4 Alla ricerca del batticuore

Alla ricerca del batticuore

We Are All Control Freaks—and Need to Be – Rush: Why We Thrive in the Rat Race by Todd G. Buchholz

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What’s the Big Idea? You can’t and shouldn’t avoid the anxiety that comes with work and freedom.

Note:L’IDEA DI FONDO

Good luck trying to erase anxiety from your life. There is no escape route from anxiety even if one withdraws from contact with other people. Do you think hermits are happy?

Note:L‘EREMITA INFELICE

Escapism cannot make us happy for a meaningful period of time.

Note:FUGA INUTILE

Why do kids like to be tossed in the air or whirled overhead like the Scottish hammer throw at the Highland games? When a child is tossed or swung in the air, his heart races, his pulse quickens,

Note:CERCHIAMO IL BATTICUORE GIÀ DA BAMBINI

The toddling child is not just playing a physical game with himself—he is also re-creating himself, morphing from a crawling character into a walking character.

Note:RICREAZIONE. RISETTAGGIO

Unfortunately, as adults we are often discouraged from going beyond baby steps. We even talk ourselves out of taking prudent risks. Why bother studying for that GRE to get into grad school? We might flunk. Why bother asking the attractive woman out on a date?

Note:SUBENTRA LA PRUDENZA

It’s spectacularly easy to find doubters who will reinforce our fears. On the eve of launching her cosmetics company, Mary Kay Ash was sitting with her husband at the breakfast table, going through their business plans. They had saved up $5,000 and were ready to commit their entire bank account to secure a small office with a few desks and to start manufacturing sample skin creams. Suddenly, her husband grabbed his chest and slumped over. A fatal heart attack killed him. All of Mary Kay’s professional advisers told her to tear up her plans. She went forward anyway,

Note:I FRENATORI

TWO KINDS OF ANXIETY

The first comes from recognizing all the confounding choices we have to make in life. Should I quit my job? Where should I send my kids to school? Should I file my tax return using the 1040 long form or short form? Should I return the phone call from my mother (yes!)? Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom.”

Note:ANSIA DA LIBERTÀ

There is, of course, a different type of anxiety, and it is more dangerous and hurtful than the dizziness of freedom. It comes not from facing too many choices, but from seeing too few choices, a lack of freedom. This anxiety can emerge on a macro scale—for example, the Chinese government that won’t let you have a second child or move to another province.

Note:ANSIA DA SCHIAVITÙ

the anxiety of freedom is far more inviting because it gives people the potential to re-create themselves.

Note:SUPERARE LA PRIMA

THE TYRANNY OF THE TODDLER

A two-year-old understands the command, but not the rationale. She understands “cause and effect” only when she is the prime mover, or when she witnesses the catalyst. She sees that some things she likes to do elicit applause, while other acts generate a scold. This dichotomy, write Ralph Ross and Ernest van den Haag, “literally puts the fear of God into us—the

Note:REGOLE INSENSATE

research shows we get a high from exerting control over our environment; in contrast, we plumb depths of despair when we are shackled. Toddlers enjoy deliberately dumping their applesauce onto the floor and watching us clean up… Little kids need to make things happen. It’s not enough for Mommy to push the stroller….

Note:BISOGNO DI CONTROLLO

THE SCIENCE OF CONTROL

In The Trial, Josef K., accused of an unnamed crime by an unnamed authority, suffers humiliation, and devolves into a jittery wreck, so helpless he cannot even kill himself. His last words: “Like a dog!”

Note:KAFKA E LA MANCANZA DI CONTROLLO

For Seligman’s experiment, the immediate question was this: Could he demoralize mutts? Seligman harnessed a variety of dogs and divided them into three groups. One group would receive electric shocks but have the ability to turn off the shock by pressing on a panel. The second group would feel the shocks but have no tool to stop them. For this key group, the world became a place of unknown and unpredictable danger. Shocks were inescapable. Finally, a control group received no shocks. Seligman then devised a clever apparatus to test the impact of this conditioning. He put each dog in a “shuttle box,” essentially a box with two rooms divided by a low barrier. In the first room, the dog would again receive a shock. But the dog could avoid further shocks simply by jumping over the divider. Here was the question: Would the dogs take advantage of the easy escape route? Seligman witnessed that overwhelmingly the control group jumped away from the pain. Most of the first group, which had learned how to shut off a shock, leaped to safety. Yet about two-thirds of the second group, which had been demoralized by inescapable, mysterious shocks in a prior setting, could not muster the energy, drive, intellect, or morale to climb over the barrier.

Note:GLI ELETTROSHOCK DI SELIGMAN… LEARNED HELPLESSNESS

Learned helplessness turns us into emotional wrecks by robbing us of motivation and our ability to learn.

Note:ABBANDONO ALLA SORTE

In Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago , prisoners are not emotionally destroyed simply because they are shivering in frigid “reeducation” camps. The brutal weather does not do them in. They are dehumanized because they feel they cannot escape the irrational,

Note:ARCOPELAGO GULAG

As Seligman did with mutts, Hiroto divided students into three groups. The first group would wear headphones through which they would hear loud, irritating noises. A button on the headphone would allow them to stop the sound. Thus, the noise was escapable. The second group wore headphones and was told they could turn off the sound. However, the experimenter lied, and the button on the headphones did nothing. Their irritation was inescapable. The third group received no noise stimulus… He sent all the students not into shuttle boxes for dogs but into rooms where they would hear a noxious, loud noise. But this time all groups had the ability to spot a lever and then push on it to turn off the sound…. Would the students push on the lever, or endure the pain? Almost all of the control group and the first group quickly grasped the task, found the lever, and escaped the noise 88 percent of the time. The second group, hobbled by their prior experience, fumbled with the lever, deployed it inconsistently, and thus suffered through the noise in about 50 percent of the instances….

Note:HIROTO. IL SELIGMAN FATTO CON GLI UOMINI

We are born helpless, quickly become control freaks as babies, and then spend our lives deciding when to relinquish power and when to take it.

Note:PARABOLA

Perhaps this overriding issue in our lives explains why the Alcoholics Anonymous “Serenity Prayer,” made most famous (and likely composed) by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, shows up glazed onto coffee mugs, printed on posters, and knitted into wool caps sold at church flea markets: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; and Wisdom to know the difference.”

Note:SERENITY PLAYER

WATER PLANTS, SAVE LIVES

More control over our lives tends to build up confidence. Now, I am perfectly aware that overconfident people can do a lot of damage. Just look at all those financial fund managers drunk on illusions of their own talent.

Note:ECCESSI DI FIDUCIA

The effectiveness that a child experiences when he figures out how to hold a cup of milk without spilling, or how to tie his own shoes. This boosts pride, and it is a pride based on actual accomplishment,

Note:ORGOGLIO

In 1976, Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin, two intrepid psychologists, visited a 360-bed nursing home in New England called Arden House. On one of the floors, they placed houseplants in each of the rooms. Caretakers watered the plants. This was the “baseline” floor. On the fourth floor, they put the old people to work, forcing them to choose the plants, the location for the pots, and then left it to the elderly to fetch and pour water into the pots from time to time. Eighteen months later the psychologists returned, expecting to see a lot of dead rhododendrons. They tested the residents and found that though all the participants were quite frail at the start, the fourth-floor residents proved more alert and cheerful.

Note:PIANTE NELLA CASA DI RIPOSO: L’IMPEGNO CI FORTIFICA

John Cage provides experimental “chance” music, and Dali bends dreamy watches like limp body parts, but they still end up with more order than the buckets of ink they start with.

Note:L‘ORDINE SI IMPONE

So many of the critics who portray our lives as an empty rat race, in which we display the moral character of acquisitive rodents, misperceive this race. We are engaged in an effort to create value in the world, to take the stuff we see about us and reimagine it.

Note:CREAZIONE DEL VALORE

WHY DO PEOPLE WHO DON’T NEED TO WORK, WORK MORE?

Here is a simple question: If the world is a wicked rat race, why do people with so much money work so many hours? Shouldn’t they take more vacation?

Note:PERCHÈ I RICCHI LAVORANO DI PIÙ?

First, “they just want more stuff so they can show off.” But if bragging were the motivation, what is more boast-worthy than a vacation in Tuscany,

Note:LA RISPOSTA SBAGLIATA

Second, “they may be paid a lot of money as lawyers or bankers, but they are like slaves to their bosses.” But if hardworking people put in extra hours because they must kowtow to some pooh-bah, why do entrepreneurs and the self-employed work even more hours than anyone else?

Note:SCHIAVI DEL LAVORO?

Thorstein Veblen, the colorful Midwestern economist born the son of Norwegian immigrants, suggested in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) that rich people love to lounge around and hope others catch them with umbrellas in their drinks. Veblen thought the walking stick was a great advertisement, for a man with a stick in his hand, rather than a wrench, must have time on his hands.

Note:VEBLEN

Now, I have seen enough clips of Paris Hilton and other “celebrities” to know that rich, ninny layabouts do exist. And I will sprain my finger to flip a television channel as fast as I can to avoid seeing them. (But, my gosh, don’t Paris Hilton and her cohorts work awfully hard to get themselves looked at?) When we examine the data for high-earning people, we see far less conspicuous hours at the spa and far more hours at the office or in traffic trying to get to the office.

Note:PARIS HILTON È UN’ECCEZIONE

Though I am loath to give Paris Hilton one more pixel of attention, let me contrast her to the patriarch of the family fortune, Conrad Hilton. Like Veblen, Conrad’s folk came from Norway, but while Veblen’s folks settled in Wisconsin, Conrad’s headed south to the New Mexico Territory, where Conrad was born in 1887. A tall, lean man who always watched his weight, Conrad built a worldwide hotel brand from a small boardinghouse in a two-horse town. And he did it with hard work. That first hotel, bought in 1919 in Cisco, Texas, was in his eyes a “cross between a flophouse and goldmine.” In the 1920s he added a dozen more. Then the Great Depression hit, the hotels suddenly emptied, and the remaining guests ducked out without paying their bills. Conrad lost his fortune. But he climbed out of debt working six days a week and scanning the country and the globe for new opportunities. In 1963, Time magazine paid tribute to his work ethic: “In his 76th year, a full decade after most businessmen retire, Hilton is busy spotting the world with hotels wherever the U.S. tourist and businessman alight, girding the globe with new links in the longest hotel chain ever made.”

Note:CONRAD HILTON, LA REGOLA

When I was doing research for a book on legendary CEOs, I was stunned to learn how bold, fearless, and energetic entrepreneurs like Akio Morita from Sony and Estée Lauder were.

Note:ENERGIA!

This phenomenon is not limited to the phenomenally rich. Wide-ranging surveys show that highly paid people do put in more hours than just about anyone else. Are they tricked into putting in more hours? Unlikely, since the hardest-working people seem to be the ones with the most education.

Note:REGOLA: PIÙ ISTRUITI PIÙ LAVORATORI

When I was teaching economics to Harvard undergraduates, I would occasionally bring up the “backward bending supply curve.” This was a fancy graph that basically conjectured that if you paid people too much, they would cut back their hours. Obviously, having reached their financial goals, they would substitute leisure for work. In reality, few people cut back on their hours when they get a raise.

Note:EFFETTO REDDITO NULLO SUL LAVORO

So, why do rich people keep working? Why do smart, highly paid people work more hours? Why do the self-employed work more than anyone else? Get ready for this answer: Work makes us happier, more eager to wake up the next morning. Those frontal cortexes of ours like us to move forward.

Note:TESI: IL LAVORO CI RENDE FELICI

Why do the wealthy and the self-employed work the most? Because they can! Because they have the control and power to put in more hours. Moreover, they clearly see a connection between working harder and achieving the psychological glow that comes with success. They want to be proud of themselves more than they want to be surrounded by fawning waiters at the beach club. Self-employed people are 29 percent more likely to work over forty-four hours a week than the average, and 63 percent more likely than those who work at nonprofit foundations.

Note:L’ IMPRENDITORE

PEOPLE LIKE THEIR JOBS, EVEN IF THEY DO GRIPE

In fact, most people really like their jobs. A random sample of over twenty-seven thousand Americans between 1972 and 2006 showed that 86 percent were satisfied with their jobs, with nearly half describing themselves as very satisfied.

Note:SODDISFATTI

If the social critics are right and we are in a vicious rat race, shackled to a quick-spinning hedonic treadmill, wouldn’t you think that knowing someone’s income would help you predict his happiness level? After all, those who slip in income would slide off the treadmill as their “superiors” go shopping at Saks. But here’s the truth: Personal control predicts happiness much better than income. Someone who earns peanuts at the zoo, but decides when to feed the elephants and when to take his own break, may be happier than (a) the emeritus executive who still gets a fat paycheck though no one listens to him anymore, or (b) the harried dentist who has to ask his office manager when he can slip out to the bathroom.

Note:REDDITO CNTROLLO FELICITÁ

GO WITH THE FLOW—TO WORK

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed the concept of “flow,” a state of mind that arises when we are completely entranced, enthralled, and absorbed by an activity. Time flies when you are a potter and love the whirl of the wheel, or when you are Dizzy Gillespie lost in a bebop riff.

Note:FLOW

Do you ever wonder why Norman Mailer always looked like he was scowling? Writers, musicians, and artists, who would seem to score high on a flow scale, tend to be more prone to depression. Extroverts are happier. Showing up for work and bumping into coworkers in the restroom and around the coffeepot points us toward happiness. Entrepreneurs are happiest when they begin bringing other people into their venture, and sharing their enthusiasm. In contrast, flow in front of a lonely typewriter is not a recipe for happiness,

Note:ESTROVERSI BISOGNO DI OSTENTARE/CONDIVIDERE

WORK HELPS US RE-CREATE OURSELVES AND CREATE TOMORROW

Greed and envy do not explain the extra hours of work, despite the Edenist screeds. A different psychological/neurological drive is playing out: Work rides the waves of chemicals we discussed in the previous chapter. Work charges up our brains with dopamine when we start anticipating a new success.

Note:LAVORO E DOPAMINA

Daniel Gilbert has cleverly noted that we get no kick from watching a recording of Monday Night Football on Tuesday, even if we did not know who won: “Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!” We want the freedom to control

Note:PARTITE REGISTRATE

We want to feel good about our success. We want to deserve our pleasure. Guilty pleasures are reserved for Godiva chocolate. People who do not feel responsible for their own success feel sadder 25 percent of the time. That’s why lottery winners usually lose their giddy smiles pretty quickly.

Note:SENTIRSI RESPONSABILI

Bill Gates did not have a vision of dollar bills stacked up to the moon and back. He had this vision: I can see a computer on every desk. Steve Jobs imagined an iPhone in every hand.

LA VISIONE DI GATES

Malthus sconfitto dalla globalizzazione

Malthus sconfitto dalla globalizzazione

THE GOOD NEWS The End of the Malthusian Trap – Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding–And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

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The Irish potato famine occurred at a time when Ireland was actually exporting food—again, the problem was absolute poverty, not absolute lack of resources. Between 1979 and 1984, Ethiopia saw food production decline a modest 12 percent, while Zimbabwe saw food production decline by as much as 38 percent. Yet it was Ethiopia that saw massive famine while Zimbabwe, which had put in place extensive prevention programs under the recently elected Robert Mugabe, did not.

Note:POVERTA’ ASSOLUTA NON E’ MANCANZA DI RISORSE

Since the turn of the nineteenth century, the most popular vision of global dystopia has been fueled by the Reverend Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. A people incapable of stemming its urge to breed, Malthus argued, overwhelms a country’s resources to the point that the only check on population growth is near-starvation. In the twentieth century, the vision was globalized in works including Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which warned, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”

Note:PESSIMISTI: MALTHUS E EHRLICH

recolonization. Related to this, it is often suggested that the industrialized world’s escape from Malthusian stagnation to modern economic growth contains important lessons for the developing world of today.

Note:RIVOLUZIONE INDUSTRIALE PUNTO DI SVOLTA

MALTHUS’S INSIGHT: THE MASSES ARE SEX-OBSESSED BREEDING MACHINES

“the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it,”

Note:LA PREOCCUPAZIONE DI MALTHUS

The simplest version of the Malthusian model suggested that the birthrate in a country was set by customs regulating fertility, the death rate by income, and income by the size of the population. Lower incomes led to a higher death rate, declining populations led to higher incomes.

Note:IL CICLO MALTHUSIANO

the only hope Malthus saw for raising general standards of living was to change fertility behavior.

Note:LA SPERANZA DI MALTHUS: CONTROLLO DELLE NASCITE

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR MALTHUSIAN TRAPS

In the UK, population size and wages shared a close relationship until around the 1800s. Wages in Britain (and across Western Europe) rose dramatically after the Black Death killed a large part of the workforce in the fourteenth century and then declined as populations recovered. Indeed, from 1200 to 1650 there was seemingly complete stagnation of the production technology of the British economy; GDP changed hardly at all, and any rise in population was offset by a proportionate fall in income per capita. More people working the same land made each individual worker less productive, as suggested by Malthus.2 From 1650 until the nineteenth century, innovation in the UK did allow for a slow expansion in output, but not at a fast enough rate to outpace population growth, so GDP per capita remained stagnant. Only with the Industrial Revolution did the link between population and wages break down,

Note:EVIDENZA MALTHUSIANA. E ROTTURA CON LA RIVOLUZIONE INDUSTRIALE

THE WORLDWIDE ESCAPE FROM LIMITS TO OUTPUT

Only with the advent of the nineteenth century do we see the spread of sustained GDP growth above 1 percent as the Industrial Revolution took hold. The nineteenth century brought considerable diversity in GDP performance, with some regions including Asia and Africa seeing very sluggish growth while others (including Europe) took off with growth rates climbing above 3 percent. Conversely, the twentieth century has seen rapid GDP growth everywhere. And following World War II, developing countries saw particularly impressive GDP performance, with Asia leading the way.

Note:LA ROTTURA CON MALTHUS

More recently, between 1960 and 2000, among the 102 countries for which the World Bank has data, only the Democratic Republic of the Congo saw negative GDP growth rates.

Note:DAL 1960

The upshot of the story is that Malthus, at least for the period since the Industrial Revolution, was wrong. Not just wrong about Britain, but wrong about everywhere. Countries rich and poor alike are seeing output growth.

Note:SINTESI

In the second half of the twentieth century, global GDP increased almost seven-fold, agricultural output approximately tripled, and population only a little more than doubled. Global cropland per capita has approximately halved since the 1950s, while daily food supplies per capita have increased by around a quarter. And worldwide, there are now as many people overweight as malnourished (around 1 billion).

Note:XX SECOLO, SECOLO DI PROSPERITA’

THE TRAP FALLS APART

Looking across African countries suggests that there is no significant positive link from GDP per capita growth to subsequent population growth. And countries where incomes rise fast don’t see life expectancy increase much more rapidly than countries where income has increased more slowly

Note:POPOLAZIONE-REDDITO: ALTRO LEGAME CONFUTATO

NEO-MALTHUSIANISM

neo-Malthusian versions involve civilizations relying on unsustainable practices to promote growth. These practices lead, at some point, to environmental overload and social catastrophe.

Note:NEOMALTHUSIANI E SOSTENIBILITÀ

Consider the rise and decline of the Mayan civilization between 250 and 1000 A.D., discussed at great length by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed… In the case of Copan, to grow enough food, Mayan farmers cut down forests and cultivated land on the steep hills around the city, which rapidly eroded, blanketing the valley with less fertile soil runoff. Skeletal remains suggest the average health of an inhabitant of Copan began to fall as this occurred—there…

Note:JARED DIAMOND SUI MAYA

It is true that the modern global economy, 24 times its size a century ago and around 390 times as large as it was a millennium ago, is using natural resources at a phenomenal rate. Global copper output increased 23 times between 1900 and 2000. Output of aluminum increased 10,760-fold. Oil production increased about 380-fold… Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased from 295 parts per million in 1900 to 381 parts per million in 2005. Concentrations of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, are increasing at the rate of 1 percent per year….

Note:TURBOECONOMIA E RISORSE NATURALI

Technological change and market forces may reduce the demand for, or reduce the disruption caused by, resource depletion. The operation of such processes in the past is what has given the lie to earlier predictions of imminent global environmental and economic collapse. For example, in 1980 economist Julian Simon challenged Paul Ehrlich to a bet. Ehrlich—author of The Population Bomb and an environmental millenarian—argued that increasing populations in a world of finite resources would lead inevitably to scarcity and so to price increases. Simon offered Ehrlich a long list of raw materials, any time range longer than a year, and a bet that those commodities would be cheaper in the future than they were in 1980. Ehrlich chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten, and a time frame of ten years. In 1990, all five had declined in price, and Ehrlich paid up,

Note:SIMON (LA BESTIA NERA DEI MALTHUSIANI) E L’INNOVAZIONE

Production and consumption, rather than population, are the central concerns.

Note:PRODUZIONE E POPOLAZIONE

INNOVATION AND UNCERTAINTY

Rapid technological advance and diffusion are key to the global escape from the Malthusian trap. Technology has allowed massively increasing global agricultural production, and it has also allowed a growing percentage of economic output (even in the poorest countries) to come from manufacturing and services, providing other sources of wealth than farming.

Note:TECNOLOGIA E FUGA DA MALTHUS

Another set of technologies that have spread are a range of simple health practices that have played a considerable role in reducing mortality, as we will see, and this reduced mortality has been a spur to smaller family size worldwide.

Note:SANITÀ E TACNOLOGIA

Africa is mired in income poverty not by the laws of nature but (if there is any simple explanation) by its institutional history.

Note:LA VIA ISTITUZIONALE

We may not know the secret to rapid income growth for poor countries in Africa or elsewhere, but we do know that the beliefs of a long-dead English parson hold little relevance. While populations have grown worldwide, the threats of both starvation and ill health have receded. The next chapter discusses evidence regarding improvements in the global quality of life in greater detail.

Note:MALTHUS HA PERSO

The Great Convergence in Quality of Life

Henry VIII, sexual carnivore and king of England for most of the first half of the sixteenth century, died at the age of fifty-five—possibly of syphilis, probably of an untreated case of type 2 diabetes. At about the same time in China, the Jiajing Emperor died of mercury poisoning at age fifty-nine, after a reign of forty-five years. Fast-forward to the start of the twentieth century. Queen Victoria died as the result of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1901 at age eighty-one—after the longest reign of any woman in history. Meanwhile, in China, the Tongzhi Emperor was born and died within Victoria’s reign—he passed away aged eighteen, of smallpox. Vaccination against the disease had been made compulsory in the UK twenty-two years earlier. Moving to the start of the twenty-first century, we find Queen Elizabeth still hale and hearty at eighty-four. So is former Chinese premier Jiang Zemin, who is the same age.

Note:LA QUALITA’ DELLA VITA DI UN RE DEL PASSATO

The discovery and exploitation of a range of health technologies, combined with improved nutrition, eventually drove a wedge between European life expectancy and that in the European empires in the nineteenth century. But the worldwide spread of such technologies and of nutrition has seen the global gap in health outcomes shrinking again over the past fifty years. A similar story of growing global inequality followed by convergence in the recent past applies not just to health but also to education, rights, and infrastructure access.

BALZO IN AVANTI E CONVERGENZA: SIAMO TUTTI DEI RE