HBD Books

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

By Geoffrey Miller

384 pp. Viking Adult 2009

The modern world is a mixed blessing.  The positive aspects are quite self-evident to everybody but the craziest of leftists.  The negative ones need some explaining.  Take your average woman with an IQ of 100.  In prehistoric times she works no more than 20 hours a week and spends her time gossiping with friends and watching her children play, surrounded by family and friends.  What is life like for a woman of average intelligence, looks and personality in modern America?  The horror is a persuasive case against the concept of progress.

She is a single thirty-year old cashier, who drives a Ford Focus and lives in Rochester.  She is averagely intelligent (IQ 100), having gotten Cs in a few classes before dropping out of the local community college.  She now has a job in retail, working 40 hours a week…fifty miles from her parents and siblings.  She has to take Ortho Tri-Cyclen pills to  avoid getting pregnant from her tipsy sexual encounters with strangers who rarely return her phone calls…and because Rochester is dark all winter, she takes Prozac to avoid suicidal despair.  Every evening she watches TV alone…Thanks to modern medicine, she can look forward to another forty-five years of life, during which she will become ever less valued an an obsolete health-care burden.

Is it possible for us to have a society that enjoys modern technology while recovering some of the personal warmth we’ve lost?  Miller tries to find a way.

The Irrationality of the Market

The classical economics model presupposes that humans behave in rational ways.  Besides the denial of the heritability of personality traits, it’s hard to find a more groundless axiom.  A fake Rolex from Replicagod.com is hard to distinguish from the real thing.  It costs $1,200 and instead of $30,000.  We can’t say the reason is that so people know you have a Rolex because you’ll probably never meet anyone who knows the difference.  A $300 Moissanite ring looks just like a $30,000 diamond one.  Such examples are not just limited to fashion.  Technology is famous for quick price drops after initial release.  

What we pay for is a brand name or technology that signals our personality traits.  We want to be associated with a brand name and the cool, popular people that advertise it.  A man may have the desire to look tough because in prehistoric time that led to mating success.  The job of GM marketers is to convince him that if he buys their product he’ll be able to at least convince others of him having that quality.  Objectively, such trait displays are irrational and do not work.  Think of the time that it takes to make enough money to buy a $100,000 car instead of a $5,000 one.  For those of us with the most basic social skills that time could be better spent socializing; that is, if attracting mates is the goal.  The most attractive personality traits such as humor, charm and making people comfortable can’t be bought and beauty only can be to a very limited extent.

Studies show that young people will conspicuously consume more after being “sexually primed,” reading a story about meeting and spending time with an attractive member of the opposite sex.  Such behavior has roots in our evolutionary past.  A young man and woman are out and about 30,000 YA.  Our young friend decides to impress his female companion by killing a woolly mammoth.  He proves his strength and courage, she gets turned on by the masculine display and they find a cave in which to engage in mind blowing sex.  Today, the equivalent of risk taking behavior and showing fitness is stopping at Circuit City and buying the latest IPod with the swipe of a debit card after wasting 10 hours of life sitting in a cubicle.  

Miller rightly sees the Stuff White People Like culture as another example of the way people signal their traits.  Instead of showing the ability to acquire and spend by buying a Hummer young people join Greepeace to show agreeableness or show the right attitudes towards homosexuals and minorities to show openness.  Any human endeavor is bound to (d)evolve into status competition.  

While this book is filled with insights about an important part of our world that doesn’t get enough attention, there are drawbacks.  Sometimes evolutionary psychology just becomes a parody of itself with the just-so post-hoc explanations of human behavior.  For example, we’re told that parents discriminate between their children based on the positive attributes they display which signal their chances of being reproductively successful.  Parents of some animals have been observed neglecting or even killing offspring with poor health or genetic defects.  Miller writes

Perhaps this is why human children try to display their physical and mental competencies by doing doing difficult things while screeching “Hey, Mom, look what I can do!”  They evolved to act as if they knew that such displays may be rewarded by fitness-promoting forms of parental investment, such as cookies.  Children whose physical or mental defects preclude such conspicuous quality signals…are subject to much higher rates of parental abuse, neglect and homicide.

A discussion follows about family reunions being a chance for distant family members to show off their best traits and the most fit getting the most support.  Yet there is much that doesn’t fit in with this theory that needs explaining.  Why do people adopt or raise step-children?  If children didn’t try to show off to their parents I could imagine Miller saying that it’s to not draw the attention of predators and to show their parents that they have self-control.  Evolutionary psychology still beats God and culture, the other two competing theories of human behavior, but in most areas it is still far from scientific.

Is There an Alternative?

Miller isn’t short on solutions either for us as individuals or as a society.  Some are reasonable and hard to argue with.  Don’t buy expensive stuff when there are just as good substitutes available for a fraction of the price.  Instead of getting the new printer, wait six months for the price to half.  

Other suggestions are just scary.  We are always going to want to signal our traits to one another and the only question is how we can do it in a more efficient and reasonable manner.  Psychologists list the big five personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism in addition to intelligence as the basic components of personality.  All signaling comes down to showing off one or a combination of those traits.  So why don’t we all just have our personality traits measured by trained psychologists and then tattooed on our foreheads?  That’ll save time!  I waited for Miller to say “just kidding” but he never did.

The most important suggestion is to get government out of the way, “legalize freedom,” do away with anti-discrimination laws and let people form the kind of communities they want where there will be ways other than consuming things to gain status.  Mormons should be allowed to ban homosexuals from their community and vice versa.  The government opposes this because if there were ways to gain status besides working and buying things they wouldn’t be able to tax it.  True enough, but there are ideological factors too that the author ignores.  He also ignores the history of anti-discrimination laws and why they came into effect in the first place.

If people were free to live near and socialize with who they wanted the first thing they’d do is split up by race.  NPR admits that integration has failed despite the facts that explicit residential segregation is prohibited and that whites will lose money to live away from minorities, particularly blacks.  Miller says in his world Black Muslims would be able to form communities that keep out white oppressors.  In the real world, it’s whites who flee diverse areas and that trend would intensify if ethnic enclaves were made legal.

Miller indicates in his his book that he is at least open to the idea that there are race differences in IQ.  Once segregation went back to pre-1960s level, there’s no evidence that blacks or Hispanics would be able to maintain a first world standard of living (see Detroit, Haiti, post-apartheid South Africa).  We’d get sob stories about NAMs (Non-Asian minorities) not having access to institutions they themselves can’t build or maintain.  There once was a time where Americans were allowed to chose the kinds of neighborhoods and communities they wanted.  Taking away that choice is the biggest “victory” of the civil rights era.

At some level, Geoffrey Miller must know this.  He can’t be, and indicates that he’s not, ignorant of the science on race and IQ.  He must also be aware enough of the political culture to know that if there’s one thing that the modern elites can’t stand and motivates the do-gooders to trample on human liberty it’s racial disparities.   A clue as to why he feels the need to say ridiculous stuff about the rights of Black Muslims to separate themselves from their “oppressors”  is found in the intro, where he says only semi-sarcastically

I’m a white heterosexual American male.  So, I try to be a good Darwinian feminist, but my sex and sexual orientation mean I’ll slip sometimes.

Elsewhere he tells us he’s a registered Democrat.  It must’ve been hard enough to admit to being a white heterosexual male; demanding he explicitly come out as a segregationist is probably too much to ask.

See our interview with Professor Miller here.