Some of the most important contemporary American literature is being written by immigrants to America and their children. A writer producing this literature may lack an American passport or, indeed, any kind of legal document permitting entry into the country. Yet it is still American literature because it is written in America and concerns America. It is a literature in which America can be found standing proud, with all its promise of freedom for those fleeing religious and social orthodoxy; but America is also stripped naked here, in all its reality of exploitation for those with nothing to offer but their cheap labour. Emerging in the last 30 years or so, it is a literature in which to read is the story of contemporary America.

The origins of this literature — of what may be called “a new literature of immigration”, for,
there is an older immigrant literature that was produced during the first few decades of the 20th
Century — lie in a legislative act of the 1960s. American immigration laws till the mid-1960s were marked by quotas governing who could be admitted to the U.S. based on country of origin. The laws — in keeping with American racial self-imagination — systematically encouraged white immigrants from Europe and placed obstacles before most others. The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the national origins formula and thus opened America’s door to a great variety of immigrants. In the 30 years that followed — for by the mid 1990s, the mood towards immigration amongst the political elite of the U.S. had begun to turn restrictive again — more than twenty million immigrants entered the U.S., more than during any previous period. The presence of Indians in the U.S. in large numbers today is a result of the 1965 act. Statistics show that more than half of the twenty million immigrants have come from seven countries: Mexico, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Korea, India, and the Dominican Republic. The new literature of immigration captures the experiences of these immigrants.

Defining an immigrant is not easy. We can say an immigrant chooses — though the actual degree
of choice can vary according to the social privilege of the immigrant — to journey to a new
life in a new country with new laws. And we can add that also distinctive about an immigrant
is the depth of engagement, willing or involuntary, with the “host” country into which the immigrant, in whatever spirit, enters. An immigrant differs from a traveller, a tourist, a slave transported across an ocean, or even an exile. The importance of a literature of immigration springs from this thoroughgoing engagement with the host country on the part of the immigrant. Because of this engagement, an immigrant literature is able to bring scrutiny to the deepest acknowledged and unacknowledged beliefs and practices of the “host” country even as it captures the wrenching experience of relocation in an alien country for the immigrant.

The Filipina-American writer Jessica Hagedorn is one of the more distinctive voices of the new
literature of immigration that has emerged from the 1965 legislative revisions. An immigrant herself, in plays, poems and novels since the 1970s she has explored the experience of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. Her most important work is her first novel, the startlingly original ‘Dogeaters’. Published in 1990, ‘Dogeaters’ is a brilliant and inventive narrative set mostly in the Philippines. Nevertheless, it too touches on the immigrant experience through one of its chief characters who narrates some of the novel from her current vantage point as an immigrant in the U.S. The relationship of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. is inseparable from Filipino experience of occupation by the U.S. from the late-19th to the mid-20th Century. ‘Dogeaters’ explores the powerful presence of American political and ideological influence in the Philippines.

The line of separation between an over here and an over there is even more blurred in the case
of immigration from Mexico. Proximity to the U.S. has ensured a continuity of contact between
Mexicans in the U.S. and their relatives and friends still in Mexico. Yet, in a series of widely
read but controversial essays and book-length non-fiction, Richard Rodriguez has presented a perspective on Mexican immigration to the U.S. that can be described as assimilationist — as recommending to the immigrant a whole-hearted absorption into America. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he has assertively laid claim to an American-ness and shown little patience for Mexican-American attempts to claim special intimacy with Mexico. America is as overpowering a presence over there in Mexico as it is in the Philippines, but as an American over here Rodriguez feels no responsibility to the country. In ‘Days of Obligation’, written in 1992, he notes, “Mexico was memory — not mine”.

There is, some would say, a special irony in Rodriguez’s assimilationist stance — an irony born
of race. Race is to America what caste is to India, the thing that is always there even when
you think it isn’t. Not surprisingly, race and racism are special concerns of the new literature
of immigration. After all, so many of these new post-1965 immigrants are non-white people living in a predominantly white society. Is assimilation a genuine option in America for an immigrant who is not white? Even today, the answer is more complicated than it would seem. Again and again, the new literature of immigration returns to examine this issue from every side imaginable to sometimes say yes, sometimes no, and sometimes something else altogether. Other important obsessions for the new literature of immigration include nostalgia as well as guilt for the “home country” and intergenerational conflicts between immigrant parents and American born children.

The literary work of Indian immigrants to the U.S. shares much with the work of writers from
other communities while at the same time remaining distinctively Indian-American. Part of the attraction of such a notion as a new literature of immigration is its ability to make the reader break out of narrowly ethnic ways of viewing the world. How does Jessica Hagedorn’s immigrant view of the Philippines in ‘Dogeaters’ compare to Bharati Mukherjee’s immigrant view of India in ‘Jasmine’? How does Meena Alexander’s view of immigrant life in New York in her novel ‘Manhattan Music’ relate to that of Korean American novelist Chang-rae Lee’s in ‘Native Speaker’? The new literature of immigration being produced in the U.S. now, post 1965, asks such questions to its readers.

The aftermath of the catastrophic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in
2001 has brought renewed pressure on immigrant communities in the U.S. In the ensuing climate
of suspicion, the new literature of immigration can do the work of humanising immigrants to other
Americans. It can also reveal, as only an immigrant perspective can, many previously overlooked aspects of contemporary American life to both Americans and interested readers in other parts of the world.

How should reasonable people react to the hype and controversy over global warming? Judging by recent headlines, you might think we are already doomed. Newspapers have been quick to link extreme weather events, ranging from floods in Britain and Mozambique to hurricanes in Central America, directly to global warming. Greens say that worse will ensue if governments do not act. Many politicians have duly jumped on the bandwagon, citing recent disasters as a reason for speeding up action on the Kyoto treaty on climate change that commits rich countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.

Yet, hotheaded attempts to link specific weather disasters to the greenhouse effect are scientific bunk. The correct approach is to coolly assess the science of climate change before taking action. Unfortunately, climate modeling is still in its infancy, and for most of the past decade it has raised as many questions as it has answered. Now, however, the picture is getting clearer. There will never be consensus, but the balance of the evidence suggests that global warming is indeed happening; that much of it has recently been man-made; and that there is a risk of potentially disastrous consequences. Even the normally stolid insurance industry is getting excited. Insurers reckon that weather disasters have cost roughly $400 billion over the past decade and that the damage is likely only to increase. The time has come to accept that global warming is a credible enough threat to require a public-policy response.

But what, exactly? At first blush, the Kyoto treaty seems to offer a good way forward. It is a global treaty: it would be foolish to deal with this most global of problems in any other way. It sets a long-term framework that requires frequent updating and revision, rather like the post-war process of trade liberalization. That is sensible because climate change will be at least a 100-year problem, and so will require a treaty with institutions and mechanisms that endure. The big question over Kyoto remains its cost. How much insurance is worth buying now against an uncertain, but possibly devastating, future threat? And the answer lies in a clear-headed assessment of benefits and costs. The case for doing something has increased during the three years since Kyoto was signed. Yet it also remains true that all answers will be easier if economic growth is meanwhile sustained: stopping the world while the problem is dealt with is not a sensible option, given that resources to deal with it would then become steadily scarcer.

That points to two general conclusions about how to implement Kyoto. The simplest is that countries should search out ―no regrets‖ measures that are beneficial in their own right as well as reducing emissions -- such as scrapping coal subsidies, liberalizing energy markets and cutting farm support. The second is that implementation should use market-friendly measures that minimize the costs and risks of slowing economic growth.

The arguments center on this second point, and in particular on the use of emissions trading and carbon ―"sinks" (such as forests) that could lower the cost of reaching the Kyoto targets. The Americans want unrestricted trading and generous definitions of what constitutes a sink, despite scientific uncertainties about this point. The Europeans want strict curbs on both.

The common thread to these issues is that the Europeans are taking a moralistic stance that the lion‘s share of reductions should come from ―"real" emissions cuts at home. The implication is that cuts made via market mechanisms such as trading, or the clever use of carbon sinks, are somehow unworthy. Yet the planet is impervious to where or how cuts are made, so long as the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is reduced.

Not that the American stance is beyond reproach. Though negotiators try to paint themselves as principled, market minded folk, the real explanation for their position is pragmatic. They know there is no chance that America will meet its target through cuts in domestic emissions. That is why they see sinks and trading as saviors. And, though they are on firm ground in insisting on unrestricted trading, they should agree to conservative definitions of sinks until scientists understand them better.

The proper aim of the negotiations should thus be to turn Kyoto into a treaty that bites, but with full flexibility over how countries should reach the targets that they have signed up to. And the guiding principle must be to err on the side of flexibility. A rigid deal that imposes heavy costs on economies would not only be undesirable in its own right; it would risk scuppering the Kyoto process altogether, leaving the atmosphere far worse off. Onerous short-term targets that force expensive adaptation will come at the expense of jobs, wages and other public goods, including measures to improve the environment. The pain could be particularly acute in the developing world.

The best Kyoto deal would harness the engine of economic growth and the ingenuity of entrepreneurs, not bet against them. Not only would that ensure that the treaty was implemented at minimum cost. It would also help to create new markets and provide incentives for businesses to innovate.

France‘s Ministry of Culture does not look like the sort of place where pessimism ought to flourish. The ministry occupies a wing of Richelieu‘s magnificent Palais Royal, round the corner from the Comedie Francaise and just a short walk from the Louvre and the Opera. On their way to lunch its inhabitants have to pick their way through throngs of tourists who have come from all over the world to admire France‘s cultural riches.

Pessimism flourishes here nonetheless. The ministry‘s officials are convinced that a rising tide of American popular culture is swamping France. And they spend much of their working lives administering a complex system of quotas and subsidies that are designed to protect French culture from total submersion.

The ministry has almost uniform support for its position among a French cultural elite worried about the threat that America poses, particularly to French film. Their concern is not, as sometimes claimed, that an upstart America hijacked the French national invention of Melies and the Lumieres. Rather it is that Hollywood is a Trojan horse bringing with it Disneyland Paris, fast-food chains and free advertising for American products from clothes to rock music. "America is not just interested in exporting its films," says Giles Jacob, the head of the Cannes Film Festival. "It is interested in exporting its way of life."

These French people lead a world guerrilla army, hoping to curb American cultural hegemony. In 1989, the French government persuaded the European Community to decree that 40% of TV programs should be domestic. It also strengthened their complex system of support (which taxes cinema tickets to help French film production) by extending it to television programs. In 1993, France threatened to sabotage the GATT trade round in order to exempt audio-visual materials from free trade agreements.

The French have found a powerful ally in Canada, which has long been terrified of being swamped by its closest neighbor. Of the films shown on Canadian screens, 96% are foreign, primarily American. Three quarters of the music on Canadian radio is not Canadian. Four in five magazines sold on newsstands in Canada, and six in every ten books, are foreign, mainly American.

Canada had, some time back, organized a meeting in Ottawa about American cultural dominance. Nineteen countries attended, including Britain, Brazil and Mexico; the United States was pointedly excluded. At issue were ways of exempting cultural goods from treaties lowering trade barriers, on the view that free trade threatened national cultures. The Ottawa meeting followed a similar gathering in Stockholm, sponsored by the United Nations, which resolved to press for special exemptions for cultural goods in another global trade pact, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.

Quite apart from its recommended solutions, is the "resistance" to American cultural imperialism correct in its diagnosis of the problem? Lurking here are three distinct questions. Is Hollywood as powerful as its enemies imagine? Is there an identifiable thing you can sensibly label "American culture"? And does America‘s domination extend to every corner of the popular arts and entertainment?

A strong case can be made out that America dominates world cinema. It may not make most feature films. But American films are the only ones that reach every market in the world: the highly successful films of India and Hong Kong hardly travel outside their regions. In major markets around the world, lists of the biggest-grossing films are essentially lists of Hollywood
blockbusters in slightly differing orders with one or two local films for variety. In the European Union, the United States claimed 70% overall of the film market in 1996, up from 56% in 1987; even in Japan, America now accounts for more than half the film market. "Titanic" has grossed almost $1.8 billion worldwide. "Armageddon" and "Lethal Weapon 4" play well from Belgium to Brazil.
Hollywood‘s empire also appears to be expanding by the year. Hollywood now gets roughly half its revenues from overseas, up from just 30% in 1980. At the same time few foreign films make it big in the United States, where they have less than 3% of the market. Between 1995 and 1996 Europe‘s trade deficit with the United States in films and television grew from $4.8 billion to $5.65 billion.

Striking figures, to be sure. Yet the more one looks at many of these films, the less distinctively American they become. One reason for Hollywood‘s success is that from the earliest days it was open to foreign talent and foreign money. Some of the great figures of Hollywood -- Chaplin, Murnau, Stroheim, and Hitchcock -- were imports. And now two of the most powerful studios, Columbia Tristar and Fox, are owned by foreign media conglomerates, Japan‘s Sony and Australia‘s News Corporation.

Several of Hollywood‘s most successful films have drawn heavily on international resources. "Three Men and a Baby", which helped to revive Disney after a fallow period in the mid-1980s, was a remake of a French comedy. "Total Recall" was made partly with French money, directed by a Dutchman and starred an Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. "The English Patient" was directed by a Briton shot in Italy and starred French and British actresses.

It may even be argued that it is less a matter of Hollywood corrupting the world than of the world corrupting Hollywood. The more Hollywood becomes preoccupied by the global market, the more it produces generic blockbusters made to play as well in Pisa as Peoria. Such films are driven by special effects that can be appreciated by people with a minimal grasp of English rather than by dialogue and plot. They eschew fine-grained cultural observation for generic subjects that anybody can identify with, regardless of national origins. There is nothing particularly American about boats crashing into icebergs or asteroids that threaten to obliterate human life.

The very identification of Hollywood with American culture, particularly American high culture, is itself a mistake. So is confusing screen conduct with real conduct, although plenty of serious-minded people do seem to treat Hollywood as a ruinous influence on American manners and morals: Michael Medved, an American screenwriter turned cultural commentator, argues that, far from nurturing deep-rooted values, Hollywood helps destroy them. "Tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy," he argues, "an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children." Making a point more about art than behavior, Terry Teachout, a music critic, says that educated Americans would cheer if an earthquake reduced Hollywood‘s sound stages to rubble. "The enemy‘ at the gates is not the United States free trade or even Walt Disney," he says with deliberate effect, "it is democracy."

Instead of treating the sovereignty of popular taste as something that underpins America‘s cultural domination of the world, many of America‘s neoconservatives (and some liberals) see it rather as a perilous solvent acting on the United States itself. The country, they fear, is dissolving into a babble of discordant ethnic voices without a common cultural identity or a shared national purpose. And they put much of the blame on the proliferation of foreign-language media outlets. One of the most popular television channels in Los Angeles is KMFX 34, which broadcasts in Spanish; there are also channels which broadcast exclusively in Korean, Cantonese and Japanese, and others that rent air-time for Yiddish and Russian broadcasts. Even in the shadow of the Hollywood sign it is possible to live without bowing the knee to a majority culture.

The world‘s culture ministers might well reply that the inroads that Spanish and Korean television have made into the United States are as nothing compared with the inroads that American television has made into their home countries. The deregulation of television in the 1980s created a legion of upstart stations that were desperate for content -- and much of the cheapest and most reliable content came from America.

Yet as new stations establish themselves, they tend to drop generic American products in favor of local productions: audiences still prefer homegrown fare if given the choice. In every European country in 1997, the most popular television programme was a local production. "Navarro", an unmistakably French action drama, has never had less than a 33% market share. Across the channel, Inspector Morse", a much re-run British detective series, owes its lasting appeal to an Oxford setting and a curmudgeonly hero.

The strength of local ties is even more apparent in pop music, long supposed to provide the soundtrack to America‘s cultural hegemony. The United States has never enjoyed the same dominance of pop music as it has of cinema, having to share the global market with Britain. According to a book reporting the results of a rock-music poll of 200,000 people, aged from nine to 62, in America and Europe, "The All-Time Top 1,000 Albums", seven of the ten most popular albums were British. As the rock market fragments into niches -- from urban rap to techno -- it is harder and harder to create global brands.

A few years ago, few self-respecting teenagers would be caught dead listening to French or Swedish pop groups (The Swedish group Abba was almost the definition of naff). Now French groups such as Air and Daft Punk and Swedish groups such as Ace of Base and the Cardigans are decidedly cool. In Germany, the world‘s third-largest music market after the United States and Japan, local performers account for 48% of the DM6 billion ($3.5 billion) in yearly sales, double the percentage five years ago. Two leading music channels, Viva and Viva-2, now devote about 40% of their time to German titles. In Spain, 58% of the total $1 billion music sales are generated by Spanish and Latin American artists. In the French market, French rock groups account for nearly half the country‘s total sales. MTV makes different programs for different regions.

As America‘s pop-music industry struggles with a stagnating international market, European groups are finding it easier to cross borders. Americans buy some $2 billion worth of Spanish music a year. Ace of Base‘s first record was one of the biggest selling debut records ever, dominating the American charts. German techno bands such as Mr. President have had a string of international successes. Ibiza is the capital of global dance music. Daft Punk sold 900,000 albums outside France, earning some 77m francs ($13m). Even Iceland has a global star in Bjork.

The American empire is equally shaky in other areas of popular culture. The British have dominated popular musicals since the appearance of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" in the mid-1970s. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Macintosh revived what had become a geriatric art form with catchy tunes, clever lyrics, sumptuous sets and relentless marketing. They turned British musicals into both a major tourist attraction and an important export. "The Phantom of the Opera" has been seen by an estimated 52m people, pulling in more than $2.5 billion. Basle has a purpose-built theatre for "Phantom".

As for fashion, the great houses of Paris and Milan dominate the high end of the market; London its street-wise, popular base. Walk down Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, with its outlets for Gucci, Valentino and Armani, and America looks like the cultural colony, not Europe. Here too it is the British who are shaking up the industry. Jean-Paul Gaultier claims that he gets some of his best ideas by walking around London. Ex-punker Vivienne Westwood is a grande dame in Paris and Milan, and two big French houses recently put young British designers, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, in charge.

Even in publishing and magazines -- an area that particularly worries the Canadians -- American domination is by no means clear-cut. The best-known magazine editor in the United States is an Englishwoman, Tina Brown, who is credited with reviving (before leaving) both "Vanity Fair" and "The New Yorker". Foreign companies control half of America‘s top 20 publishing houses. Earlier this year Bertelsmann, a German conglomerate, purchased America‘s biggest publisher, Random House, provoking headlines about American culture being sold to foreigners.

In fact, Bertelsmann may well be a stronger global force than its American-owned rivals. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it built a network of book clubs, publishers and record companies across the old Soviet block. It holds a stake in Prague‘s City Radio, owns the biggest newspaper in Hungary and in Slovakia, and has launched a glossy science magazine in Russia in a venture with the Orthodox Church.

"ARE economists human?" is not a question that occurs to many practitioners of the dismal science, but it is one that springs to the minds of many non-economists exposed to conventional economic explanations. Economists have typically described the thought processes of homo sapiens as more like that of Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock — strictly logical, centered on a clearly defined goal and free from the unsteady influences of emotion or irrationality — than the uncertain, error-prone groping with which most of us are familiar. Of course, some human behavior does fit the rational pattern so beloved of economists. But remember, Mr. Spock is a Vulcan, not a human.

Even economists are finally waking up to this fact. A wind of change is now blowing some human spirit back into the ivory towers where economic theory is made. It is becoming increasingly fashionable for economists, especially the younger, more ambitious ones, to borrow insights from psychologists (and sometimes even biologists) to try to explain drug addiction, the working habits of New York taxi-drivers, current sky-high American share prices and other types of behavior which seem to defy rationality.

Many economic rationalists still hold true to their faith, and some have fought back by devising rational explanations for the apparent irrationalities studied by the growing school of "behavioral economists". Ironically, orthodox economists have been forced to fight this rearguard action against heretics in their own ranks just as their own approach has begun to be more widely applied in other social sciences such as the study of law and politics.

The golden age of rational economic man began in the 1940s. Famous earlier economists such as Adam Smith, Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes, had made use of irrationality and other aspects of psychology in their theories. But in the post-war years these aspects were mostly brushed aside by the new wave of rationalists. The dominance of rationality went hand-inglove with the growing use in economics of mathematics, which also happened to be much easier to apply if humans were assumed to be rational.

Rational behavior was understood to have several components. At a minimum — so-called "narrow rationality" — homo economics was assumed to be trying always to maximize his general "happiness", what John Stuart Mills, a 19th-century philosopher, called "utility". In other words, given a choice, he would take the option with the highest "expected utility". And
he would be consistent in his choices: if he preferred apples to oranges, and oranges to pears, he also preferred apples to pears. In addition, there is a broader definition of rationality, which includes the notion of a person‘s beliefs being based on logical, objective analysis of all the available evidence. Whether this is a meaningful definition continues to be the subject of much philosophical debate.

By the late 1970s, economic rationality was not only the orthodoxy, it began to effect events in the real world. Macroeconomic policy, notably in America and Britain, fell into the hands of believers in the theory of "rational expectations". This said that, rather than forming expectations on the basis of limited information drawn from previous experience, people take into account
all available information. This includes making an accurate assessment of government policy. Thus, when governments announced that they would do whatever was necessary to bring down inflation, people would adjust their expectations accordingly.

In the same way, Wall Street investment firms, too, increasingly, fell under the spell of the "efficient markets hypothesis", an economic theory that assumes that the prices of financial assets such as shares and bonds are rationally based on all available information. Even if there are many stupid investors, went the theory, they would be driven out of the market by rational investors who could profit by trading against the investments of the foolish. As a result, economists scoffed at the notion that investors could consistently earn a higher return than the market average by picking shares. How times have changed. Some of those same economists have now become investment managers — although their performance has suggested that they should have paid heed to their earlier beliefs about the difficulty of beating the market.

During the 1980s, macroeconomic policies based on rational expectations failed to live up to their promise (although this was probably because people rationally refused to believe government promises). And the stockmarket crash of October 1987 shattered the confidence of many economists in efficient markets. The crash seemed to have occurred without any new information or reason. Thus, the door of the ivory tower opened, at first only slightly, to theories that included irrational behavior. Today there is a growing school of economists who are drawing on a vast range of behavioral traits identified by experimental psychologists which amount to a frontal assault on the whole idea that people, individually or as a group, mostly
act rationally.

A quick tour of the key observations made by these psychologists would make even Mr. Spock‘s head spin. For example, people appear to be disproportionately influenced by the fear of feeling regret, and will often pass up even benefits within reach to avoid a small risk of feeling they have failed. They are also prone to cognitive dissonance: holding a belief plainly at odds with the evidence, usually because the belief has been held and cherished for a long time. Psychiatrists sometimes call this "denial".

And then there is anchoring: people are often overly influenced by outside suggestion. People can be influenced even when they know that the suggestion is not being made by someone who is better informed. In one experiment, volunteers were asked a series of questions whose answers were in percentages—such as what percentage of African countries is in the United Nations? A wheel with numbers from one to 100 was spun in front of them; they were then asked to say whether their answer was higher or lower than the number on the wheel, and then to give their answer. These answers were strongly influenced by the randomly selected, irrelevant number on the wheel. The average guess when the wheel showed 10 was 25%; when it showed 65, it was 45%.

Experiments show that most people apparently also suffer from status quo bias: they are willing to take bigger gambles to maintain the status quo than they would be to acquire it in the first place. In one common experiment, mugs are allocated randomly to some people in a group. Those who have them are asked to name a price to sell their mug; those without one are asked to name a price at which they will buy. Usually, the average sales price is considerably higher than the average offer price.

Expected-utility theory assumes that people look at individual decisions in the context of the big picture. But psychologists have found that, in fact, they tend to compartmentalize, often on superficial grounds. They then make choices about things in one particular mental compartment without taking account of the implications for things in other compartments.

There is also a huge amount of evidence that people are persistently, and irrationally, over-confident. Asked to answer a factual question, then asked to give the probability that their answer was correct, people typically overestimate this probability. This may be due to a representativeness heuristic: a tendency to treat events as representative of some well-known class or pattern. This gives people a sense of familiarity with an event and thus confidence that they have accurately diagnosed it. This can lead people to "see" patterns in data even where there are none. A closely related phenomenon is the availability heuristic: people focus excessive attention on a particular fact or event, rather than the big picture, simply because it is more visible or fresher in their mind.

Another delightfully human habit is magical thinking: attributing to one‘s own actions something that had nothing to do with them, and thus assuming that one has a greater influence over events than is actually the case. For instance, an investor who luckily buys a share that goes on to beat the market may become convinced that he is a skilful investor rather than a merely fortunate one. He may also fall prey to quasi-magical thinking — behaving as if he believes his thoughts can influence events, even though he knows that they can‘t.

Most people, say psychologists, are also vulnerable to hindsight bias: once something happens, they overestimate the extent to which they could have predicted it. Closely related to this is memory bias: when something happens people often persuade themselves that they actually predicted it, even when they didn‘t.

Finally, who can deny that people often become emotional, cutting off their noses to spite their faces. One of the psychologists‘ favorite experiments is the "ultimatum game" in which one player, the proposer, is given a sum of money, say $10, and offers some portion of it to the other player, the responder. The responder can either accept the offer, in which case he gets the sum offered and the proposer gets the rest, or reject the offer in which case both players get nothing. In experiments, very low offers (less than 20% of the total sum) are often rejected, even though it is rational for the responder to accept any offer (even one cent!) that the proposer makes. And yet, responders seem to reject offers out of sheer indignation at being made to accept such a small proportion of the whole sum, and they seem to get more satisfaction from taking revenge on the proposer than in maximizing their own financial gain. Mr. Spock would be appalled if a Vulcan made this mistake.

In 1980, the World Health Organization (WHO) succeeded in its campaign to rid the world of smallpox. It has never let anyone forget the fact since. And rightly so. Given the effort it took to eradicate this scourge, the WHO richly deserves to make certain that smallpox, though gone, is not forgotten. Leprosy, however, appears to have endured the opposite fate. This ancient blight is forgotten, but not gone -- an unhappy predicament for its sufferers and for the WHO, which is still fighting against it.

So far, the WHO is committed to "eliminating" leprosy but not to "eradicating" it. That might seem a strange distinction to a layman, but in the argot, elimination is defined as a reduction in the number of cases in a population to below one per 10,000 people; eradication implies that no cases exist at all. The WHO Leprosy Elimination Programme, inaugurated in 1991, aimed to complete its task by 2000.

The campaign has made a lot of progress. It has reduced the number of people with the disease from more than five million to less than one million, and eliminated leprosy from 98 countries. But several South-East Asian and African states, as well as Brazil, still report from four to six cases of leprosy per 10,000 people. So at the Asian Leprosy Congress in Agra, the target
date for global elimination was postponed to 2005.

A pity. But on the face of it, a five-year delay in "eliminating" a scourge that has horrified people since biblical times is a mere blip. There is, however, a fear that having allowed the deadline to slip once, the project‘s momentum may be lost -- and even that the eventual result may be worse than if no grand plans had been laid in the first place.

The WHO originally accepted the idea of "eliminating" leprosy because in 1989, a symposium of experts decided that eradicating the disease was not feasible. In 1998, a workshop convened by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, echoed that advice. However, it added a new worry: that eliminating leprosy might not be possible either. Given the current state of knowledge of the biology of the disease, these epidemiologists argued, an elimination campaign could not guarantee to stop transmission, and thus keep the caseload down.

That is because a lot of basic information about leprosy is still missing. Doctors cannot, for example, diagnose it before a patient starts to show symptoms. Nor do they know how likely a treated patient is to relapse. More significantly, they remain unsure exactly how the disease is transmitted, how it infects the human body, and at what point a carrier of the bacterium may infect others.

As a result, and despite its success in treating those already infected, the campaign has not had much impact on the rate of new infections. That figure still exceeds 650,000 a year, or around 4.5 cases per 10,000 individuals in the worst-off countries; it has shown little sign of falling in the past 15 years.

The solution should be more research. Given the recent unraveling, by the Pasteur Institute in France, of the genome of Mycobacterium leprae, the organism that causes the disease, science is better poised to carry out such research than ever before. But the loudly proclaimed 2000 deadline caused research funding to tail off. Funding bodies assumed that basic research into leprosy was becoming irrelevant, since the problem was being solved where it counted -- in the field. So they turned their attention elsewhere. In 1990, for example, the International Federation of Anti-Leprosy Associations spent $6.5m on research projects. By 1998, its spending had declined to $3m. A lot of nifty public-relations work is going to be needed to repair the damage.

Fortunately, public relations is something that leprosy officials seem to be good at. They have already been pretty successful at "rebranding" the infection as ―Hansen‘s disease‖, at least in medical circles. The Hansen in question, a 19th-century Norwegian doctor, did not, of course, recognize leprosy for the first time -- the usual reason to dub an illness after an individual. But he did identify Mycobacterium leprae, and that is good enough cover for the spin-doctors. Indeed, the Brazilian government went so far as to ban the "L" word completely, even in the names of aid organizations such as the British group LEPRA.

Cynicism aside, there may be good medical reasons for abandoning the old term. Most illness attracts sympathy for the victim. Leprosy often elicits repugnance. In some clinics, therefore, patients are now told only that they are suffering from a ―skin infection‖,
and may complete their recovery without ever learning the details. Indeed, there is evidence that not telling people the whole truth gives better results than leveling with them - perhaps because they can take their medicine openly, without having to lie to their family and friends to avoid the stigma of being branded a leper.

Rebranding may also come to the rescue of the Leprosy Elimination Programme. The latest talk is not of elimination, but of "very good control" -- accepting, and being honest about, the fact that the disease will be around for the foreseeable future. As one participant in the CDC workshop remarked, "a number of us would like to eradicate the word elimination."

This would alter expectations again since "control" is not, like elimination and eradication, a euphemism for abolition. And that might backfire. For although the elimination campaign put research funding on the back burner, it did, with its promise of an achievable goal, galvanize efforts in the clinic and the surgery. The WHO programme has already spent $50m and has another $50m pledged -- but on the understanding that there is a clear end in sight. If the language changes again, and particularly if the 2005 deadline also proves a mirage, the WHO may have to work hard to keep the money flowing; 1980 was, after all, a long time ago.

Every conscious mental state has a qualitative character that we refer to as mood. We are always in a mood that is pleasurable or unpleasurable to some degree. It may be that bad moods relate to their being too positive reinforcement in a person‟s current life and too many punishments. In any case, moods are distinguished from emotions proper by not being tied to any specific object. But, this distinction is not watertight, in that emotions need not be directed at objects that are completely specific (we can be angry just at people generally) while there is always a sense of a mood having a general objective like the state of the world at large. Moods manifest themselves in positive or negative feelings that are tied to health, personality, or perceived quality of life. Moods can also relate to emotions proper, as in the aftermath of an emotional incident such as the failure to secure a loan. A mood on this basis is the mind‟s judgment on the recent past. For Goldie, emotion can bubble up and down within a mood, while an emotion can involve characteristics that are non-object specific.

What is important for marketing is that moods colour outlook and bias judgements. Hence the importance of consumer confidence surveys, as consumer confidence typically reflects national mood. There is mood - congruence when thoughts and actions fall inline with mood. As Goleman says, there is a “constant stream of feeling” that runs “in perfect to our steam of thought”. Mood congruence occurs because a positive mood evokes pleasant associations that lighten subsequent appraisals (thoughts) and actions, while a negative arouses pessimistic associations that influence future judgment and behaviour. When consumers are in a good mood, they are more optimistic about buying more confident in buying, and much more willing to tolerate things like waiting in line. On the other hand, being in a mood makes buying behaviour in the “right mood” by the use of music and friendly staff or, say, opens bakeries in shopping malls that delight the passer-by with the smell of fresh bread.

Thayer views moods as a mixture of biological and psychological influences and, as such, a sort of clinical thermometer, reflecting all the internal and external events that influence us. For Thayer, the key components of mood are energy and tension in different combinations. A specific mixture of energy and tension, together with the thoughts they influence, produces moods. He discusses four mood states:
• Calm-energy: he regards this as the optimal mood of feeling good
• Calm-tiredness: he regards this as feeling a little tired without any stress, which can be pleasant. • Tense-energy: involves a low level of anxiety suited to a fight-or-flight disposition.
• Tense-tiredness: is a mixture of fatigue and anxiety, which underlies the unpleasant feeling of depression.

People generally can “feel down” or “feel good” as a result of happenings in the world around them. This represents the national mood. People feel elated when the national soccer team wins an international match or depressed when their team has lost. An elated mood of calm - energy is an optimistic mood, which is good for business. Consumers, as socially involved individuals, are deeply influenced by the prevailing social climate. Marketers recognize the phenomenon and talk about the national mood being, say for or against conspicuous consumption. Moods do change, though. Writing early in the nineteenth century, Toqueville describes an American elite embarrassed by the ostentation of material display; in the “Gilded Age”, sixty years later, many were only too eager to embrace a materialistic vulgarity. The problem lies in anticipating changes in national mood, since a change in mood affects everything from buying of equities to the buying of houses and washing machines. Thayer would argue that we should be interested in national events that are likely to produce a move toward a tense- tiredness state or toward a calm-energy state, since these are the polar extremes and are more likely to influence behaviour. Artists sensitive to national moods express the long-term changes. An example is the long- term emotional journey from Charles Dickens‟s depiction of the death of little Nell to Oscar Wilde‟s cruel flippancy about it. “One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell”, which reflects the mood change from high Victorian sentimentality to the acerbic cynicism of the end of the century, as shown in writers like Thomas Hardy and artists like Aubrey Beardsley.

Whenever the mind is not fully absorbed, consciousness is no longer focused and ordered. Under such conditions the mind falls into dwelling on the unpleasant, with a negative mood developing. Csikszentmihalyi argues that humans need to keep consciousness fully active is what influences a good deal of consumer behaviour. Sometimes it does not matter what we are shopping for - the point is to shop for anything, regardless, as consuming is one way to respond to the void in consciousness when there is nothing else to do.