On being deviant

According to Tibor Scitovsky (a great name for an economist AND a regal title for a cat), eccentricity quite literally costs more than conformity. If you're conformist enough to have the same tastes as millions of other people, you'll probably be able to find things in the economy that suit your tastes. That's because millions of people wanting roughly the same thing means we can create economies of scale that allow us to produce those things more cheaply. And things like advertising encourage us to share tastes so that we have a chance to create those economies of scale. 

In short, says Tibor, the economy is really about mob rule, because the bigger the mob that wants something, the more likely it is that what the mob wants will be produced.

Now if you're not part of the mob, we can call you an eccentric. As an eccentric, you'll probably find that your tastes cost an awful lot more than what the mob's buying, or that what you want isn't available at all. That's OK if you happen to be a millionaire AND an eccentric, because you'll just pay the high prices or get what doesn't exist made up for you. And in fact, we tend to think that eccentrics are millionaires, because rich eccentrics are the only ones we know of who can literally afford to indulge their eccentricity. The rest of us, Tibor says, are mostly "forced by the high cost of eccentricity to give it up and conform instead."

Hmmmm. I wonder if that's what's happening in all those rabbit-hutch housing developments in my old neck of the woods. I can't believe that people wouldn't rather live among some trees or plants, or by the water, or in some more soulful environment. Yet this is what we keep producing, and this apparently is what we keep buying.

Christopher Alexander, architect and author, says it's a myth that to cure ourselves, we just have to do some inner work and change ourselves. He calls it "a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings." In fact, he says, our state of harmony with ourselves is completely dependent on our harmony with our physical surroundings: "Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life. Others make it very difficult."

So - if being eccentric is expensive, and it's cheaper to conform to the mob, then what we, the mob (now made up of a lot of eccentrics) end up with is a lot of what nobody really wanted in the first place. And living surrounded by a bunch of what nobody really wanted in the first place makes it hard to come to life. And THAT makes me think it's worthwhile to keep on being an eccentric, in case there are more of us than we know, simply accepting that life will be more expensive than it might otherwise have been and budgeting accordingly.

After all, you get what you pay for.

Comments

[Heather]

I'm all for a little eccentricity. And it appears that it will have the added bonus of helping to prop up the economy.