Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords lot of these companies do try and claim that they had no knowledge of this. This did not happen within the boundaries of my firm. It turns out that both individuals and companies often prefer to be kept in the dark about unethical practices that are further up the supply chain. So there was a really, really interesting paper by Julie Irwin and some other colleagues who wrote a paper on this idea of willful ignorance.
And the idea was that you had a product and you had access to a whole bunch of different pieces of information. And one of them was the labor conditions or the environmental conditions. And the question was, do people actually ask for this information? You can look at it if you want, but you could decide not to look at it.
And it turns out people didn't want to look at that information because they didn't really want to be confronted with this kind of conflict between their beliefs and what they really wanted. And they found this effect was stronger for people who cared more about labor issues, who cared more about environmental issues. They were more likely to avoid, you know, avoid this information in order to kind of avoid this conflict. Think of the deep irony of what Nero just said.
The folks who care the most about ethics might be most willing to turn a blind eye to unethical business practices because they know if they found out about those practices, they would feel obliged to do something about it. We've talked about many ways in which consumers and companies play games with one another, using products to speak on their behalf or using products behind which they can hide. But there's one dimension of economic activity we haven't explored, and that's time. I asked Nero how some of us use our calendars to broadcast our social status.
It used to be that people want to broadcast their social status by being idle. But that idea has been turned on its head in the United States. It turns out nowadays that people who are busy are actually seen to have more social status. So rather than somebody who is very wealthy, who could waste their time, take fancy vacations, you know, invest in learning these kind of archaic mannerisms, it turns out the person who works really hard, who's really busy, who's very effortful, is the one who's seen to have more social status.
And I think in part, that is because we live in a society that values social mobility. So we actually conducted the study in the U.S. and we conducted the same study in Italy. And we found that for Italian people, they thought the person who was living a life of leisure had more status.
Of course, they have so much money, they can just relax all the time. Whereas in the U.S., they thought the person who was working all the time actually had more status. And I think what was going on was that in the U.S., people sort of value this sense of earned status. So status can be earned in the U.S., where I think in Italy, it's more of a society where status is inherited.
So for example, my co-author is Italian, and she's always talking about how people come from good families or not. And so there's very much this idea that your status isn't necessarily something that you earn, but you inherit. And so in that sense, working hard really wouldn't get you anywhere. Whereas in America, you have the sense that you can actually climb the ladder.
And so celebrities, for example, might say, instead of saying, you know, I make one movie every year, and I get to hang out on the beach for the other 10 months of the year, they actually are suggesting, oh my God, I'm so overworked. Yes, we actually looked at tweets of celebrities who were tagged with this hashtag humblebrag, this idea of bragging, but sort of disguising it as a complaint. And a lot of the ones, a lot of the tweets we found had to do with being busy. So, you know, I have to be in the recording studio this morning, and then I have a book meeting in the afternoon, and then I have to travel to New York in the evening, and hashtag I have no life, you know, these kinds of tweets.
You're trying to say something about yourself. You're busy. You're really important. You don't have time to do other things.
And so you see that on social media. That's kind of an acceptable and effective way to show your status by telling people how busy you are. You want to ask about your own life, which is I understand that growing up, you came from a family that in some ways prized not demonstrating its commitment to status. It actually prized not buying the expensive things as a way to show off.
So I'm of East Indian origin, and my parents immigrated to this country. And it turns out, in East Indian communities, showing your social status is a very, very important thing. So people are really, really motivated to show their status. And when I was growing up, that was happening through buying, you know, really expensive cars.
So a lot of my parents' friends, they had Jaguars, and they had Mercedes. And I remember I went to a friend's house one time, and they had a Jaguar. She was also Indian. And I asked her, she was complaining about her mom kind of being frugal about different things.
And I said, oh, that's so strange, because, you know, she's frugal, and yet you have a Jaguar. And she said, oh, well, that's just to show off. And I just thought the candidness of that moment really, really, you know, sparked something in my mind, like, wow, people are just trying to show off. And my mom also would often complain about how all her friends would buy these expensive cars.
And the only reason they were doing it was to show off. And so I just, I kind of got really fascinated with this idea of showing your social status. And I think kind of an evidence of how things are shifting now towards maybe towards something like busyness. Now all her friends are retired, and they all brag about how busy they are.
And now my mom complains about how everyone talks about how busy they are all the time. So I think, you know, it's sort of an evolving, kind of an evolving mechanism. Thanks for having me. Ah, the faint scent of Factor 50.
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