'You loved A Beautiful Mind. Now enjoy the sequel - A Painful Bum.'
I'll explain. Two Princeton professors have won the Nobel prize for economics in the past decade.
One, now world-famous (thanks to Russell Crowe), was John Nash in 1994. A mathematician by training, Nash exported into economics the concept of "rational choice". Why, you ask, do young African-Americans in the ghetto turn so persistently to violent crime? Because they are morally degenerate, says the racist. Because of social deprivation, says the liberal. No, says the economist, because the gangsta makes a rational choice based on self-interest. Crime, with its high monetary yield and relatively low risk of detection, is the smarter thing to do. Beats the car wash, welfare, or flipping burgers.
Rational choice turns up interesting paradoxes. Economists at Caltech, having examined IRS audits in the wake of Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, discovered that a lower rate of income tax actually produced significantly greater return for the government. Why? because tax-payers "rationally" comply with levels they consider fair. They do not evade, or shelter, their hard-earned income.
This year, the Nobel prize for economics was won by another Princeton professor, Daniel Kahneman. Like Nash, he originates in an outside discipline: psychology. Kahneman's shtick is "hedonics". He has introduced into the economic calculus the question: what makes people happy or, at least, less miserable? And how do we factor hedonics into our analysis of individual decision-making?
Kahneman's results, too, are interestingly paradoxical or, as the economists like to say, counter-intuitive. His most famous experiment, in 1996, surveyed 682 patients undergoing colonoscopy. In this procedure a flexible, telescopic tube is introduced through the rectum, into the many yards of the large intestine. Air is blown into the gut, meanwhile, to enable the colonoscope (which has a little scalpel alongside its cold electronic eye) to slice off any suspicious tissue for biopsy.
Colonoscopy can last up to an hour and a half. It is (particularly for men, I suspect) intensely humiliating and, despite sedatives, not without pain as the foreign object moves inward and upward into your vitals, snipping as it goes. There is an alternative, non-intrusive, procedure: barium meal and x-ray. Uncomfortable, but not painful.
What Kahneman did was, randomly, to lengthen the procedure for half of the 682 patients with an extra terminal minute, in which the colonoscope, before being extracted, remained stationary. It was uncomfortable, but not terribly painful.
Very simply, those who had the extra minute (irrespective of how excruciating the earlier part of the operation had been) had a consistently more favourable reaction afterwards and were much more likely to elect for colonoscopy again, rather than barium and x-ray. Ask someone who didn't have the extra minute what it was like and they were likely to reply: "It was hell - like being raped by an unlubricated fire hose." Ask someone who did have the extra minute and the answer tended to be, "Not so bad".
There is, Kahneman deduced, a durational element in how we evaluate our experiences. The last level of pain, or pleasure, conditions what we remember of the whole event - our verdict on it, so to speak. For economists, this has useful applications in predicting decision-making, and the "shortcuts" most of us employ in the hundreds of such decisions we make every day.
The Kahneman thesis raises interesting issues, not just for economists. If you are a dentist, would it be ethical to prolong an agonising treatment by inflicting unnecessary minor pain for a tail end minute or two? One can see other applications in the classroom and the office.
I'm having difficulty, though, in seeing a movie in all this. Bottoms Up? Beautiful Behinds? A Right Royal Pain in the Arse? Russell's name would look rather good under that last one, don't you think?
