Lab Rats that can Create their own Brain Stimulation Levers

For some weird reason, I think I was dreaming about lab rats pressing on levers to electrically stimulate their brains' pleasure centres, so while lazily rolling in bed before I got up today, I was thinking that's how humans are basically behaving as our world gets more and more technologically complex.

With insights from science allowing us to reduce huge, complicated and dynamic systems into their simple causes and effects, we're able to know what causes what to a very accurate degree. We know what drives us at the deepest level. We're not that different from animals. From the studies of laboratory animals with electric nodes wired up to the pleasure centres in their brains, it was found that the electrical stimulus was reinforcing and can override behaviour. Laboratory animals will press a lever at high rates (> 6,000 times per hour) to deliver brief stimulation pulses to brain regions. The reinforcement from direct electrical activation of this reward substrate is more potent than other rewards, such as food or water. The potency of this electrical stimulation was most dramatically shown in a classic experiment where the animal subjects suffered self-imposed starvation when forced to make a choice between obtaining food and water or electrical brain stimulation (Routtenberg & Lindy, 1965). The second distinct feature of reward from electrical brain stimulation is the lack of satiation; animals generally press to stimulate continuously, taking only brief breaks. These two features - super-potent reward and lack of satiation - are important characteristics of direct activation of brain reward mechanisms.

Unfortunately in this sense, I suppose, science and technology co-exist and advance each other accordingly. Every new item on the market is sold to reproduce that kick from activating our brain reward mechanisms and promises, in fancy marketing language, to give us enhanced kicks. These include nifty new gadgets and websites promising entertainment that suck us into hours of unproductive, addictive fun. But this is not limited to technological products - the market reflects peoples' demand for novel and better ways to activate their brain reward mechanisms (obviously), and with that we see flashier cars, harder drinks, trendier clothes, swankier clubs, bigger brands, super-sweet foods, etc. These things do not satiate us, and they replace our otherwise normal behaviours.

Whatever is "better", on average, ultimately boils down to what activates those brain reward mechanisms more and faster, and people are willing to pay good money for it. An immediate distinction between now and the past is that, with our advances in ideas and technology, we're getting more and more capable of delivering those quick-reward ends compared to other periods in our history. We've become laboratory rats who are capable of creating our own fancy brain stimulation levers, and we're psychotically pressing them. In contrast, a caveman was capable of only activating his pleasure centres by doing the menial but traditionally sound things that led to good feelings - seeking friendships, taking care of relatives, falling in love, communicating with others, finding food to eat, etc. These days, who needs such longwinded activities? They take too long before they lead us to the promised land.

Abused Medicine

It is remarkable to me how economists can continue to push on and not be disillusioned about the disconnect between their work and reality. I'm not saying that what economists do are naive, useless or unrealistic. In fact, I think economics should represent the ideal state of affairs of transactions and give-and-take. But there are many things in reality that will always distort economics and affect the elasticity of the supply-demand of some resources.

Off-handedly I can think of the following very basic supply-demand distortions:

Minimum wages/employment
When an industry experiences lessened demand for its good or an oversupply in production, a firm should do something to reduce cost in order to stay afloat, and a part of this is linked to employment conditions. A free market dictates that wages are fluid in order for it to function well and should decrease when costs rise. But the reality is that labour often organises itself to resist such wage-decline and employment changes.

Lack of labour fluidity
In a nutshell, the free market states that the system always remains in equilibrium because of resource mobility. In the arena of labour, when one industry declines, another has to rise and this should pose no problems as labour can relocate itself to fill up the demand in those new industries. But this hardly happens easily. When a worker faces the prospect of leaving his/her current job for another, he/she has to learn new skills and sometimes give up a whole way of life. The global free market also largely overlooks the fact that traveling across borders, implicitly asserted as necessary, poses a great deal of inertia.

Marketing
Another supply-demand curve distortion is marketing. It basically seeks to exploit consumer psychology to somehow keep demand high despite price increases. Price should be an indicator to the consumer of his/her utility for the good, and by right if the good doesn't change, a price increase should reduce consumer demand for it. But because of marketing, the price mechanism is affected and consumers continue purchasing goods despite price increases.

These things often create distortions that have to be compensated somewhere else in the market, but the repercussions aren't often traded off one-to-one, also because the consequences are unforeseen.


There are more I can think of if I decide to stretch my imagination, but the idea of economics being largely idealistic and somewhat utopian remains given how it can be distorted. I'm still for the idea that its role as an objective, neutral and rational prescription for policy or other matters is great, but in the hands of self-interested people with the know-how for exploitation and utility maximization (which just sounds downright political to me) this doesn't quite make sense.

But that's why sometimes I still have my reservations for blaming free markets alone for the plight of the third world, the lower class and the poor - it is really the people who want to run the free market in a political manner that results in the class inequalities of today. Sweatshops wouldn't happen if corrupted governments and their poor regulations can be exploited to keep labour oppressed (recall institutional strength - good legal frameworks - as an importance precursor for free markets), and fast food companies wouldn't be on such a roll if policy wasn't so strongly dependent on commercial interests (recall the separation of the state and economics as cardinally ideal). Seriously, what kind of justification can one conjure up to lobby against improved safety guidelines for workers?

That's why it looks kind of like abused medicine to me; something created in order to cure but instead misused as a drug.

Step Aside Kotler

Every marketing guru will tell tales about how to use SWOT analysis, name a product or pitch a service to do good marketing but nobody ever pinpoints the true reality of marketing so here goes.

Marketing is all about manipulating the supply and demand curve in your favour. As long as prices can be raised without demand falling, that's marketing at work and profitability coming in. And there are tons of ways to exploit the psychology of consumers in order to keep both demand and prices high. It all boils down to who is the most creative, scheming and manipulative bugger there is out there to discover these supply-demand mechanism loopholes.