Year of Economics #6.1 Microeconomics of Beauty (brief digression)

Dear Abhay,

A gallery recently asked me to contribute a small piece of writing – roughly 300 words, the invitation specified – as a website accompaniment to an exhibit on fashion. The exhibit, titled Social Seduction, “explores the significance and effect of fashion on society.” It features selections by a number of designers and artists from “the Fashion Resource Center’s 17 progressive years as a special collection of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.” The theme of the exhibit prompted me to pursue some nascent thoughts I had on related ideas, one thing followed another, and my 300 words grew to 1,600. Furthermore, it became clear as I wrote it that this short piece in fact belonged in the Year of Economics correspondence. So I offer you here a second “brief digression,” this time branching off your last essay on Capabilities, and interrupting my work on part 7. Please forgive my abbreviated restating of Sen’s capabilities idea, which I needed to include for the gallery context. I am sending it to you first, a bit embarrassed that it has been so long since my last YoE contribution, and I do not know whether the gallery will accept it. In any case, I hope you find it and its questions thought provoking.

I look forward to your response, and also wish you a Happy New Year.

Matthew


Year of Economics – January 1, 2004 – 6.1:
The Microeconomics of Beauty (A Brief Digression)


1. Beauty #1: gap
(Marcel Proust)

When we are young, our desires, our beliefs confer on a person’s clothing an individual personality, an irreducible essence. We pursue the reality. But because we allow it to escape we end by noticing that, after all those vain endeavors which have led to nothing, something solid subsists, and this something solid is what we have been seeking. We begin to isolate, to identify what we love, we try to procure it for ourselves, if only by a stratagem. Then, in the absence of our vanished faith, by means of a deliberate illusion, costume fills the gap.


2. Hair #1

The story goes like this. The mother practices her newly learned skill on her daughter’s hair. The next day at school (a school for girls) a teacher (all the teachers are women) asks the daughter where she has gotten her haircut. “My mother,” says the girl. After school, the mother greets her daughter’s return home to find all the teachers and the principal (also a woman) accompanying her. “Is there some problem with my daughter at school?” asks the mother. “No problem,” says one of the teachers, and the principal says, “We all want haircuts. How much do you charge?”


3. Equilibrium #1

A military experiment goes awry and transforms its subject into a superhero. Previously a man of average strength, he could for example lift a one-hundred-pound rock. After the experiment, whenever he becomes overly agitated, he changes into a green monster-man with superhuman strength. However, he also shrinks to the size of the exact inverse proportion at which his strength remains constant. He can, for example, in the form of the six-inch tall green monster-man, lift a one-hundred-pound rock. For a creature of six inches, the act represents a feat of superhuman strength. He roars with anger. When he calms down again, he returns to his original average-man form. He again lifts a one-hundred-pound rock. Now this represents a feat of only average strength. The rock, meanwhile, does not know the difference.


4. Hair #2
(BBC news; Serena Lei, The Washington Diplomat)

Hundreds of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and nonprofit groups have volunteered for the monumental task of rebuilding Afghanistan. What does Afghanistan need most to rebuild? In a country in which a woman’s word is sometimes said to be worth half that of a man – what is the value of half a word? How does one rebuild a diminished language?

One rebuilding project, The Body and Soul Wellness Program, will provide Kabul with a beauty school. American money will fund it, and top cosmetic companies will donate supplies. The school will train Afghan women in the arts of cutting hair, the skills of beauty, and the management of a small business; all in an effort to raise women’s spirits while instilling the skills that lead to financial independence. Mary MacMakin, a seventy-two year old American AID worker who had been living in Afghanistan for nearly forty years, conceived of the project. Her work with relief agencies demonstrated to her the importance of self-sufficiency for social change. USAID and the Feminist Majority helped fund her efforts to set up workshops in dressmaking, silk weaving, and woodworking. In 1996, she founded PARSA (Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Support for Afghanistan), which provides job-training programs for widows in Kabul. In July 2000, the Taliban accused her of spying, arrested and deported her. She now runs PARSA from an office in Peshawar, Pakistan. PARSA served as the inspiration for The Body and Soul Wellness Program, a project of New York-based marketing consultant Patricia O’Connor.

O’Connor: We have devised a program from perms and hair coloring through business book keeping. This isn’t just about providing lipstick. These women have been tortured, abused and oppressed. To have other women work on them is a wonderful thing to achieve, but at the same time you can show them ways to gain economic independence.

Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue magazine, donated $25,000 to the Body and Soul program and met with manufacturers including L’Oreal, Estée Lauder, and Revlon, to persuade them to donate supplies and review curriculum. The majority of Afghan women are illiterate and do not have the luxury of going back to school while raising families, but Afghan women who take the Body and Soul courses are asked to return and teach.

O’Connor: The thing about the beauty industry is that you can do well and be taught the technical and creative skills, and yet be illiterate. The curriculum is very visual.

The fact that The Body and Soul Wellness Program was originally named The Body and Soul Beauty Program demonstrates the organizers’ effort to market the program as more substantive than beauty, as well as their awareness of the skepticism surrounding beauty education in a wartorn country. Military action continues in Afghanistan, and basic needs remain difficult to attain. But Hassina Kazem, a spokeswoman for the Embassy of Afghanistan, champions the market for beauty salons in Kabul, even in the face of poverty. She has noted that underground beauty parlors existed during the Taliban rule, and that hairdressers opened makeshift salon tents in refugee camps.

Kazem: Getting their hair done is a necessity.


5. The 200%

The concept of the 200% works like this. In the example of Starbucks coffee, each Starbucks location doubles itself: once (the first 100%) as this Starbucks on this street in this neighborhood; again (the second 100%) as the perfect Starbucks, the diagrammatic one, the blueprint. The second 100%, common to all Starbucks, allows one kind of recognition: when we see it, we say, “a” Starbucks. The first 100%, individual to each, allows another kind of recognition: when we see it, we say, “the” Starbucks. Yet the phenomenon of the 200% – 100% generic/100% specific – by no means applies only to consumerism. Postmodernism does not characterize it, nor does modernism. We find it in the planned cities of the ancient Roman Empire, a limited series of archetypal elements (forum, viaduct, pantheon, etc.) fitted to their setting and situation. We find it as well in the manifestations and practices of any religion. The burka makes a woman 100% “a” woman wearing a veil, as well as 100% “woman”, in the iconography of Islam. While the microeconomics of beauty in Afghanistan maximize social interaction – a form of social interaction previously illegal – they also, like a Trojan horse, define a market, and revise the human head as a delineated locale for the 200%. Each haircut now becomes both 100% haircut and 100% Revlon.


6. Equilibrium #2

Amartya Sen, the great economist from India, has proposed a capability-centered approach to replace the inadequate utilitarian analysis of individual welfare. According to his perspective, well-being depends upon the things people can do and the things that they can do well. Take reading, for example. Literacy is important not because of the utility it yields, but because of the sort of person one becomes when one reads. Furthermore, reading increases the number of options people have, as well as the freedom to choose among those options; options which themselves also transcend utilitarianism. Consider the Sen capabilities model, but in the place of reading, substitute beauty. In the case of Afghanistan, one can clearly observe the value to the individual of the drastically increased capability. Beauty was illegal; now it is legal. The illiterate may master the skills of beauty; beauty becomes for them a kind of literacy. Women, in a distinctly minor social position, experience a starkly transitional capability, or a binary measure: the skills of beauty are either absent or present. When present, they offer a step into a less limited life. Yet when we compare this example to the example of America, a new instability disrupts the capabilities model. From the vantage point of America, the average consumer looks on the Afghanistan model as a kind of economic fable, and experiences a tinge of melancholy, even envy. How clearly the fable assigns value to the intangible. All the value – the human interaction, the well-being of appearance and skilled labor – begin to fade in significance in the America example. They become a kind of social foundation, expected, even required. The distinctions and differences between the limitless haircut options for the American consumer become purely a matter of taste. A new question arises: when faced with a surplus of choice within a defined field (beauty), does the value of that choice ever reduce to zero? Does an overflow of beauty possibility produce a beauty irrelevance, a point at which all choice becomes equal? Does a capability equilibrium exist?


7. Beauty #2: the arrows of Beauty
(Marcel Proust)

Then, if our imagination is set going by the desire for what we cannot possess, its flight is not limited by a reality perceived in these casual encounters in which the charms of the passing stranger are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage. If night is falling and the carriage is moving fast, whether in town or country, there is not a single torso, disfigured like an antique marble by the speed that tears us away and the dusk that blurs it, that does not aim at our heart, from every crossing, from the lighted interior of every shop, the arrows of Beauty, that beauty of which we are sometimes tempted to ask ourselves whether it is, in this world, anything more than the complementary part that is added to a fragmentary and fugitive stranger by our imagination, overstimulated by regret.




Sources in detail:

1.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 3 The Guermantes Way, p. 529.

5.
Jean Attali, “The Roman System, or the Generic in All Times and Tenses”, Mutations, Rem Koolhaas, Harvard Project on the City.
6.
Steven Pressman, Fifty Major Economists, p. 190-191.

7.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 2 Within A Budding Grove, p. 398