1
Marina Bianchi
Professor of Economics
Department of Economics and Environment
University of Cassino
Via Mazzaroppi 10
Cassino, Italy marina.bianchi@caspur.it
Abstract
Tibor Scitovsky (1910-2002) left his mark on a wide array of important topics in economics, from international trade and growth to monopoly power and competition,though his main interest was to uncover the welfare implications of economic interactions. In the last thirty years of his life he focussed on the study of a completely neglected component of these interactions, the role that stimulating activities in all their variety, from sports to the arts, from conversation to intellectual activities, can have on individual and social wellbeing. This brought him to redress the balance of economic thinking, tipping it towards the mechanisms underlying individual preferences and the ways these may respond to variables such as variety, novelty and change. My essay concentrates on this late research, and on the analytical consequences in terms of rational choice and social welfare that Scitovsky’s new approach suggests. His
Joyless
Economy , published in 1976 and in a revised edition in 1992, represents his attempt to deal with these problems and to acquaint economists with some of the findings of psychological research relevant to pleasure, utility, and well-being. The book was not a success in terms of its impact on mainstream economics, though in the past decade or so all its central points have become subjects of independent research and many of the questions opened by it are now among the leading questions of current psychological and economic research.

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Introduction: Scitovsky’s early studies and interests leading to The Joyless Economy
Tibor Scitovsky was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1910.
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His father, a civil servant, in 1920 became president of Hungarian General Credit Bank, the largest in the country, and lifelong member of the upper chamber of parliament. Scitovsky had only affectionate words for his father, whom he admired and respected for his honesty, generosity, compassion, and the politeness he showed to everybody irrespective of their rank, a rare quality, he noticed, among Hungarian gentry. His mother he described as charming and generous but also demanding, short-tempered and secretive. He strongly resented her possessiveness, which forced private tutoring on him and made him a rather lonely, very shy and bookish child, with only adults as friends (Memoirs, 14). Wonderful escapes were the long and lazy summers spent at his grandmother’s estate not far from
Budapest; these are fondly recalled in his Memoirs. The rise in family affluence brought by his father’s new position allowed his parents to fully indulge their passion for collecting art and antiques. Their new house in Budapest was a mansion of 18,000 square feet, beautifully furnished and decorated with the luxury of eighteenth century France.
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As Scitovsky frequently insists, these childhood years had a great influence on him, shaping his attitude towards the many enjoyments life can offer beyond work and income
(1986: ix).
Scitovsky attended Law school in Budapest, though with no great enthusiasm. He then went to Trinity College in Cambridge. There, after two years of “floundering” around (Memoirs, 10), he switched to economics with Dobb as his favourite teacher and
Robertson as his director of studies. In 1935, after a period spent at home because his passport had expired, he returned to England, this time to the LSE. With the world economy still undergoing the Great Depression, Scitovsky has recorded how far from reality a curriculum centred on full-employment equilibrium appeared to him and his fellow students (1986: viii). The appearance of Keynes’s
General Theory one year after his arrival at LSE, was felt like a breath of fresh air; suddenly all traditional texts looked
“stale and stuffy” (1991: 225-6). Robbins’s weekly seminars became a stage for fierce argument for and against the new thinking.
A few years later, Scitovsky unexpectedly won a fellowship that took him to the
United States where, however, he was stranded by the outbreak of the second world war.
On his student visa he could not work; but neither could he leave. He felt that his only hope was to publish in order to make himself academically employable. He remembers the agonizing months spent at the libraries of Columbia, Chicago, and Harvard, waiting for inspiration that was “awfully slow in coming” (ibid. 225).
His focus in that period was on trying to explain why Keynesian unemployment could or could not be reconciled with neoclassical economics and in particular which markets failed to clear and why, and what prices were involved. His first published paper, in 1940, was on financial markets. It offered a novel explanation of involuntary unemployment based on the impossibility for the interest rate to perform two different tasks at once, that of equating the flow of saving with the flow of newly issued financial assets, and that of equating the demand and supply of financial assets previously issued.
The paper, considered by Scitovsky one of his best, was not much noticed. Still, the problem of the interaction and possible mismatch between what he thought of as first-

3 and second-hand financial markets remained a lasting interest and much later he returned to it, extending it to ordinary goods as well (Scitovsky 1994).
After having served with the American Army in Europe, with the end of the war
Scitovsky returned to the United States, where he was appointed to a tenured position at
Stanford University.
The previous years of study and slow progress in many different fields of economic theory proved to be precious. Until the late ’sixties Scitovsky wrote on a wide array of economic problems, always revealing an original touch.
In his first years at Stanford he went back to the problem of price determination and introduced the figure of price-makers based on a model of specialized knowledge and asymmetric information, a model that gave room for the analysis of transaction costs and non-price competition.
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The topic of prices in asymmetric markets remained a lifelong interest in Scitovsky’s research (see Scitovsky 1990). He also worked on the welfare effects of governmental tariffs, on economic integration, and on grants-in-aid for thirdworld countries.
At the end of the ’sixties there came a change in Scitovsky’s life. He divorced his wife and remarried. In order to “ease the pains of divorce” (1991: 232), he accepted a job in Paris at the Development Centre of the OECD. There he wrote an illuminating comparative study of the Taiwanese and South Korean economies. His newfound interest in motivational psychology dates from this period in Paris. This led him to explore the different sources of individual satisfaction and culminated in the publication of The
Joyless Economy in 1976.
This new phase of his intellectual life was hardly understood by his fellow economists, as was his book. Yet Scitovsky described it as one of the most difficult tasks he undertook, as well as one of the most exciting, one that greatly added to his selfknowledge and his understanding of others (ibid.: 236). For Scitovsky the new direction of his work represented a natural and logical extension of his previous interests (ibid.:
234). His attention to the problem of welfare had made him alert to the effects that consumers’ behaviour may have on their own personal well being, while recognizing individuals’ incomplete knowledge of their sources of satisfaction was an evident counterpart to his previous work in markets with asymmetric information. Finally, coming to the United States from Europe, he was always sensitive to the differences of education and culture between these two continents. These, he felt, helped to explain the differences in lifestyles he observed more than income or affluence (ibid.: 235).
1. Wants and self-rewarding activities .
Skilful consumption and the enjoyment of life
When Scitovsky began to question the economist’s assumption “that consumers can be trusted to know what is best for them”, he realized that he too did not know what the components of a good life were (Memoirs: 105a). It was from the lesser writings of
Cambridge economists such as Marshall, Keynes, Harrod, and especially Hawtrey, that he started to glean some suggestions. Marshall for example, in contrast to Jevons, had stressed that an important source of satisfaction was to be found in self-rewarding activities rather than in pure wants . Hawtrey, for his part, had advanced the distinction between defensive and creative products, between goods that aim at relieving pain and distress and those that aim at producing positive pleasure.
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In Scitovsky’s hands these

4 early suggestions became the distinction between two different forms of satisfaction, those deriving from comfort - activities that ease and free life from pain and bother - and those deriving from stimulation, those self rewarding and creative activities that provide most of life’s pleasure.
It is important to uncover this distinction because the motivations and incentives that work for one form of satisfaction are not the same as those that work for the other.
Behind the desire to sleep, eat, or drink there is a need, a need for rest, or for relieving hunger and thirst. Pleasurable activities, instead, such as reading, playing, walking, or talking with friends, are independent of need. Better, as Scitovsky put it, behind these activities there is also a need, the need for stimulation and for relieving boredom. Yet this need does not act as a discerning device: innumerable activities can supply physical or mental challenges but it requires skills to select them and make them enjoyable. As
Hawtrey had forcefully argued, while defensive consumption deals with the familiar and the known, to enjoy creative activities requires an active effort on the part of the subject, an effort of knowledge, imagination, and exposure (Hawtrey 1926: 189-90; Scitovsky
1991: 236 ) . Creative consumption is also skilful consumption.
However, it was in a new body of neuro-psychological research that Scitovsky found an organizing framework and empirical support for his new economic ideas. The motivational model that emerged from those studies, linked especially to the name of
Berlyne (see Berlyne 1971, and Berlyne and Madsen 1973), focussed on the concept of arousal, the stimulations the central nervous systems receives from outside, and the ways the individual’s feelings of ill- or well-being are related to these stimuli (
JE : 18, 21).
Backed by a consistent body of empirical evidence, in this framework feelings of pleasure seemed to respond not to the levels of the stimulus associated with a given experience, as in the older relationship described by the Wundt curve, but to changes in the stimulus potential. Pleasure, in other words, is context dependent, and requires contrast to emerge. The variables responsible for well being become in the new research program the variables of change: novelty, surprise, variety, complexity and uncertainty.
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As a consequence, all the situations that increase the stimulus potential, or the perceived novelty and variety of an experience, when this is felt to be too low and boring, are pleasure enhancing. So are all the situations that decrease the stimulus potential of an experience when this is felt to be too high, over-burdening or threatening. Pleasure is maximal when novelty, variety, uncertainty, and so on, are felt to be neither too high nor too low. Yet reaching a position of maximum pleasure is not the same as reaching a position of rest, the equilibrium position of economic models. Repeating an experience inevitably erodes its novelty potential: maximum pleasure, when repeated, becomes diminishing pleasure.
Not all activities and experiences share the same fate, however. There are some that for their complexity, internal variety, and combinatory relation with other forms of activities are able endogenously to produce change and become a source of sustained pleasure. These are the creative activities, which Scitovsky contrasts with defensive ones, those that instead suffer the decreasing pleasure of increasing satiety.
Had Scitovsky simply stopped at this point, his contribution to a theory of choice would already have had rather radical and challenging implications. Berlyne’s motivational model enlarges the scope of individual choice and incentives. Since staying in an equilibrium state modifies it, agents cannot confine themselves to equilibrating real

5 income constraints with their given preferences. Additional variables are responsible for their well being. First of all, the time and frequency of an experience cannot be ignored since the stimulating power of novelty and contrast is strictly dependent on the time distance between experiences. Secondly, knowledge and skills are important, since the pleasure of experiences that are too easy to learn also fades easily. Thirdly, the social context of choice can amplify or reduce the novelty potential of an experience.
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Scitovsky often lets us understand that in earlier periods, those of less material abundance, stimulating variables were often, so to say, decided for us, exogenously. Rich meals and many daily comforts, being rarer and intermittent pleasures, were also a more permanent source of stimulation ( JE :66-67). Now it is the consumer who has to be skilful and to actively look for ways of managing these new variables of well being. Learning therefore becomes crucial, a source of discerning choice but also of innovation and enjoyment. Having already discovered in his studies on monopoly the link between the distribution of knowledge and the capability to innovate, Scitovsky was ready to capture the more dynamic view of decision makers that was implied in Berlyne’s model.
Scitovsky, however, added yet another important point to the Berlyne analysis, insisting that the qualitative differences that characterize comfort and pleasure, or defensive and creative consumption, are also a source of conflict between the two, a conflict that causes both individuals and society to suffer welfare losses.
2. Habituation and addiction
Defensive and creative consumption in fact compete with each other for consumers’ time, money and human resources. Yet the reason for conflict between the two is not this inescapable trade off, but is due to the fact that for Scitovsky creative activities are at a systematic competitive disadvantage relative to defensive ones. A first disadvantage is one of costs of access; as we have seen, pleasure-yielding activities require more investment in skills and time in order to be known and enjoyed.
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Second, there is the fact that the rewards associated with stimulating activities, though higher, are released only after the necessary investments have been made. This delay additionally may contribute to making them uncertain or difficult to detect.
The problem of choice with delayed and uncertain rewards has been much studied in economics. Recently, however, the literature on habit formation and addiction has uncovered patterns of behaviour that challenge some of the assumptions and conclusions of traditional theory.
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In particular, empirical evidence seems to support the idea that agents, when confronted with choices with distributed rewards, can be affected by two distinct forms of myopia.
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According to the first of these, described by a model of choice known as melioration theory, agents may be unable to calculate all the “internalities” that past consumption has on present; that is to say, they may not be able to calculate the overall utility function of distributed consumption choices. Instead they may end up simply settling for the consumption alternative that gives them higher average utility at each moment of choice. The equilibrium result of these actions, chosen piecemeal, corresponds to an allocation of resources that is non-optimal, in other words, it is less rewarding than had the agents been farsighted (see Herrnstein and Prelec, 1992: 241).
The second form of myopia causes agents to end up making suboptimal choices even if they had foreknowledge of all the effects of past choices. This is due to the fact

6 that, as Strotz had noted (Strotz 1955), the time distance of rewards seems to influence the ranking of alternatives. When the moment of choice is distant the more delayed and rewarding alternative is ranked higher (tomorrow morning I shall exercise) but when choice is near the ranking reverts to the more proximate even if lower reward (when morning arrives I stay in bed). In short, the nearer the reward the larger it appears (see
Ainslie and Haslam 1992; see also Thaler 1981: 127).
The short-sightedness of piecemeal actions and that of magnifying proximate rewards are invoked to explain why people might fall into patterns of behaviour that reduce rather that enhance pleasure. Once established, these patterns become difficult to break; forhabits pose independent claims on behaviour that tend to reinforce the pattern.
Both the need to compensate for the loss of pleasure a habit induces and the need to avoid the pain of breaking it provide new incentives that prevent individuals from abandoning habits.
For Scitovsky comfort seeking activities belong to those welfare-reducing consumption pursuits that, once established, become a behavioural trap. Using an explanation very similar to melioration theory, Scitovsky shows how comforts can be seductive. Easy to learn, they reveal their potential harmful effects only slowly, but at that point it is too late for agents to step out of them.
As a final remark, for Scitovsky society at large tends to reinforce the competitive disadvantage of creative activities that results in less than optimal equilibria. On the one hand, both American Puritanism and a dominant culture of production converge in downplaying the importance of acquiring skills and competence in consumption, with the paradoxical result that the unparalleled increases in productivity and disclosure of new resources that this culture of production has created, do not also translate into ways of learning to enjoy them (1972a; JE : 269). On the other hand, economies of scale and the division of labour are not as advantageous for pleasure as for they are for comfort. This is so not only because productivity gains seem to favour more the efficiency of comfort goods,
10
but also because in an economy of mass reproduction novelty disappears faster
( JE : 257), often leaving consumers with the sole option of consuming at an ever increasing pace.
3. Why income does not measure happiness. The social problem of boredom
Economists’ identification of individual choices with well informed, optimal choices is also what justifies their assumption that national income is a measure, even if imperfect, of welfare. Having broken the first identity the second too was questioned by
Scitovsky. He was among the first economists to have commented on Easterlin’s studies on the relation between income and self-reported estimates of happiness ( JE :33). These studies, which revealed a very low correlation between individual happiness and the secular rise of income, seemed to confirm that there must be other “measures” of happiness apart from income. Scitovsky himself lists four: status, work satisfaction, novelty and habituation (ibid.:139) Recent studies and data on happiness across countries have confirmed the original results found by Easterlin (see for example Oswald 1997,
Diener 1999, and Frey and Stutzer 2002). They have also explored and confirmed
Scitovsky’s intuition of the relevance, as markers of well being, both of status, one’s own relative position in society, and of work and work recognition (see Layard 2003). The

7 negative effects of habituation have also been studied both theoretically, as we have seen, and empirically (see Frederick and Loewenstein 1999; see also Frank 1999).
On the analysis of novelty Scitovsky, however, remains highly original. The role of creative consumption in well being, the formation of consumption skills and even the specific consumption technology of this dimension of happiness is a research field that is still in need of exploration and analysis.
The problem of novelty also has a negative side that is often neglected. This is the problem of the damage that a systematic lack of novelty can cause, the problem of unrelieved boredom that for Scitovsky falls heavy especially on the idle poor and unoccupied youth (Scitovsky 1981:131-32). In recounting the personal and intellectual conditions that prompted the writing of the Joyless Economy Scitovsky often reproached himself for having completely ignored the idle poor. The book, he says, dealt with boredom and its relief only from the point of view of those people for which boredom is a minor nuisance. It is not so for the long-term unemployed or unemployables who have more leisure time than they know how to use (Scitovsky 1996:600). They suffer from chronic boredom, a malady as terrible as starvation, and one that can have fatal consequences. In the absence of skills for relieving boredom in a harmless way it is easy to revert to the excitement of violence and vandalism (Memoirs:106-107).
In the rush to publish his book, Scitovsky said that he failed to realize and stress the fundamental role that education has, not only in making life more pleasant and enjoyable, but also in preventing those harmful activities that relieve boredom but disrupt society. To the effects of boredom and the civilizing role of education (and parental care)
Scitovsky devoted most of his attention and research in his later years (see Scitovsky
2000 and also, “Boredom, its causes and consequences”, Undated typescript, p. 9).
Conclusions. Beyond satiety
“You only have to look around you at all the people who are dieting and jogging to realize that, with respect to some needs at least, a large part of the advanced countries’ populations have not only reached but passed the point of satiety”. So noted Scitovsky in
1987 (Growth in the affluent society 1987:97). Yet, he added, the opposite implicit assumption, that consumers’ demands are insatiable, lies behind current models of selfadjusting, full-employment equilibrium (ibid.:97). How to reconcile this assumption with the satiability of wants?
In The Joyless Economy , commenting on Hawtrey’s characterization of defensive goods, Scitovsky recalls that not all defensive activities cater to wants that are satiable.
Addictions and strong habits are an example. Once a habit is formed, the loss of pleasure that accompanies repeated consumption is compensated for by an escalation of consumption of the same kind. Even some social comforts, such as the desire for status, can become insatiable. Competing for status is an unending game because no competitive advantage can be permanent. The relative gain of today becomes the loss of tomorrow when new winners arrive.
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In both cases, when comforts become insatiable either because of habituation or because of an unending competition for status, the results for welfare are negative.
Creative activities, from the enjoyment of friendship to engaging in the arts, would be better candidates as sources of unending demand. Yet, as we have seen,

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Scitovsky thought that no comparable effort has been devoted to the creation of consumption skills as has been devoted to creating production skills. The result is a distortion that translates into an over-investment of individual and social resources in defensive activities and an under-investment in creative ones.
In many instances the contrast between comfort and pleasure depicted by
Scitovsky is very sharp and perhaps too pessimistic. By exploiting the time dimension of consumption and the context of use, comfort activities can escape the trap of habituation.
Yet being able to succeed in this is a creative skill. It is therefore still of great importance that he stressed the acquisition of consumption skills and the role that novelty plays in enjoyable consumption.
1 Scitovsky was very open about his formative influences. Information on his life and cultural background can be found in Scitovsky 1991, 1992b and 1999. His Memoirs, which are in typescript at Duke University, are rich in personal and intellectual details and refreshingly honest.
As to secondary sources, a wide-ranging discussion of Scitovsky’s work and achievements is to be found in Earl 1992. Boskin’s (1979) edited volume of essays in honour of Scitovsky contains peer evaluations of his impact. And, a stimulating set of essays dealing with the issues I have discussed here is collected in Friedman and McCabe 1996.
2 This house still exists: expropriated in 1952 by Hungary’s communist government, it was sold to the British government, and became, and remains, the British Ambassador’s residence.
3 This for Scitovsky was his main contribution to economics (1991:229)
4 For Keynes continued capital accumulation and technical progress would bring us close to want satiation. But this freedom from the economic problem and the new opportunity it opened to live wisely and agreeably was in fact for Keynes “a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself”(see Scitovsky 1985: 188 and 1991: 237). Harrod too, discussing the same problem, depicted a scenario of wars and violent sports as a way to respond to the new human idleness (1991: 237).
5 Criticisms of some of Berlyne’s empirical findings related to complexity can be found in
Martindale et. al., 1990. Yet indirect support of Berlyne’s approach is supplied in Parducci’s definition of happiness as a relative concept and in Kahneman’s contrast theory.
6 I have discussed these issues in Bianchi 2002. The more active role that consumers play in this alternative approach are analysed in Bianchi 1998.
7 Pleasure in other words is costly!
8 Mainly that errors do not cancel out with experience, but are systematic (see Thaler 1991).
Analyses and case studies of addiction that assume a quasi-rational model of choice are in Elster and Skog 1999. The rational addiction model has been developed by Becker and Murphy 1988.
9 For an analysis of the anomalies of inter-temporal choice see Loewenstein and Elster 1992.
10 Vacuum cleaners can compress the time involved in keeping a house clean, but how to compress the time required to listen to a symphony? The importance of consumption time, a factor that is rarely taken into consideration when creative products are at stake, was recognized by Scitovsky as early as 1959, in an article that discussed the productivity lags that afflict the arts
(see Scitovsky 1959 and also 1983). He anticipated Baumol and Bowen’s formulation of the cost

9 disease phenomenon of the live arts (see Baumol and Bowen 1966, and for an overview of the problem, see Throsby 2001). These points are addressed in Bianchi 2003a.
11 I have criticized these arguments, particularly that status competition has only negative effects on welfare, in Bianchi 2003b.
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