Monthly Archives: June 2004

Pets are people

There are 65 million dogs in the US and 77 million cats. 

Seventy-six million households own a pet (roughly 3 in 4). 

We will spend $34 billion on pets in 2004 (up from $17 billion in 1994): $1.6 b. on the pets themselves, $14 b. for food, and $8 b. for veterinarian care.

There are some interesting patterns in these numbers:

There are slightly more male dogs than female dogs and slightly more female cats than male cats.  This suggests that we honor the cultural notion that dogs are "male"” and cats as "female.”"  What happens to the animals that do not fit this gender profiling?  You don’t want to know. 

Some owners of Vietnamese Pot-bellied pigs found their new pets too aggressive, and they did something surprising.  They took them to a slaughter house.  Then they did something really surprising.

In some cases, the owners took the meat from their pigs home, which certainly goes against our traditional thinking about what we do with our pets.”

Indeed, pets are animals of a special kind.  They have special rights and privileges.  Generally speaking, we don’’t slaughter them, and, specifically speaking, we don’’t eat them. 

Why not?  Animals are animals, and protein is protein, right? 

Hah, pets are not animals.  Let’’s be clear on that. Fifteen percent of Americans travel with their pets each year, apparently.  Why?  "More and more people consider their pets as members of the family.”"

Surely this is just a metaphor.  We don’’t really suppose that this animal, obtained from a pound, incapable of speech, inclined to acts of stupidity, is really somehow "related”" to us, do we? Well, yes, actually, we do:

According to a American Animal Hospital Association survey (1997), more than 60 percent of cat and dog owners include news about their pets in their holiday greetings, 27 percent take their pets along for family photographs and pictures with Santa, and 79 percent give their pets holiday or birthday presents.

We give them presents?  Birthday presents?  To an animal that does not know what day it is, and has a tough time the wrapping paper?

I have a suggestion: we are conferring something like personhood on our pets.  We are turning these animals into social creatures with special rights and privileges.  They have the right, most of them, to live in doors, to eat better than many people in the third world, to receive excellent health care, and we promise not to eat them when they die.  (There is a flourishing trade in pet cemeteries, and surely this is a good measure of their extra-animal status.  We see them off to a better place.)   

Those who fail these conditions are seen to be not merely callous.  They are seen to be morally culpable.  We are inclined to say things like, "There is something really wrong with those people.  They left their dog out all night.  Again!”"  This is a moral judgment of what we take to be a moral failing.  Why?  Because pets aren’’t animals.  They are something more.

But these are just the minor conditions of personhood.  We go a lot further.  We believe pets have special tastes and preferences, we agonize over their cuisine, we wonder if they are feeling a little "off”" today, and whether they want the blue or the red lined basket.  In the new regime, animals have a cultivated palate, a rich emotional life, and aesthetic preferences. 

There is still more.  Apparently, "89 percent of pet owners believe that their pet understands all or some of what they say."”  In this case, we are conferring a higher sentience upon them.  We are supposing that they are capable of speech.  We believe that we are talking to them and that they are talking to us. 

In a famous passage, Clifford Geertz had this to say about personhood:

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.

We have taken our peculiar idea of the person and conferred it on our pets.  This is an exceedingly odd and interesting transformational exercise.  After all, these animals are, by human standards, deeply stupid.  When we treat them as persons, we engage in an astonishing act of metamorphosis.  But implausibility does not discourage us.  We are a nation of individuals and we have decided that our pets are going to be individuals, too.

References

Geertz, Clifford. 1974-1984. "From the native’s point of view" On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.  Culture theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. editors Robert Alan LeVine, and Richard A Shweder, 123-36.  New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 126.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1976.  Culture and Practical Reason.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Data on pets:

http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4021/is_2000_August/ai_65300663

http://www.avma.org/membshp/marketstats/sourcebook.asp

http://exoticpets.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=exoticpets&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.appma.org%2F

http://www.hsus.org/ace/11831

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/potpigs.htm

Adorable or what? Not

Adorable or what?

Not at all. You are looking at a major investment opportunity. Today’s blog is not warm and fuzzy. It’s hard headed and money seeking. It’s about where to put your money in the stock market.

Here’s the anthropological take on pets.

There is a growing group of unmarried or divorced people. We know that, in 2002, the married population stood at 59%. This number is falling, down from 62% in 1990 and 72% in 1970. So unmarrieds stand at 41% and their numbers are growing.

Will this group live alone? No, chances are they will go out and buy Gizmo there on the left.

This tells us the pet population will increase. How else will those who want to get married find a mate, if not by taking Gizmo to the park for a walk? How else will those who want to stay single survive life alone. They will need a companion, and, yes, it will be Lulu, sitting there next to Gizmo.

So that’s it? Of course not. Those who are married are going to want pets, too. Especially if they are childless. After all, they need a child surrogate. You know who you are. You are the people we hear at the supermarket having intricate conversations about whether Danny (second from right) would like IAMs or something a little meatier. (“Yes, but what about his cholesterol?”)

So that’s it? Of course not. Those who are married with children are going to want pets, too. They are struggling to give their children the perfect childhood. They cannot be done without “Pattikins” (far right) or “Buddy” (middle).

This is what they call “coverage.” Everyone needs pets. We need them when we live alone. We need them when we’re married. We need them when we’ve got kids. Street kids need them as spare change magnets. Firemen needs them to fight fires. Presidents need them as photo ops. Hospitals use them as care-givers. College football teams need them as mascots. Bookstores use them as paper weights.

We are, as a culture, becoming increasingly pet-centric. I recently staying in a grand hotel that lets you bring your pet. This used to be the privilege of film stars and the very wealthy. Airlines will now let us travel with them.

And when it comes to pets, we cease to be rational, penny pinching consumers. Buddy needs a new collar, a new parka, a new hip. “Here, just take my credit card. No, that’s ok, just keep it.”

The real question here is where to make this opportunity to work for you, and, of course, Buddy. I have made one investment which is doing very nicely, thank you, up $2.00 a share. Their ticker symbol is WOOF. (Though, come to think of it, if you are now preparing to take stock advice from an anthropologist, you need to have a serious talk with Buddy.) I have a call in to my favorite analyst, a brilliant young man (and Harvard Business School grad) at UBS. I will let you know what he thinks the best picks are.

References

Marriage statistics from: http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsUS.shtml

The economics and anthropology of the bare midriff

Yes, it’s come to that. I am reduced to posting pictures of attractive women. But, no, actually, there is a story here.

This summer, women are covering up. The NYT says they are “exposing less skin [and] ditching the micro-minis, cropped tops and thong-baring jeans of previous summers.”

We must take this news bravely. The work of anthropology and economics will have to carry on. In this post, I want to use the two fields together to think about this new trend. (I am counting on help from my economics readers.)

An economics explanation suggests itself:

When women begin to wear less, they start a competition for male attention. In this matter, men are not the most subtle creatures. Advantage goes to women wearing less. What is attention-getting at T+0 (time right now) is merely ordinary at T+1. So women wear still less…and so it goes. Eventually, women are looking ‘trashy,” in the words of Jane Rinzler Buckingham of Youth Intelligence. At this moment, the competition is, in a sense, “maxed out.” There is no competitive place to go.

There is presumably a “stall” moment. Women know they have a problem, but they do not have a solution.

Then there is a “reset” moment. Women move back to modesty. In a sense, they have to do this merely to start the game again. But what about those outliers, women who continue to wear less and reap the benefits of doing so? “More clothing” women now suffer a competitive disadvantage.

An anthropology-economics suggests itself:

In order for women to move back to “more,” the community of women (and the marketplace) must respond more or less collectively but without the benefit of explicit decision making or communication. They must move together and at roughly the same moment. How does a consensus like this emerge without the benefit of a presidential commission? This is a problem for complexity theory, the place that economics and anthropology meet, in my opinion. How and when women undertook this latest “emergent” move would make a great case study. (Selflessly, I volunteer my services as the ethnographer.)

Furthermore, women must find a way to bring in the outliers, those women who refuse the new terms and reap considerable benefits from doing so. There must be some kind of moral suasion going on here, as women police the behavior of other women. Chances this are this happens through the distribution of scorn and accusations of ‘trashiness.” We might think of this as a process by which the “more” women withdraw the social capital possessed by the “less” women. The “less” women are now admired by men but mocked by women.

In this case, there is an economy of social capital that we do not understand. This is a great place for economists to help out in the anthropological domain.

Some additional, purely anthropological considerations:

Some of this turns on cultural tectonics. There are cultural ideas at work, moving beneath, and inflecting, the surface of the marketplace. A very brief sketch:

1) In the 1960s: women present themselves in a more or less sexual manner. The counter-cultural has set new standards of candor.

2) In the 1970s: women begin to think that male reaction to this sexuality is offensive. As one of them told me, ‘they are not reacting to me, they are reacting to my body.” . Feminism is ignited. Wolf whistles and other reactions were now greeted with hostility

3) In the 1980s: women wear more. The preppie trend is a “cover up” look and relatively asexual.

4) 1985: Madonna, in her famous boy-toy video of 1985, gives the “all-clear” signal. She argues that women should reembrace their sexuality…as long as they can choose the outcome of this sexuality. Women wear less.

5) Summer of 2004: women start to wear more.

Some of this comes is due to the “max out” problem. But some of it may be a reflection of a deeper tectonic shift.

It may be that women are unhappy with what the “wearing less” did to men. Almost certainly, it was one of the things that encouraged men to think of themselves as “dogs.” (See several posts on this blog on this topic.) In short, a change in women provoked a change in men that women did not like and would now like to change.

If this is so, we are looking at the start of a new stage in the “gender wars.” Men, consider this an early warning. It’s not just the clothing that’s going to change.

As to the larger question, how we think about the interactions of anthropological considerations and economic ones, clearly there is lots to do. How do actors compete when this competition is informed by cultural considerations? How are the cultural considerations shaped and inflected by the competition? You’re asking me?

References

La Ferla, Ruth. 2004. What Stylish Young Women are Wearing: More. New York Times. June 8, 2004.

Thanks to actress Rebecca Budiq for the use of her photo.

Ronald Reagan and the Liberal Left

This is not the Ronald Reagan I thought I knew.

In this memorial week, an unfamiliar picture of Reagan has emerged. Reagan read the economist Hayek. Reagan took his holidays with journalist William F. Buckley. Reagan was an essayist with wide interests and deep knowledge.

When Reagan was in office, we were encouraged to think of him as an “amiable dunce,” the hand puppet of corporate interest, the entirely teleprompted president.

As a devotee of the liberal left, I bought it. This is not the place for a recantation of the ideological indiscretions of my youth (though I recant, I recant). It is the place to wonder how and why the Liberal left could have made an error of this order.

I believe the Liberal left continues to treat “we’re smarter than you” as their trump card. It is the fount of their scorn. It is proof of their political qualification. It is the argument that “proves” that they are right and ‘those bastards” are wrong. It was their charge against Reagan. It is their charge against Bush. This is one of the mightiest planks of their platform.

There are two problems here.

First, the charge of intellectual inadequacy absolves the Liberal Left from having to take the ideas of the Right seriously. It is indeed a way of arguing that the Right does not have ideas, that it is merely the mouth piece of vested interests. Ironically, the claim to intellectual superiority serves as warrant for an anti-intellectual act.

Second, there is a vicious circle at work here. When the Liberal left supposes that they are smarter, they underestimate the opponent. When they underestimate the opponent, they lose when they might have won. By insisting they are smarter, they give up a chance for victory.

How bright is that?

References

Reagan, Ronald. 2001. Reagan, In his own hand. New York: The Free Press.

Massive Change II

As I said in the last post, I had a chance in Vancouver to hear Bruce Mau describe his Massive Change project. The project will show the best ideas, people and projects with which to take on the 4 Ps: pollution, poverty, politics and paralysis.

Mau puts his project somewhere between the good hearted Left and hard headed Right, right there in the excluded heartland of our ideological world.

Good hearted Left

The trouble with most projects that want to “do good” is that they don’t believe they have to “do well.” Somehow, they believe that caring about social problems absolves them having to be efficient. Worse, they use their good works as a way to install collectivist solutions…as when the community organizers “help” the poor by mobilizing them to “fight capitalism.” Still, there are moments when you have to say that this side of the ideological divide is able to capture for free intellectual capital, imagination, and dynamism that is the envy of the business world (think Apple vs. IBM). Perhaps more important, there is a very substantial group of people out there that say only collective, NGO-type solutions can “save the planet.”

Hard Headed Right

On the other side is the private sector. For them, “doing well” is probably enough. They believe that public solutions will swim up out of private initiative. Personally, I believe that this is usually the right approach: governments and NGOs often destroy more value than they create. (See my passionate defense of this notion in the blog entry called “Dr. O’Neill, may I present Dr. Boudreaux?”) More to the point, this group knows how to get things done. The private sector has problem solving skills that make the Left look like an amateur dramatic production of a very bad play. But still and all, it is not clear that private initiatives will address the most global and the most serious of our collective problems. In particular, pollution appears to be, from a private initiative point of view, an intractable problem.

Mau in the middle

I give you Bruce Mau. He scorns the Left and its inclination to pretend solutions it does not have. He was apparently roped into designing Naomi Klein’s NO LOGO before he fully understood its content. He casually dismisses the Kleinian approach as “lunacy,” (I think this was the term he used. I still prefer my own “clanking stupidity,” as below.) Brands are not, Mau says, the work of the devil. They are the “public address system of capitalism.”

Mau stands with Ashoka, the champion of the “social entrepreneur.” Ashoka will be one of the themes of the Massive Change exhibit. He believes that capitalism has got steadily better in the last 50 years, while governments have changed not at all. Mau believes that social solutions come when we harness the economy, the profit motive, property rights and market initiative.

But these solutions happen faster when summoned and dramatized by a collective undertaking. And that’s what Massive Change is for. This will be, among other things, an exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery in October of 2004. If the exhibit is anything like Mau’s talk, it will be a stunner that manages in a few hundred square feet to review the best and brightest people and ideas now at our disposal, and to create a problem solving momentum that you normally associate with the CEOs rallying the troops at the annual conference. The sheer imaginative scope and energy of the thing is something to behold.

Mau embraces Arnold Toynbee’s notion of ‘the welfare of the entire human race as a practical objective” What differentiates his ‘take” on this notion is the emphasis he gives to the word “practical.” Mau may have his head in the clouds, but he has his feet firmly on the ground. This exhibit is about what we can do right now to begin doing something right now. His review of the best and brightest people and ideas leaves you thinking, ‘that’s right. We can do this.” So much for the “J’accuse” indignation and pessimism that comes so often from the Environmentalists.

It is now clear that we live on a “small planet.” We are looking at problems that are global in reach. We are looking for solutions that must be global in scale. And, as Mau demonstrates, we have the solutions. What is called for as something that pushes us beyond the conventional approaches into the realm of the possible. Massive Change is a wonderful push.

massive change

I spent the week in Vancouver, visiting family and talking at the Design Management Institute meetings. (Sorry about no posts.)

When I was growing up there, I used to think of Vancouver as the bimbo of the Pacific Rim, beautiful but not too bright, routinely outclassed by San Francisco, LA, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai.

She was the kind of city that made a good impression until she opened her mouth. The hope was that she would marry well, because the idea that she should have to fend for herself was not a happy prospect.

Well, she did marry well. There is now a very substantial Chinese community, South Asian community, tech sector, and art scene. The universities are getting better. The house prices continue to rise. The population grows. The parks, beaches, mountains and ocean continue to enchant. With all that rain, it must be the greenest city on the planet.

It was a funny place to hear Bruce Mau talk about saving the planet. Crisis, what crisis?

It was a virtuoso performance. For 40 minutes, Mau described his new project, Massive Change in ordinary language and a low key way. 10 minutes into the presentation I was gasping for air. The sheer scale of the thing! The presumption! The drama! Who thinks this way? Who dares to dare this much?

Massive Change will be installed at the Vancouver Art Gallery in October of 2004. Vancouver will never be the bimbo of the Pacific Rim again.

Now, I have to run. Small things like food and laundry need attending to. Hope to post again this afternoon. Come back for more on Bruce Mau and Massive Change.

Away on business

Ok, I am going to be in the field and on the road for the next week or so.

If I can blog, I will blog.

If not, have a look around.

There must be something you haven’t read.

Best, Grant

Gods under scrutiny

They shape the way we think about the world. They decide who may have our ear and who may not. The editors at The New Yorker are as Gods. We may not know them, we may only know their work.

Along comes Ms. Milkman, a student in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton. Milkman had the bright idea of examining 442 stories printed in The New Yorker from Oct. 5, 1992, to Sept. 17, 2001. The NYT, closing ranks, is not impressed: “The study was long on statistics and short on epiphanies.”

Not so fast.

According to Ms. Milkman, the number of male authors rose to 70 percent under Mr. Buford, compared with 57 percent under Mr. McGrath. … The study also found that the first-person voice rose mightily under Mr. Buford, which may reflect the growth of memoir in the 90’s more than anything else. … Mr. Buford was relatively more interested in sex, a topic in 47 percent of the stories he published as opposed to 35 percent under Mr. McGrath. Mr. McGrath’s authors tended to deal with … children, more frequently than Mr. Buford’s writers: 36 percent under Mr. McGrath, 26 percent under Mr. Buford. (History, homosexuality and politics all tied for the attentions of Mr. Buford at a lowly 4 percent.)

I knew Mr. Buford at Cambridge. We spent many Sunday afternoons playing touch football on the backs of King’s College. (Transplanted to Oxbridge, some North Americans take to silk scarves and faux accents. The rest of us played football.)

Milkman’s portrait sounds like the man I know. He is, in the old fashioned phrase, a “man’s man.” He is a writer of the old school, a person prepared to put himself in harm’s way for the sake of the story. No, I don’t mean touch football. Buford is the author of Among The Thugs, a first-person, thoroughly anthropological study of the English soccer hooligan. He posed as a hooligan, traveled as a hooligan, rioted as a hooligan and only just survived to tell the tale. Talk about harm’s way.

But Ms. Milkman’s portrait does not become him. There is a complexity, an imagination, a fineness, and a recklessly conceptual quality she does not capture. Her numbers “dumb him down.” In this blog, we have once or twice wondered whether the numerical study of culture and commerce might not help us capture the new complexity of the world. But Milkman tells us less, not more. A single interview with Buford (and McGrath) would have done better than the database.

I think the real story here is two fold. First, that Milkman dared to presume to study this elite, and, second, that she found a way in that did not depend on their participation (though it sounds as if she got it).

Among the Editors. Very well done, Ms. Milkman, but, next time, pose as a writer.

Buford, Bill. 1991. Among the Thugs. London: Secker and Warburg.

Carr, David. 2004. New Yorker Fiction, by the Numbers. New York Times. June 1, 2004. Available here.