Edward Hadas

By Edward Hadas

The opinions expressed are his own.

Ah, the curse of materialism. The true spirit of Christmas has been obliterated by a landslide of gifts. The crass commercialism which surrounds the experience of holiday shopping, not to mention the returns and post-Christmas sales, has turned this joyous holiday into little more than an exaltation of the worst aspects of our modern consumerist economy.

Or so it is often said. But is the complaint fair? It’s certainly true that the exchange of gifts on a large scale is a relatively new feature of Christmas festivities. In the 1840s, Charles Dickens has the Spirit of Christmas Present take the miser Ebenezer Scrooge to witness joyous celebrations of the feast. Food, drink and good cheer are in abundant supply, but there are no presents.

In the 1880s, hand-made gifts were making the day special for many American children. By the 1920s, a more commercial spirit had triumphed in the land of mass production and the factory-made Christmas was already causing complaints about inappropriate gifts. According to historian William Waits, some businessmen felt a little queasy about advertisements for such supposedly ideal Christmas gifts as a can of paint, a cooperative apartment, potatoes and floor wax.

Waits notes that Santa Claus had starred in many seasonal advertisements. He plausibly interprets this as a sign of discomfort with the invasion of the cash nexus into a holiday which was then still considered predominantly religious. The desire to make people buy things and the search for profit seemed to fit poorly with the poor infant of Bethlehem. But the reworked Saint Nicolas took gifts out of the marketplace. In Waits’ words, Santa “did not use money and was not engaged in making profit…. His gargantuan giveaway was antithetical to pecuniary self-interest and its only reward was the satisfaction of making recipients happy.”

The jovial generosity in the North Pole workshop can certainly be interpreted as no more than a feeble attempt to escape the dark reality of “pecuniary self-interest” (aka greed). There is no question that Christmas is now a big business. Holiday presents account for about 0.6 percent of U.S. GDP, based on spending intentions reported in a Gallup survey. Producers and retailers alike cannot easily separate the spirit of the season from the call of the cash register.

Not that Christmas greed can always be measured in dollars and cents. Few people are as bold as the British girl who threatened Santa that a failure to deliver on her wish-list would drive her to “hunt down your reindeer, cook them and serve their meat to homeless people on Christmas day”. But parents and other gift-givers will recognise the sentiment. Recipients’ high expectations can turn the exchange of presents into something like extortion.

Some families have been so repulsed by the grasping and the commercial spirit that they have vowed to boycott the holiday completely. Others try to simplify. I know one which has reduced the exchange of gifts to the barest minimum — each family member gives $100 in cash to every other.

Such Scrooge-like approaches miss the good side of Christmas giving. The holiday can be considered the annual highlight of an industrial version of what anthropologists call a gift-culture. Gifts are useful and easily understood tokens of emotional and social life. The obligatory nature of many gifts (“I have to get something nice for auntie”) does not necessarily make the offering insincere (“That’s so kind of you to think of me”). On the contrary, when the gift-culture works well, love and duty reinforce one another.

At its best, the contemporary Christmas gift-culture does have something of a Santa-effect. The harsh logic of prices and markets gives way to the generous logic of love and the anonymous products of mass assembly lines are transformed into personalised tokens of affection and esteem. Even the seasonal excesses spring from good intentions. Christmas presents can show that there is a spirit more powerful than the mean techniques of monetary calculation.

The Christmas culture deserves neither condemnation nor enthusiastic endorsement, for it is both a generous celebration of abundance and a distasteful materialist greed-fest. The noble and the base are inextricably mixed. Christmas makes shopping close to something like holiness, but it also brings out some of the worst aspects of consumerism — the blind desire for ever more stuff, the desperate search for bargains and the restless ambition to show status through nice things.

The best aspects of Christmas are undermined–and the worst are amplified — by the weakness of any gift-culture, the limited ability of material things to represent the immaterial. No quantity of generosity can prove that the gift-giver is truly socially superior to the recipient. And nothing found in a shopping mall or on a retailer’s website will truly show the extent of our love.

Photo: A visitor lights a candle at the Church of the Nativity, the site revered as the birthplace of Jesus, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem December 19, 2011, ahead of Christmas. REUTERS/Darren Whiteside

Something has gone wrong with global warming. It’s not that the world has stopped heating up. It’s that the anti-warming political movement, which seemed almost unstoppable when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, has stalled.

Last week’s United Nations climate change conference in Durban ended with little more than an agreement to talk some more about what to do next. Even that was too much for Canada, which has just said no to emission-reduction targets. The activists blame recalcitrant governments and many commentators blame economic distractions. They are probably both right, but I think the activists’ own approach bears much of the responsibility.

While only experts can judge the strength of the scientific evidence for man-made climate change, no technical knowledge is required to be troubled by the way the activists present their case. The willingness to describe knowledgeable opponents as “deniers,” a word previously used only for fantasists about Nazi atrocities, suggests a very unscientific attitude.

The “Climategate” emails show scientists so passionate about their beliefs that they are unwilling to brook opposition. Fervor seems to have led to overconfidence. The status of the claim that recent years have been by far the warmest in a millennium has been downgraded from certain in 2001 to likely or mistaken (depending on the expert consulted).

The activists’ excess of passion and certainly has led them to a dogmatic conviction that a radical policy — rapid and sharp reductions in carbon dioxide emissions — is required to save the world. Since industrial economies cannot yet function without using large amounts of energy generated by burning carbon, the anti-carbon prescription equates to a campaign against prosperity — tough on rich countries (too tough for Canada to bear) and practically a sentence of economic stagnation for poor ones.

Such draconian measures only make sense if global warming is exactly what devout affirmers say it is — hazardous, accelerating, man-made and about to go non-linear (science-talk for catastrophic). Otherwise, a more moderate strategy makes sense. We should work on energy conservation (good in any case), increase research on carbon-neutral technologies and build up industrial production and prosperity in poor countries so they will be better able to marshal technological forces against the problems which global warming may eventually cause.

Why do activists show so little interest in such a sensible compromise? I blame the sorcerer’s apprentice. In the 1797 poem by J W Goethe (familiar from in the Walt Disney film Fantasia), this clever student is able to invoke — but not control — the magical-technological ability to turn a broom into a water-carrying machine. The man-made global warming activists tell a less poetic version of the same story. It goes like this: we have learned how to use the energy stored in the earth to serve our purposes, but do not know the spell which keeps the unleashed energy from destroying us — and we have no equivalent to the poem’s old master to rescue us from our carbon folly. Halfway countermeasures are likely to replicate the apprentice’s effort to stop the broom by splitting it with an axe — he ended up with two brooms and twice the trouble. Under the circumstance, moderation would be madness.

Durban is history, but the debate on global warming can still be calmed down. Activists need to admit that both their scientific analyses and their policy recommendations have been under the spell of this sorcerer’s apprentice-model. Rather than telling a simple tale of good (themselves) and evil (unresponsive industry and anyone who disagrees with them), they should accept that possible man-made climate change is a complex topic which deserves dispassionate study. True, delay might prove dangerous, but so too might hasty action. Besides, in practice, the activists’ current approach has been tried and found wanting.

A call for more careful study is not a counsel of despair. Rather, it is a call for aid from one of the most effective power-groups in the contemporary economy: scientists and engineers working together with politically sensitive regulators. Consider the dark arts of aviation, mobile phone technology and nuclear power (now there’s something with a sorcerer’s apprentice-feel). In all these domains, knowledge has been advancing steadily, accidents are rare and well grounded criticism has helped to make the technologies safer and more acceptable.

Indeed, in the modern economy this technical-regulatory complex — undramatic committees meeting in unbeautiful offices — plays the heroic role of the master sorcerer. It does not permit wild experiments and it eventually changes old practices when new evidence comes along. If climate change is to be taken seriously, the IPCC and UN conferences need to have less madness and more method.

By Edward Hadas
The opinions expressed are his own.

Americans are both the fattest people in the world and the biggest spenders on health care. Both those facts can be traced, at least in part, to a common attitude.

First a few numbers. The latest global handbook from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that 34 percent of Americans are obese by the criteria of the World Health Organization. In health care spending, the United States leads with 17 percent of GDP. In both categories, U.S. numbers are almost twice as high as the average numbers of OECD members.

The extra fat accounts for only a small portion of the extra American spending on health care. Researchers recently estimated that the medical expenses caused by obesity, which is connected to problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes, amounted to $147 billion in 2008. That number suggests that even if Americans were no fatter than the OECD average, they would only spend 3 percent less on health care than they do now.

I believe there is a more significant connection between the obesity problem and the amount Americans spend on health care than these numbers suggest. Both the choice to eat too much and the choice to pay up for almost everything labelled “medical expense” are spawned by an attitude which can be called health willfulness. The United States leads the world in this attitude, but it, along with obesity and health care spending, is probably on the rise almost everywhere. It helps explain why spending on health care increased from 4 to 10 percent of GDP since 1960 for the entire OECD.

Health willfulness is the belief that it is my right to decide what to do with my body. If I want to eat without concern for my health, so be it. When it comes to health care, I expect the modern medical system to satisfy my desires, whether for help in getting slim again or for heroic efforts to prolong my life. Money should not matter.

The attitude fits with the modern culture’s enthusiasm for individualism and consumer choice, but it has some unattractive consequences. The damage caused by a willful approach to eating is plain to see. The damage caused by willful health care is harder to see because it can be obscured by the sensitivity of life and death matters. Is it not better to favor life, whatever the cost? But the willful approach to medical care has made the American system sickly. Too much is spent on care that pleases vain or desperate patients and family members, without doing much for health. As much as one-third of total spending is dedicated to care during the last year of life.

There would be less to complain about if the high cost of these willful choices were born only by those who make them. But direct payments from patients account for only 12 percent of the total medical spending in the United States. The rest of the funding comes from society as a whole, through plans run either by governments or by heavily regulated insurers. In effect, health willfulness is usually an individual’s decision about how to spend everyone’s money.

The socialization of medical costs has much going for it. Both the mixed American and European systems and the more monolithic British arrangement provide the poor with care they could not otherwise afford. Socialization also spreads the burden of expensive treatments over a lifetime and the costs of sickness over well and sick alike. But the combination of medical socialization with health care individualism has increased total health spending and created involuntary subsidies from those who chose fewer interventions to those who choose more. In most rich countries, both the economy and justice would now be served by a partial de-socialization of health care.

How to do it? One approach is already standard practice in many American and European arrangements — make patients pay part of the cost. These plans would be more effective and just if the fees were calibrated to incomes, so rich and poor people felt the same economic pain. (Speeding fines are set this way in Finland.) Another approach is to allow people to opt out of the socialization of costs for selected treatments. They could choose an insurance plan which excludes, for example, serious operations for people over 80 or treatments for cancer which add less than one year to life expectancy. The frugal would pay less and get less. Alternatively, the standard health insurance policy could cover less than it currently does. Higher priced policies would be available so the most willful could still satisfy their health care desires.

The practical details of medical de-socialization — setting prices and dealing with late changes of mind — are tricky. But it’s worth a try. We’re more careful about expensive things when we have to pay for them out of our own pocket.

Photos, top to bottom: A cheeseburger is pictured at a Five Guys restaurant in Washington May 26, 2010. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas; A passenger waits for a delayed flight at Heathrow airport’s terminal four in London August 12, 2006. As healthcare costs in such heavyweight nations as the United States and heavy-smoking locations as Dundee keep rising, and as governments move to cut huge budget deficits, hundreds of local authorities, employers and health insurers – even the occasional former investment banker – are dabbling with health incentive schemes. REUTERS/Toby Melville