The Anxiety Economy ,from《Economist》

The Anxiety Economy: Why the Future of Work Will Be All About Stress

MAY 7 2012, 12:59 PM ET63

(But don't stress out. It's a good thing.)

I want a wantologist.

On Sunday, I learned that a "wantologist" -- what, you don't have one? -- is somebody paid to figure out what you want. Arlie Russell Hochschild, writing in the New York Times, quotes Katherine Ziegler, wantologist, helping a client t o figure out what it is that she wants. The conversation went something like this:

What do you want? "A bigger house."

How would you feel if you lived in a bigger house? "Peaceful."

What other things make you feel peaceful? "Walks by the ocean."

Do you ever take walks nearer where you live that remind you of the ocean? "Certain ones, yes."

What do you like about those walks? "I hear the sound of water and feel surrounded by green."

After realizing that the thing she wanted wasn't a bigger house so much as the thing a bigger house would afford --peace of mind -- the client built a little room filled with green plants. This decision no doubt saved many tens of th ousands of dollars in the process, depending on the price of the plants. The wantologist earned her salary.

***

Two generations ago, there was no such thing as a wantologist, a dating company, a nameologist, a life coach, a pa rty animator, or a paid graveside visitor, Hochschild informs us. Today, they're everywhere.

Is that bad? Hochschild claims it is. She predicts that we're entering a dark age of emotional emptiness. We, an anxi ous people, work harder and harder to afford the salaries of people to make us less anxious, which ironically deprive

s us of family time, which makes us more anxious. Apparently, paying people for emotional and psychological needs i s turning us into emotional psychos.

Maybe she's right. I see it the other way. I think wantology sounds pretty great. I love party animators. I don't curr ently employ a life coach, but I like knowing I could, in the future. Rather than mark the beginning of something tru ly dark, the wantologist represents the continuation of one of the happiest long-term trends in modern history -- the explosion in wealth that we often don't take for granted when we write about the miserable short-term prospects of the economy.

FEEDING OUR NEUROSES

Food is not an obvious place to begin in the Defense of the Wantologist, but anyway, that's where we're starting. Fo r 100,000 years, the great priority of all societies was the production of food. The inability to make enough of it is o ne reason why real wages famously stagnated for the hundreds of years (if not thousands, or tens of thousands) bef ore the industrial revolution. This graph of subsistence wages in various cities around the world gives you a good ide a of what economists call the Malthusian Trap. When populations collapsed, as they did after the Black Death, wages rose. When populations grew, wages collapsed over time to the subsistence level, indicated in the Y-axis by "1" in t he graph below.

Across the centuries, more than 70 percent of a typical family's income went to food, and more than 70 percent of these countries worked in food production. You can't afford much creativity in the services sector when wages hover around the subsistence level and the vast majority of your money and time is dedicated to growing and eating. It is safe to say that 16th century Dehli did not have a thriving wantology sector. This also explains why, for example, you would not expect to find much of a yoga industry in Mali, nor an "party animator" sector in Haiti. These industries are luxuries that only wealth and high production efficiency can afford.