Generation Bubble

Psychologists have long since identified and tested in laboratory conditions the “status quo bias,” a force that leads us to need more than what would constitute a rational incentive by economists’ rules in order to prompt us to alter our established behavior. Rather than questioning who stands to benefit from the status quo, the status quo bias lets us pin the blame for reproducing things as they are, with all the existing inequities, on irrational, short-sighted individuals (i.e., us) who are wired to resist change and can’t really be taught what might be better for them. The best we can do is to not rile them out of their rut.

But might the status quo bias itself be encouraged by the beneficiaries of an existing order to preserve their advantages? Our entertainments glorify existing or endangered  power structures (the nuclear family, the small town), the news media exaggerates the danger of change, pundits and politicians tout incrementalism as the only feasible option for change yet trumpet the lack of immediate results as failure, revolution is regarded as impossible or as inevitably degenerating into oppression and evil. Reconciling oneself with existing injustices is depicted as maturity, as laudatory realism. Altruism and self-sacrifice are illusory, if not secretly selfish. Idealists are actually zealots, and utopian thinking is a precursor to totalitarianism. The best and most satisfying life we can hope to live is an ordinary one, and nothing means more to an ordinary person than the pleasures of circumscribed domesticity — being a king in one’s castle, raising children the right way (your way), falling deeply in love (unless it becomes so passionate as to be disruptive, then it is blind and crazy).

For existing social conditions to be reproduced on an ongoing basis, the contours of our subjectivity must be shaped in such a way that we assimilate change to the existing order rather than regard it as evidence of the entropic decay of that order. In other words, we have to be flexible enough to ignore social changes that conserve power in its existing places and fixate on those changes that threaten it, to the point where we ourselves feel threatened. Protecting the status quo is a matter of making threats to the social order resonate on a strictly private, personal — and possibly fictitious — level.

One of the ways to do that is to play up the notion of path dependency (we’ve been set on a certain course, and now it is too costly to change course) while orchestrating state subsidies to mitigate inequities produced as we trot along  that path. In this post about transportation policy, Will Wilkinson explains how this works:

I don’t think this kind of path-dependency/status-quo bias/lock-in effect would be insuperable if government would simply stop actively subsidizing people to arrange their lives around the status quo system. . . . But this is hard to do in a democracy, since people tend to want what they’ve got and feel entitled to the subsidies that support the status quo.

But it’s not necessarily that we “want” the existing arrangement. We just don’t want to wager it in trying to secure something better. Psychological studies have found that we are more afraid to lose what we have and tend to compensate by overvaluing what we already have (the “endowment effect”). The degree to which we convince ourselves that we “want” what already is may be  the degree to which our reasoning is being distorted by the status quo biases. Causality is murky here, however: Playing up the “gamble” of change is perhaps one ideological mechanism for shoring up the status quo bias. And various state subsidies are ways to tip the scale further, making the size of the “wager” larger. Even if the subsidies are only promised, they have the same weight as if they were realized. Their fulfillment will most likely seem to hang on supporting the status quo more resolutely, with more patience — that is, to do nothing more vigorously.

Wilkinson continues:

If people live the way they do because they’re being actively subsidized to live that way, and the government takes the subsidy away, people will feel punished. This sort of thing is why democratic politics (ironically) tends to involve frequent attempts by ideologues to jam policies people don’t want down their throats so that they get something new (like it or not!) and eventually come to want it, since people tend to want what they’ve got.

They need not be actively subsidized; they may not even need to be promised subsidies. The sheer weight of inertia, the manufactured preference for stasis over momentum, is sufficient. Within the context of democracy, our indifference can be made to seem like dignified political participation, while those inflamed with the passion to address problems are seen as dangerous maniacs who want to “punish” us with change. Usually, in consumer capitalist society, change is only perceived as nonthreatening and natural if it is belched up by the market under the guise of healthy competition, as something new and improved to beat existing options. The only permissible revolutions are commercial ones.

Aspiring-machines: Status quo bias as permanent counterrevolution.

Consumerism demands we have a “natural” love of novelty, which runs counter to the view convenient for political order that we prefer the status quo. This contradiction requires a constant ideological calibration, to assure that the desire for novelty doesn’t also become a desire for social change, that the latter is turned into the former. To assuage the seeming inconsistency and deny the seeming continuity between these desires,  the market’s churn is often rationalized as “creative destruction,” which is itself an aspect of the status quo. Market mechanisms are seen as eternal, always already in place; the disruptions that stem from them are incidental, and anyway they allow our free will to manifest itself as consumer choice.

In another recent post, in response to this essay by Kay Hymowitz about “the postfeminist dating scene,” Wilkinson highlights another species of conservative reasoning that serves as an ideological support mechanisms for the status quo bias.

I think I first saw this kind of argument clearly laid out in Tocqueville. If I remember correctly, he noted that there is a kind of soothing clarity in stratified societies with brightly marked class lines. When classes are stable over generations, and there is little mobility up or down, conventions that govern class relations become settled, making it easy to know how to behave toward those above and below one’s station. Moreover, when classes are fixed and mobility is limited, there is little anxiety about improving one’s position, since there’s so little prospect for doing so. American-style democratic equality creates a pattern of unceasingly stressful striving for relative rank, and all this mobility up and down produces a confusion in manners that can lead to dangerous social frictions and resentments. It becomes too hard to know what to expect of others, or what others expect from us.

Where there is social mobility, or the possibility for social change, conservatives will pull out the “toxic confusion” card to militate against it — the poor helpless folks, the innocent pawns in our political and economic machinations, are getting so confused by our fiddling with the rules. Even though change might seem to help them, it really only upsets them, much like when you move a cat’s litter box or change a baby’s feeding schedule.

Wilkinson rightly dismisses this line of argument: “Rapid social change inevitably makes it harder to coordinate expectations. If it is a change worth having, then the pains of adjustment are worth it.” And he notes that the suffering we may face as individuals doesn’t justify our rejecting larger movements toward social justice: “Annoyances and disappointments suffered in the process of realizing fundamental conditions of a decent society don’t call into question the desirability of those conditions. All this vexation is a very, very small price to pay for equality.” That seems self-evident, but the reactionary nature of our selfish complaining can easily be masked or even vindicated by invoking a warped version of personal freedom. The celebration of  individualism and convenience, in which they are reinforced as transcendent and inherent goods, becomes a way to justify to ourselves our intransigence, to focus on our parochial grievances rather than recognize the way in which the benefits in any social change will eventually reach us our posterity. Individualism becomes self-willed myopia, convenience becomes a matter of indulging adamantine stubbornness.

From our blinkered private points of view, it becomes harder to countenance the notion of the greater good, and customary to dismiss efforts to argue for it by pointing out that there’s no perspective from which one can ascertain what the greater good is. We are all too selfish and limited to see it, so it’s no good trying for it, and instead we should address ourselves to accepting what is. Maybe with God’s help, we’ll see that what is is good.