Tag Archives: consumption

Roger Brown

On June 6, a U.S. Treasury note in my portfolio would mature and its value was $30,000. I had decided after Al’s death had ceased to engulf my mind and I had a chance to check out my retirement funds, to consolidate my assets, think about my likely life span, and face the fact that I did not care much about enriching any of my relatives. I had decided, after all, that I had no interest in increasing my equity and so would try to spend all my income and gradually reduce my capital. My goal was to spend my last penny as I drew my last breath—“a neat trick not easily managed,” my great friend in psychology, Stanley Milgram, had commented.

Roger Brown, Against My Better Judgment: An Intimate Memoir of an Eminent Gay Psychologist, New York, 1996, p. 173

Geoffrey Miller

Shortly after Charles Spearman’s key work in 1904, intelligence became the best-studied, best-established trait in psychology. Higher intelligence predicts higher average success in every domain of life: school, work, money, mating, parenting, physical health, and mental health. It predicts avoiding many misfortunes, such as car accidents, jail, drug addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, and jury duty. It is one of the most sexually attractive traits in every culture studied, for both sexes. It is socially desired in friends, students, mentors, co-workers, bosses, employees, housemates, and especially platoon mates. It remains ideologically controversial because its predictive power is so high, and its distribution across individuals is so unequal.

Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, New York, 2009, pp. 144-145