Karl with Carl

This essay argues that bringing Marxist and Jungian thought together can be surprisingly fruitful. While both traditions are ultimately concerned with human flourishing, they focus on different aspects of reality which would need to be combined for genuine emancipation: the social and the individual, the conscious and the unconscious, objectivity and subjectivity, modernity and ancestrality, science and spirituality. After briefly discussing divergences and convergences between the two authors, I present fragments of a Jungian-Marxian anthropology, around the depth of social struggles, the relations between ideology and archetypes, the psychic costs of capitalism, and Degrowth as the possible political project of this synthesis. If one takes human and nonhuman flourishing seriously, one can only go post-capitalist and seek to reorganize society around a slower pace, a simpler life, and more sharing and caring. The essay ends with a plea to bring back the soul to the core of radical activism.

Risk Tolerance and the Financial Satisfaction of Credit Card Users

This study tests whether risk tolerance mitigates the effects of credit card mismanagement on users' financial satisfaction. We used data from the Health and Retirement Study and found results showing that credit card mismanagement reduces the financial satisfaction of lower-risk-tolerance users only. The results also suggest that the psychic costs of credit card mismanagement (i.e., stress and anxiety), not the monetary costs (fees and higher interest rates), may be the biggest contributors to the dissatisfaction associated with credit card use.

Selling “Psycho Films”

Trauma-themed military documentaries served a variety of promotional purposes—many of them strictly corporate—during and after World War II. These experiments in institutional advertising, with their emphasis on the therapeutic dimensions of extensive militarization, were hardly limited to the postwar period. In a fundamental sense, they originated with the military’s wartime efforts to contain widespread concerns regarding war trauma—efforts that met the militant tone of certain orientation films with a more measured, even somber reflection on the psychic costs of combat.

Psychic vs. Economic Barriers to Vaccine Take-Up: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria

This paper experimentally evaluates the relative importance of psychic costs of tetanus vaccination compared to monetary costs among women in rural Nigeria. We compare vaccine take-up between two conditions to receive cash incentives: clinic attendance vs. vaccine take-up. Because the only difference between these two conditions is whether a woman was required to receive a vaccine upon arrival at the clinic, the difference in clinic attendance between these two groups captures the psychic costs of vaccination. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find no evidence for significant psychic costs. Priming about disease severity increases the perceived severity of disease, but not vaccine take-up. Monetary costs strongly affect vaccination decisions.

An Analysis of Trust, Employee Trustworthiness, Fraud, and Internal Controls

We analyze important strategic relationships among trust, employee trustworthiness, fraud, and internal controls. A game is modeled between a manager and an employee, two rational decision makers. The manager makes control decisions based on the strength of controls and on employee trustworthiness, which are modeled as functions of monetary and psychic costs and benefits of committing and not committing fraud. We propose a rich definition of trustworthiness that incorporates an employee’s propensity to commit fraud and sensitivity to controls. Equilibrium strategies are identified that could be used to determine the best strategy and the optimum strength of controls to use by identifying trustworthy, untrustworthy, and opportunistically trustworthy employees. A relationship of trustworthiness with a probabilistic choice of controls by the manager is established. As the strength of controls increases, the trustworthiness of the employees also increases, but a minimum critical level of trustworthiness is required to make controls effective. A high level of control may be needed to deter fraud. Also, this increase in trustworthiness does not translate to a proportional reduction of controls by the manager. We caution against excessive investments in internal controls. A low strength control with high probability of controls may be a cost effective way to deter fraud. We also explore the interaction of controls strength with the losses to the manager when fraud is committed. We find that control is not always a viable strategy. Optimal payoffs indicate that, unlike simultaneous decision making, under sequential decision making, the manager’s best strategy is to choose controls and auditing an employee. Policy implications and managerial insights of these findings are discussed.