̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - capitalism

Spending for smiles: money can buy happiness after all

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 15:00:00 +0000

People who spent more money on purchases which matched their personality were happier, found the study, published in the journal Psychological Science. According to the researchers, matching spending with personality was more important for individuals’ happiness than the effect of individuals’ total income or their total spending.

̽��ֱ��study, by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, was conducted in collaboration with a UK-based multinational bank. Customers were asked whether they would complete a standard personality and happiness questionnaire, and to consent to their responses being matched anonymously for research purposes with their bank transaction data.

̽��ֱ��final study was based on 76,863 transactions of 625 participants. ̽��ֱ��study whittled down 112 spending categories automatically grouped by the bank into 59 categories that had at least 500 transactions over a six-month period.

̽��ֱ��study matched spending categories on the widely recognised “Big Five” personality traits – openness to experience (artistic versus traditional), conscientiousness (self-controlled vs easy-going), extraversion (outgoing vs reserved), agreeableness (compassionate vs competitive), and neuroticism (prone to stress vs stable).

For example, eating out in pubs was rated as an extroverted and low conscientiousness (impulsive) spending category, whereas charities and pets were rated as agreeable spending categories. Further examples can be found below.

̽��ֱ��researchers then compared the participants’ actual purchases to their personalities using this scale, and found that people generally spent more money on products that match their personality. For example, a highly extroverted person spent approximately £52 more each year on pub nights than an introverted person. Similarly, a highly conscientiousness person spent £124 more annually on health and fitness than a person low in conscientiousness.

̽��ֱ��study was authored by Sandra Matz, a PhD candidate in Cambridge’s Department of Psychology; Joe Gladstone, a Research Associate at Cambridge Judge Business School; and David Stillwell, ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in Big Data Analytics & Quantitative Social Science at Cambridge Judge Business School.

“Historically, studies had found a weak relationship between money and overall wellbeing,” said Gladstone. “Our study breaks new ground by mining actual bank transaction data and demonstrating that spending can increase our happiness when it is spent on goods and services that fit our personalities and so meet our psychological needs.”

̽��ֱ��researchers believe the findings hold widespread implications, including for Internet businesses using search-based recommendation engines. Companies can use this information to recommend products and services that don’t just increase clicks, but will actually improve the wellbeing of their customers – allowing companies to forge better relationships with customers based on what makes them happier.

̽��ֱ��researchers also backed up their findings by running a second experiment, where they gave people a voucher to spend either in a bookshop or at a bar. Extroverts who were forced to spend at a bar were happier than introverts forced to spend at a bar, while introverts forced to spend at a bookshop were happier than extroverts forced to spend at a bookshop. This follow-up experiment overcomes the limitations of correlational data by demonstrating that spending money on things that match a person’s personality can cause an increase in happiness.

“Our findings suggest that spending money on products that help us express who we are as individuals could turn out to be as important to our well-being as finding the right job, the right neighbourhood or even the right friends and partners,” said Matz. “By developing a more nuanced understanding of the links between spending and happiness, we hope to be able to provide more personalised advice on how to find happiness through the little consumption choices we make every day.”

Categories with the lowest and highest scores on each of the Big Five personality traits:

Big 5 Trait	Low	High
Openness	Traffic fines, residential mortgages	Entertainment, hair and beauty
Conscientiousness	Gambling, toys and hobbies	Home insurance, health, fitness
Extraversion	Home insurance, accountant fees	Entertainment, travel
Agreeableness	Traffic fines, gambling	Charities, pets
Neuroticism	Stationery, hotels	Traffic fines, gambling

Reference:
Sandra C. Matz, Joe J. Gladstone, and David Stillwell. ‘Money Buys Happiness When Spending Fits Our Personality.’ Psychological Science (2016). DOI: 10.1177/0956797616635200

Adapted from a Cambridge Judge Business School press release.

Money really can buy happiness when spending fits our personality, finds a study based on 77,000 UK bank transactions.

Spending can increase our happiness when it is spent on goods and services that fit our personalities and so meet our psychological needs.

Joe Gladstone

Glen Scott

Shopping

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Africa: the coming revolution

sjr81 — Wed, 21 May 2014 08:38:57 +0000

Professor Keith Hart, a former Director of Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies, returns to the university tomorrow (Thursday) to deliver the annual Audrey Richards lecture – a showpiece of the Centre’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Hart will use the lecture to contend that conflict, poverty and extremism on the African continent should not divert attention from the long-standing strengths of the informal economy in Africa’s cities and the continent’s new embrace of the digital revolution in communications. Professor Hart will show how such social dynamics may have surprising lessons to give to the troubled market economy in the 21st century.

“In the present decade, seven out of the ten fastest-growing economies are African,” said Hart. “It was never the case that a national framework for development made sense in Africa and it makes even less sense today. ̽��ֱ��coming African revolution could leapfrog many of the obstacles in its path, but it will not do so by remaining tied to the national straitjacket worn by African societies since they won independence from colonial rule.

“ ̽��ֱ��world economy is precarious in the extreme, but Africans have less to lose. Africa’s advantage in the current crisis is its weak attachment to the status quo.”

During the lecture, Hart will also consider the role played by free trade and protection in the revolutions that made modern France, the United States, Italy and Germany, as well as examining the organization of international trade in Southern Africa and reviewing the prospect for greater integration of trade regimes on the continent as a whole.

Professor Hart’s original research in Ghana in the 1970s is renowned for coining the notion of the informal economy. It has been widely applied to account for economic activities that are not recorded by conventional measurements such as the gross domestic product. He has more recently published influential studies on how new forms of money may entail more emancipatory possibilities than has been the case in capitalism’s historical forms.

Professor Hart is currently the co-director of the Human Economy Programme in Pretoria ̽��ֱ�� and Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His lecture is given as the Audrey Richards Annual Lecture in African Studies. It pays tribute to Richards (1889-1984), a Cambridge social anthropologist, who founded the Centre of African Studies in 1965.

Hart’s lecture today inaugurates the Centre’s 50th anniversary events that will highlight half a century of excellence in African Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s new Africa initiative builds on this legacy of African Studies.

̽��ֱ��lecture, Waiting for Emancipation: ̽��ֱ��Prospects for Liberal Revolution and a Human Economy in Africa, takes place in room SG1 & SG2 in the Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, at 5pm Thursday. All are welcome to attend.

Africa’s fastest-growing economies could offer a radical alternative to the West’s current reliance on national capitalism according to an academic who helped coin the term the ‘informal economy’.

̽��ֱ��world economy is precarious in the extreme, but Africans have less to lose.

Keith Hart

Globe by Hans Olofsson

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23 things they don't tell you about capitalism

lw355 — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:38:04 +0000

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Dr Chang left his homeland for the first time when he moved to Cambridge as a graduate student in the 1980s. His time in Korea had coincided with an economic miracle, when the country transformed itself from being one of the poorest countries to one of the richest by the late 1980s. It was an economic transition that he now looks back on with academic interest: ‘Of course when you are living through it you don’t realise the enormity of the change,’ he says. ‘But, as an economist today, I feel extremely fortunate to have witnessed this leap, rather like a historian of mediaeval England witnessing the Battle of Hastings.’Dr Chang’s research in the Faculty of Economics encompasses trade and industrial policy issues, foreign investment and intellectual policy rights, corporate governance and the stock market. Partly shaping his research agenda is his work with the many organisations he advises, from the World Bank to Oxfam, and the Ecuadorian Presidency to Shell.‘I don’t wish to work on a permanent basis anywhere other than in academia but I have a lot of interactions with non-academic people – in government, business, international organisations, and NGOs – because much of my research is directly relevant to policies,’ he says. ‘These interactions help me to take a fresh look at economic theory and how it relates to the real world.’He is also keen to bring economics to a new audience by communicating complicated ideas in plain language. His latest book 23 Things… explains how capitalism really works by challenging such dogmas as the ‘free’ market, globalisation making the world richer, and rich countries being more entrepreneurial than poor ones, before concluding with his eight principles for rebuilding the world economy.

What might others be surprised to learn about you?

A few years ago, South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense banned my book Bad Samaritans: ̽��ֱ��Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism in the country’s military barracks as ‘seditious’ literature. Funnily enough, the incident propelled me into something of a celebratory sphere in Korea – whenever the issue was discussed, somehow my book became representative of the list of 23 banned books. I suppose you could say it was the best kind of ban. Bad Samaritans had a certain aura and yet was available everywhere except in army bookshops, with the result that sales more than doubled!

Who or what inspires you?

I’m inspired by people who have fought for a better world – the individuals we know about and also the countless, nameless people who have made sacrifices to change the world. I often get asked by my students whether, with so many things wrong with the world and so much resistance to change, it is realistic to expect any social and economic reform. But only 200 years ago people thought that abolishing slavery was totally unrealistic, and 100 years ago women were imprisoned for wanting the vote. These things were changed because people fought for them. So I tell them yes, although in the short run it’s almost impossible to change anything, in the long run it is possible.

If you could wake up tomorrow with a new skill, what would it be?

I would love to wake up having learned another language overnight because knowing another language is like knowing another world. Spanish would be the best because some of my favourite writers are from Latin America, but even if it’s a language with only three books I would gladly take it if it were given to me.

What is your favourite research tool?

It’s more a research methodology than a tool, but I’ve learned much from looking at the economics of real societies and comparing them across time and space. ̽��ֱ��real world does not operate in a way that economic models would predict – life is often stranger than fiction. My favourite example is Singapore. It’s famous for its free trade and welcoming attitude towards foreign investors but in many ways it’s a socialist country, with all the land publicly owned, 85% of housing provided by the government-owned housing corporation, and more than 20% of national output produced by state-owned enterprise. It is a perfect example of both the limitations of economic theory and the pragmatic mixture that is needed in the real world – anyone trying to invent an economic system on the basis of a particular theory would not invent Singapore’s economy. Real-world analysis wakes you up from your hidden assumptions and helps sharpen your theory.

What will the future look like in 2050?

In contrast to what is often hyped, over the past 30 years the world economy has grown more slowly and has become more unstable and more unequal than it was during the preceding 30-year period. On top of this, we are in the middle of a financial crisis the end of which is not yet in sight. Unless we reform this system we could continue to have these problems over the next 50 years. I see the challenge as restoring the balance between the market and the government, finance and the real economy, and material prosperity and environmental sustainability. Economists will need to do their bit to help find solutions.

For more information, please contact Dr Ha-Joon Chang (hjc1001@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Economics or visit www.hajoonchang.net/

Author of the recently published 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Dr Ha-Joon Chang studies how international markets succeed and fail, asking what steps might be taken to rebuild the world economy.

We are in the middle of a financial crisis the end of which is not yet in sight. Unless we reform this system we could continue to have these problems over the next 50 years."

Ha-Joon Chang

Mark Mniszko

Ha-Joon Chang

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