The Market for Meditation

It has been reported that the guru, Maharishi Mahesh, who recently died, throughout his life made billions from college students who wanted to learn how to meditate and purchased all sorts of Maharishi products in so doing. Take a peek at the website. A commentator on NPR said there are Maharishi products for almost every aspect of your life.

Meditation itself is a fascinating exercise. Authors on Eastern meditation range from those who advocate specific techniques and traditionalist methods, to those who advocate unspecified forms of meditation with every task. Zen "walking meditation", for example. The market for meditation is chalk full of copyrighted ideas and trademarked symbols, and the business of meditation understands that successful differentiation from other practices lead to a certain kind of power. It lowers the search-costs of prospective meditators, and gives them an American-style branded meditation they can seek.

Maharishi, one of the earliest entrants into the American meditation market, offered something college students in the 60s had scarcely heard of, and for which there were no substitutes. Maharishi products therefore had very inelastic demand, meaning that as the price continued to increase dramatically, demand kept increasing as well. The price of meditation rose from $35 to about $250 and as an NPR news piece says, as demand kept increasing Maharishi almost single-handedly introduced Eastern mysticism to the West.

I, on the other hand, have never paid more than $15 for a yoga class. A few years ago I took around five or six different classes. I found that most of the time you can take the first yoga class for free, and if there are enough locations around, you can learn most of the basic ideas for free by skipping around. The advanced or luxury classes like Maharishi's, however, are much more expensive. The price and exclusivity itself are objects of my curiosity.

What is peculiar about the demand for mysticism is its similarity to "Veblen goods", named after Thorstein Veblen. It is some good for which the price increasing increases the quantity demanded. It is related to the "snob effect", although it is difficult to say whether the increased price triggered the increased demand or the other way around. Veblen goods are the opposite of "Giffen goods", which are so inferior the price increasing causes quantity demanded to increase as well. Giffen goods are said not to exist. Increasing incomes in the 60s could easily have lead to the increase in luxury goods like meditation schooling, but this is only conjectural. Low-income earners meditate as well, just as low-income households may spend a larger share of their income on other spiritualisms, like at church.

Utility gained from Maharishi's meditation likely displays a different sort of preference satisfaction altogether, more like satisfaction though Scientology, and that is why some have commented on it as the "Maharishi Effect".

How Capitalism Caused Hot Russian Women?

Anne Applebaum from Microsoft's Slate Magazine wrote an article proclaiming that the fall of communism made women more beautiful in Russia, as evidenced by the emergence of super-models like Natalia Vodianova pictured left.

Under Soviet control there was no market for fashion magazines, TV series dictated by ratings, and various market mechanisms built into 'preference satisfaction'. Soviet communism did not offer the myriad of beauty products and sexual instruction that the capitalist West offered. There were famous Soviet film actresses, like Lyubov Petrovna Orlova, yet Applebaum notes that she was allegedly Stalin's prized actress and was much more "cheerful and wholesome" than sexy. She said market mechanisms brought beautiful Russian women into markets that they could succeed in.

What's missing from the article is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Western cultural values became accepted in Eastern Europe. The article gives all the credit to capitalism, forgetting imperialism.

Capitalism succeeded in creating a more potent spectacle than the Soviet Union, and part of that had to do with the way women are judged in Western society. The reason why Applebaum thinks capitalism caused hot women is because Applebaum herself was socialized into a society dominated by capitalist conditions of production, including the production of image: when Russian production became interconnected with Western production, Applebaum, like so many - you could call them "global gentrifiers" - could not tell the difference between capitalist penetration and cultural imperialism.

And because the West is both capitalist and imperialist, when Westernization causes women around the world to look - not surprisingly - "Western", she assumes it's because of an economic transformation.

Okay, okay. So it sounds like I'm trying to leave capitalism out of it. Capitalism certainly played a role in speeding up the process of Westernization. But my argument is that Applebaum, and other people too, are thinking that - because Russian women are being exploited and made to look like American models - she assumes that they are becoming sexier than before. But, of course, Applebaum is an American and from a particular time-period in American history. She's completely sidestepping 'cultural relativity' and replacing it with naivete.

Viticulture and Capitalism

Does the EU Commission in Brussels trust capitalism? For all the anti-capitalist bleating about beastliness of capitalism, the kernel of European economics is undoubtedly capitalist, no matter how diluted. Yet if you look at an industry that is of special local pride to Europeans, such as wine, you wonder if their leaders truly believe in such concepts as risk and reward or profit and loss.

The European Commission--which is the executive branch of the EU--is on course to approve a proposal to reform the heavily subsidized, minutely regulated European wine business. The general response from Europe's wine belt has been to resist calls for liberalization, in the name of tradition, culture, and the "soul" of wine. The opposition is not about money—not least because the commission has made it clear that it is not cutting funds from the 1.3 billion euro wine budget.

Here in Freiburg the local supermarket shelves are loyal to locally grown wines, regardless of their quality or price. When I trained through France last week the vineyards of Strasbourg were teeming with wine production. Wine production is almost everywhere in Europe. But France receives most of the budget from the CAP, (which in turn is 40% of the entire EU budget!) I love French philosophy, but stuck-up French vintners are truly a national peculiarity. They will bitch in disgust if they have to serve an ounce of wine from the German-side of the Rhine River. A generation ago, these wine growers would not even drink wine from the next village. But now this protectionist bourgeois industry must face the reality that Europe and the world will demand an honest price from them, and perhaps might not pay for their long-time subsidized wine. Sarkozy is of no help because he's a French nationalist, and will help "protect" the French vintners from price demands of capitalism.

But with socialist wine production under the CAP, half of the wine budget pays for wine that is never even bought on the market. That's 1.5 billion liters of wine surplus that is never consumed, and Europeans call this the great "wine lake" of France. A Free Wine campaign will be a wise decision if it takes place, because right now this industry, while the most subsidized, is also the most complicated. There are rules for nearly everything. (Try reading all the .pdfs in that link and try to figure out exactly how one is supposed to grow the grapes, how to sell the wine, etc.) Mariann Fischer Boel, the (Danish) agriculture commissioner at the EU, says on her website that “there is more tension in wine than I have seen in any other agricultural product.”

And all this time the French and Luxembourgeoissie believe the wine industry is so complex that this only means it requires state oversight to be “properly managed”. Both countries profit enormously from viticulture and wine-related industries, such as wine tourism. At least Luxembourg sells nearly all its wine. French wine au contraire is often left stagnant on the market. Why not liberalize and allow the best and profitable wine producers to continue producing? Perhaps that will mean more wine from Luxembourg on the market. Nay! Something will stop the ironically anti-capitalist Europe from embracing this prospect.