When a male monkey becomes top monkey his serotonin level soars - Business Report (South Africa)
Does it provide an argument for why governments should aim to keep unemployment low? As Business Reports suggests perhaps the conclusion is free Prozac for all.
According to the Economist's review of his book, Layard thinks the big source of unhappiness in western countries is the rat race, which he defines as the "zero-sum game of competition for money and status" that has gripped rich societies.Will this area of research become standard fare in economics in a few years? I'm not sure. Some are skeptical.
Layard explored a similar theme in his lectures last year: "A degree of rivalry is wired into our genes. Among monkeys, the top male monkey gets the females. In consequence, monkeys with the strongest drive to reach the top reproduce most and that drive has become spread throughout the species.
"The mechanism that produces that drive is interesting. It is not so much the desire to reproduce as the sheer pleasure of being top. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that accompanies good feeling, and researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles studied how the level of serotonin varies in vervet monkeys.
"When a male monkey becomes top monkey his serotonin level soars. But if the researchers artificially displace him from that position his serotonin level drops.
"Similar effects are evident in humans, so people who win Oscars live four years longer than people who are nominated but fail to win."
Does it provide an argument for why governments should aim to keep unemployment low? As Business Reports suggests perhaps the conclusion is free Prozac for all.
posted by John B. Chilton at 2/22/2005 01:15:00 PM
2 Comments:
Bob Frank has been on this kick for decades. I recall a seminar presentation by him when he visited our university, in which he very neatly buried his initial assumption that competition is, by definition, a negative sum game. Using that assumption, he was able to prove [surprise, surprise!] we'd be better off if we didn't compete.
Well I wish he'd practice what he preaches and stop writing this stuff.
John Nye has a great critique of Robert Frank's position, and traces it back to Fred Hirsch's "Social Limits to Growth".
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Nyepositional.html
(Hat tip to Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek: http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/)
I would mention that Tibor Scitovsky also wrote on the issue in his "Joyless Economy".
However, here is a conjecture:
1) The original story posits that there has been selection among monkeys for a drive to reach the top because top monkeys reproduce more.
2) With the spread of monogamy amongst humans, has this moderated the gains from reaching the top? Monogamy appears to be a cooperative strategy among males to reduce the variability in reproductive success.
3) If 2), then will become a less ambitious species over time?
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