This book hooked me from its name alone: not only is the pun on its subtitle of Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior exactly my sense of humor, those subjects are right up my alley. Miller's thesis is that much of modern conspicuous consumption is a waste, and not just in the environmental sense. In his view, much of what we buy as signaling and trait display devices are also a waste in evolutionary terms, because human beings are already extremely good at figuring out who they want to have sex with, and most purchases don't actually add much value to the whole mating determination process. Proving that takes him through evolutionary psychology, the economics of consumption, product marketing and consumer behavior, signaling theory, the relationship between technological progress and human nature, the quantification of personality types, how shared qualities like musical taste relate to sexual attraction, and the politics of conservation. He's really funny and well-read, with a keen eye for how our endless quests to spread our genes manifest themselves in our product purchases, with plenty of references not only to recent scientific research, but also to relevant pop culture like The Sims.

Miller opens the book by asking the modern reader to pretend that they're explaining the logic of consumer capitalism to a Cro-Magnon, playing on the absurdity of the work-buy-consume paradigm of the modern industrialized nations by having the Cro-Magnons ask what exactly all the goods and services our lives revolve around are useful for in evolutionary terms, like maximizing mammoth hunts, aiding berry foraging, acquiring more mates, and so on. To no one's surprise, they're not much use directly, but this is not just a recapitulation of Naomi Klein's thesis in No Logo that brands have hijacked our lives. So many pages have been written about consumer capitalism that a reasonable person might be forgiven for their lack of enthusiasm at yet another political screed, since the takes write themselves: either consumer capitalism is a rot, a sickness, a spiritual disease; or we live in the best of all possible mall worlds and the haters who don't like it are just jealous losers. Likewise with evolutionary psychology, surely one of the world's most misunderstood disciplines: either it's the key to explaining just about every nuance of human behavior, or else it's a tendentious mishmash of backwards reasoning and just-so stories. Yet who would disagree with this amusing summary?:

"Animal bodies and behaviors evolve largely as advertisements for their genes. Male humans evolved potent new sales tactics - verbal courtship, rhythmic music, gentle foreplay, prolonged copulation - for seducing skeptical female customers into accepting free trials of their fastest-moving consumer goods (sperm). Female humans evolved potent new tactics of relationship marketing to build long-term loyalty among their highest-value male customers, and to promote continued male investment in their new subsidiaries (children)."

However, as an evolutionary psychologist, his aim is to cut through relativistic and unscientific descriptions of our shopping trips. As he says, "Consumerist capitalism, as humans practice it in any particular culture, is not a natural or inevitable outcome of human evolution, given a certain level of technological sophistication. An evolutionary-psychology analysis of consumerism is accordingly not a way of giving science's seal of approval to consumerism, nor is it a way of morally justifying consumerism as the highest possible stage of biocultural progress." This is important, because even though much consumption closely resembles narcissism ("Narcissists tend to alternate between public status seeking and private pleasure seeking"), and he has a really funny chart attempting to quantify narcissism by calculating the cost per pound of items ranging from tap water ($0.0000633/lb) to a Victoria's Secret bra ($240/lb) to a porn DVD ($1,510/lb) to a human egg ($4.5 trillion/lb), just saying "people buy things to show themselves off" needs a bit more explanation. I was really cheered by seeing that I'm not the only one who has trouble appreciating what the people around me have spent so much time and effort on:

"Seriously, can you remember anything specific worn by your spouse or best friend the day before yesterday? Can you remember what kind of watch your boss wears? The brand of your nearest neighbor's dining room table? The face of the last person you saw driving a Ferrari? Probably not, unless you have the obsessive consumer fetishism of American Psycho's protagonist.... The net result could be called the fundamental consumerist delusion - that other people care more about the artificial products you display through consumerist spending than about the natural traits you display through normal conversation, cooperation, and cuddling."

He posits three different models of consumption, with the first two being mostly-accurate caricatures of the way many people look at capitalism:

- Wrong Conservative Model: human nature free markets = consumerist capitalism (the hardcore libertarian model that includes Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and modern Republicans)
- Wrong Radical Model: the blank slate oppressive institutions invidious ideologies = consumerist capitalism (the "blank slate" model criticized by Steven Pinker that includes Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Rose, and Richard Lewontin)
- Sensible Model: human instincts for trying unconsciously to display certain desirable personal traits current social norms for displaying those mental traits through certain kinds of credentials, jobs, goods, and services current technological abilities and constraints certain social institutions and ideologies historical accident and cultural inertia = early twenty-first-century consumerist capitalism

The "Sensible Model" that he champions has a lot of moving parts, and he discusses how his model compares to other, more well-known models that have been used to explain how humans go about satisfying their desires. One of the big ones is Maslow's hierarchy, which he has issues with to the extent that it "mixes innate drives (breathing, eating, seeking status, acquiring knowledge) and learned concerns (seeking financial security, self-esteem, and increased intelligence). It does not 'cut nature at the joints' in terms of the key selection pressures that shaped human behavior: survival and reproduction." I've had similar thoughts before; the basic insight that some human needs are more fundamental than others is hard to argue with, but for any theory to attain at least the veneer of science, the devil is in the details. Miller's framework makes a lot more sense, or at least it's more clearly grounded in the behaviors which seem more fundamental. When it comes to our desires as consumers, it usually all comes back to sex appeal:

"The most desirable traits are not wealth, status, and taste - these are just vague pseudo-traits that are achieved and displayed in widely different ways across different cultures, and ones that do not show very high stability within individual lives, or very high heritability across generations. They exist at the wrong level of description to be scientifically useful in connecting consumer psychology to evolutionary psychology. Rather, the most desirable traits are universal, stable, heritable traits closely related to biological fitness - traits like physical attractiveness, physical health, mental health, intelligence, and personality."

Physical attractiveness is easy for people to assess, no matter the particulars of cultural standards, but much of the middle part of the book is devoted to the more difficult task of explaining how we unconsciously demonstrate aspects of our personalities and seek like-minded others through our purchases, in a more consumerist version of Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life. He models this with the Central Six, abbreviated GOCASE: general intelligence plus the Big Five of openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extroversion. I've always been fascinated by personality tests, from the semi-respectable like MMPI or Myers-Briggs to the absurd like astrology. Much like with Maslow's hierarchy, nearly all of them seem like they're capturing something "true-ish" about ourselves, but the fact that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of incompatible measures out there makes Clickhole's parodies like "Are You an Introvert, an Extrovert, or a Sea Monster?" or "Which Blade of Grass Are You?" probably the best ones out there. However, the GOCASE framework explains a great deal across many domains, and most importantly, is stable and consistent enough to be the gold standard for psychologists trying to measure real aspects of our personalities. It's the distinct permutations of those six factors which make up the variety of people that we see in the world.

And it's often highly specific combinations that we're seeking in our partners, even if we couldn't consciously articulate what, exactly. Some people like high agreeableness (if you see your partner as a refuge from the world), some like low agreeableness (if you want someone who will challenge you), some like it in between. Some people aren't too picky (especially if you score poorly on the G factor), while others demand such exotic configurations of the Central Six that it takes them a while to find a partner. Anyone who's read Matt Ridley's The Red Queen or merely done some dating knows that the endless sexual arms race of signaling/counter-signaling/fake-signaling involves a frustrating amount of discerning signal from noise, even in matters of taste: "Personal taste should not just attract like-minded individuals; it should also repulse differently minded ones. To be effective, it must be a high-risk, high-gain form of taste signaling, rather than a meek nod to the least common denominator." Or, in another interesting passage where he compares attempts to maintain the glamour of diamonds in the face of alternatives like zirconia:

"Advances in gem production raise the possibility that in biological evolution, too, traits that began as fake alternatives to certain signals of quality may have evolved to be more useful and even more desirable than the original traits ever were. For example, verbal humor may have originated as a way for subordinate youths to imitate and mock older, more physically dominant sexual rivals - until eventually, humor became even more attractive than dominance, just as Moissanite achieved higher brilliance and fire than diamonds."

Some signals are unquestionably better than others, at least for most people. For example, one of the best ways to make a connection with someone you're attracted to is to discuss your shared aesthetic tastes, especially music. How is it that having a similar music phase in middle school or a shared guilty pleasure make you want to have offspring with someone? A big part of it is the subconscious recognition of which personality traits that the bands embody - everyone knows that a punk is different from a pop fan, a metalhead from a classical aficionado, a folkie from a country lover, and so on - but few are willing to say outright that your playlists are your personality type, or are able to explain why exactly finding some with the same reaction to the same artist means so much to them. Miller runs with that idea, for example arguing that a minor taste for the avant-garde is a good indicator of openness, but that too much might be a warning sign: "An individual with a longstanding appreciation of Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) is therefore a safer bet than one with a newly acquired enthusiasm for Inland Empire (2006)." (Remember that the book was published in 2008; insert your favorite cutting edge "safe weird" vs "weird weird" examples here).

Less controversial is the idea that your taste in something like pets can show off something about you, as someone with a big active breed of dog is more likely to have the high conscientiousness required to keep up with the necessary feeding, walking, and exercising than someone with a tiny toy dog, with the obvious implications for potential willingness to expend time and energy on children. And as attributes like conscientiousness becomes ever more important in the modern world, ways of displaying and measuring it will be more important in turn: "School, work, and credit - three pillars of consumer capitalism - are also, not coincidentally, the most reliable and conspicuous indicators of conscientiousness. All other consumer purchasing depends on these three pillars, so they are fundamental to conspicuous consumption." Seen in that light, the fact that much of what we buy and consume serves to signal to potential mates that we're the type of person that they'd really like to have sex with makes perfect sense.

However, much of what we buy seems to offer limited value for our money. Some of the funniest parts of the book are where Miller skewers how our attempts to flaunt ourselves go awry. For example, how much benefit do guys trying to impress babes really get out of status objects like sports cars?

"Even if male Corvette drivers do manage to attract a little extra female attention, the math doesn't work out very well for them. Suppose a male driver enjoys an average of one extra short-term mating per year attributable to his choice of car. The Chevrolet Corvette Z06 ($70,000) has a $50,000 price premium over the comparable-size Chevrolet Malibu sedan ($20,000), and both cars are designed to become obsolete in about five years. Rational car-buyers could then calculate that the Corvette’s price premium of $50,000 yields an expected five extra sexual encounters during its five-year product life, or $10,000 per encounter. By contrast, a typical encounter with a professional sex worker costs about $200, or fifty times less. Instead of paying the Corvette's price premium, which might yield one encounter per year, the driver could just buy the Malibu and, with the cash he saved, have one encounter per week. The prospective male Corvette-buyer must accordingly either be wildly overoptimistic about the car's attractiveness to women, or be very bad at math, or strongly prefer sexual encounters with amateurs rather than professionals."

We're also bad at math when it comes to our health, in a way that reminds me of the cartoonish catering towards our basest desires in the movie Idiocracy:

"For example, Costco sells M&M candies in sixty-four-ounce bags for about $8. I like M&Ms, so that seems like a great impulse purchase if I think I deserve a treat. However, at 142 calories per ounce, that bag contains about 9,000 calories of milk chocolate, which, knowing myself, I would eventually eat. An intensive aerobics class burns only 500 calories an hour, so it would take eighteen hours of aerobic lessons, at $10 per hour, to counteract the fat gain. So, rationally, I should be willing to pay about $180 to the Costco cashier - or my wife, or anyone - to restrain me from buying the $8 bag of M&M's."

Are there acid tests for personality traits?

"For example, it may be hard to judge a daughter's boyfriend's agreeableness (kindness, warmth, generosity) if we meet him in a quiet, air-conditioned steak house. Much better to invite him over for a midsummer extended-family barbecue at which he is in encouraged to drink several beers, and then assaulted chaotically on all sides by children, dogs, footballs, and stinging insects. If, under these more difficult, disinhibited, and diagnostic conditions, he becomes irritable to the point of throwing the footballs at the dogs and squirting mustard at the children, we know his agreeableness level is rather low (and that he might have a short temper with our daughter's future babies). Conversely, if he remains calm, cheerful, and helpful as the sweat rolls down his beer-flushed, mosquito-stung, dog-licked face, we know his agreeableness level is rather high. The cultural evolution of such occasions for accurate personality assessment may explain why major social rituals (dates, job interviews, parties, banquets, holidays, weddings, honeymoons) entail such long durations, high stress levels, and disinhibiting drugs such as alcohol. These conditions bring out both the best and the worst in us."

And what do pickup lines sound like when stripped down to their bare essentials?

"If I say on a second date that 'the sugar maples in Harvard Yard were so beautiful every fall term,' I am basically saying 'my SAT scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my IQ is above 135, and I had sufficient conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree.' The information content is the same, but while the former sounds poetic, the latter sounds boorish."

I could go on and on. Miller's conclusion is that to stop such senseless waste, we not only have to recognize it for what it is, but also agree collectively to take concrete political action. Some suggestions are radical enough to be right out of science fiction, like the "trait tattoos" that would encode your Central Six measurements visibly, thus completely removing the need for most conspicuous consumption since at a glance you would be able to see who's compatible with you: "Mass social transparency sounds frightening and embarrassing, but it is what humans have been striving for ever since the prehistoric development of gossip, reputation, 'face', and status symbols. It would allow at least some rational people, some of the time, to choose their friends, mates, co-workers, and neighbors more quickly and accurately." The Gattaca-type incentives for people to fake their tattoos are obvious, yet the idea is worth some thought. More politically respectable, at least in some regards, is the idea of more consumption taxes. The politics of this are extremely tricky - the FairTax as currently proposed is primarily supported by libertarians opposed to income taxes, the bullet tax he proposes to solve the negative externalities of gun crimes would be absolutely opposed by conservatives, while it's mainly liberals who seem to support soda taxes to combat obesity - yet the logic behind the idea of taxing the hell out of grotesque status symbols like megayachts seems mostly unimpeachable. There are five main reasons he presents for consumption taxes, none of them illogical or unsupported by empirical evidence:

First, people would reduce, reuse, and recycle more;
Second, the consumption tax would also create incentives for people to buy longer-lasting goods that have a higher resale value in the secondary market;
Third, the consumption tax would encourage people to buy products that consume less energy and matter to operate;
Fourth, the consumption tax would promote social capital and neighborly camaraderie;
Finally, the consumption tax would increase savings, investment, and charity

As a popular social science work, this one earns its place among the top tier by being carefully argued, well-sourced, provocative, and well-written. Evolutionary psychology is still in its infancy as a discipline, yet Miller's explanation of how it relates to consumer capitalism is both intuitively true as well as widely applicable. I can't believe I found an author with something actually new to say about the endless "do opposites really attract, or do birds of a feather really flock together?" debate. ( )

This is a book in two parts. For the first part, 250 pages are devoted to an excellent summary of some of the principles of evolutionary psychology, and particularly as it applies to consumerism. Although Mr Miller makes some bold, provocative statements his penchant for the broad generalisation based on no data tends to undo him at times. It is not true that economists "dont understand marketing" - the complex systems that drive pricing and price promotions in the travel industry are models very well understood by economists, for example. He also, as is regrettably common in the field, backs up his hypotheses with experiments based on laughably small and unrepresentative samples - typically less than 100 college students studying psychology!! Hardly your "average" consumer . Marketers would never get away with this, their clients would demand more robust experiments

But still this section is good . Miller focuses on six key traits that people are signaling through their consumer behaviour: experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability and intelligence (IQ) and these are explained well and entertainingly. It basically makes sense - we all know we don't buy a BMW for functional reasons, we buy it as "costly signalling". We all remember that when cake mixes where first introduced into the US housewives rejected it - it was too easy and if any household activity is a signal of conscientiousness it must be cake baking. Once marketers realised this and added the instruction to "add an egg" the conscientiousness signals were better and sales took off.

So far so good then. Unfortunately all this good work is undone by about 70 pages of fatuous drivel trying to form some sort of manifesto - entirely unnecessarily. He starts from the premise that consumerism is bad and must be changed - not for environmental or sustainability reasons, its just somehow bad. And of course the reader is expected to agree with this . From there we are taken through a succession of wooly headed schemes. First of all we are going to be allowed to "form our own communities" - not online communities you understand but tangible ones. Communities will form with the power to include and exclude potential residents. On what basis? Shared values and measurement of the "six traits" - which by the way Miller advocates should be tattooed on people's foreheads. No he does, really. Apparently forehead tattoing is common in New Mexico. But leaving that aside, even without the obvious racial and other discriminations that would take place (good luck if you are disabled) how on earth this could ever possibly work without ending up with a scenario from The Walking Dead is not explained

Then we move on to the abolition of consumerism. Make it yourself. Borrow stuff. Buy second hand - ignoring the fact that everything second hand must be first hand at some point. Hire local artisans. Apply social pressure to your peers to do the same.

Then taxation. Now I have no issue at all with progressive consumption taxes being part of a tax regime - but what this has to do with evolutionary psychology i have no clue

But what about the effect on the economy and jobs and services and, well, the fabric of society? Miller shrugs this aside. The free market, you see, is the most powerful system designed by mankind. It will cope. This is such a lame argument and his manifesto so wrong headed that I threw the book down in disgust.

But not before I noticed in the appendix the little "natural living test". This, Mr Miller assures us, will test how close we are to living like our "happier ancestors". Again, no evidence that our ancestors were happier is given its just an assumption. Given that mine were miners on one side of the family, and domestic servants on the other side, I seriously doubt this is the case. Perhaps their expectations were lower. Mr Miller asks questions such as when was the last time you "rocked a baby to sleep" or "felt the sunrise warm your face" or "repaired something that was broken". You see our happier ancestors repaired things because it made them happy - not because they were poor and goods were scarce. The test also does not ask questions such as "when was the last time you had to fetch water from a pump 3 miles away" or "had to go hungry because your employer forgot to pay you" or "didn't have any warmth or electricity because you didn't have a shilling for the meter?" something that my ancestors were very accustomed to. This kind of nostalgia for a past that never actually existed is risible

So - all in all, read the first 250 pages and slam the book down before the concluding 70 pages of codswallop ( )

lacked the time and mental energy to finish this esp as it seemed to say in oh so many ways how our society has bought into the marketing of more than any of us will ever need! ( )

Animal Spirits

When I studied economics it was more or less taken for granted that people's spending was based upon the costs of products and the costs of money. Keynes added some subtlety here with his analysis of trust, but basically, people always were supposed to spend.

We never asked ourselves why. Why do people populate shopping areas to buy more clothes, electronic appliances and household goods (and books) than they actually need? And this particularly, as the pleasure of acquisition is usually short-lived at best? Actually, compared to 30,000 years ago, you can ask yourself how much progress we have really made. At that time people worked about twenty hours a week, leisured in small clan groups, and had a life expectancy after surviving infancy of about 70 years with growing respect for the elderly.

Biology offers an answer in this pop-science book. Most of our evolution, we humans lived in small groups where image and status were all important for attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children. Nowadays Mr. Miller claims, we ornament ourselves to create that impression. Many products are signals to look good in the eyes of others. Modern people are self-marketing minds feeding one another hyperbole about how healthy, clever, and popular they are, through the goods and services they consume.

In extreme cases such consumerism may get out of hand. Extreme consumerism affects about one percent of the population and is like “narcissism, a deeply engrained pervasive pattern of self-centered egotistical behaviour” that usually begins by early adulthood and that combines an intense need of admiration by others with a lack of empathy for others. A core symptom of such behaviour is that such people view themselves as stars in their own life.

Mr. Miller claims the word "materialism" is misleading, as consumer capitalism is at its heart semiotic. It is not a conspiracy of Chicago school free market prophets, but the combined effect of human nature, current social norms, technology, social institutions and ideologies, historical accident and cultural. His biological approach to human need is vastly more detailed than Maslow's pyramid of needs, which does not always match human nature's need for reproductive success.

Key traits humans communicate are health, fertility, beauty, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to novelty, and general intelligence. Wealth, status, and taste are used to implicate this. Humans and particularly teenagers have unique abilities for finding new fitness indicators. Still, it isn’t always done efficiently. Female fitness indicators like bags are rarely noticed, even though human males are relatively choosy about the women they mate. Mr. Miller claims that marketers ignore evidence from modern biology that people do not only display wealth, status, and taste, but also kindness, intelligence, and creativity: they are hard-wired that way.

Mr. Miller divides the products we buy into two categories: either they are things that “push our pleasure buttons”, or they are things that display desirable traits. The basic needs in life are cheap for modern consumers, but showing off status is always going to be expensive. High costs guarantee the reliability of quality signals. Quoting from Amotz Zahavi’s “handicap principle”, only high-quality animals can afford to waste a lot of time, energy, and resources on issuing costly signals. Human traits that meet these criteria are the face, the voice, hair, skin gait, height, for women breasts, bums and waists, for men beards penises and upper body muscle mass, plus for all maybe language, humor, art, music, creativity, intelligence, and kindness.

Quality signaling makes sense. Signaling beauty and health helps attract care from parents and kin, and solicits social support and sex partners. Tests have shown that men in mating mood spend more and women in mating mood do more charity, particularly if the spending and charity are conspicuous. Women tend to find a man with a Porsche more attractive for a short-term relationship than men with a Honda Civic, although not if these men are considered as marriage partners. Equally, women looking at attractive men intend to spend less money. Quality signaling also applies to nations in the form of white elephant projects. We spend money on luxuries and status symbols to appear more reputable, popular and rich, and the high costs we are willing to pay are an incentive for others to use deception (e.g. fake Rolex watches).

Conspicuous signaling can be divided into the categories waste, precision, and reputation (page 118). Products can fit into multiple categories. Conspicuous waste is simply a way to display the scope of one’s control over resources. The 20th century saw a move towards conspicuous precision, particularly in the Far East and Europe. It reflects a gradual de-materialisation of consumption. Conspicuous reputation is even more abstract. Branded products lead the consumer to feel higher in status, sexiness, and sophistication. Luxury advertisements have 2 audiences: they inform buyers about the products, but also the coveters who cannot afford them about the status these products offer. As such they assure buyers that coveters now.

People also signal their character through various means. Modern psychology accepts six central dimensions to an individual’s character that are hereditary and good predictors of habits, preferences, values, and attitudes: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, intelligence (IQ). People can judge these six traits in just a few minutes. Mr. Miller focuses on intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.

IQ’s predictive power is high, as it correlates positively with body symmetry, longevity, semen quality, physical and mental health, mating, and romantic attractiveness for long-term relationships. Universities are inefficient in preparing employees, but signal intelligence (which could just as easily be known from a good IQ-test), conscientiousness, and openness:

Harvard and Yale sell nicely printed sheets of paper called degrees that cost about $ 160,000. To obtain the degree, one must demonstrate a decent level of conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness in one’s coursework, but above all, one must have the intelligence to get admitted. (…) The Harvard degree is basically an IQ-guarantee.

Openness has its positive and negative effects, and its appreciation is hence diversified and the mean on the Openness Bell Curve is essentially the best. Conspicuous displays of openness might show mental health (resistance to schizotypy, schizophrenia, and other forms of psychosis). Highly open consumers can be highly profitable, because they can be highly gullible. They are early adaptors and fashion followers. Low openness consumers prefer traditional products that have traditional features and designs. Science has found a negative correlation between openness of countries and parasites. Even within the US there seems proof for collectivism and conservatism (success of the Republican Party) and perceived vulnerability to colds, infections, and commutable disease. It also explains xenophobia rising with age when immune systems grow weaker.

Conscientiousness is primarily the inhibitory self control of the frontal lobes over the impulsive limbic system, leading to integrity, reliability, etc. It matures slowly with age. Conscientiousness is in greater need in modern complex societies. Consequently, a public facade is important for modern adults (Mr. Miller quotes Woody Allen here, who stated that “90% of success is just showing up”). That is why the markets still produce many goods that require regular maintenance. "A single young man with no house plants and no pets is rightly viewed as a poor prospect by young women seeking Mr. Right." His conscientiousness is either untested or it failed the test (Mr. Miller advises to take a dog and walk it regularly). Personal care products and fitness machines are other expressions of conscientiousness, as are objects for collecting. A decent house and car indicate a decent credit rating. Besides credit, a curriculum vitae is one of the best indicators.

Agreeableness, or the capacity for empathy, kindness, benevolence, egalitarianism and social justice is the hope of mankind and "our most persistent source of hypocrisy and runaway self-righteousness". Highly agreeable people are conformists who respect peer-group opinions, fashions, and product choices. Agreeableness is as two-sided as openness. In courtship a man must show low levels of agreeableness (maturity, social dominance, risk-taking and assertiveness), later on high agreeableness (romantic thoughtfulness, kindness, and family values). In tests, mating-primed showed less conformity to the average opinion or consumer products, and mating-primed women more. Religious festivals and traditional gift-giving days are important opportunities for signaling agreeableness. Men are still required to spend about two-months’ salary on an engagement ring. Etiquette, the norms of the local ruling class, often has “the implicit goal to demonstrate that one’s prefrontal cortex can maintain tight inhibitory control over selfish and impulsive behaviours”. Political opinions are considered proxies for agreeableness, as is the trillion dollar global business of church visits.

I liked this book, as it confirmed ideas that I have toyed with myself (e.g. the use of courses in corporate life). On the other hand, Mr. Miller seems very certain in all the examples that he gives. In economics the Invisible Hand can often explain many phenomena quite well at a first impression. However, when you dig deeper, the situation turns out to be more complicated than first expected. The same you see now in Darwinism and genetics. As part of his theory, Mr. Miller claims that men are good at judging other people’s intelligence. It does not match my experience, particularly if it affects attractive members of the opposite sex. Equally, I would not want to reduce religion to signalling agreeableness, but it is an interesting theory for why religion has lost popularity in countries that have embraced conspicuous precision, and the “de-materialisation of consumption”. So although I am not so sure if Mr. Miller is always right, but his book is certainly thought-provoking. It also helped that Mr. Miller has few qualms about political correctness. ( )

The book uses the findings of evolutionary psychology and our compulsion to display our desirability as mates, friends, parents etc to explain how conspicuous consumerism developed, why communism fails, and how conspicuous consumerism is not inevitable. It is written with enough humor that when your own irrational behavior is pointed out, you can consider it without defensive anger. Despite having thought about American consumerism, the book gave me plenty of new examples and new ways to think about it.

When the author turns to solutions or new ways, some of his ideas made my skin crawl but still worthy of consideration. Other ideas sound right and brilliant but unlikely to occur. A population more aware of their hidden motivations would seem to me capable of making some headway towards a more satisfying way to live. ( )