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Economist: Women, testosterone and finance/ Sexual selection in humans

Women, testosterone and finance

Risky business

Aug 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Hormones, not sexism, explain why fewer women than men work in banks

Getty Images

THAT the risk-taking end of the financial industry is dominated by men is unarguable. But does it discriminate against women merely because they are women? Well, it might. But a piece of research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University, near Chicago, suggests an alternative—that it is not a person’s sex, per se, that is the basis for discrimination, but the level of his or her testosterone. Besides being a sex hormone, testosterone also governs appetite for risk. Control for an individual’s testosterone levels and, at least in America, the perceived sexism vanishes.

Dr Sapienza and her colleagues worked with aspiring bankers (MBA students from the University of Chicago). They measured the amount of testosterone in their subjects’ saliva. They also estimated the students’ exposure to the hormone before they were born by measuring the ratios of their index fingers to their ring fingers (a long ring finger indicates high testosterone exposure) and by measuring how accurately they could determine human emotions by observing only people’s eyes, which also correlates with prenatal exposure to testosterone.

The students were then presented with 15 risky choices. In each they had to decide between a 50:50 chance of getting $200 or a gradually increasing sure payout, which ranged from $50 up to $120. (Some of this money was actually paid over at the end of the experiment, to make the consequences real.) The point at which a participant decided to switch from the gamble to the sure thing was reckoned a reasonable approximation of his appetite for risk.

As the researchers suspected, women and men with the same levels of testosterone generally switched at the same time, demonstrating similar risk preferences. In other words, women who had more testosterone were more risk-loving than women with less, while the data for men at the lower end of the spectrum displayed a similar relationship. Curiously, the relationship between testosterone and risk taking was not as strong for men with moderate to high levels of the stuff, though previous studies have shown this relationship can be significant as well.

In all cases the correlation was strongest when the salivary measure of testosterone was used, suggesting that it is the here and now, rather than the developmental effects of testosterone on the brain, that is making the difference.

The researchers then followed the subjects’ progress after they graduated, to see what sort of careers they entered. As expected, men were more likely than women to choose a risky job in finance. Again, though, the difference was accounted for entirely by their levels of salivary testosterone. The researchers also studied the subjects’ personal investment portfolios after they had graduated, once in June 2008 (pre-crash) and again in January 2009 (post-crash). In a paper that has yet to be published, they demonstrate that the riskiness of these portfolios, too, was strongly correlated with subjects’ responses in the lottery game. The past year has, presumably, been kind to those with low testosterone levels.

Sexual selection in humans

Mr Muscle

Aug 27th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The price and privilege of beefcake

AFP Novosti

The way to hook the ladies?

WHY are men’s muscles so much bigger than women’s? Partly, of course, because men do the fighting and hunting. But also, perhaps, because women like men who can do these things well, and are thus attracted to muscular men. Both phenomena—competing with members of the same sex and showing off to members of the opposite—are subject to a form of evolution known as sexual selection. It is sexual selection that created the deer’s antlers and the peacock’s tail, and William Lassek of the University of Pittsburgh and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, think it explains men’s muscles as well.

The main characteristic of sexually selected features is that they are expensive to maintain. Since, whether competing or attracting, only the best will do, resources get piled into them, almost regardless of the consequences. In a study just published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Dr Lassek and Dr Gaulin show that this crucial characteristic is true for men’s muscles.

Their data came from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which followed 12,000 American men and women over the course of six years. They found that men require 50% more calories than women do, even after adjusting for activity levels, and that their muscle mass is the strongest predictor of their intake of calories—stronger than their occupation or their body-mass index (a measure of obesity). And there is another cost to being muscly: men’s immune systems are less effective than those of women (which was known before), and become worse the more muscular the men are (which was not).

The benefits, however, were there, as well. The more muscular a man, the more sexual partners he reported, both in the past year and over his lifetime, and the earlier his first sexual experience was likely to have been. This may, in part, be a result of the ability of muscular men to intimidate 97lb weaklings. But in a society where extreme forms of such intimidation are curbed by law, female choice seems as likely an explanation—especially as previous studies have confirmed scientifically the everyday observation that women do indeed prefer men with big biceps and triangular torsos.

Because muscles come at such cost, Dr Gaulin thinks an evolutionary fight is going on between natural selection, which conserves metabolic expenditure and promotes longevity, and sexual selection, which willingly trades both for extra mating opportunities. This may explain why men have such a range of muscularity. In the past, the strong man would have had better mating opportunities in the short term, but the skinny guy who outlived him could have had just as much reproductive success over the course of his longer life.

The irony for the skinny guy is that the laws which protect him from aggression also make it less likely that the hulk will fight himself into an early grave. Modern medicine, meanwhile, means the hulk’s weakened immune system is less likely to expose him to lethal infection. Time, then, to get the weights out, and start pumping iron.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: The Case for God

The Case for God

Review by John Cornwell

Published: July 20 2009 06:01 | Last updated: July 20 2009 06:01

The Case for God: What Religion Really Means
By Karen Armstrong
Bodley Head £20, 376 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

WB Yeats wrote that our ideas about God are all “trash and tinsel”, like a tawdry wedding dress hiding the truth that lies beneath. Karen Armstrong, one of our best living writers on religion, agrees. But in her latest book, The Case for God, she argues that there was a time when people understood God better.

“The modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept,” she writes. In other words, our notion of God, whether we be atheists or believers, has regressed to the infantile.

The biggest offenders are those who treat God like an interventionist Superman problem-solver. Armstrong’s catalogue of inept culprits includes politicians who appeal to God to justify their policies, terrorists who invoke him to commit atrocities and scientists who fit God into a physical theory, even if just to debunk him.

Science, she argues, has had a deeply misleading influence on both believers and unbelievers. When Richard Dawkins attacks God, his target is an absurd super-designer, necessarily more complex than any of the complexities in nature. Moreover, there are believing scientists who see God as a kind of fine-tuning twiddler. In fact, modern notions of God, Armstrong says, are largely the fault of theologians who, from the 17th century onwards, attempted to exploit science as a prop for faith. This rational quest for God, she says, actually encouraged atheism.

She also points out that science-based theology is notoriously unreliable. When a theologian conjures up God to fill a gap in our knowledge, a new theory can then eject him. And the idea of God as an “it”, or a “being”, or an object in the world competing for attention with other objects, has undermined a deeper, more mysterious sense of God that had developed in all faiths over centuries.

Armstrong seeks to isolate what she sees as the crucial lost idea of God as the unknowable and unspeakable. Anything less than acknowledging the ineffable nature of God, she insists, leads to idolatry – worshipping a god of our own creation. By definition, there is no easy way to write about the unsayable.

One of her attempts, at the heart of the book, involves the teachings of Christian philosopher Denys the Areopagite, St Paul’s first convert. “First we must affirm what God is,” she writes. “God is a rock; God is One; God is good; God exists. But when we listen carefully to ourselves, we fall silent, felled by the weight of absurdity in such God-talk.”

In the next phase, we deny these attributes. “But the ‘way of denial’ is just as inaccurate as the ‘way of affirmation’. Because we do not know what God is, we cannot know what God is not, so we must then deny the denials ... ”

The final phase, if you’re still on board, is a state that mystics call the “dark night of the soul”, or the cloud of unknowing. Writing about God, she says, is hard. So is reading about him.

Yet just thinking about God won’t do; Armstrong insists that sensing God depends on prayer, ritual, scripture and silence; it is a process rather than a logical conclusion. Nor does any single faith have a monopoly on enlightenment. If only religions could return to true enlightenment we would be capable, she writes, quoting Keats, of handling “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

What are the prospects for Armstrong’s call for a more enlightened understanding? Some religionists are beginning to turn towards a more imaginative, less scientific and dogmatic approach to faith. She believes a maturer understanding of God would lessen antagonism between science and religion; reduce religious-inspired violence; and bring about greater compassion.

Sadly history shows that most attempts to combat wounding elements within religion tend to provoke reactions from the extreme. Armstrong is aware of this; but this prodigiously sourced, passionately written book is a compelling plea to give it a try.

John Cornwell is author of ‘Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Riposte to the God Delusion’ (Profile)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Forensic eye on divorce

Forensic eye on divorce

By Megan Murphy

Published: May 7 2009 20:47 | Last updated: May 7 2009 20:47

Brian Myerson, the activist investor who made his fortune by taking stakes in undervalued companies, made an unfortunate bet when negotiating a £26m ($39m) divorce settlement with his ex-wife.

Like dozens of entrepreneurs before him, Mr Myerson gambled that the shares of his own company would rise in value, ultimately outstripping the worth of his more mundane – if fungible – assets such as cash and property.

With his business since ravaged by the credit crunch, Mr Myerson was forced to plead poverty before the Court of Appeal in a failed attempt to back out of the deal.

It is a mistake that Jeffrey Nedas, one of a select group of forensic accountants that specialise in matrimonial cases, has seen many times before.

“Things go down as well as up,” the genial Mr Nedas says over a leisurely breakfast round the corner from his office in Mayfair, central London.

Here in the heart of what has become known as the divorce capital of the world, where the marriages of globe-trotting financiers, top executives and A-list celebrities fizzle out regularly, top family lawyers such as Fiona Shackleton (nickname: the Steel Magnolia) and Raymond (“Jaws”) Tooth have become almost as famous as their wealthy clients

But it is people such as Mr Nedas who play an equally important, if more behind-the-scenes, role in dividing the spoils of a failed marriage when there is far more at stake than the mortgage and a few savings accounts.

Mr Nedas, who recently set up his own shop after 11 years as a partner at BDO Stoy Hayward, the professional services firm, has acted as an expert on more than 150 divorces involving the valuation of a business or business interests.

More couples turning to ‘postnup’ deals

With the legal status of prenuptial deals in England and Wales mired in controversy, wealthy couples are increasingly turning to postnuptial agreements – entered into after a marriage – to govern how their assets should be divided in the event of a divorce.

Last year, five senior judges sitting in the UK Privy Council backed the enforceability of the deals in the closely followed case of Macleod v Macleod.

While still a relatively new concept, “postnups” are often used in cases where a couple’s wealth has increased dramatically during the course of their marriage or when a relationship starts to falter but both parties want to try to make it work.

They also offer significant tax planning advantages, especially when wealth is being shifted from one generation to the next, says Jeffrey Nedas, a forensic matrimonial accountant.

With the credit crunch in effect forcing some husbands and wives to stay together, lawyers say that postnuptial deals allow couples to agree the outlines of a settlement while they wait for the economy to recover.

As a forensic accountant, he is also called upon frequently to trace assets through a web of exotic offshore locales to work out whether someone is underplaying their own net worth to win a cheaper settlement.

Mr Nedas, who charges £395 an hour for his services, says he sticks to two main principles when advising business owners involved in a divorce.

First, to take a sensible and commercial view when valuing the asset, to avoid racking up excessive costs.

Second, if a business is the main source of their prosperity, to make every effort to keep it running successfully, protecting a steady income flow for the benefit of both parties until it can be sold.

Mr Nedas did not set out to make a career in divorce. But a chance meeting with Mr Tooth, whose divorce clients have included Irina Abramovich, Sadie Frost and Eimear Montgomerie, the former wife of Colin Montgomerie, the top golfer, at a mutual friend’s Christmas party 10 years ago brought Mr Nedas into matrimonial accounting.

At the time, the landmark case of White v White was just making its way through the courts, soon to revolutionise the way divorce deals are struck in England and Wales.

In 2000, the House of Lords ruled that settlements should take into account a couple’s total wealth instead of their financial needs, eliminating any bias in favour of the “breadwinner” over the spouse – usually the wife – who has stayed home to look after the children.

Since then, experts such as Mr Nedas have become integral to the divorce process in providing a valuation of each and every asset in the hopes of forging a fair split.

Like the so-called “divorce mafia” of lawyers that acts on the biggest and most high-profile cases, matrimonial accounting remains a niche practice.

“You need a real depth and breadth of knowledge to be effective in this field,” says the accountant, who travels abroad frequently to work on cases involving Asian business magnates.

It was this knowledge that prompted Ingrid Myerson to hire Mr Nedas to investigate whether her ex-husband had millions stashed abroad while maintaining he could no longer afford to pay her the amount agreed.

Katrin Radmacher, the German heiress who is seeking to enforce a prenuptial agreement against her ex-husband, a former banker, also sought the services of the London-born, Cambridge-educated accountant. And three years ago, it was Mr Nedas who helped Melissa Miller, the glamorous American ex-wife of Alan Miller, the former New Star fund manager, to secure a landmark £5m settlement after a brief, childless marriage.

While he acts for husbands as often as for wives, the dapper accountant says he has sympathy for the women whose first inkling of the true state of their finances comes after their husband has asked for a divorce.

“For some of them, they will have enjoyed this luxury lifestyle for years, but when everything comes out, it turns out they have been living in a castle built on sand,” Mr Nedas says.

As far as the contentious issue of prenuptial agreements, which are still not legally binding in England and Wales, Mr Nedas advises most of his clients to sign one.

Courts will still take them into account when distributing assets, provided each party was properly advised, did not apply undue pressure and understood the nature of the agreement.

While some recent surveys have indicated that the number of big-money divorces filed in England and Wales may dwindle as the recession takes hold, Mr Nedas, for one, does not seem too worried.

“Divorce has turned out to be a hardy perennial.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Don’t forget our war

Don’t forget our war

By Stefan Wagstyl

Published: April 4 2009 01:34 | Last updated: April 4 2009 01:34

Bluebird
By Vesna Maric
Granta £12.99, 224 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

Not My Turn to Die
By Savo Heleta
Amacom £16.99 240 pages

My Childhood Under Fire
By Nadja Halilbegovich
Kids Can Press $8.95 120 pages

The Cellist of Sarajevo
By Steven Galloway
Atlantic Books £7.99 288 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

Like Eating a Stone
By Wojciech Tochman
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Portobello £7.99, 112 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

The Bosnian war killed more than 100,000 people and disrupted the lives of millions. The brutal violence of 1992-1995, often played out before television cameras, left Europeans reeling at the thought that such destruction was still possible in their own backyard. It was as if nothing had been learnt from two world wars and the Holocaust. What hope was there for humanity if a continent that prided itself on its traditions of democracy, human rights and the rule of law could not stop genocide on its own soil?

More than a decade later, the war is slipping into history. With so much else on the global agenda from Iraq to the economic crisis, there is little time for Bosnia. But the territory is far from being at peace with itself. The fragile state created by the 1996 Dayton peace accord struggles to control Bosnia’s simmering ethnic hatreds. Without international administrators, backed by troops, the Serb, Croat and Muslim communities might again resort to violence. The legacy of 1992-1995 lives on.

The first books to record the war were instant histories. Often written by journalists covering the conflict, they combined political analysis with witness reportage. The best have stood the test of time, notably The Death of Yugoslavia by Allan Little and Laura Silber, a former FT correspondent. Later, came volumes from the foreign soldiers and officials involved in trying to stop the violence and to deal with its aftermath, such as Swords and Ploughshares: Building Peace in the 21st Century, by Paddy Ashdown, the British politician who served as postwar Bosnia’s international high representative.

A welter of publications on Iraq and Afghanistan over the past few years has squeezed Bosnia off the bookshelves. But five recent books on Bosnia show just how deep the wounds of war are, how far they extend and how long they fester. Even those who escaped the worst of the conflict see their lives utterly changed.

Two are memoirs by teenage victims of the Bosnian conflict who are looking back on the violence, showing how it altered their lives. The third is a child’s diary from the Sarajevo battlefront. The fourth, is a finely written novel by a Canadian author and the last a powerful piece of reportage by a Polish writer on the grim business of digging up mass graves. Together, these books do not replace the histories and the political analyses but they give a more personal insight into the conflict.

Not My Turn to Die is the memoir of Savo Heleta, an ethnic Serb living in the mainly Muslim town of Gorazde who was 13 when war broke out. Unlike many Gorazde Serbs who flee the town, Heleta’s parents decide to stay – they have Muslim friends, and are well-known and liked in the community.

The enormity of their misjudgment dawns on them as ethnic Serb forces surround Gorazde and shell the inhabitants almost daily. Fear breeds hatred and hatred generates violence, even among people who know each other well. Even the fair-minded struggle to stick to their principles. The rest fall prey to savage prejudice.

Heleta’s matter-of-fact account is sparse. One would like to know more of the older Heleta’s thoughts on his ordeal and on his transformation from war victim to professional conciliator. But this is a powerful book, which shows how difficult it is to make peace after such a conflict, not least peace among neighbours.

War memoirs don’t have to be grim reading. They can even be funny. Among those who watched the war unfold was Vesna Maric, a 16-year-old living in the historic town of Mostar when the fighting started. As she recounts in Bluebird, her lively memoir, Maric’s quick-thinking mother soon arranges for Maric and her elder sister to leave Bosnia. They join a coachload of other Bosnian women and children who are rescued by British charity-workers and brought to the UK.

Maric adjusts pretty well to British life, British rock music and British boys. But a sense of loss remains. Describing her first trip back to Bosnia after the war, she says: “You feel for your old slippers, and as you try to put them on you see your heels won’t fit and that they’re now three sizes too small.” Clearly Maric’s experiences were less traumatic than Heleta’s but the war has still changed her life utterly.

The same is true for Nadja Halilbegovich, a 12-year-old in Sarajevo when the war begins, who decides to keep a diary. Aimed primarily at teenagers, My Childhood under Fire is her brief account of the fighting, which she has translated from its original Bosnian into English. The striking element in her life under siege are the lengths to which Sarajevo’s inhabitants went to maintain what might be seen as life’s inessentials.

In Halilbegovich’s case, these include the city’s Palcici youth choir. In spite of the shelling, the killing and the maiming, despite the difficulties securing daily bread and water, the choir’s children continue to meet and to sing.

Halilbegovich’s diary is a very short account, which should not really be compared with Anne Frank’s diary. However, like Frank’s, Halilbegovich’s comfortable prewar existence is replaced by one in which nothing is certain, not even life itself. “I cannot describe the despair that smothers Sarajevo,” writes Halilbegovich. “Yesterday a neighbour was killed on my street. A bomb exploded right in front of him. His wife ran into the street, crying, screaming and tearing her hair out.”

Like Anne Frank, Halilbegovich and Heleta come from educated middle-class backgrounds. Maric’s prewar family life is blighted by her father’s alcoholism but her parents too are educated and by no means poor by Bosnian standards. All three left Bosnia during or after the war and went on to western schools and universities where they learnt English. All are, therefore, looking at their wartime experiences from a certain physical and psychological distance. This is true even of Halilbegovich’s diary, which is supplemented by autobiographical notes written later. As in previous wars, the educated have a big advantage in getting their stories out, particularly if they know English. The uneducated go unheard.

What can an outsider from far-off Canada, who did not experience the war, bring to our understanding of the Bosnian conflict? In the Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway examines how war distorts and corrupts almost everything in its path. His fictional account is inspired by the true story of Vedran Smailovic, a renowned local cellist, who marked in a unique way the 1992 shelling of the Vase Miskina market, in which 22 people died and 70 were wounded in the first of three particularly bloody mortar attacks on Sarajevo markets. When he heard the news, Smailovic took his cello to the site and for the next 22 days performed Albinoni’s beautiful Adagio in G Minor daily in honour of the victims.

The cellist is a nameless figure at the heart of the novel. Galloway concentrates instead on three people who go about their daily lives, knowing that the next mortar shell or sniper’s bullet could strike at any time. Kenan, a family man, struggles to cross the city to fetch water; Dragan, a pensioner, agonises over where to cross a road without being shot; and Arrow, a female sniper whose skill leads her to be drawn into the moral quagmire of war. As Galloway writes, quoting Trotsky, “You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”

Galloway is a fine writer who pays as much attention to the novel’s structure as to the geography of Sarajevo. But at times there is too much artifice in the narrative, giving the work a slightly detached air. For example, nobody is labelled Muslim, Croat or Serb. The purpose, I suppose, is to suggest that the human tragedy of Sarajevo transcends the mundane realities of ethnic identity. But that is not how the people of Bosnia see themselves in war – everybody has a label and bears it all the time. As Savo Heleta’s memoir shows, the idea that everybody was a Yugoslav vanished in a hail of bullets.

This point is not lost on Wojciech Tochman, a Polish reporter who, after the war ended, followed Bosnian women trying to discover what had happened to their missing husbands, sons and fathers. In Like Eating a Stone, he focuses on the work of Ewa Klonowski, a Polish-born anthropologist, whose macabre job it is to examine mass graves so that the survivors can help identify the dead. These people know exactly who is a Serb, a Muslim or a Croat and can never forget.

The reminders of war are everywhere, and not just in the bones collected by Klonowski. Mejra Dautovic, a 58-year-old Muslim mother, is looking for her daughter, Edna, a beautiful woman in her 20s when she disappeared. Dautovic must accept not only that Edna is almost certainly dead but that her Serbian interrogator and torturer, Nebojsa B, still lives in a nearby town and works for the police. And Nebojsa had once been Edna’s boyfriend.

Tochman doesn’t spare the details. At one point, Jasna Ploskic, a Muslim mother, describes how she and other women are locked in a cellar with their children, with no food or water. An eight-year-old Serb boy peeps through the window and Ploskic asks him to bring water. The boy runs off and comes back. He opens the bottle of water and empties it in full view of the thirsty children.

Tochman makes no comment on the atrocities he records and he lets the witnesses speak for themselves. His work is all the more powerful for leaving the answers to terrible questions hanging. What kind of country can Bosnia be now where a torturer such as Nebojsa B still works for the police?

This is a profound meditation on the horrors of war. These are horrors that are felt not through the brain or even the heart but through the pit of the stomach. A woman describes how she gets up in the morning after yet another restless night and greets her son: “ ‘Same thing again, Mama’, says my son. ‘You were gnashing your teeth in the night again.’

‘Was I crunching again, sorry.’

‘As if you were eating a stone.’ ”

This is reportage of the highest order – reportage that employs the specific to tell a universal truth, that war is always evil, especially civil war. Somehow Tochman’s approach reaches deeper into the heart of darkness than the other books.

Read the memoirs to see how ordinary (middle-class) young people experienced the war. Read The Cellist of Sarajevo to discover what a fine novelist can make of the tragedy. But to peer into the deepest recesses of man’s inhumanity to man, read Like Eating a Stone.

Stefan Wagstyl is the FT’s East European editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Faith nation

Faith nation

By John Lloyd

Published: March 28 2009 02:00 | Last updated: March 28 2009 02:00

Many liberals in postwar Europe view those who are enthusiastic about religion with a certain amount of suspicion. To be a "religious nut" - to talk fanatically about one's faith - would be to invite at least covert ridicule; one just has to remember how President George W Bush was mocked in Europe for his evangelism. In much of Europe, most people don't understand why anyone should be joyously and openly religious.

In God is Back , the Economist's editor John Micklethwait and its US editor Adrian Wooldridge seek to address this incomprehension, and show how it limits the understanding of what moves hundreds of millions of people round the world. Protestantism, for example, emphasises the direct experience of God through the intercession of the holy spirit, and accounts for about a quarter of the world's 2bn Christians. This, and other extreme forms of religious belief, is widely regarded by liberals as backward, ignorant and obscurantist. The authors, however, view it as "a great force for social progress and upward mobility in the developing world". Pentecostalists, they say, "provide people with the right psychological disposition to thrive in a capitalist economy", because of their emphasis on discipline, regular habits, thriftiness and preservation of the family.

The authors observe that, in general, "the great forces of modernity - technology and democracy, choice and freedom - are all strengthening religion rather than undermining it". And as a result of this, they claim that the world is moving in the "American direction, where religion and modernity happily co-exist, rather than in the European direction, where secularisation marginalises religion". In the US version of religion (predominantly Christianity), technology, marketing, the internet and popular culture are pressed into service to gain and keep the flock. As much of the literature on US religion either deprecates its rightwing bias or boosts its wonder-working power, a cool and fair analysis such as this is a welcome rarity.

The book opens in Shanghai, with an account of a group of upper middle-class people holding a Christian prayer meeting at one of their homes. The gathering is expressing ardent agreement with the Biblical text in the book of Romans, which denounces men who "give up natural sexual relations with women and burn with passion for each other". These worshippers are the kind of people, well-educated and motivated by a desire to join or stay in the middle class, who are at China's cutting edge, part of its formidable drive to be the leading economy in the world. As this vignette shows, such people can conjoin modern openness with prejudice, especially against homosexuals. This is disconcerting for those who believe that 21st-century intellectual thought should be at war with bigotry.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge have coauthored books on globalisation, the nature of the business corporation and the US right. Although it may seem like a departure from the sort of subject matter one might expect senior Economist writers to cover, God is Back is the duo's most successful and vivid book to date. It is filled with clear and apposite examples of resurgent religiosity. Take the case of Chick-fil-A, a fast-food chain, selling chicken sandwiches. The company's mission statement is "to glorify God by being faithful stewards of all that is entrusted to us and to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with Chick-fil-A". This is not a lone or freakish instance of unembarrassed belief in God, say the authors.

The central message of this book is that the US, by separating the state from the church and decreeing religious freedom, established the lasting base for religious entrepreneurialism, and for a successful export of various forms of Christianity. Thomas Jefferson saw separation as good for religion because it would promote competition; James Madison saw it as good for the state because religion could be free "to promote public morality, unencumbered by state patronage". On their beliefs - and those of the other framers of the Constitution - an entrepreneurial religious agora was created, constantly able to renew itself, as it is now doing.

According to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, the just-departed President Bush was not out of line with postwar US presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and that louche cosmopolitan Bill Clinton all affirmed their faith and sought to promote it. This was in strong contrast to most European politicians.

US evangelicals are not a collection of rednecks: their churches are often mixed-race, their interests increasingly comprehend world poverty and global warming, and they are shedding the anti-intellectual image. Marginalised from a largely secular educational establishment, they have "formed an impressive array of academic associations", which exist parallel to the state colleges and the Ivy League.

Christianity is the overwhelming focus of the narrative. In this sense, the book fails to be comprehensive and falls short of its sub-title, "How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World". The God that is back is a Christian one, with an American accent. Islam gets some space, much of it an assessment of the evidence on how far the faith has mutated into a series of violent campaigns to Islamise, or re-Islamise, as much of the world as possible. There is little about Orthodoxy, not much more about Judaism, while Buddhism and Hinduism must fend for themselves.

Above all, the authors destroy the equation often made by anti-Americanists between US evangelism and radical Islam. The former resides in an assumption, not just of toleration, but of pluralism: the second insists not just on the rightness of its path but on the duty to impose it by force. "History", said Jefferson, "furnishes no example of a priest-ridden country maintaining a free civil government." For all its sins against liberalism, particularly on the issue of gay sexuality, new-minted US Christianity has remained true to the founders' belief that faith should be freely found.

John Lloyd is a contributing editor to the Financial Times.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: The up side of down

The up side of down

By Stephen Cave

Published: August 9 2008 01:17 | Last updated: August 9 2008 01:17

Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More
By John Naish
Hodder & Stoughton £16.99, 304 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
By Eric G Wilson
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux £20, 176 pages

Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests
By Julian Baggini
Profile Books £10.99 224 pages
FT Bookshop price: £8.79

We are all chasing happiness. We talk of it as if it were real, a place the budget airlines will surely soon be flying to, or a new product – iPhoria? – that will hit the shelves any day. We sniff at mere contentment. Disgruntlement we see as aberration. And being down in the dumps is a certifiable disease.

But what would happen if we all finally found happiness? Imagine if life’s little flaws – the way the car grumbles on the motorway, the fact that Tuscany is becoming too touristy – stopped nagging away at us, and we realised that things are fine just as they are? For a start, if we thought life already blissful, we might do without the even fancier iPod; if we had already found paradise, we probably wouldn’t need to upgrade our patio furniture; and if we were more at ease with ourselves, we might not bother with the new hairstyle or the botox.

Within weeks, the high-tech industry, which feeds on the creation of new and unfulfilled desires, would be in difficulties; the fashion world, which survives by persuading us that our perfectly good jeans are either too baggy or too tight, would start to flounder. The luxury goods industry would surely follow; new cars would be next. Before long, we’d be in a full-blown recession. Give it a decade and we’d be back in the Dark Ages.

So we should be careful what we wish for. Contrary to the enormous and growing literature on how to be happy, perhaps there’s something to say for dissatisfaction. Three writers who have had enough of our ecstasy-obsessed culture certainly think so. They make the case for the dethroning of happiness from its place as the only worthy state of mind, and argue we should instead celebrate our grouchier sides.

There are two good reasons to appreciate emotions other than happiness. The first is that few of us are likely to live our lives in bliss. By making happiness holy, we dismiss the overwhelming majority of human experience as nothing more than an also-ran. The second is that dissatisfaction is the driver of human endeavour – and not just in the luxury goods industry.

In Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More, journalist John Naish picks up both these themes. “If you look at our evolutionary wiring, we have to conclude that we are not designed to have happiness as our natural default state,” he writes. “Nor can happiness be grown beyond its natural proportions, like some weird-looking specialised insect mandible.” Instead, we’ve evolved to receive a happiness kick when we do certain things that optimise our chances of surviving and reproducing. If you are hungry and kill a wild boar, or, in modern terms, stumble across an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, the good-time feeling kicks in. But when afterwards you feel like there’s a bowling ball sitting in your stomach, that fug of felicity is likely to pass.

Or, as my mum used to say, we’re not put on this earth to be happy. But today many of us refuse to accept this. And by believing that happiness is the only emotion worth having, we dismiss the value of subtler, darker feelings. As Eric G Wilson puts it in Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, we demonstrate “a craven disregard for the value of sadness”. Wilson, a professor of English literature and self-confessed melancholic, argues that we deceive ourselves into believing there can be positive without negative, up without down. “In a world undoubtedly tragic”, to seek only jollity is, he writes, “to become inauthentic.”

Melancholy, on the other hand, “connects us to our fundamental being” and allows us to see the world as it really is, with what Wilson calls its “vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience.” As witnesses, he calls on a host of similarly sorrowful characters, from John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen to Vincent van Gogh and Herman Melville. All of these, he says, have “endured the limbo” and “created out of this insight original products”. But now the melancholic is an endangered species, Wilson believes, under pressure to pop pills and engage in positive thinking until he achieves the “psychological rigor mortis” of bland old happiness.

Wilson’s book is proving to be controversial in his native US, where the right to happiness is famously enshrined in the founding deed, the Declaration of Independence. In the land where well-being is serious business, Wilson has been accused of making light of depression, and romanticising a debilitating illness. Though little could be described as “light” in this book, he does overshoot his paean to despondency. This is forgivable in the passages where his prose is close to poetry; less so where he wallows in wordy faux-profundity.

Wilson is strongest when he details the creative power of gloom. He is right to recognise that melancholy is “the muse behind much art and poetry and music”, but also that “this treasure comes at a serious price”. Without sullenness, “what we see as culture in general, that empyreal realm of straining ideas, might never have arisen”. Like Naish, he sees an evolved role for malaise – as the wellspring of innovation, “a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo”. The dissatisfied soul would be dreaming up new and better ways of meeting life’s challenges, while, in Naish’s words, “constantly cheerful Stone Agers would have lolled about grinning while their wounds festered, their crops died and bears devoured their children.”

The positive power of displeasure is also the focus of Julian Baggini’s new book Complaint, which is a robust defence of the importance of disgruntlement. “Human beings did not get where they are today by being sanguine about imperfection,” he states, “the meek would have no world to inherit if the more petulant did not set about building one fit to last.”

Baggini aims to rescue the reputation of grumbling. He believes that dissatisfaction is the motor not only of our consumerist economy but of progress itself: “All major social advances have started with a complaint,” he writes. If the barons had been content with their lot, there would have been no Magna Carta; if the suffragettes had been more happy-go-lucky, there would be no women’s rights.

Baggini’s arch-enemy is religion, all the major variants of which teach us to accept our miserable fate as God’s will. Christianity, for example, tells us to turn the other cheek. Its success lies in reconciling people to life’s injustices in return for the promise of eternal bliss in another world. Rejecting this reassurance is to rebel against God. “Complaint is a secular, humanist act. It is resistance against the idea ... that suffering is our divinely ordained lot and that we can do no more than put up with it piously.”

Ironically, the largest section of the book – on misguided complaint – is itself a long lament. In it, Baggini rages against a vast range of what he sees as wrong-headed whingers, from campaigning journalist John Pilger to Kent’s Lydd Airport Action Group (who, in case you were wondering, oppose said airport’s expansion, and are therefore guilty of Nimbyism). Complaining may be crucial to our humanity, but misguided gripes – about things that either cannot or should not be changed – just get us down all the more.

By far the most egregious repeat offenders of spurious grumbling are, in Baggini’s view, the middle classes. They move about in search of the best schools and jobs, then complain at the loss of traditional community; travel to the top of Machu Picchu in Peru only to complain about all the tourists; and expect other cultures to be authentic while patronising the local Starbucks “like a libertine who wants his innumerable conquests to be chaste virgins”. Worst of all, they find ever new ways to channel their “visceral abhorrence of the proletariat”, such as by joining the Jamie Oliver bandwagon in order to carp on about the state of school dinners.

There are many insights in this neat (and short) book – indeed, Complaint is a work of popular philosophy of the best kind: it doesn’t dumb down the ideas of the greats, but employs the tools and training of the philosopher to explore the deeper significance of everyday life. The questions Baggini poses – how much imperfection should we accept, and how much should we strive to change? – are ones we face every day and determine the course of our lives perhaps more than any others.

The consideration of when enough is enough also preoccupies John Naish. Though he opposes the happiness cult as much as Wilson and Baggini, he is also concerned that our disgruntlement doesn’t get out of hand. The modern malaise, he believes, which the happiness fanatics are trying to cure, often has a simple evolutionary explanation: the instinct that was naturally selected through millennia in the wilds is to strive for ever more – calories, stuff, options. But in this time of plenty, we quickly end up with far more than is good for us. Like the Ghost of Christmas Present, Naish takes us on a tour of our modern-day excesses. These range from food to information – did you know that we tend to overeat when in crowded environments, or that, according to a recent study, prolonged exposure to e-mail can temporarily knock 10 points off your IQ?

The worries these authors express are not wholly new. Many a literary dystopian has warned us what we stand to lose as a society of drugged-up happy zombies. Utilitarianism, the idea that the highest good is the maximisation of happiness, has heavily influenced modern politics and economics. Yet its critics have long been aware of the so-called paradox of hedonism: that true contentment can only be approached indirectly – like being spontaneous, trying too hard is the surest way not to achieve it.

But Naish, in his witty, self-deprecating style, takes the argument against the happy set one step further: could it be that the pressure to be constantly buoyant is actually adding to our woes; that our inability to attain nirvana is making us feel like failures? Most psychological research, he claims, shows that once we reach the age of 25, neither winning the lottery nor losing both legs is likely to have much long-term effect on our happiness. We are stuck with ourselves as we are. Yet the golden carrot of continual joy is dangled before us as if rapture were just one step away. These unrealistic expectations are themselves an obstacle to self-fulfillment.

“The price we pay for our advance in civilisation is a loss of happiness,” wrote Sigmund Freud in 1930. Happiness and progress simply do not make for cosy bedfellows. So perhaps it is time to stop chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of continual good cheer and instead take ownership of our discontented side. Who knows, it’s just possible that by lifting the intense pressure to be unremittingly joyous, we might find it that little bit easier to smile.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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ST: PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOUR - Feel the eyes upon you

Home > Review > Others
Aug 6, 2008
PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOUR Feel the eyes upon you
By Olivia Judson
UNCANNY: A performer at a street festival in Tokyo. Several experiments have shown that people respond to pictures of eyes by altering their behaviour in subtle ways. -- PHOTO: AFP IMAGINE a photograph of the London skyline - the houses of Parliament, the clock tower of Big Ben. Now add, floating in the sky above, a large pair of eyes looking at you. This image used to grace the inside walls of a bus I used to ride. It also had a caption: 'Secure beneath the watchful eyes.' Brrrr. It wasn't an advertisement for a creepy Orwellian film, but an effort to draw attention to the presence of closed- circuit television cameras. But looking back, it seems to me that the designer of the poster may have been on to something. Several recent experiments have shown that people respond to pictures of eyes by altering their behaviour in subtle ways, even when they haven't consciously noticed the eyes are there. For example, take a game beloved of economists, the dictator game. In its simplest form, you have two players. Player A (the dictator) is issued a sum of money; he or she gets to decide whether to share the money with player B, and if so, how much to give. The dictator gets to keep whatever's left...and that's it. Game over. (What fun economists have!) In anonymous versions of the game - played over the computer, so dictators and recipients can't identify each other - most dictators don't share. In one series of experiments, though the players were anonymous, the background computer screen was modified so that it sometimes included two eyespots. The results showed that dictators were much more likely to give money when the eyes were present. In a different set of experiments (using a more complicated economic game), the background screen sometimes included a picture of a robot with human-like eyes; here, too, players were more generous when the eyes were there. Such effects aren't restricted to these artificial situations. A couple of years ago, scientists at a university in the north of England did an experiment in their staff common room where people were supposed to pay for coffee by putting money into a box - an honour system. Above the notice reminding everyone to pay, the scientists put a picture of eyes during some weeks and a picture of flowers in other weeks. In the weeks with eyes, people paid more often than they did in the weeks with flowers. It's not surprising that such cues could affect behaviour without our being aware of it. We constantly respond to things that the conscious brain hasn't registered. For instance, suppose you are asked to sniff a scent before looking at a photograph of a stranger. The scent is too faint for the conscious part of your brain to detect - so you sniff and think you smell nothing - yet it will affect your response. Unpleasant smells increase the chance that you'll take a dislike to the photograph. And when it comes to eyes, humans are especially sensitive. Our eyes have a large 'white'. This makes it easy to see where someone is looking. Moreover, certain neurons in the human brain respond strongly to eyes; a number of researchers believe that humans have neural circuits dedicated to perceiving eyes and the direction they're looking. Why might this have evolved? Many animals respond to eyes and alter their behaviour when they sense they are being observed. For instance, birds like starlings are sensitive to whether a predator is looking at them. On coral reefs, fish that clean other fish for a living are more likely to do a good job at removing parasites, and less likely to take a bite of their customer, when other fish are watching. Another example: Ravens, which store food to eat later. But they have a problem: thieves. Ravens steal from one another. So if a raven notices it's being watched while storing, it will often remove the food and hide it elsewhere. Humans are a highly social species; perhaps we've evolved to be sensitive to being watched because what other people see you doing may alter the way they treat you. In our evolutionary past, individuals seen to be selfish or greedy may have found themselves ostracised - or even killed. To my mind, all this raises a slew of questions. Our cities are plastered with images of faces - do these influence our behaviour? What about countries that have real dictators, whose photographs are ubiquitous - does that have an effect? Moreover, to date, experiments have looked at the effects of eyes on generosity and honesty. But can images of eyes modulate other aspects of our behaviour - a tendency towards vandalism, say? Instead of signs announcing, in words, the presence of surveillance systems, would pictures of pairs of eyes be more effective? Perhaps we should do some experiments. NEW YORK TIMES