We’ve all heard the adage “don’t sweat the small stuff.” (And if by some chance you’ve never heard it before, well…now you have.) The general idea is that little things, being little, don’t really matter that much and we shouldn’t get too worried about them. This seems fairly reasonable at first glance. But another view was offered on an episode of The Simpsons, by Homer’s temporary new boss (and James Bond style supervillain) Hank Scorpio. Asked by Scorpio why he seems so glum, Homer says it’s just a lot of little things. Scorpio responds by saying “You can’t argue with the little things. It’s the little things that make up life.” Perhaps I’m revealing the hidden depths of my character here, but for now, I’m going to side with the supervillain. But first, a seemingly random tangent on Twitter theatrics. (I’m still saying Twitter and not X, just like I still say Google and not Alphabet.)
So, a while ago there was a bit of a row on Twitter about, of all things, banana availability as a metaphor for capitalism. One thread written by one of Twitter’s many socialist denizens mocked the idea that the ready availability of bananas is anything worth caring about, writing “No one, absolutely no one – not even the most dishonest globe emoji neoliberal freak – buys a banana at Trader Joe’s in Calgary in December and marvels in ecstasy at the decadent opulence of modern capitalism. They dully cross it off their list and move on, barely conscious of it.” She further asserts that nobody is made happier by having bananas and we “will not be poorer for replacing them with other foods.”
In case my earlier statement about siding with the supervillain didn’t do enough to reveal the moral rot in the depths of my soul, let me further reveal I apparently exceed what some imagine “even the most dishonest globe emoji neoliberal freaks” are capable of, because I absolutely do have this reaction when buying bananas. I think bananas are great. They’re tasty, they have a fantastic micronutrient profile, and they’re easy to handle and eat. My two young children also really love them, which makes the task of ensuring my children get lots of fruits and vegetables in their diet just that much easier. And the fact that even in the darkest and coldest parts of the Minnesota winters, I can go to any grocery store at any time and buy seven pounds of fresh bananas for about three dollars is something that absolutely inspires a measure of awed delight in me.
(As an aside, she is on to something when she says most people just “cross it off their list and move on, barely conscious of it.” Part of the reason I don’t have that reaction, and am instead filled with wonder and gratitude, comes from studying economics. In The Use of Knowledge in Society, F.A. Hayek described the market system as a marvel and adds that he “deliberately used the word ‘marvel’ to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted.” This complacency, unfortunately, is still quite widespread.)
Adding to this, consider the time that Senator Bernie Sanders dismissed the importance of consumer choice among a wide range of products, saying that you “don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers” available to you. Just as our Twitter socialist thinks nobody’s life would be poorer for lacking bananas, the socialist Senator doesn’t see much value in having a wide variety of deodorants and sneakers. But, again, I have to out myself as an unfathomable freak and disagree with the Senator. Having a wide variety of shoes and deodorants is, in fact, a very good thing.
Let’s start with deodorant. I agree that for many people this isn’t a matter of great importance. I use it out of basic respect for the world, but I don’t really have much of a preference here – most varieties of deodorant are, to me, perfect substitutes. However, my wife is particularly sensitive to smells. Scott Alexander once said of himself, “I can’t deal with noise. If someone’s being loud, I can’t sleep, I can’t study, I can’t concentrate, I can’t do anything except bang my head against the wall and hope they stop.” Smells have a similar effect on my wife, and if I wore a deodorant with a smell she found obnoxious, it was a pretty big deal to her. Luckily, one brand of deodorant I picked out via my usual method (randomly grabbing whatever was closest when I realized I needed to buy more) had a scent she found rather pleasant, so I’ve just stuck with that kind ever since. This benefit may seem trivial when perched on high in Sanders’ ivory tower, but to some people, it makes a really big difference.
The same can be said of shoes. If you’re someone who finds it difficult to find shoes that fit your feet well, or if you have issues with your feet that can make walking difficult or painful, being able to find just the right kind of shoe can have a huge impact on your quality of life. I don’t know how many varieties of shoes Sanders has divined is the “right” amount – fewer than 18, apparently. If the kind of shoe that works out perfectly for you isn’t among the variety of shoes Senator Sanders thinks is important enough to be offered – well, too bad for you I guess. You’ll just have to go on experiencing pain and limited mobility.
Even beyond the functional aspect of shoes, there’s also an aesthetic and cultural component. For example, consider this episode of EconTalk where Russ Roberts interviews Josh Lubar about, among other things, the “sneakerhead” culture. These are people who love sneakers, collect them, trade them, and have a whole community and culture built up around this shared interest. Personally, I don’t get it or understand the interest, but that’s fine – that’s just my opinion and I don’t rule the world. Nor would I want to. But my own personal indifference to sneakers doesn’t change the fact that for many people, having lots of sneakers available is a great source of joy and community, and I’m glad they have that. Unlike either the socialist Senator or the socialist Tweeter, I don’t confuse my own lack of interest in something as proof that it can’t actually be that important to anyone else.
So that’s one upshot of this whole episode. Be aware that just because something may seem trivial to you, this doesn’t mean that it has a trivial impact on the lives of other people. Part of what is lost in the collectivist mindset is a real appreciation of just how wide a diversity of thoughts, opinions, tastes, and preferences there are in the world. It’s just not the case that having only a few different options is basically as good as a wide range of options. People aren’t interchangeable cogs or chess pieces. What looks like trivialities to you might be enormously valuable to someone else.
The second upshot brings me back to Hank Scorpio and his contention that the little things are what make up life. Let’s just grant that the sudden disappearance of bananas would in fact be at most a minor downside for me, and thus the presence of bananas was really only a minor positive. Still, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this “minor” benefit brought about by markets and commerce is just one of a hundred million other similar “minor” benefits – benefits that flood our lives so much they have become as invisible to us as the water in which a fish swims. And a hundred million small improvements to the quality of people’s lives adds up to a monumental improvement in the quality of life. Bananas, deodorant, shoes – these may all be “little things” in the minds of some. But life is made up of the little things, even if some treat those things as beneath them.
READER COMMENTS
Peter
Feb 6 2024 at 1:57pm
Well said
Gorgasal
Feb 6 2024 at 2:18pm
My wife and son have very wide feet. Getting them shoes is a long process. But at least we usually do find something for them to wear. If the choice was only Senator Sanders’ fewer than 18 kinds, they would be spending their days in pain. Perhaps the Senator would like to spend a few days in shoes that are too small for him, because a size he needs just wasn’t among the approved less-than-18 kinds?
Regarding bananas, fun little fact: bananas were widely available in Western Germany at the end of the 80s, and pretty much unavailable in Eastern Germany. So much that Eastern Germans coming over to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall were greeted in places by Western Germans hanging bananas on their Trabants’ rear view mirrors.
(Trabants being, along with Wartburgs, the only two makes of car available in Eastern Germany. A restriction of choice that should make the dear Senator’s heart rejoice. Except that these were unsafe, cramped, slow, stinky, with long waiting lists (you’d register for one the day your child was born, so the child had a chance of scoring one when it turned 18), and most Eastern Germans wanted nothing more than to ditch these contraptions and buy a Western car. Choice overload be damned.)
David Henderson
Feb 6 2024 at 3:59pm
Good post. When I first read the tweeter (or Xer) saying:
No one, absolutely no one – not even the most dishonest globe emoji neoliberal freak – buys a banana at Trader Joe’s in Calgary in December and marvels in ecstasy at the decadent opulence of modern capitalism. They dully cross it off their list and move on, barely conscious of it.
I thought she was kidding. Then I realized she wasn’t.
It shows two things, neither of which is flattering to her.
First, she doesn’t talk to many people who strongly disagree with her. Even after decades, I still celebrate getting fresh fruit in the middle of winter, maybe in part because I remember living about 800 miles east of Calgary in the 1960s and not being able to get ANY fresh fruit at the Carman Safeway.
Second, she doesn’t seem to care that there are people who value things she doesn’t.
Jim Glass
Feb 6 2024 at 7:08pm
Did anyone ask her what she thinks life was like for the masses in NYC before the first railroads were able to bring in any off-season vegetables and fruits — and milk for the children? Before then milk could be transported from the farm only as a far as a horse cart could carry it before it spoiled.
Don’t the kids today seem all miserable and complaining about everything on social media? About how they’re the worst off generation ever? They can’t buy a house as soon as they graduate from college, may actually have to work *in* an office, face global warming of 2 degrees C over the next 70 years. (My generation faced global frying of 2,000 degrees in about 70 minutes if somebody hit the wrong button.)
Shrinks tell patients everywhere the first two keys to escaping angst and anxiety are: #1 Gratitude, and #2) Perspective on the larger realities of one’s own life and times. It’s not a secret, this is all over social media too, for anyone interested in being not miserable. But why trouble oneself to learn anything along those lines, for that reason? When one can enjoy scoring vanity points in the posing competition on social media for best complaining about how unjust the world is. Damn capitalists! Where’s my Uber?
TMC
Feb 6 2024 at 4:39pm
“They dully cross it off their list and move on, barely conscious of it.”
To me, this is the beauty of capitalism. No planning ahead, no special trip – it’s just there.
robc
Feb 7 2024 at 12:48pm
*clap clap clap*
Well said.
TMC
Feb 6 2024 at 4:41pm
BTW, nice new website, but same poor comment section. Comment is there, goes away, sometimes comes back, sometimes doesn’t. People figured this out 25 years ago.
Junio
Feb 6 2024 at 6:14pm
Lovely post.
Having encountered people such as her before, and adding a bit onto what Henderson said, it’s unfortunate that socialists and other related types disparage the value of having a variety of consumer choices.
I imagine someone in a much less fortunate position would appreciate the little things she takes for granted. Funny to see how misaligned her position is with reality.
john hare
Feb 6 2024 at 6:55pm
I am indifferent about bananas. Once in a while is good enough. I am not indifferent to others dictating my preferences. Being a carnivore probably bothers some people about me, and they can just deal with it.
There’s a long list of things I just don’t get. Collectors that pay many multiples of an objects original cost. Paying four figures or more for a seat watching pro sports. Alcohol as a life focus. But if any of these (or several others) drive you, it’s none of my business.
Jim Glass
Feb 6 2024 at 7:56pm
If she’s really a socialist one could ask her if she cares about toilet paper. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics didn’t start manufacturing toilet paper until 1969 (eight years after they put Gagarin in space). And it wasn’t ‘squeezably soft’ Charmin, survivors report it had splinters. And that being the status of socialist toilet paper, one might ask her what she might imagine about the status of socialist feminine hygiene products.
As an interesting, under-reported aside of history, the lack of toilet paper led to one of the most original espionage efforts you’ll never see dramatized in a James Bond movie, Operation Tamarisk…
No toilet paper. Little thing. Surprising consequences.
Jim Glass
Feb 7 2024 at 9:30pm
The algorithm reads my comments here, just sent me a former Soviet Comrade’s illustrated history of Soviet toilet paper on YouTube. Feel free to forward to the good socialists on Twitter/X.
Giorgio Castiglia
Feb 6 2024 at 8:46pm
A key thing the author of the tweet misses is that the fact that many people dully cross fresh bananas off of their shopping list and move on IS ITSELF a marvel of the market economy. That the market delivers goods like bananas to consumers with such consistency and stability that many of us simply take it for granted is the very reason why many of us “neoliberals” find the market fascinating.
Monte
Feb 6 2024 at 9:33pm
Actually, we’re better off emotionally with more choices than fewer ones. Consumer choice is about variety, and researchers have determined that variety contributes significantly to happiness. Socialists like Sanders would have us live only according to need, governed by rule and order. But like William Mason said, “There is a grace in wild variety surpassing rule and order.”
Contra Barry Schwartz, choice is not a paradox. I would argue that eliminating consumer choices increases anxiety and decreases overall happiness. I personally find it awe-inspiring that we have dozens of brands of toilet paper to choose from. After all, growth and prosperity, and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up…
JdL
Feb 8 2024 at 7:55am
“created from the bottom up…”
Har! Very good.
Daniel Arcure
Feb 6 2024 at 10:20pm
I always thought the best response to Senator Sanders would be to point out that no one “needs” three houses. Yet, he apparently thinks he does.
MarkW
Feb 7 2024 at 5:15am
I thought the best response to Sanders would have to ask if anybody needs a library or bookstore with thousands of titles? And why shouldn’t we have a Ministry of Culture that could put an end to the inefficient madness of producing countless new feature films, TV series, pop songs, detective novels, bodice rippers, science fiction, and children’s cartoons? After all, the existing stock of works we already have could be reproduced, read, watched, and enjoyed by every generation forever without wasting effort producing a single new work. And nobody *needs* new clothing styles or architectural styles or recipes, etc. So much human effort wasted on producing and consuming redundant and unnecessary frivolities!
john hare
Feb 7 2024 at 5:38pm
The best answer to need I’ve heard was a verbal one about 20 years ago. You need air, water, enough food and shelter to keep you alive, all of which is available in a North Korean prison cell.
MarkW
Feb 7 2024 at 5:45am
Speaking of the miracle of bananas in a northern winter, the late novelist AS Byatt who died last year opened one of her books this way:
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.
I’m beginning to think we could begin to write similar things about the golden age that feels like it’s already been starting to slip away:
Once upon a time when restaurants and bars were open late every evening, when most men and women still dreamed of raising children and the worry for the future was finding room for new generations not finding enough young people to care for the sick and the elderly, when universities were paragons of free thought, when the greatest nations treated each other with increasing openness instead of suspicion, when most people understood and esteemed the system that had brought ease and abundance, there was a man who lived in Indian summer and mistook it for spring.
Phil H
Feb 10 2024 at 3:35am
Yeah, I think this is very well put. I live in southern China, and consumer choice has exploded over the 20 years I’ve been here. It makes life better in lots and lots of ways, and opens up new ways for people and places to be distinctively themselves. For example, Xiamen food didn’t really exist as a category when I arrived, but as more tourists visit, restaurants have started to brand themselves as specifically Xiamen cuisine, which has pushed them to define what Xiamen cuisine is, take some local favourites and upgrade them, innovate and improve. Everyone’s benefiting.
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