Survey of Families and Households (1987–88 and 1992–93) to explore an alternative explanation of these differences. They find that there is no difference in the level of domestic violence found in married and cohabiting couples in the first

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The economics of hate

year of the relationship, but that violence increases at higher relationship durations in cohabitation. This type of finding is in conformity with the sorting mechanism ideas which drive Pollak’s model. As with Pollak, Kenney and McLanahan do not explicitly dwell on any specific emotions. On top of this, none of the data used here (or in other economic studies of domestic violence) contains any information on the emotional states of the participants. Notwithstanding this, one may note that it is theoretically easier, on average, to leave a cohabitant relationship due to lower costs (of various physical and legal types including children), yet people appear to stay. The literature on domestic violence has thus far not made any attempt to take into account the cognitive dissonance and multiple preference approaches. It is thus even more ‘raspberry jammy’ in its method than writing about general morality and personal money management matters. Hate seems to be a commodity in this research, and the policy proposals offered (that is more punishment) back up this assertion. The previous two sections have only dealt with emotion in a limited way. In the case of cognitive dissonance, emotions arise due to acknowledgement of certain facts being painful. In the family model of domestic violence, an emotion of anger or hatred towards certain people or situations is transmitted from within the family situation as a ‘taste’. These suggest that there are problems of dealing with hatred greater than those in the simple kind of static model. But what if hate was, like drugs, addictive; would these problems be even greater? We turn to this in the next section.

PRODUCTION FUNCTIONS WITH EMOTION AND EMOTION AS AN ADDICTION The individual produces hate in the context of a household production model. Thus they use time and other goods – and other emotions to generate hate. Although an emotion can not be counted as an output in the same ways as pots of raspberry jam or steel, this does not stop us applying the same key theoretical concepts to its production. The most typical production assumption in economics is that there are diminishing returns to factors of production. This ultimately gives rise to the idea of downward-sloping demand curves for factors of production. In a static model of household production, one of the key inputs is time. Indeed one could imagine a pure hatred production model where all a person does is spend the time concentrating on hating the objects of hatred and uses no other factor inputs at all. However, one would expect the availability of complementary inputs to raise the productivity of hate-specific time. The

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simplest case is the existence of a tract – a book or pamphlet such as a pseudo-Scientific racist text such as used by the Nazis in 1930s Germany or others in more recent times. Every hour focusing on the objects of hatred is now more enjoyable, therefore output has increased. Initially the tract may be an information good – for example it may be a piece of ‘scientific racism’ which gives the individual pleasure from providing support for their beliefs. However, once information has been received it can not be received again, and therefore there can not be an output gain from just consuming the information repeatedly. Changing the context in which the information is consumed may, however, add value. There can be other types of market goods supplied as inputs to the production function which have a specific asset value to types of hatred. One possible route for unifying the treatment of emotion (deemed to include hate) and economics is to look at the field of addiction. Becker and Murphy (1988) proposed a general model of addiction which has been applied to cigarette smoking, and other fields, by a growing number of empirical researchers. In it, consumers take into account the impact of future consumption on health and the addictive capital stock. Becker and Murphy (1988, pp. 675–6) make no distinction between goods in terms of their pharmacological properties as: ‘People get addicted not only to alcohol, cocaine and cigarettes but also to work, eating, music, television, their standard of living, other people, religion, and many other activities’. The significant parts of this statement, for our present purpose, are the remarks about ‘other people’ and ‘religion’. Obviously if other people provide utility from being hated and some religions promote hate, then it would seem axiomatic that hate is connected with addiction. The crucial feature of addiction, in the Becker sense, is that the marginal utility at a point in time depends on consumption in other periods; it does not matter whether this interdependency has a chemical component or is simply learned habitual behaviour. A fully rational individual plans for the sequential dynamics brought about by the intertemporal non-separability of consumption arising from addiction. The distinctive feature of the model is that lead consumption enters the equation along with the lag consumption term of the myopic model. Not surprisingly, Becker’s approach has met with criticism from well outside the ‘hard core’ of American economics (for example Tomer, 1996, and from slightly nearer home Akerlof, 1991, and pre-emptively, Winston, 1980). Most critiques have to stop short of claiming that addicts are totally irrational lest they cease to be regarded as ‘economics’ in the first place. The theory gap is filled with some notion of metapreferential choice or a modification of Festinger’s cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957, as treated

The economics of hate

50

in Gilad et al., 1987), which we have just discussed. The time-honoured problem arises with the alternative approaches, viz. however much more plausible they may seem, it is difficult to operationalize them. A number of papers have sought to refine and extend the rational addiction model to enhance its resistance to criticism (Orphanides and Zevros, 1995). In general, such refinements of rational addict models tend to take the route of incorporating adjustment costs into the process. One might seek to argue, from psychological or biological premises, that hate might be particularly likely to have the three intrinsic properties used to define addictions. That is: ● ●

●

tolerance – greater exposure means that the sensation experienced is less with additional units; reinforcement – each unit consumed adds to the desire for more units in contradiction to the principle of diminishing marginal utility in basic economic models; withdrawal – stopping consumption altogether leads to pain costs that are over and above the costs equivalent to the loss of pleasure caused by having to substitute to less-preferred goods.

It could be argued that one sees these elements manifest in some haters. Within a strict rational choice framework with perfect foresight one might expect that higher withdrawal costs would lead to lower levels of investment activity. However, if the individual follows other forms of discounting, or has myopic thinking, then this will not necessarily be the case. Some degree of myopia or neglect of future event probabilities would, in Becker’s terms, mean that the person does not follow the ‘rational addiction’ model, although they are clearly not irrational in the sense of having random non-price-responsive behaviour. Whilst a rational addiction model of hate would imply higher equilibrium levels of hate, it would still normally be thought to predict a deterrent effect of punishments such as prison sentences and fines. As we now have a dynamic model, the effects of the punishments will be greater in the long run than the short run to an extent depending on the discount rates of the haters. If hate beliefs are sufficiently extreme, then one of the inputs into the production function is what we may broadly define as torture. Costs can be inflicted on the victim in different ways. The least costly form of hatred to the victim is enforced departure from the situation. If they remain, they may provide benefits by being made to suffer in particular ways. That is, the hater gets utility from maximizing the discounted value of the pain that the victim is made to suffer. This implies strategic rationality in the modes

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of torture chosen. We should pause to point out that we are not discussing the more purely instrumental torture carried out for the extraction of information which need not contain any element of hatred even on the broadest definition of the phenomenon. Torture in the domestic violence situation and in the worst excesses of Nazi Germany does not have instrumental ends in view. However, in the organized race hate case there may be spin-offs in terms of deterrence gains, such as the mass exit of the hated group from the region due to fear of the higher costs of extreme protracted torture.

RATIONALITY IN A WORLD OF EMOTION Hate might be treated as a commodity in the ways discussed above, but can we still be rational when we have strong colorations of emotions intrinsically embedded in the decision-making situation? There have been claims in social psychological literature that situations of hatred are intrinsically irrational ones, for example in discussions of racial prejudice (Allport, 1954; Milner, 1983). The discussion of domestic violence above and the presentation of the idea of production functions for hatred that followed sidesteps this whole problem. This is also found in major global issues. For example, Frey (2007) discusses assassination and assassination attempts on political figures. In his list of motivations, the nearest he gets to considering emotions is point 4 on his list, which is entitled ‘Deranged people’ and contains only a discussion of John Hinckley’s wounding of Ronald Reagan. He concludes with the remark that these can be considered random events. Econometric work on world issues of mass ethnic/religious conflict follows in the same vein. For example, Jaeger and Paserman (2005) study the dynamics of violence in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict since the outbreak of the Second (or ‘al-Aqsa’) Intifada in September 2000, during which more than 3300 Palestinians and more than 1000 Israelis have been killed. The conflict has been volatile in the statistical sense as there are periods of high levels of violence and periods of relative calm. In itself, this says nothing whatsoever about the presence or absence of rationality among the chief participants as there may be strategic factors precipitating the level of activity. Using data on the number of deaths occurring each day between September 2000 and January 2005, Jaeger and Paserman estimate reaction functions for both Israelis and Palestinians. They find evidence of unidirectional Granger causality from Palestinian violence to Israeli violence, but not vice versa. Such reaction functions are premised on the assumption

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that each side maximizes utility subject to conjectures about the actions of the other. In other words the statistics say that Palestinian violence is provoking Israeli counteractions but not the other way round. This finding is consistent whether they look only at the incidence of fatalities or at the level of fatalities, and is robust to the specification of the lag structure and the level of time aggregation. There is little evidence that violence on either side has a direct deterrent or incapacitation effect but it seems that successful assassination attempts do reduce the number of subsequent Israeli fatalities. The authors conclude that, despite the popular perception that Palestinians and Israelis are engaged in ‘tit-for-tat’ violence, there is no evidence to support that notion. If hate beliefs are sufficiently extreme, then one of the inputs into the production function is what we may broadly define as torture as suggested above. Torture may provide additional utility sources due to satisfying a sadistic emotion. In some cases this may be motivated by feelings of revenge even if it is a generalized revenge on a representative of a group thought to have collectively, in the past, wronged a group to which the torturer belongs. Costs can be inflicted on the victim in different ways. The vengeful hater gets utility from maximizing the discounted value of the pain that the victim is made to suffer. This implies strategic rationality in the modes of torture chosen. We should pause to point out that we are not discussing the more purely instrumental torture carried out for the extraction of information, which need not contain any element of hatred even on the broadest definition of the phenomenon.

PERSONAL AND SOCIAL CAPITAL Once we have an economic model in which there is a future, even if it is only a two-period model, we have scope for the formation of capital. This was instanced in the discussion of addiction and domestic violence given above. Those for whom hate is addictive can be seen as forming ‘hate appreciation’ capital. The notion of capital has a long and debated history in economics. The one thing we can be sure of is that it does not simply mean equipment such as tractors and car manufacturing plant. The current area of greatest excitement surrounding the concept of capital is in the areas of ‘personal’ and ‘social’ capital. This can be traced back to Becker’s pioneering work in the 1960s. This started the bandwagon of sticking adjectives in front of the word capital. The first one to be prefixed was ‘human’. Since then we have had various sub-genres of human capital such as appreciation capital, addiction capital, religious belief capital, relationship capital and now social capital (see for example, Schuller, 2007; Nooteboom, 2007). The

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essence of Pollak’s model of domestic violence discussed in the last section is some form of a ‘capital’ one, that is that people form (potentially addictive) domestic violence-related capital in their childhood development. The actual term ‘social capital’ is vogue-ish well outside mainstream economics. It probably finds its main popularity in the field of development amongst both economists and non-economists. Social capital has tended to be invoked in the realm of ‘nice’ things like community spirit and other support networks rather than ‘nasty’ things like anger, hate, murder, war, murder and terrorism. If one were inclined to be cynical, this could be related to the discussion of externalities in Chapter 2. That is, social capital is an important sounding portal through which to smuggle arguments for projects of aid and social improvement as if they had some kind of scientific imperative behind them, rather than being an ethical predilection of the person proposing them. Through it all, we need to recall that the defining characteristics of capital are that it is built up over time, yields a return in the future (hence it is a stock with a flow of returns) and involves sacrifice of consumption in the present in order to build up. Although it might seem to be stretching the analogy, one can find these elements in social capital. The functioning of markets is likely to be more efficient when there are certain bonds between people which go beyond mere financial transactions. For example, a high level of trust lowers transaction costs in the face of uncertainty if trust is backed by performance and reciprocity (Zak, 2004; Barber, 2004). However, it can not be discounted that shared negative emotions may be a form of capital that can increase the productivity of a group. An obvious example of this is in the field of international sports competition where there is a clichéd expectation that players will ‘raise their game’ against traditional enemies. One way of modelling social hate capital is to look at the degree of adherence to rules or conventions and the extent of emotional support for them. Akerlof (1984) follows in the straightforward neo-classical tradition of prior work by Arrow and Becker, in treating such customs, or social institutions, as consumer or investment goods. Choice of observance or disdain follows from the standard utility maximization postulate that an individual is motivated by a cost–benefit calculation. Akerlof focuses on a possible prisoner’s dilemma. There are two extreme sub-optimal scenarios. One is where the custom is obeyed even though all agents are disadvantaged by so doing, and the other is where the custom is overthrown by all agents despite ubiquitous welfare losses. A social custom or habit (cf. Heiner, 1983; Coleman, 1987; Twomey, 1999) can serve the same economic functions as the routines which become embedded in the conduct of a firm, the principal one being to reduce the

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The economics of hate

various costs associated with risky decision-making. Thus the evolutionary analyses of firms stemming from Schumpeter (1934) (which reached full fruition in Nelson and Winter, 1981) is also of relevance. In Akerlof’s formal model, utility has three arguments in addition to the usual ones; social reputation (R), belief in the customary code of behaviour (B) and conformity with its conventions, in this case conventions about hating (A). A hate convention would be, for example, not to talk to a person of the hate group or not to desist from physical assault on them if a confrontation arises. I now briefly outline the general model with several changes in notation. Reputation is a continuous variable with dummies being added for ‘belief or disbelief in the code’ and obedience or disobedience of the code. There is not a one-for-one mapping of (dis)belief into a code into (dis)obedience of it. Obedience of a code one believes and disobedience of a code one disbelieves in are obviously the most expected of the four contingencies between these two dummies as costs of disobedience may prohibit indulgence in the disapproved taste. Divergences between obedience and belief may give rise to cognitive dissonance as discussed above. Reputation depends on the obedience dummy and the observed fraction of other people who obey. This gives rise to the individual utility function: U ⫽ U(G, R, A, B, e)

(3.1)

where G ⫽ commodity consumption; R ⫽ reputation; A ⫽ obedience or disobedience to the hate code; B ⫽ belief or disbelief in the hate code; e ⫽ personal tastes. The reputation function is: R ⫽ R(A, B%)

(3.2)

where B% is the percentage of the community believing in the hate code. The equation for aggregate changes in belief in customs is B% ⫽ g(B, A%)

(3.3)

where A% is the fraction obeying the code and the dot above B% represents the rate of change. The presence of reputation is necessary to ensure the possibility of an equilibrium with non-zero compliance in the absence of very strong beliefs. I add function (3.4) for A%, where again the dot above A% represents the rate of change. · % ⫽ f(A, B%) A

(3.4)

Hatred in conventional microeconomics

55

 BF(A)

Beliefs in hate code (B)

 AF(B)

E2

E1 45º Obedience to hate code (A) Figure 3.1

Hate code market

There are many possible combinations of equilibria for the rate of change of A% and B%. Figures 3.1 and 3.2 further illustrate the model. The 45º line is a benchmark as it shows positions where belief and obedience change at equal rates, although they may of course be starting from different levels. The other functions show the rate of change of the percentage observing the hate code given a fixed level of belief and vice versa. The line of causation in both directions is through reputation-building or losing. If we rule out dissonance, within individuals, in the model of social customs we would take this to imply that the obeyers and believers are the same people. Assuming different tastes or returns from compliance across the population implies that the observer function shows the cumulative likelihood

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Beliefs in hate code (B)

 BF(A)  AF(B) E2

E1

Obedience to hate code (A) Figure 3.2

Hate code market: alternative equilibria

of an indvividual succumbing to observance. If there are variations in the rate of impact of reputation/belief rates on obedience rates and vice versa, multiple equilibria are possible. The cases shown in Figures 3.1 and 3.2 have two equilbria and three different zones of divergence between optimal belief rates and observance rates. In Figure 3.1 the lower equilibrium shows belief rates falling below observance rates, whilst the upper equilibrium shows the reverse situation. In Figure 3.2 the observance rates fall below belief rates at all times, even in both equilibria. The relevance of the possibilities shown for any particular activity or commodity depends ultimately on the precise property of the utility function and the punishment cost function that Akerlof does not explicitly include. If hate is an addictive commodity compared with a non-addictive commodity, the observance function (that is the aggregate zero consumption percentage) may shift down and the belief function shift up, thus creating two opposing effects in terms of the likelihood of obtaining equilibria like those shown.

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The code observance model can apply equally well to situations where individuals are expected to adhere to a code of hate. For example it is a matter of honour to inflict costs on another race, or the opposite situation where there is a code of non-hate, for example in societies where the explicit concept of ‘hate crime’ has been made part of public policy. A paradox could occur. Imagine there are two communities, A and B, where A is hate-oriented and B is anti-hate-oriented. We could end up with a situation where A has a low level of observance (and hence little hate) but a high level of belief in the code and B has the opposite. Thus the equilibrium outcomes are the ‘wrong way round’ from what one might intuitively expect. There is no obvious reason to suppose that any particular combination of beliefs and code observance will occur when people exhibit multiple utility syndromes which we might term dissonace or delusion. Historically we can observe situations where there is a substantial amount of hate capital, yet little over hate actions. Sometimes this suddenly erupts into a sustained outpouring of hate which might be analysed using catastrophe theory. In this section, we have begun to look at the social situation in which the hater or hatee finds themselves. The fuller treatment of group hatred is postponed until Chapter 7 until we have dealt with a wider treatment of individual hate emotions (Chapter 4) and some case studies of how hate is perpetuated (Chapters 5 and 6).

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have taken the basic framework of conventional economic theory into more direct relation with the topic of hate. So far, there is virtually no economic writing directly on hate, bar the work of Glaeser. To gain insight into the economic perspective on hate we have therefore focused on two so-far unrelated examples of literature. One is on the economics of the emotions, and the other is on the performance of acts which might be deemed to fall under the category of hateful consumption and production. It will be apparent that this enterprise is not without a certain degree of strain. We might be tempted to conclude that economists have a tendency to either ignore or define away the very features that are the essential characteristics of hate as it is normally understood. The ultimate significance of this observation comes when we get to Chapter 9 where we consider the trend of anti-hate policies. In the next chapter we attempt to give a treatment of emotions in general, and hate in particular, in the context of a ‘wider’ economics than that so far discussed in this work.

4.

Widening the economic approach to hate

THE SIX STATEMENTS ABOUT HATRED RECONSIDERED In this chapter we look at broadening the conception of the individual used in economics in the context of hatred. To an extent this requires us to look at issues of a biological nature, as emotions are intrinsically biological rather than the passive commodities implied with the narrow economic approach. First, let us refresh our memory of the six statements given earlier. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

Hatred is the most extreme emotion. Expression of hatred is more likely to provoke extreme social disapproval than expression of other emotions. Displays of hatred exhibit more irrationality than displays of other emotions. (2) is due not so much to (3) as to fear of the consequences of the action of a hateful individual. With respect to (2) and (4), people are generally less likely to dismiss displays of hatred as temporary aberrations that will settle down than they are other emotions such as anger. Once formed, hatred is not easily diffused or deflected into ‘safety valve’ outlets.

The first of these can be linked to biological roots within an evolutionary view of tastes. Hate can be seen as a corollary of anger which will be a useful trait in environments where resources are being contested. In the most primitive situation, all else being equal, the angriest individual will fight the hardest. This clearly may be counter-productive in complex situations if the ‘anger into hatred’ nexus is something which impairs judgement. Statement 2 needs to be viewed more critically than hitherto as it is a statement heavily imbued with cultural relativism. One perceives that cultures, in the world today, that feel themselves heavily oppressed by 58

Widening the economic approach to hate

59

America, may be quite approving of expressions of hate towards America. Where statement 2 is applicable, we have a situation where a social convention has emerged that anger tipping into hate is potentially counterproductive for the group to which an individual belongs. Statement 3 has been totally ignored in the narrow economic literature thus far with good reason. This is because moving in this direction involves abandoning the core economic model. The most relevant literature to this statement is the work on so-called ‘emotional intelligence’ that emerged in the USA in the mid-1990s, which was briefly discussed in the previous chapter. Statements 4, 5 and 6 form less of a challenge to notions of rational conduct. Statement 6 could be rendered simply as a problem of costs of removing an activity in which there has been investment in personal and social capital. Statement 4 can be viewed as a rational reaction by others to the costs to them of other people’s capital investments in hate, and 5 is an extension of this. Statements 4, 5 and 6 are linked to the notion of distinguishing between hate and anger, possibly with anger seen as an emotion and hate being something ‘more than’ or ‘beyond’ this. As we have seen, economists do strive to provide rational choice models featuring emotions so the pertinent issue is whether hate takes us out of this zone.

EMOTIONS, EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND MIXED EMOTION It does not seem possible to discuss hate without bringing in emotions, even though as we have previously pointed out, hate is not normally characterized as an emotion. As we have seen, it is possible to discuss large areas of economics without bringing in emotions although we looked at the arrival of emotions in economics in the previous chapter. In an expanded economic model with sociobiological foundations, an emotion is a taste or trait (Collins, 1993; Elster, 1998). Such traits may be beneficial or detrimental to survival. Let us now expand on the survival potential of emotions with more specific reference to hate than in Chapter 3. The crudest possible example is in a ‘caveman’ world of scarce resources with two groups A and B fighting over a fixed pool of resources with no possibility of cooperation arising between them to produce division of labour and trade. We would expect the outcome to depend on their relative skill and cunning in fighting. So, in the limit, a slightly superior group in terms of endowment of fighting capital might come to take all the resources. It is of course open to the two groups to behave like ideal citizens in the world of Chapter 2 and to come to a voluntary agreement to divide up resources in

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a social welfare (joint utility) maximizing way. But, in the caveman world we have small numbers competition and pervasive uncertainty plus the problem that, since these are cavemen there is no legacy of social capital from successful outcomes of the demonstration of gains from trust. If fighting is a dominant strategy then tastes which are conducive to productivity in fighting might be selected for, and those which are not would be selected against. Individuals should be programmed to expand and defend their resources by some means or other. Logically, they could so do without hating anyone. That is, they could take a detached instrumental view of attacking and killing other people for survival purposes. Leaving aside the possible implausibility of this statement we can still see that hate can be useful if it increases fighting productivity. Thus we have the emergence of tribalism which need not be specifically racist or in any way ethnically based. Interestingly, in Phillip Short’s (2004) mammoth study of the Khmer atrocities led by Pol Pot, he gives an explanation of the ‘caveman’ type as he dismisses the common explanation of the elimination of a vast percentage of the population as genocide. Instead, he attributes the series of events to a level of hate inspired by devotion to eliminating those who stand in the way of the ‘cause’ of the revolution. We might refer to this as ‘instrumentally reified hate’ where the elimination of all sympathy to those who stand in the way speeds up the attainment of the cause. The Cambodian cause was not of course strictly one of exclusive resource conflict as there was also a strong element of Puritanism in the confused utopian socialism which was being peddled. Survival trait productivity might be expected to influence male/female differences in the capacity to develop hate. As our nearest route in the basic emotional repertoire is hate, it is interesting to note that biological research (reported on BBC Radio 4’s Science Now in June 2006) suggest that men are quicker, that is more efficient, at recognizing angry faces than women. Up to this point, I have shied away from the matter of the status of emotions. Emotions have only been considered as states of feeling in terms of their efficiency with respect to the long-term goals of the organism hosting them. However, people are quite different from other animals. We might reasonably suppose that animals do have emotions, as cats and dogs appear to be happy or sad. The greater complexity of human emotions brings with it the scope for malfunction or dysfunction in the form of neurosis and the existence of conflicting emotions. Granted, there is now a trend to apply therapeutic correction to animals as well as people but this could just be a manifestation of anthropomorphism. Neurosis and conflict in emotions leads us back to the issue of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995). The relevance to economics is the matter of judgement in decision-making. The neuroscientific argument is that when emotions of sufficiently high quality

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and intensity overload normal brain functions, decisions will be based on these rather than objective data. That is we have cognitive biases. Thus, moments of ‘tipping’ into emotional overload give us the spectacle of the ‘otherwise normal person’ seemingly losing both their ability to reason and their conventional repertoire of judgements, which may involve violating their usual moral constraints. This is essentially the explanation that Beck (2000) gives to explain war and genocide, even though he does not refer to emotional intelligence as such. There are additional problems of conflict and uncertainty in people’s assessment of their own emotional state. That is, they may argue that their own state is not an emotionally grounded one at all but rather a rational one free from emotion and thus clear and balanced. This is bolstered by notions of scientific thinking and symbolic imagery from religion and mythology that lend weight to a course of action of its being ‘right’ and/or ‘inevitable’. The incremental slide to acceptance to Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ is a prime representation of this. The matter of delusion was introduced in Chapter 3 in the context of cognitive dissonance. The standard economic treatments of cognitive dissonance do not directly address the issue of personal identity, although the original work of Festinger (1957) in the field was more concerned with issues of the self. Economic models of cognitive dissonance are really extended versions of the problem of dealing with costs in decision-making. The widening of the economic approach to hate requires that we look at issues of identity and how it is formed, particularly in relation to the symbols and stimuli that people experience. Perhaps due to the focus on optimality in economic thinking, the notion of neurotic emotions is excluded from economic thinking, not only on the individual level (Cameron, 1997), but also at the aggregate level. Neurosis may be characterized as displaying obsessive preoccupation with certain negative emotional states. From an economic point of view, a neurotic individual is one who is not fully rational as their neurosis prevents them from reaching the maximum level of utility otherwise obtainable. In the case of neuroses, specific emotions may become like a disease and serve their own ends other than the function of the person whom they are meant to serve. We could see this in terms of addiction where hedonism, in the lay sense, takes over from utility maximization because there is an underlying problem that can not be addressed through rational reflective means. The potential costs of neurosis may exhibit asymmetry, as an equal percentage deviation from ‘normality’ into neurosis in either direction will not necessarily bring the same costs. For example, an individual with an excessive fear of attack is not likely to experience the same repercussions as an individual who is neurotically cavalier of their personal safety.

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Although neurosis is not discussed in economics, the implication can be drawn from other discussions of deviations from normal behaviour (cf. Frey, 2007) that it is a random individual aberration for which random positive and negative deviations will cancel out across an aggregate population. This implies that the aggregate population should not become neurotic. This is somewhat questionable when one looks at issues like chronic debt problems (Cameron, 1995b) and media obsessions with risky phenomena disproportional to their incidence. Likewise, we can find societies where there is possibly a neurotic obsession channelled into hate and reciprocal fixations with being hated. At the aggregate level of the economic system, neuroses can be viewed as constraints which lower welfare. Therapy addressed to neuroses is an additional cost akin to that of cleaning up pollution.

A WIDER ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE: A PSEUDO INPUT–OUTPUT MODEL OF HATE AND HATE EPIPHENOMENA The chief problem of economic approaches to emotional states is that these entail not just psychological and biological issues but also social ones. It is, however, convenient to begin our ‘widening’ enterprise at the solely individual level. The individual is treated as having feelings and actions. What is the simplest nexus of hate and emotion such as that which underpins most of the current vogue for anti-hate policy? It can be put in the form shown in Figure 4.1, which an economist could see as a production relationship. A stimulus is an initial piece of information. The ‘to be hated’ person (hatee) appears on television or in one’s street or workplace. The thought is the cognitive processing of this experience which triggers the emotion of anger, rage or whatever which may culminate in hate defined as an emotion or hate defined as the specifics of the action at the end of the chain. The thought may be processed with or without delusion, cognitive dissonance or neurosis. For example, if the hate is a derivative of investing in reified depersonalization of an enemy, due to resource conflicts that can not be advantageously solved in other ways, then it would be hard to claim that this is neurotic from the viewpoint of the individual hater. Before proceeding to look at a more complex chain of hate, it is worth stating that, amongst the people who normally touch on hate as a largescale social issue, it is implicitly quite strongly suggested that hate is not to be treated as having economic roots even if it is nominally inspired by income inequality. Klaus Fischer’s excellent history of Judeophobia and

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Stimulus > Thought > Emotion > Expression of Emotion > Action Figure 4.1

The hate nexus

the Holocaust (Fischer, 1998) clearly posits that the Nazi party rise and policies were not of economic origin. He says, ‘As Norman Cohn puts it the energy to exterminate the Jews sprang from a “quasi-demonological superstition” rather than from economics or political motives of the perpetrators’ (1998.p. 14). This is not to be dismissed by the clear evidence that the hierarchy of the Nazi movement did make substantial economic gains from their confiscation of Jewish wealth and infringement of Jewish property rights which was not redistributed to the poor struggling masses. The basic claim here is that opportunism involving money does not necessarily map backwards into a prior economic motivation for the events that generated the potential for forced resource transfers. The prime example of this is the looting and pillaging to be found in situations of riots and civil disobedience. In a very different and more recent context from Nazi Germany, we find Amy Chua (2003, p. 287) quoting the Ayatolla Khomeini as saying ‘we did not create a revolution to lower the price of melon’. More formally, Richardson (1960) analyses statistical evidence of major wars from 1850 to 1950 and concludes that the majority were related to ideology, nationalism or religion, and not to economic issues. Our first step then in the wider approach is to acknowledge that individuals have feelings/emotions which may become autonomous of economic circumstances and can therefore lead to actions which may not be deemed rational in the usual sense in economic analysis. These feelings may be tied in to the concept of identity. In other words, a person may feel that they are being deprived of their very essence and status as a ‘person’ because of the actions of, or in the extreme case the mere existence of, specific groups of other people. This is particularly evidenced in manifestations of xenophobia where what is at stake is the ownership of the notion of being ‘British’, ‘American’, ‘Russian’ or whatever. National identity is a somewhat elusive concept as it is hard to tie it directly to ethnicity and religion – for example the ‘true’ Americans and Australians would seem to be ‘Red Indians’ and Aborigines respectively. In Table 4.1 we split a variety of hate-related feelings and actions into two categories. One is of ‘primary’ and ‘derived’ emotional states. These are in the first column. The categories of ‘derived actions and mental states’

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Table 4.1 Hatred-relevant emotions and actions Primary and derived emotional states

Derived actions/mental states

Bitterness Revenge (Intense) Dislike Obsession Contempt Loathing Jealousy/Envy Resentment Spite Hatred Anger Malice Prejudice

Aggression Paranoia Victimization Racism/Sexism Homophobia Misogyny/Misandry Xenophobia Religious Hatred/Anti-Semitism Assault (includes Rape) Harassment Bullying Murder Threats (in the limit Death Threat) Suicide Sado-Masochism

are in the second column. I am not claiming that it is necessarily true that emotional states always precede and cause mental states. As James and Nahl (2000, p. 35) remark, ‘Even if it feels as though anger is automatically released it does not automatically lead to aggressiveness’. Clearly, there may be complex reciprocal relationships where there can be a feedback loop between the emotional state and the mental state. Each may spark the other and in such a loop there are issues of uniqueness and stability of equilibrium. Unstable states may occur or the feedback may be minimal. To keep the diagram simple there are no causation arrows zig-zagging between the two lists. We discuss these more informally below. We have conflated actions and mental states together in the above discussion. This is in keeping with the current analysis and policy of ‘hate crimes’ which tends to treat hateful thoughts as equivalent to hateful deeds. We may note that in the case of religious hatreds only anti-semitism is granted a regular nomenclature of its own in media coverage. The term was only coined as late as 1879 by William Marr, the founder of the League of Anti-Semites in Germany (Fischer, 1998, p. 23). Where other religions do receive a term it is likely to have ‘phobia’ rather than ‘-ism’ status. The ‘-ism’ rather than the ‘phobia’ (Judeophobia) is used contrary to the situation with gay and lesbian attitudes where the ‘phobia’ is used in popular discourse rather than the ‘-ism’. We have two lists but four types – two in each list. This is premised on

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the notion that actions require prior existences of emotions or thoughts in order to enable them to happen. We might think that the man who in a fit of rage murdered the lover of his wife is acting in a blind rage without prior thought. However, the economics of murder literature tends to take the view that he will subconsciously weigh up the expected costs of punishment from so doing, There is a multi-layered modular network implicit in the above table. For example, one route is that a person develops an obsession about ‘other’ races/nations which may become xenophobia; this might inspire the person to acts of hatred such as suicide bombing. On some interpretations of the life of Hitler, issues about his mother and Jewish doctors may have precipitated his drive to become an entrepreneur of hatred. The same locus of Nazism has been cited for the (American) Aryan girl singing duo ‘Prussian Blue’, whose mother attributes her race hate to the consequences of being assaulted by a black man (Channel 4 television documentary, July 2007). For any given individual, certain modular mappings may be preordained to be dominant to the point where alternative mappings never become manifest. This may be related to the intrinsic strength of certain emotions in human nature which may be quite resistant to cultural modification designed to reduce them. The degree of malleability shows signs of being asymmetric, although this is difficult to establish empirically. That is, the productivity of effort to raising hate/anger from a given starting point is potentially much higher than equivalent effort applied to reducing it. If this is true, it makes the economics of hate policy much more awkward than might at first sight appear. That is, in a strongly hateful environment there may be a game of ‘catch up’ as hate entrepreneurship continually outstrips peace efforts. Three crucial elements will differ between individuals and cultures in this modular matrix approach. These are: ● ●

●

The location of the entry point into the matrix or web of hating. The presence of ‘dead’ modular routings – that is for some people there will be no links between certain links in the chain. For example, someone can be misogynist or misandrist without this being derived from obsession or turning into acts of murder, bullying or harassment. The degree of feedback between different elements in the individual’s web of hate.

Some individuals may exhibit little feedback, for example they might receive one informational stimulus such as a negative hate report about a

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specific group in a populist newspaper and respond to this with emotions and/or actions but yet take the matter no further. For others there may be reciprocity as this sparks a purposive search for more confirmatory information. Further confirmation may engender more emotions, thoughts and actions and more information-seeking. Such oscillating feedback loops might be seen as full-blown neurosis given the definition above. And if this becomes a contagion amongst a group of people then we have social neurosis of the type overlooked in economics. It should be clear that the discipline of the market can not be guaranteed to remove social neuroses as it may in fact create them through such things as advertising, peer pressure and specific identity-challenging products. Outside the modular matrix of the individual lies the perception filtering and interaction of the recipient; to put this in more conventional economic terms, the supply and demand for hate. As mentioned earlier, the individual who actively demands being hated and receives positive marginal utility from it would be deemed to be some kind of masochist, unless, of course, they foresaw an instrumental gain from being hated, that is they wished to be a victimized person in order to generate great works of art from the experience. For those who receive disutility from being objects of hate, there will be an inverse demand function for hate, namely a demand for its removal. In the limit, this might involve migration if the hatred is geographically specific, or indeed suicide from strong persecution, even if the individual has neither self-hate nor any desire to use this as a signal to haters. The inverse demand of victims will be dealt with further in later chapters.

SELF-HATRED One potential entry point to the web of hate in the modular matrix is self-hate. It could be argued that this is fundamental and prior to all the other nodes in the matrix. This is particularly so if one (cf. Horney’s (1999) discussion of pride and self-hatred in neurosis) takes the view that hate is not a ‘normal’ emotion (like anger) but rather a neurotic state in which dysfunctional personal and social capital has defeated a person’s best interests. Understandably self-hate has not been an issue in the limited amount of economic literature pertaining to the subject of hate. It is not, for example, mentioned in the literature on war, riots, terrorism and domestic violence or in the specific paper on the ‘Political economy of hatred’ by Glaeser (2005). This is because the literature has focused on group processes underpinned by the standard rational choice model. This does not incorporate any notion of the self per se1 even though individuals are the centre of the

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analysis. A person is effectively a machine which produces its owns satisfaction subject to constraints. This mechanistic focus is reflected in the standard Beckerian model of suicide pioneered by Hamermesh and Soss (1974) which does not contain any ‘option value’ of life (that is being alive per se does not have value) and is thus just an extension of standard life cycle savings/consumption models. As with the literature on divorce discussed in Chapter 3, most of the research is heavily data-oriented and does not at any time mention the word ‘hate’. The nearest related elements are the occasional inclusion of alcoholism as an explanatory variable and the inclusion of Durkheim’s discussion of the causes of suicide fluctuations (Cameron, 2005), which does not take us directly to hate but, at least, takes into account connections with other people. Durkheim puts suicide on the agenda as a subject for social scientific debate in contrast to the mainly moral and religious discussion of earlier times. He identified four categories of suicide (see, for example, Thompson, 1982). They are a mixture of theorizing and generalization from his inspection of European suicide rate data. The four types were anomic, fatalistic, egoistic and altruistic. i.

Anomic suicide: Anomic derives from the Greek words ‘anomie’ or ‘anomy’, meaning lawlessness resulting from breakdown of standards and values. Anomic suicides occur when the ‘normal form’ of life is disrupted through either a dramatic change in society or in the personal situation of an individual. Durkheim further divides anomic suicide into economic and domestic anomie. The former can be generated during periods associated with economic depression or over-rapid economic expansion. Individuals experience a sense of disorientation and role confusion because of a large change in their relationship with society. Similarly, in domestic anomie, a person may not be able to cope with the change represented by the death of their husband or wife. ii. Fatalistic suicide: This may occur when regulation is too strong. Durkheim suggests that ‘persons with futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline’ may commit suicide. The duress of prison life is often invoked as a situation where this might occur. iii. Egoistic suicide: This type of suicide refers to the case where the individual lacks sufficient integration within society and results in a feeling of not belonging to any meaningful social group: ‘However individualized a man may be, there is always something collective remaining – the very depression and melancholy resulting from this same exaggerated individualism’ (Durkheim, 1897, p. 214).

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iv. Altruistic suicide: In the case of altruistic suicide the individual sacrifices themself for the benefit of others. One extreme of this would be suicide bombing to promote what the bomber perceives as the collective good of a nation or religious group. The altruistic suicide clearly serves the purpose of perpetuating hate in the case of suicide bombing. However, this may be a case where we would want to argue that the entry point to the modular matrix of hatred is not predicated on self-hate. As is clear from the above, Durkheim located the four types of suicide within a grid of social regulation. The core reason for any type arising is that the individual is unable to integrate their own needs adequately with those of society. Indeed, most of Durkheim’s taxonomical enterprise revolves around the notion that people who do not feel they fit into society as ‘normal’ are at risk of suicide. The act of suicide may then be an act of turning the inside self-hate, from rejection, out towards society. Outside the mainstream of suicide research there is a body of literature on the higher suicide rates amongst gay teen males (see www.virtualcity.com/ youthsuicide/ for references and abstracts of papers). What this phenomenon suggests is that suicide is as much a function of the hostility of society towards any apparent deviation as it is of the individual to adapt to the needs of society. The turning inside out of hate to impact on others is treated in some papers on para-suicide signalling games. Specialists use the term ‘parasuicide’ to denote a case of deliberate self-harm not intended to result in death as an extreme strategy in a game-theoretic model of relationship management first developed formally by Rosenthal (1993). Cutler et al. (2001) use this game-theoretic framework to explain the rise in attempted suicides amongst US teens. They suggest that a child’s suicide signal may convince their parents that they are genuinely miserable so that the parents choose to allocate more resources to the child such as time and money. This is referred to as the direct value of a suicide signal. In other cases, the parents may in principle be unwilling to distribute these resources to the child, but give in due to the internal or external cost (embarrassment, for example) at having a child attempt suicide. Exploring suicide and para-suicide takes us into self-hate to some extent, but the standard methodology does not take us into a very much wider economic approach, even given the frequent reference to a non-economist (Durkheim) in the literature. If we tack on the idea of emotional intelligence we might reach a somewhat unsavoury sounding, and possibly glib, conclusion that those who choose to kill themselves are doing so because of a lack of emotional intelligence, no matter how much ‘mechanical intelligence’ they may have. If this is sparked by self-hate one might even go

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Table 4.2 Hating self and hating others options Self

Other

Don’t hate Hate Hate Don’t hate

Don’t hate Don’t hate Hate Hate

further to argue that hatred of such social inadequates is socially beneficial by causing to remove them from dependence on society. A wider approach is in need of a conception of the self beyond a utility maximizing machine. Admittedly, the core rational choice model of suicide was criticized in a book on investment appraisal by Dixit and Pindyck (1994) on the grounds that no value was attributed to actually being alive. The absence of such value curtails quite drastically individual identity! Dixit and Pindyck’s suggestion to attach an ‘option value’ to life does not take us any further down the road towards a notion of self and identity. Recent developments in suicide statistics, specifically the rise of young male suicides in formerly socialist eastern European economies outstripping the traditional world suicide hotspots, have inspired explanations based on the search for identity (Czapinski, 1995). We therefore need a conception of ‘self’. Consequent to a notion of self, comes the idea of the ‘other’. Discussing suicide brings in the notions of hate towards self and the other, with these sometimes being reciprocally linked. For any given individual we now have four possible combinations shown in Table 4.2. This is a very simple presentation which conceals some complex issues (some of them suggested by the discussion of Table 4.1) which we return to below. What do these four categories represent? The global non-hater (Type 1) might be seen by most people as a psychologically healthy person, presuming they did not have other neuroses. The global hater (Type 3) might be seen as the full-blown neurotic. Type 2 may be seen as possibly someone submissive. This type may conceal within it different types of person. That is, the hate for others could be sublimated and repressed into one’s self due to a position of powerlessness where it is not possible to perpetuate any form of revenge or atonement. Or, it could be ‘pure’ in that the person has a genuine latent self-hate which is never at any point projected onto other people. Type 4 and Type 3 are the more archetypal cases which are easier for us to grasp conceptually without entering into complex arguments about the sources of neuroses. Again, though, there may be different modular routes at work here.

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MULTIPLE UTILITY AND PERSONAL IDENTITY Previously (in Chapter 3), I followed the general trend, in economics of self-control literature, of dealing with attempts to avoid choices that are in some sense ‘bad’ by strategies designed to promote those that are more ‘good’. An individual will try to resolve problems of a fragmenting identity by reining in the bad impulses in deference to the good. The good/ bad polarity comes in either through simple self-interest such as health risks, or through implicit moral considerations. There is no logical reason why a self-control model has to be set up this way round. We might just as well model a drug addict who loves drugs and has no desire to give up but is struggling to control a weakness, who is influenced by other people’s objections to their consumption choices. In the context of hate, it is not necessarily irrational for an individual to follow the teachings of a religious leader who tells them it is the correct thing to do to hate other people. If this notion has been internalized as the idea of ‘good’, then weakness of will may be exhibited in undesirable feelings of tolerance and guilt towards the hatees. Such feelings are documented in the stress felt by Nazi personnel who were not monolithically and ruthlessly hateful. Perhaps then the important point about discussions on metapreferences, self-control and multiple utility is not the matter of self-control and the failure to do good, but the centrality of the person’s identity to their decision-making. Applying familiar economic concepts to psychotherapeutic parlance, we might say that a person with a reconciled identity is in equilibrium, and the person with a fragmented identity is in disequilibrium. An important feature in personal identity maintenance is the relationship with authority. This was featured to some extent in the discussion on suicide. The famous experiments of Stanley Milgram (1963) offered perhaps the most depressing non-naturalistic data in the study of hate. The implications of the Milgram experiments would seem to be that authority and peer pressure could quickly tip rational individuals into catastrophically inhumane acts due to the wish to comply with authority. Compliance with an authoritarian voice can then be a way for an individual with a fragmented identity to bring it into equilibrium. This would not necessarily have to involve hate as it could mean just obeying rules not to do things which have little impact on other people. Going back to Tables 4.1 and 4.2, the disequilibrium of stressful multiple identity authority can mediate in various ways in the modular matrix model of hate. Authority voices can be used to justify the hate of others or to motivate prior states that engender hateful acts and emotions. Authority compliance can be a way of overcoming self-hate (even if this is just a temporary equilibrium) by engaging in satisfaction of the authoritarian demands and thus receiving

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identity-confirming rewards. These may be purely introspectively introverted, for example the camp-following fascist does not need to meet the leader and receive a medal, but their internal conception of the situation gives an internal reward. We have just been discussing bringing others into one’s mental imagery as a means of overcoming the dissonance of fractured identity. The next section explores some additional concepts in this area.

TRANSFORMATION AND PROJECTION By this point we have taken on board the notion of hate as a disequilibrium state of emotion in opposition to the role of a functional state which helps serve the objectives of the individual. Table 4.2 and the four types of hater detailed there require some more explicit discussion of transformation and projection. The classic example of this is in the case of ‘de Clerimbault’s syndrome’ which is a delusional form of romantic obsession (Youngson, 1999), where the sufferer misinterprets every gesture and action of the distant love object (such as a boss, teacher, politician or actor) as resonant with intent for themselves. This involves transformation of signals emitted by an agent, in this case quite innocently, into much ‘bigger’ signals. That is, their meaning content has been amplified and it has also been metamorphosed into something very different from its original intent. The dysfunctional individual projects aspirations, which are unmet in their state of neuroses, onto the chosen individual. In the present case the most logical aspiration to project is that the individual is someone who can provide them with unconditional love, thus they will never be exposed to the pain of rejection or unkind treatment. Given that delusions are not real and can therefore never be fulfilled, any attempt to satisfy them must provoke a catastrophic disequilibrium of some sort. This may be a nervous breakdown, as in the case of the British actress Nicola Paget, who became fixated with Labour party ‘spin doctor’ Alastair Campbell, conceiving a fantasy network of communications when they had not been meeting in reality. This is a case where hate did not ensue because the end state of the process was a breakdown on the part of the projecting individual which effectively involved a withdrawal from the emotional dynamic and a later deliberate reconstruction of the individual’s identity. The unstable equilibrium leads to a collapse and the recognition of a ‘problem’ needing some kind of amelioration if not a full-blown solution. Youngson (1999) comments on cases of this type resolving into hatred where the obsessive individual, finding themselves rejected or treated in a manner short of expectations by the fantasy figure, resorts to the attempted destruction of the fantasy object.

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This might take the form of accusations of harassment at work if the situation is one of an employee–boss nature. Such a response is the opposite way of seeking equilibrium from the non-hating breakdown case. That is, instead of the temporary destruction of one’s self, one attempts to destroy the blocking individual. The attempt to destroy someone’s life through accusations and scheming and so forth, even if it does not involve outright violence, might reasonably be deemed to be hatred. We have just addressed transformation and projection in a specific type of case. Clearly the more general relevance needs to be considered. Indirectly, there is a great deal of qualitative data on this kind of subject. The libraries of the world groan under the weight of books about Hitler, for example; thus we have the writings of historians which likewise cover the Holocaust more generally and other waves of mass extermination. Transformation and projection are two processes which may follow a unilinear sequence in either direction or be reciprocal and continuous, thus rendering them capable of interpretation in the ‘capital’ analogies of modern microeconomics of the Becker type. The popular and specialist use of the term ‘projection’ is usually specific to the case of individuals attributing negative characteristics they refuse to see in themselves. This is a good recipe for hate, especially if there is self-hate driving the process as it absolves an individual from blame and guilt and removes it to another person. More explicitly, one might represent the act of projecting selfhate onto another person as a case of using a substitute. That is, blaming someone else for one’s problems brings higher utility than blaming oneself. Again, pure self-hate and self-hate projected onto others may both be addictive commodities with different parameters. Transformation involves the demotion of the status of a person, thus implying their fundamental rights are fewer. The traditional means of doing this which rings through all histories of war, -isms, phobias and persecutions is to see people as ‘animals’ with perhaps the most popular insult term being ‘pigs’. The pig epithet has the connotations of being fat and/or stupid and/or dirty. A pig is also symbolic of servility. This type of anthropomorphism transforms the economic use of people. Due to the scarcity of resources (amongst other things) we have tolerated low wages and poor employment for people in a market economy. Animals, however, have progressively found that their main function (when they do not get to be companion pets) is to be eaten, as technology eroded their transportation and workforce functions (if they had any, and we may note horses and dogs are not eaten in some cultures but are in others). Or, as technology advances in medicine and cosmetics, they find themselves being used for experiments for the benefit of humans. If animals occupy a lower status than humans, then being designated as an animal exposes one to the risks of

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animal status treatment. This is particularly so if there is a herding effect of behaviour as people seek status and confirmation of identity by joining in. Animal liberationists would of course point out that the mistreatment of animals comes from their ‘non-person’ status, and we observe through history that hate victim groups are often depicted as animals (being called pigs, having monkey chants made in earshot, being portrayed as smelly) or having unwholesomely close relations with them (sleeping with them, having them under the kitchen table). Worse still then, being ‘animalized’ is to be reduced to the status of a vegetable – if you like, ‘vegetabilized’. The widest social use of the term ‘vegetable’ is to describe people who are in near comatose states (without active consciousness but still living) as being in a vegetative state. This adds being nearly dead to the ‘stupid and smelly’ insult repertoire of animal depiction. In January 2006, the former England football manager Graham Taylor was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday show by Paddy O’Connell about his experience of being ridiculed in tabloid newspapers as a ‘turnip’. He claims that he was capable of laughing off such persecution in the guise of humour but found more distressing the fact that he found himself in situations where people felt that they had been legitimized (by his non-person status) into being physically intimidating and threatening to him for no reason other than that he had failed to reach their expectations as a football manager. We may turn full circle from the Taylor story back to the self-hate syndrome. His situation is a classic case of scapegoating. The foundation of his victimhood was to take the blame for the failure of the national football team. This failure represented a threat to the idea of Englishness, in particular the notion of English superiority to foreigners. This may be a throwback to the days of the Empire. Football is a classic bonding ground for the formation of collective identity and thus in economic terms a national failure at football is a significant ‘public bad’, with huge utility losses to many from the failure of a few. We should also note in the Taylor case the use of humour as part of the marginalization of an individual’s status in a projection scenario. Humour is here a strategic means of demeaning the hate object. This will be discussed further below.

HATE IN THE MARKETPLACE The discussion up to this point has made clear that hate is supplied as a commodity in various ways. Given that we could see hate as a form of emotional pollution that inflicts costs on society, there would seem to be incentives for devising means of allowing it to be expressed in a lower cost

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form through ameliorative substitute commodities. If one regards hate as a special form of the general case of information signal problems – which is an interpretation which could be drawn from Glaeser (2005) – then the obvious solution is provision of information. However, there may be blockages to the operation of markets, not least that there are thriving markets in hate as a product. An explicit consumer good in this context (such as a racist pamphlet) can be seen as a capitalization of information and emotion connected to transformation and projection in the construction of individual identity. Such goods will invoke authority, and their consumption implies compliance with the authority figure and thus helps individuals resolve identity disequilibria. Let us suppose that part of the negative social capital of persecution of specific groups is a body of mythology, such as claims that they eat babies of other groups, or that they give off bad smells which cause diseases. This is difficult to actively disprove. So long as there are some inexplicably missing babies, or people claiming to have become ill from the bad smell, a veneer of plausibility can be maintained (see Chapter 6). If conspiracy theories are added to this, for example claims that the hated group has access to positions of power, then we reach the totally unfalsifiable situation where absence of information to corroborate this can be attributed to a cover-up. As stated above, the other side of the market for hate is that markets may provide ameliorative products which help to remove or reduce both the expression of hate and its existence. For example, many forms of music and sport might lay claim to being instrumental in dissolving racial barriers. Sport provides a particularly interesting example of the safety valve situation with respect to ‘ancient hatreds’. All mass-consumed sport is inherently competitive. This means that territorial contests will often bring together groups with ingrained hatreds often derivative of actual wars and conquests taking place many centuries ago. Examples of this in soccer can be found not only in matches between England and Scotland or England and Germany but in club matches in some UK cities where there is a club of Roman Catholic origin and a club of Protestant origin. The safety valve is very much ‘in the marketplace’ as leisure activities must inevitably become commercialized in a market economy. The ameliorative status of some of these activities is ambiguous. The Graham Taylor story (above) already raises doubts about sport. The emergence of rap and hip-hop music caused consternation to those in the core of mainstream media due to fears over the potential it had to galvanize urban discontents and thus raise a storm of the ‘hating the haters’ syndrome enumerated by Glaeser (2005) as a logical economic strategy. Now we have considered

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the wider economic approach to hate, it should be noted that ‘hating the haters’ here does not come from the information bias issue stressed by Glaeser. Rather, extreme criticism of the worst effects of commodities such as rap music and computer games is that it is in a sense a ‘pure commodity hate’. That is, it may not even be satisfying the need to resolve disequilibrium of personal identity but is simply enjoyable for its own sake. This may be due to basic human impulses for domination and conflict that have been attenuated by the veneer of civilization as implied by the brief discussion of sociobiological literature in earlier chapters. It should be pointed out here that we are not re-stating the ‘ancient hatreds’ argument of some political and historical literature, but rather a primeval inbuilt demand for hating something or someone. The pure hate commodity may also produce status-imbued leader figures who arise without coming through a political process, and who have potentially the option of becoming entrepreneurs of hate (see Chapter 7). The most relevant cases for this are the homophobic lyrics (plus video script and on-stage antics) of rapper Eminem2 and Jamaican reggae/dancehall artists, chiefly Buju Banton, Beenie Man, Capleton and Sizzla. Buju Banton’s notorious 1990s hit tune Boom Bye Bye, which he continued to perform at concerts, encourages listeners to shoot gay men in the head, pour acid on their bodies and burn them alive. In these cases representatives of the victims (in the Eminem case, fellow musician Moby and in the reggae case gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell) have accused the artists concerned of being directly responsible for a number of violent assaults. The response of the artists concerned was not to offer the ironic defence or the cathartic safety-valve argument of computer games/violent films/ cartoons. Rather the immediate response was to target more heavily those campaigning against them, thus arousing supporters to attack these individuals. This appears to have abated, as the Moby–Eminem feud seems to have been laid to rest and by July 2007 the four reggae/dancehall artists named above had joined in signing the Reggae Compassionate Act. The agreement follows the three-year-long Stop Murder Music campaign, which resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of the singers’ concerts and sponsorship deals, causing them income losses estimated in excess of 5 million US dollars (£2.5 million). This seems to be a good example of the use of economic power to adjust over-supply of hate, although it should be noted that there are lesser known artists in the genre, vowing to continue the promulgation of hateful entertainment. The option is open for a figurehead to become a hate entrepreneur possibly as an epiphenomenon of their own demand for potency per se. Making people exercise hate of others is a display of personal power and authority in much the same way as bestowing favours on followers. As far as I am

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aware, there are no specific instances of a figurehead emerging from the sport and entertainment field into fully-fledged (that is politically active) hate entrepreneurship. Eminem and the ‘murder music’ artists would seem to have been caught in a spiralling dynamic from the expression of their own ingrained views rather than entering directly into hate entrepreneurship. Commentators have been quick to suggest that these artists have not really changed their views but just made an accommodation to negative publicity. Easily assimilated entertainment products are global commodities. It is not just that the specific products can be exported in their originally produced form by their original producers – they can also be tailored to a very different environment. Chua (2003, pp. 74–5) reports on the arrival of militant black consciousness rap and hip hop in Brazil, but concludes, however, that (p. 75) Brazilian rap is ‘not posing any real threat to whites’, indeed it is very popular amongst the white university students and thus can be deemed to be media assimilated, as in the past with other insurgent pop culture movements. Along with rap music, computer games present attitudes which must seem shocking to the mild-mannered humanitarian. The opportunity is given to not only act out fantasies of killing, but to relish it and to gild the activity with pejorative language towards the victims. The game ‘Carmaggedon’ (see James and Nahl, 2000, pp. 50–51) has features such as extra points and playing time earned for running down pedestrians. The imaginary streets in such games are named things like ‘Maim Street’ and ‘Coastal Carnage’. The presence of punning could be seen as perhaps a classic ‘safety valve’ mentality as it emphasizes that this is ‘fun’ and therefore not ‘real’. The link between play media activity and real-world actions is a long-debated one. In the context of brutal driving games, road rage experts James and Nahl (ibid., p. 52) are keen to deny the presence of any safety-valve benefits. They declined to endorse a computer road rage game due to the fact they ‘disagree with the notion that expressing rage in a game reduces rage in reality . . . practicing acts of torture and murder especially with graphic multimedia effects, can weaken inherent inhibitions, against performing acts of violence’. Similarly, Tavris (1982), in her book on anger, comes out strongly against the safety-valve argument. She claims that the opportunity to express anger in another context, rather than directly at its object, does not dissolve the anger but rather simply gives its subject a chance to rehearse it. The scope for safety valves depends on the type of hatred. For example, consider the case of xenophobia or nationalism versus the animal rights activist or pro-life campaigner. Is the fundamental difference due to the

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role of obsessive transformation and projection rather than the nature of the topics? The difference here is between protecting that which can not help itself (the unborn foetus or the monkey in a cage being maltreated) versus feelings of suspicion and anger towards a fellow human being.

CATASTROPHE THEORY At this point it is worth briefly mentioning a formal technical method of analysing situations that has only made minor incursions into economics. Up to this point in this chapter, we have delved into psychological processes which are outside the core of microeconomic theory. Core economic theory can deal with disequilibrium, and game theory may allow the handling of certain strategic features of hate and hate markets. Where it is weaker is in terms of modelling outcomes as anything other than equilibria or states which could smoothly be transformed into disequilibria. Catastrophe theory is not a regular part of economics although applications have been made of catastrophe theory to economics and other social sciences (see for example Saunders, 1980, ch. 6). It seems appropriate to consider it in a wider economic approach to hatred particularly as there are notable features of hate behaviour ignored by Glaeser (2005), which broadly seem amenable to catastrophe theory models. Saunders (1980, p. 83) writes that the following are characteristics of catastrophes: ‘sudden jumps, hysteresis, bimodality, inaccessibility and divergence’. He does not write about hate but does go on to discuss anger, claiming that catastrophe theory has advantages over standard economic approaches, because anger does not have the property of cardinal utility(?). One ought to note that until the recent outburst of ‘happiness’ research cardinal utility was pretty much banished from the field of research economics even if it regularly intruded into the economic textbook. The logical deduction from Saunders’ claim would seem to be that anger does not have basic properties of a commodity as it is an extreme emotion. By implication, if catastrophe theory is more advantageous for anger it should be even more advantageous for hate given the prior discussion in the present work. Sudden jumps are a prevalent phenomenon in the field of hate, for example, outbreaks of racist persecution which might be defined to include the witchcraft crazes discussed in Chapter 6. Group/representative hate is always with us and yet it can be quite dormant for long periods in terms of mass expression of it. Further, there is no obvious connection between rationally-based trigger mechanisms and the volume of expressed hate. That is, it is not simply the case that a rise in the numbers of

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gays/lesbians/migrants/Jews/whatever has a stable parametric relationship with the number of assaults/incidents/protests against them. At any point in time, there is (if you like) a steady supply of mockery and disrespect to any established religion or political regime or set of beliefs. If we had a steady-state model of emotionally symbolic reactions we might then expect steady levels of hate activity, whereas expressions of hate activity seem to be cyclical. On occasions this is linked to economic activity (chiefly unemployment) but this is far from convincing. Within the context of a conventional economic model sudden jumps could be attributed to shortages in the supply of high productivity hate entrepreneurs. The alternative is the catastrophic explanation. It would appear that the triggers are emotional and symbolic, being linked to threats to identity rather than actual resource threats. This position is taken in the context of profoundly violent intra-national ethnic conflicts, by Stuart J. Kaufman (2001) in his book Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War. The Danish cartoon and Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses fiascoes are good cases in point for both symbolic and catastrophic explanations. We should also note that justification for the application of therapy to the individual neuroses (which may drive hate in the market) has been given by Zeeman’s (1976) application of Catastrophe theory. We should note for completeness that besides the above and the obvious ‘null’ hypothesis of random inflammation, there is still the prospect of a symbolic congruence and salience explanation. We should of course finally note that there is no ‘scientific’ methodology which would categorically differentiate between these explanations. Standard statistical methods can not do the trick. Kaufman (2001) basically draws ad hoc inferences from case studies of four eastern European sites which has obvious problems of selectivity and subjectivity.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have attempted to go beyond the concept of hate used and likely to be used in conventional economic analysis. Previous chapters have treated hate within the context of an individual, with consistent stable preferences, making decisions geared towards maximizing their utility. In contrast, we have looked at a wider framework, where an individual faces issues of the construction of personal identity but still in the overall context of an economic approach. In the following chapters we move from theoretical to applied hate. In practical terms, this refers to how we would go about strategically pursuing

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our need for hate or our need to escape from being the recipient of the hate felt by others.

NOTES 1. Excepting the small amount of economic work on cognitive dissonance discussed in Chapter 3 which only skirts the manner of personal identity in a peripheral manner. 2. In Eminem’s case severe misogyny was also an issue in terms of overtly acting out notions of raping his mother and incitement of other men to kill their wives.

5.

Applied hate in the material world at the individual level

INTRODUCTION So far we have dealt with the theory of hate in terms of its incorporation in models of individual choice. Hate does not take place in a vacuum. It requires some context for its expression such as a romantic relationship or the workplace or a sports event. Even pure self-hatred does not take place in a vacuum as it expresses itself in behaviour which impacts on others, such as suicide or bulimia, and is situated within a perspective on how other people will react. All of the contexts are some form of interpersonal relationship but the degree of genuine voluntary choice varies. The extreme of lack of choice for an adult is where someone is forced to work with or buy from or sell to someone of whom they experience intense hatred because they are so poor that they can not find any other options. Here we find a connection between the volume of expressed hatred and economic factors. There are additional economic situations other than work or direct commodity consumption which may precipitate hatred. The chief of these is being forced to share accommodation which instigates a degree of personal relationship between otherwise unconnected people. Again the scope for exit from this situation is constrained by income. For children and young people, the market may again restrict the ‘exit from hatred’, option in terms of experiencing hatred at school. For the teachers, the problem is again a straightforward one of market forces, for example a teacher in a violent school may be able to exit to a less violent school provided they have the relevant personal capital. One situation where extreme hate is sometimes precipitated combines the features of forced accommodation and forced working relationships. This is the case of the traditional ‘rock’ or ‘pop’ band. Acrimonious splits which take a long time to heal (if they ever do) often involving violence and petty mutually damaging lawsuits. This kind of fact is documented in numerous books and all over the Internet. One good example will suffice. The UK band The Stranglers formed in the 1970s, eventually achieving substantial worldwide success. Lead singer Hugh Cornwell split suddenly without consulting his band members. In his subsequent memoirs he even 80

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finds it impossible to name his former colleagues. The core of the conflict is in his relationship with karate-trained, University of Bradford graduate, Jean-Jacques Brunel, who reputedly propelled Cornwell completely through a dressing-room door or wall, leaving his body shape cut out in his wake. The role of the market in stimulating the volume of hatred by curbing exit potential is fairly obvious. In the rock band case, a desire for continuing success and income forces people who do not want to be together to stay together. In the romantic relationship case, the analogous factor is staying together ‘for the sake of the children’ or (less so in recent times) because of social stigma at severance. All of this can be couched within the narrow utility-maximizing economic approach to hatred as expounded in Chapters 2 and 3. The warring partners may not deliberately set out to obtain utility from hate as such but instead receive it and supply it as negative externalities of the suboptimal situation. Their willingness to stay reflects the benefit from staying exceeding these costs added to other costs. Warring partners may of course resort to abatement technologies such as adultery in the romantic case (cf. Cameron, 2002a) or playing in other bands in the music case. As well as being ‘potential safety valves’ for release of tension like therapy or leisure activities, these can also represent investment in other less hateful options. In terms of a wider economic approach to hatred (Chapter 4), there will be further restrictions on exit from a hate environment due to emotional investment in personal identity. In the rock band situation, a degree of self-hate may be involved in the projected hate of the band member, as being forced to stay with them is symbolic of an inability or reluctance to have a successful career outside the confrontational set-up. In the dissolving parents ‘forced to stay together for the sake of a child’ case, one might expect a projection of hate on to the child as being the cause of the foreclosure of the exit option. The child also represents the failed investment of making a bad choice of partner.

ABUSIVE PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS Most individuals face one or more compulsory relationship due to being born into some form of family. Where people are without family or removed from their family by the state, they will still, in a developed economy, be placed in some relationship with a person(s) acting in loco parentis. This can be a complex set-up. The person who is taken into a care home or fostered walks in a bigger labyrinth of potential hate as they have targets in the replacement parents and the real parents if they are

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eventually uncovered. Hate can here be stirred up by the sense of having been both abandoned and lied to. Expressed hatred of parents and siblings might be seen to some extent as ‘natural’. It is likely to be the first hate most people experience as parents operate as barriers to the desires of the will of the child. Likewise, sibling competition over resources will cause restrictions, and this can cause further felt injustices if parental preferences seem to be skewed towards sibling rivals. If these primal feelings are not mediated by other processes to develop an awareness of the logic (and possibly fairness or benevolence) behind resource restriction, then an individual may develop a reservoir of neurotic aggression, specifically an attitude of ‘doing harm unto others before they do it to you’ as a pre-emptive strategy. Such a reservoir of aggression has constant potential to be a vehicle for transference to later symbols of resource-blocking such as partners, supervisors, employees, colleagues and so on. The essence of this problem is a reluctance to participate in reciprocal relationships. Even a comparatively hate-free early family life is relevant to the overall operation of hate in a wider marketplace due to the potential for disengagement from reciprocity. Barber (2004) (see James and Krebs (2005) for a critique) argues that lack of parental investment in cultivating altruism may lead to a weak development in it at later stages which enhances the ‘bystander’ phenomenon (see below) of not intervening to cushion others from hate. The ‘narrow’ economic approach to such situations is to treat them within the ‘economics of crime’ view where costs are inflicted on serial haters because of the social costs inflicted by their behaviour. This can be applied to the cessation of witchcraft prosecution in developed economies as discussed in the next chapter. In the wider view, we need to look at the ego and identity of emotional investments pertaining to hate. One of the key strategic efforts is to avoid the punishment which may be inflicted by society on account of the individual’s behaviour by: ● ● ● ●

Carrying out the abuse in a way that can not be detected. Engaging the complicity of the victim so they do not complain. Shifting the blame on to the victim. Rewarding the victim on occasions with better behaviour – hence the Jekyll and Hyde love–hate syndrome.

The first of these items does fit squarely in an ‘economics of crime view’ but the others are wider issues. The items on this list are not discussed in the economic literature on domestic violence (see Chapter 3). We may note

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that personal abuse could be linked to the economic analysis of rational addiction. Abuse will be an addictive good if it has intertemporally nonseparable utility. Thus, the amount of abuse in one period influences the marginal utility of abuse in later periods. In an addictive framework, we may have the possibility of ‘binge cycles’ where the supply of acts of hatred jumps up to a high level and then falls back to near zero for substantial periods of time, even though during the time period of such a pattern there has been no shift in the causative parameters. With reference to the school and workplace bullies discussed in the next sections, we should point out that rational addiction does not have to mean that the bullies deliberately set out to become bullies. As emphasized in the paper by Orphanides and Zevros (1995), an individual may through a stochastic process fall upon an addictive good they were not seeking to consume. If bullying does become (or indeed is) addictive, then it would naturally lead the addicted bully to seek out other targets if either themselves or the current targets are removed from the current environment.

SCHOOL Awareness of school bullying by teachers and fellow pupils has been around for centuries and there are many documents of it being institutionalized in rituals within schools (for example the fictional depiction of Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays written by Thomas Hughes in 1857). However, research into bullying at school is only a very recent phenomenon (see Rigby, 2003) no doubt due to the fact that, until recently, bullying was seen as a fact of life about which not much can be done in the way of intervention. Although now growing rapidly, such research was uncommon before the mid-1990s. None of the research on this subject is by economists. Indeed all of it seems to be squarely situated within the middle of a single paradigm. That is, mainstream positivist psychological research. Bullies and victims are studied using video observation, personality scales and questionnaires. Data collected by these means is input into classical hypothesis testing of broadly the same type undertaken by economists. The main bearing of the literature on an economic approach is in terms of the formation of ‘bullying capital’ as a prerequisite for the formation of more general ‘hate capital’. Hate capital of whatever type enhances the productivity of the hater (as discussed in Chapter 3). Bullying at school can be a purely private matter, although there is inevitably an element of social construction to this. Teacher bullying, peer bullying and intimidation of teachers will tend, in the main, to be witnessed by others, unlike some other forms of personal abuse. This aspect is discussed in terms of

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‘bystanding’ in the literature (for example Rigby and Johnson, 2006). Rigby and Johnson report, on pupil-on-pupil bullying, that there is a fundamental schism between different social capital factors. There is a statistically significant effect of peer approval on stated intentions to intervene to help a victim. This contrasts with a null effect for teacher expectation on such behaviour. There are questions about the robustness of such findings as empirical work is small-scale and one-off rather than consolidated across a range of different types of school in a systematic way. It does not attempt to explain in any detail why bystander intervention exhibits a statistical decline with the age of child. It should be noted that the age differences discussed here tend to be in the 8–12 years range where there will be a growing physical differentiation in strength of children. The age decrement might be rationalized in terms of rational game theoretic strategies. Serial bullying can serve a rational function as a means for the perpetrator to obtain success and status in an enclosed economy (such as the playground) when they lack other skills to procure these things. Success in this activity can serve as a marker for leadership qualities in the playground economy. An environment which is economically similar to the playground economy arises in prison (political, legal and for war and forced labour – such as the Gulag – Applebaum, 2003), as the participants do not have their own resource base via trading outside the system. Rather, they are left to compete over a fixed set of resources bestowed by their captors – usually on a nominally equal basis or in proportions based on some notion of need or equity. Although bullying in the prison type of situation by guards may seem obvious, the relevant point here is the tolerance by guards of a hierarchy of bullying amongst the inmates. Such bullying capital has transfer value. The successful bully can rely on their threat potential deterring challenges if they wish to lead in other areas.

EFFICIENCY IN SEEKING OUT VICTIMS As this is a wider group situation rather than the small numbers dynamic discussed in the earlier parts of this chapter, there is scope for permutations of the bullying cluster. Clearly if all members of the global group were equally physically and psychologically strong (and assuming the same about outside resources – friends, relatives they might draw on), there would not be any bullying. Also, if all agents were totally rational there would also be no fighting over territory or position as a Pareto-optimal allocation based on existing strength would be worked out and adhered to.

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A playground is a primitive economy like the Gulag and prison camp where threats and command of others by fear is a viable resource allocation strategy. This is a situation best analysed in terms of non-competitive market structures rather than supply and demand. A very different extreme schema would be to posit one very dominant individual (bullying monopolist) and the rest being much weaker and equal to each other. In this situation different equilibrium outcomes are possible depending on the motivation for the bullying and the degree of characteristic distinction and the distribution of preferences amongst the subordinate individuals who we may designate as ‘the audience’ to represent the social context of bullying acts. We can regard the audience as having a demand for acts of bullying supplied by the dominant to satisfy the sense of order in the playground economy. The dominant figure(s) can be seen as the consumer of the characteristics of the subordinates. Characteristics of the subordinates will divide along personal and social lines. That is, the individuals we have assumed to be equally weak/strong in personal endowments (physical, emotional and mental) can have differing characteristics, such as wider social distinctions along lines of race, religion, ethnicity and class. They may have personal distinctions in terms of height, weight and so on. The issue of the use of distinguishing characteristics to mark out the victim targets highlights the possibility of the school bully as a hate entrepreneur (a concept discussed in full in Chapter 7). The stereotypical depiction of the school bully is as non-entrepreneurial in that they simply have a reign of terror over all those involved, thus creating the bystander problem due to fear. In such a scenario, they would not be making a strategic attempt to market their product (bullying of the weak) by careful selection of targets and the style in which they are bullied. There will be a cost relationship between personal characteristics and the bystander effect. Although bullying might be seen as a form of social deviance, in its entrepreneurial aspects it would capitalize on the presence of social conventions over normality. Thus if we wanted to quantify the targets (that is capital inputs into the bullying product) we would use some type of equation which weights the deviation of individuals from ‘normal’ characteristics. The higher the value of the deviation index, the lower are the costs the bully will face from bystander effects. A strategic bully would cultivate audience aspects which are something beyond bystanding, in that the bystander passively enjoys the bullying output. Enjoyment is enhanced by the impact of technologies such as mobile phones and general cybercommunication in ‘socializing’ this kind of consumption. The nature of the costs the bully will face from bystanding group intervention are as follows:

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● ●

possible loss of position; possible intervention from outside the group, for example the more bystanders there are and the more discontent they feel, the more weight of evidence there is to invoke external intervention; loss of satisfaction from the outcome of the bullying situation; bullying act itself.

It is easy to envisage what will happen when we relax the simplistic assumptions made above, although it becomes more difficult to guarantee any kind of equilibrium. In the playground bullying economy we need to bring into view the nature of utility felt by the bully from bullying. That is, does it have the conventional raspberry jam properties discussed in Chapter 3? If bullying is a commodity, then marginal utility may be a rising function of the strength differential between dominator and victim so that the activity essentially shades into sadism but with no masochistic exchange from the other party. The bully will shun competition and cooperation. As bullying by definition is an expression of a desire for dominance there will be an aversion to rival bullies, and any apparent cooperation should be an uneasy alliance of subordination with weaker fellow bullies. For this reason, organized conflict sport such as boxing (which is something visited on the cowardly bully of Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays) will not be a very good substitute, in the bully’s utility function, as the existence of such contests and their benefits to participants is based on nearness in capacity and the exoneration of ideas of fair play and good conduct. The self-control issue can be of much less relevance here if the cause of the bullying is a lack of civilizing influences which form social capital and/ or emotional intelligence and so on, as the behaviour may be a straightforward extension of the latent will-to-power which the individual has no desire to control. William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, later made into films is a classic depiction of anarchy arising from this.

WORK The comments made about school bullying research apply, by and large, to workplace bullying research also. The major exception is probably that, in this case, research is not carried out through examination of video evidence. Literature in this area largely comes from management and workplace psychology research, although the work of Sutton (2007) discussed below has tipped the issue of dealing with bullying into the mass-market self-help book arena. Economists’ interest in unfair treatment at work

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has focused instead on discrimination via job exclusion, lower wages or promotion disadvantages. In the literature on workplace bullying, there is a tendency to use highly normative terms. That is, rather than just plain ‘harassment’, there is constant reference to ‘moral harassment’ (Schuster, 1996; Rodgers and Gago, 2006) in group actions with a lack of ethics. There are debates about the definition of workplace bullying (see Beswick et al., 2006). Much of the literature tends to catalogue a list of what kind of acts constitute bullying. Besides physical assault, verbal abuse and unfair manipulation of work effort, the checklist on this also tends to mention sarcasm and derisory remarks. In narrow economic terms, we can lump all the ‘negative acts’ enumerated in definitions of bullying as sources of disutility to the victim. The corollary of this is that their ‘real’ or ‘hedonic’ wage falls and we would expect them to quit so long as there is a net expected benefit of higher hedonic returns in the next job. We should, for the sake of symmetry, point out the obverse situation for the bully that they would accept lower wages in a job because of the opportunities it offers to engage in bullying compared to an otherwise identical job. There is little concern, in the research literature, with the objectives of the bullies themselves – there is certainly no attempt to spell out their motivation. Bullying literature is heavily driven by the organizational-level perspective. The general focus is on bullying by those in positions of greater power with the implication that bullying and harassment is an abuse of power. However, there can clearly be horizontal bullying – that is abuse by those at the same position in an organization ladder. This may represent an abuse of collective power if the bullying is from a group of colleagues. It may be a spillover from phobias operating in general society, for example the workplace bullying may be nothing to do with work per se but rather a manifestation of racism or gender bias. Given the focus of the literature on workplace bullying it is not surprising that it does not specifically refer to hate motivations. It is also somewhat lacking in attention to fundamental economic factors that may inspire bullies into bullying acts when they do not intrinsically hate the victims. The most fundamental economic factor is the force of competition in driving firms into the need for cost-cutting, higher productivity and so on. This may create tension in the workplace. This aspect is only covered allusively in the literature on ‘change’ in the workplace (Beswick et al., 2006) where other euphemisms for cold economic reality, such as ‘downsizing’ and ‘rationalization’ dwell. The lack of attention to economic forces has the further consequence that the differences between non-profit and for-profit organizations are not fully explored. Let us briefly consider a stylized economic model which allows for bullying and hate at the workplace. Imagine the following world:

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In a population of N workers there is a randomly distributed collection of dyads of pairs of individuals, Hr the hater and He the hatee. No individual is assumed to hate more than one person or to be hated by more than one person. Each Hr is indifferent about Hes other than ‘theirs’. There is exclusivity of role – that is no Hr functions as an He for any other Hr and vice versa. In addition, there is a capital dimension to the dyadic interaction, namely, it is not necessarily ‘hate at first sight’, although that may occur.

This last point is illustrated in Figure 5.1, which shows the hate functions where exposure increases dislike until there is a tipping point into ‘hate’ which need not be the same for each member of the dyad. Figure 5.1 shows reciprocal mutual dislike functions for D1 and D2 where each has increasing marginal rates of dislike for each other with each further unit of exposure. D2 has a stronger dislike of D1 than vice versa. The diagram shows ‘hate points’ for each at the point where the curve becomes vertical, giving inifinite marginal rates of dislike from further exposure. This is a somewhat technical classification of the hate point. In many circumstances people would believe hate had set in long before this point. Whether or not this hate translates into harassment (or indiscipline for the subordinate) is a matter dependent on a wide range of other factors. When a dyad is formed, there is a set pattern to the interaction, for example let us suppose each member has to spend one hour each week in the same meeting together. We may note at this point that some of the specialist literature on bullying assumes that there has to be at least a weekly occurrence of victim events for the activity to be counted as bullying (see discussion in Beswick et al., 2006). Markets operate as if there were perfect competition for goods and factors, including labour, so that workers are paid their marginal revenue products. In a random sorting process (that is, no attributes correlate with Hr or He status) it could transpire that there is no workplaced interpersonal hatred if the number of dyads is small enough. That is the dyads might never meet or they just would not meet often enough under certain outcome distributions. Of course, they could additionally meet in outside social spheres but we assume this away for simplification. Given these assumptions, the capital nature of the dyadic relationship dictates that utility levels of the parties will change over time. For the victim, there may be increasing returns to this negative relationship capital. That is, at some point the accumulation of past instances makes each new unit of hate from the bully more

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D2

Intensity of dislike

D1

Exposure Figure 5.1

Dyadic hate functions

damaging. If the bully is both sadistic and addictive then there is a potential for a logical spiralling of the negative interaction between the two. If the bully is sadistic to the point where they get increasing marginal utility from the suffering of the victim (we are here ruling out a sado-masochistic dyad where the victim enjoys being hurt by their specific sadist) then the dynamics of the situation are for bullying to escalate. The nature of the hierarchy within the workplace was not discussed above, as we failed to make an explicit assumption about the flow of hate with respect to job responsibility. This can clearly arise from either direction. Hate may arise from resentment of an authority which is imposed on one or from unreasonable behaviour by those in subordinate positions. This may be fuelled by feelings of injustice if the holder of authority has not been legitimated in any way and/or is being abused. This kind of hate gives rise to very direct economic effects when it escalates to the level of

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industrial sabotage. Sabotage can take the form of direct destruction of output, indirect physical damage or obstructing production or more indirect intervention in the form of leaking of secrets. The development of hate in this kind of context is more than just a reification of contested resources as we can clearly see ample evidence of situations of income inequality which do not develop into hate. In this situation, we can have escalation of bullying even if there is no sadistic addiction, because resistance by the subordinate individuals may spark a chain of reactions and counter-reactions as the ego identity of the bully is challenged. In the scenario described above, hate dyads have an influence on productivity. If we have perfectly competitive profit-maximizing firms, the firms which are inefficient because they recruited disruptive hate dyads will be driven out of business as they will be more costly than equivalent firms. This process may lead (if there are few enough dyadic possibilities) to a competitive equilibrium devoid of workplace hate (and possibly bullying). However, if the firms are insulated in some way from competitive pressures then it is possible that the costs of hate can be absorbed. One arena where this potential exists is the non-profit sector. Non-profit status automatically grants some degree of monopoly as it immediately creates entry barriers. The firm may be insulated from the threat of rival supply. Hence the individuals in it may be able to soldier on without dismissal whilst they create pockets of inefficiency from either bullying or bystanding on known bullying. It is also worth noting that in not-for-profit firms, the goals of the firm are more ambiguous due to not being grounded in instrumental financial aims. This can create a protective cover for bullying activities which might even be claimed to be productivity-enhancing. Let us take a stylized example from the arts sector. A director of a theatrical production might be able to bully a performer under the guise of ‘getting the best out of them’ in an entrepreneurial capacity. This situation is further enhanced by the idiosyncratic human capital in such situations. The performer may have invested time and effort that can not be recouped in quitting as this has little transfer value, and thus may find themselves in the sort of ‘forced’ relationship of this chapter. This situation also has powerful potential for bystanding by the other performers due to the risks to their own careers of intervention. For the sake of completeness, we should note that where actors praise the suffering benefits from being subject to gruelling rehearsals and improvisations, this may be a situation of sado-masochism if they get direct utility from the suffering. If this is not the case, then we might deem there to be neither bullying nor sado-masochism if the pain is considered to be worth it for the sake of the artistic product which ensues.

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COPING WITH BULLIES AT WORK: SUTTON’S NO A**HOLE Workplace bullying, like that in the school and the Gulag, looks as if it is intrinsically difficult for the individual to escape. If it leads to stress occasioning reduced performance and absence it may give the bully more ammunition to use. If the bully is at a higher status level there may seem to be no ‘voice’ option to exit. Nominally developed economies now feature support systems within the workplace for the bullied and harassed worker as part of the policy of organizations. This may seem to be a noble achievement in an ideal world but such processes can only work if those with grievances feel they will be listened to and the process does not instead expose them to further risk. Into the void of the downtrodden victim has ridden the flag-waving text of Sutton (2007), exhorting organizations not just to have protective processes and policies for equal opportunity but to promote a ‘No Asshole rule’. One must first deal with the issue of demotic language before proceeding to the substance of the matter. Sutton’s original article used the offending ‘A’ word eight times and clearly used it as a focal point. However, when his manuscript was presented to Harvard University Press it was turned down because of the offending word in the title and text (furthered by ensuring that a self-rating questionnaire has the acronym A.R.S.E.), and thus finally surfaced outside the mainstream academic press. Sutton’s work can be divided into a discussion of the strategies of the bullies and the strategies best used by the victims – the latter part of which has some semblance to a sort of ‘Ghandian economics’. Here is his list of: The dirty dozen common everyday actions that a**holes use 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Personal insults. Invading one’s personal territory. Uninvited personal contact. Threats and intimidation, both verbal and non-verbal. Sarcastic jokes and teasing used as insult delivery systems. Withering email flames. Status slaps intended to humiliate their victims. Public shaming or status degradation rituals. Rude interruptions. Two-faced attacks. Dirty looks. Treating people as if they are invisible.

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This list is not very different from those mentioned above, which are to be found in officially inspired discussions such as Beswick et al. (2006) and corporate leaflets on harassment and bullying. Sutton ups the ante not only by his use of ‘street’ language but also by lavishing some forceful quantification on the productivity issue. The productivity of such methods in eroding the status of the victim is related to the claim that negative interactions have a five times stronger effect on mood than positive interactions. This takes us nicely (if it is true of course!) into a straightforward welfare economics argument about negative externalities. That is, keeping around that ‘very productive A**hole’ may be deceptive if the negative externalities are not accounted for. As for the strategies of the victims, Sutton eschews the nostrums of many books which claim that working harder with passion allows you to get around people who are demeaning and rude at work. Instead, he proffers the idea of developing indifference and emotional detachment whilst concentrating on winning small strategic victories rather than going for an all-out conflict win in a head-to-head with the bully. He also advocates limitation of exposure to the bully. Of course, the best means of limiting exposure is to exit to another job. Like Sutton’s recommendations this is circumscribed by economic conditions. If bullying is endemic to the situation and not a sporadic encounter with a randomly bad person (which would seem to be the conceptual embodiment of how he uses the term ‘asshole’) then one may simply walk into a repeat of the departed situation. This becomes more problematic in a world of asymmetric information as there may be a ‘better the devil you know dilemma’ due to having more information about the current workplace. This means also that the costs of seeking redress may be higher in a new workplace. Sutton’s book is not the only one on the subject livened up by picturesque descriptions of workplace bullies. Texts by Hornstein (1996), Lubit (2004), Babiak and Hare (2006), illustrate a ‘hating the haters’ response in symbolic details of depicting them variously as animals, both sly (‘snakes in suits’) and predatory (‘brutal bosses and their prey’), and as diseases (‘toxic managers’), thus degrading their human status. There is also reference to ‘corrosive’ managers in other literature. All of this gives the bullying managers the qualities of anomaly; that is, people are people, and bad-natured bullying workers/managers lose their people status. Thus a cure can be found by driving them away or healing the sick body (workplace) which their disease has invaded. This is a world where there are no sins, only sinners.

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AMBIENT STRANGERS The above sections dealt with situations where there is some form of relationship between the hater and the hatee which is often partly forced upon them. The most obvious forced relationship is that of birth, as one can not choose one’s parents. Forced parental relationships also arise with adoption and fostering. Throughout history there have also been instances of forced marriage. Forced religiosity belongs in Chapter 7. Things change when we come to the issue of strangers. ‘Stranger’ is a very commonplace word which everyone would presume to understand clearly in the English language. Sociologist Georg Simmel gave the classic treatment of the concept of the stranger as quoted by Peter Lawrence (1976); the stranger is not the man who comes today and leaves tomorrow, but rather the man who comes today and stays tomorrow . . . The stranger is involved in a particular form of interaction; he is not only, by definition, outside the group – he also confronts it. The concept of the stranger refers not to those who are unknown or socially inaccessible, but to those who are present but not integrated. (p. 22)

The important point to be noted here is that we are operating at a level which is prior to, or outside, racism or ethnic discrimination as such, although the archetypal conceptual stranger is the ‘wandering Jew’. As ever, there is an issue as to why negative reactions to strangers, founded on suspicion and distrust, should move up the definitional ladder from extreme dislike or aversion/prejudice to hate, bearing in mind – see Table 1.1 in Chapter 1 – that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of hate is this weak form. We should note that although the ambient stranger is not in a ‘forced’ relationship with the hater/hatee, there are in the examples discussed below elements of ‘forcing’, in that a person may be involuntarily made to consume aspects of the other person’s personality. The obvious case of this is the ubiquitous celebrity whom one may deliberately avoid yet still accidentally encounter on magazine covers, website news front pages and on radio and television shows one has tuned in to for other reasons and so on. If we accept that individuals have a reservoir of potential hate, which can be described as a latent demand in economic terminology, then we may move on to the notion of ambient hatred towards strangers. The idea of using the word ‘ambient’ is to designate the background nature of the bubbling hate reservoir. Ambient hatred towards strangers can take various forms, which can be broadly divided into four. 1.

The token individual of whom one has had no personal experience but who is a representative of some form of stereotype.

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2. 3. 4.

Extended celebrity/success schadenfreude, tipping into hatred. Act-based property infringement. Act-based moral infringement.

I now briefly discuss these in turn, although many of the issues are dealt with in more detail in the next two chapters. The Token Individual The token individual of whom one has had no personal experience but who is a representative of some form of stereotype. The reason for distinguishing the token individual is to make a distinction from the discussion of group hate in Chapter 7. The idea of being ‘token’ is here equated to ambience. The individual represents some aspect to which there is aversion, but this is not inflamed to a hatred level unless there is a salient but random encounter with the individual. Extended Celebrity/Success Schadenfreude Extended celebrity/success hyper schadenfreude tipping into hatred. Here is a selection of quotations from the Cambridge Message Board Celebrity Hate Club – We’re All Neighbours: Published by Jude 1 at 11:03 a.m. on Thursday 20 July 2006. I hate so many ‘celebrities’ i think i may be in danger of dying from all the hate and poison flowing through my veins. Published by Matt Abysmal at 1:25 p.m. on Thursday 20 July 2006. I was going to say that hating celebrities was all a bit pointless, then saw June Sarpong’s name up here and grrrrr just thinking about her whining voice makes me reach out for something to smack her about a bit! :o) Published by swanlike at 9:43 p.m. on Thursday 20 July 2006. Graham Norton HATE him! I’d like to jump on he’s face while wearing my Toe-Tectors then put his head in a blender. Published by BooBoo at 1:26 p.m. on Thursday 20 July 2006. It is ultimately pointless. But if I didn’t hate celebrities I’d hate real people instead and that is so much more dangerous . . . ;) I’d attack them with .. oohhh biros or something.

There are numerous other examples of this kind of thing. One possible approach to this is to suggest that such virulent opinions on celebrities are

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an example of the prevalence of ‘everyday incivility’ (Phillips and Smith, 2003) which is indicative of the weakening of social ties and virtue, which might be seen as a growth in negative social capital. No one is suggesting that celebrities, politicians and those temporarily flicked into the limelight should be protected by across the board anti-hate policing. But what if it results in death threats? A few years ago Swiss soccer referee Urs Meyer, who retired six months after the campaign launched against him by the Sun newspaper, received 16 000 hate emails, including death threats. This was all on account of a decision he made which went against England. In the climate of emotional inflation, death threats seem to be becoming part and parcel of everyday life albeit official statistics are not kept of them (in the USA, death threats are not recorded in harassment at work data). The protagonists in the UK Big Brother case (discussed below in Chapter 9) have had death threats (which were taken seriously by the police) as have others, such as a teenage boy who launched a website arguing on behalf of animal-using industries and researchers. It may seem a long way from (supposedly) light-hearted ad hominem attacks on celebrities and sports persons to such things as racially motivated murderers. However, the underlying issues are fundamentally the same. To wit, the depersonalization of an individual. In a global mediadriven society, many cognitive relationships are not with people but with the perceived images of people. The same process of depersonalization is entailed in becoming a hand-combat soldier or a state-sponsored mass murderer such as an agent of the Holocaust. The corollary to advancing reified depersonalization is emotional inflation in rhetoric. Things speed up, and traditional animalistic metaphor hatred may not be ‘good enough’ for the modern hater. The volume of communications drives down the impact value of any act or statement, and thus these have to be louder. From an economic point of view we could also point out that if hateful acts bring utility which is diminished by socio-technological changes then the individual may feel the need to step up their hatred investments in order to maintain an addictive emotional equilibrium. Amy Chua (2003, p. 19) writes that ‘Americans don’t hate Bill Gates even though he has owned as much as 40 per cent of the population put together’ as she attempts to sharpen the connection between income inequality-based hatred and ethnic disparity. But is this true? She provides no evidence other than (a few pages later) some vague opinion poll evidence in respect of public feeling about anti-trust actions against Microsoft. There are two aspects of any untruth. Firstly, Bill Gates may be universally hated for reasons that are not primarily to do with his vast wealth. Hence, Americans would also hate him. Secondly, Americans may

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hate him because of his immense wealth but here we enter into the terminological quagmire again. If they write disgruntled emails about him and forward vicious jokes but stop short of firebombing his office or arranging a campaign to depose him of his position, then do we call this just ‘resentment’ as he is clearly a lot better off than someone in Hitlerian Germany or massacre-era Rwanda? On the other hand, it was reported in December 2006 in the UK press that celebrity (in the pure sense of having no performing or entertaining talent) Jade Goody, known for coming fourth in television’s Big Brother, stripping naked thereon and exhibiting many extreme signs of lack of education, was effectively hounded out of her house and forced to move by persistent harassment before the furore over racism broke out in the Celebrity Big Brother programme in which she appeared. It might be noted that some convicted child sex offenders have managed to live in ordinary streets with less abuse than this. Act-based Property Infringement The obvious case of property infringement would be hatred towards someone who steals something from you. This could be tangible property but it could also be intellectual property such as ownership of songs, texts, computer code and so on. The latter is not really ambient as it emanates from the working relationship context. The obvious example to choose here is the ‘neighbours from hell’ case which has been the subject of many populist television programmes. One case of this type even led to a murder in the UK (in December 2006). Being a neighbour is not necessarily a forced relationship as it is possible to forgo relationships with neigbours unless matters of property come into the picture. Such things as excessive noise are a property matter due to the breaching of shared amenity (quiet). The neighour situation can expand into sadistic addiction but it still is essentially an ambient stranger situation in the sense that it is unlikely anyone is strategically choosing their residence in order to increase the chances of finding specific individuals to annoy. Leaving these matters aside, I would like to focus on perceptions of ‘road rage’. This is a classic ambient stranger problem as individuals are pushed into conflict for no reason other than sharing a public good (the road) at the same point in time. Road rage is distinct from ‘neighbours from hell’ as it is not a case of recurrent conflictual relationships between the same hate dyads. Road rage is one of the more nebulous hate phenomena of our times. The term was coined by the British press in the late 1990s, although the area where it gets most attention seems to be the USA. Being as nebulous as it is, it is not possible to make claims about international differentials

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in road rage, as appropriate statistics do not exist given the lack of definitions, lack of clarity of criminal offence status and lack of collecting effort. According to Scott (2000, p. 2), road rage is ‘quite unlike other forms of interpersonal violence’, thus making its interpretation a formidable challenge for researchers and, by implication, a distinctly problematic area for conflict resolution practitioners (see Chapter 8). Why does Scott claim it is unique? The reasons are: ● ● ●

It involves strangers. It is related to a driving incident. It hinges upon invasion of personal ‘space’ and thereby is a challenge to identity.

The second of these appears truistically irrelevant. From the overall thrust of the present work, one would be led to conclude that the others are common characteristics of many hate situations. Scott goes on to present a catalogue list of the ‘every reason I can think of for road rage’ style and then seeks to use the identity theory of Northrup (1989) to explain the phenomenon. The major statistic which is presented is that the vast majority of drivers are angry whilst on the road without the necessity of any precipitating events to generate the anger (according to one commissioned USA survey). Driving is an intrinsically aggressive activity as one is in charge of a potentially lethal machine, and being forced to share common property in an uneasy alliance in the context of a culture which heavily stresses individual ownership. We might state that some individuals act ‘as if’ they own the road and hence any use by other people which reduces their own amount of ownership is seen as an infringement of property. From this unreasonable point of view, extreme anger about being cut up, overtaken and so on is entirely rational. The issue arises, as with another media favourite, soccer hooliganism, as to whether the road is just a ‘site’ for aggressive activity which does not have anything additional about it to cause violent behaviour. That is, if we control for all the other factors present – such as large numbers of tired, frustrated, bored people stuck together in close proximity – we may find that far from there being road ‘rage’, there is an actuarially small amount of traffic-related conflict. To given an analogy, let us suppose that shopping in supermarkets had the same characteristics as the use of roads, for example very long queues at crucial times, cramped aisles which increase collision and ‘overtaking’; would we find statistically greater or less incidence of ‘rage’? Admittedly, I have seen the term ‘supermarket rage’ being used consequent on a specific event in the USA but have also seen road

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rage discussion groups wondering why there is not more supermarket rage. Finally, we should note that these kinds of rage may be candidates for analysis by catastrophe theory. Act-based moral infringement According to Marcel Dekkers (2000, pp. 128/9), a man in Manchester was threatened with death after his act of masturbating a dolphin garnered media attention. This last case brings to the fore the fact that ambient stranger discrimination is the hotbed of death threats and even assaults, such as those vented on the houses of suspected paedophiles when there is heavy publicity about this activity. In such circumstances, citizens’ level of hate takes them into a vigilante pose as we would normally expect such cases to be dealt with through the due processes of law. The due process of law is a symbolic embodiment of ‘normality’ in a developed economy. Moral infringements, such as sexual congress with sea creatures, lead to hatred of the deviant which may acquire scapegoat status. The moral objections may be group-based. For example, the encroachment of the supermarket giant Tesco, on all aspects of UK life has led to regular expressions of virulently hostile sentiments despite its attempt to promote ethical trade. This is a simple extrapolation of the big business=bad thing mentality spurred on by some specific events. Going further up the macro-hate scale we find hatred of other nations not due to xenophobia but due to moral judgements about imperialism or cultural hegemony. For example, Chua (2003, p. 240) claims ‘there are a surprising number of Australian websites filled with the assertion that the Unites States “deserved” the attacks of September 11’ although she gives no evidence to support this. Such a statement, of course, requires a null hypothesis as to how much expressed cyberhate of Americans by Australians you expect there to be.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have looked at individual hate in the sense of hating someone primarily as themselves rather than the representation of a group or a symbol of some wider psychological or sociological phenomenon. Admittedly some workplace hate will be dynamically related to the symbolism of hierarchy and subordination. In the next chapter, we will look at a case where a wider symbolic hate is involved. Purely individual hate may spring spontaneously in a ‘blind’ manner. That is, like its polar opposite of ‘love at first sight’ it may spring forth without any apparent prior

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prompting. This may or may not have a rational basis but even if it does not have a rational strategy of pursuing, it may be followed. As ever it is not easy to pinpoint what is and what is not rational in terms of choices. It may seem understandable why someone would develop hate in response to unjust and equitable treatment by an abusive individual or on the other hand why someone may hate someone who blocks their desires and thereby causes them frustration. When it comes to the ambient stranger hatred we would seem to need broader sociobiological explanations. The next two chapters will look more widely at social hate. In this chapter, the social dimension has largely been considered in terms of the market processes whereby haters and hatees may be sorted into or out of market sectors.

6.

Hate in the air: the economics of psychic possession

INTRODUCTION We have discussed in previous chapters the rational basis for individual interpersonal hatred and have also considered means of expressing it and strategies for attempting to satisfy its needs. These were in the domain of the material world, for example if one bullies someone at work, such as refusing to allow them a lunch break, then direct material support is being overtly withdrawn from the victim. In this chapter, we move beyond the material world into the realm of using purely mental force to impose the pain costs of being hated on the victim and also to satisfy the needs of the hate emotion by causing discomfort and resource loss to the person, and in the limit killing them possibly in a painful and horrible manner.

CLARIFICATION AND DEFINITION This chapter title contains the term ‘psychic possession’ because I would argue that the underlying core of all para-material hatred projection is psychic possession. That is, the true apex of hate towards someone is the desire to be totally in control of their destiny. In the material realm, this would be reflected by not simply wanting to kill someone but to prolong a period of suffering and mental anguish. This would particularly typify ideas about revenge. Psychic possession thus covers what has traditionally been called in various times and places: magic, magick (Aleister Crowley’s term to distinguish occult practice from stage ma