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Can a nation lose its self-confidence? Stephanie Rozes, a French political analyst, believes that it can:

The French say that now they are happy, but when you ask them about the future they are pessimistic. They feel they are not in control of their destiny. For the past 15 years, the French have been convinced that tomorrow will be worse than today. They want to conserve the present.

I’ve got a piece on confidence and unemployment in the new issue of the RSA Journal. It starts with this little anecdote, which seems to me pretty representative:

Earlier this year, NatWest surveyed 9,000 young people about their salary expectations. The gloomy economic forecasts seem to have influenced the respondents, because their expected average earnings fell from last year’s estimate. Instead of saying they would be earning £70,000 by the time they were 35, they modestly anticipated £54,000. The average salary for a 35-year-old is £23,893.

The article was written in response to a piece on the recession by David Blanchflower, a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee. It’s well worth reading, especially if you need cheering down; you can also ask him a question. My question will begin with a long, drawn-out scream.

It looked great on paper, but I found 500 Days of Summer dull and flat. It replaced plot with narrative trickery and effective characterisation with set-pieces stolen too blatantly from other films (this was good, but it was nothing on this).

I was also slightly irritated by the overall theme, but I think that was just because the dynamic was reversed – ie. in this case it was happening to the bloke. When I thought about it, every romantic comedy I’ve seen in the last few years (more than I care to admit) has had pretty much the same motif. Hollwood rom-coms have stopped doing “rags to riches”: their big transformation is now “shy to confident”.

Susie Scott’s excellent book Shyness and Society, a sociological study of shyness, suggests why this might be the case. Scott argues that shyness is something people have always experience, but that only we have chosen to stigmatise:

It is only since the late twentieth century that shyness has been defined as a failure to assert oneself, to be in touch with one’s feelings and to “be all that you can be”.

The renowned psychologist Phillip Zimbardo’s shyness.com is a classic example of this approach. Its homepage assures us that:

Shyness and social phobia do not have to interfere with achieving professional and interpersonal goals.

The assumption is that shyness is a bad thing – and that confidence is normal.

One consequence of this, Scott says, is that we feel increasingly anxious about our shyness. We feel strongly the demand to be poised, skillful and assertive in our dealings with others, and we are ashamed how little we are “really” like this. As a result, we all secretly feel as if we are faking it.

Where did the demand to be confident come from? Scott pinpoints modern culture:

In many ways, the shy person represents the complete anathema of contemporary Western culture’s “ideal” worker: by appearing to reject the go-getting, team-building, you-can-do-it ethos of the modern office, they pose a silent threat to the goals of an efficient, streamlined service economy and the exploitation of human resources.

Which brings us right back to 500 Days of Summer. Reader, he gets the job.

The dreadful Guardian Saturday magazine reports on a landmark 1976 psychology study:

Two American researchers, Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin, gave a group of elderly nursing home residents a plant to care for. Another group in the same home were given plants, but told that nurses would take care of them.

Three weeks later, those who had cared for their own plants reported much higher levels of happiness than those who hadn’t; 18 months later, their health and levels of activity had improved and, most significantly, fewer of those residents had died.

The author concluded from this that caring for others, even for plants, can make us happier – and even extend our lives.

I conclude that taking part in pseudo-scientific experiments can make us happier – and even extend our lives.

Perhaps someone can explain to me why my conclusion isn’t valid?

What is luck? Do some people have more of it than others? If they do, where do they get it?

The new Harry Potter film is tremendous – no matter what the reviews say. I can’t say what it would be like if you weren’t a massive fan who’d read all the books several times, but I enjoyed it.

The film features one of J. K. Rowling’s best creations: “liquid luck”, or felix felicis. This potion gives anyone who drinks it good fortune for a short period. Harry wins a small vial in a contest and takes it in order to convince Professor Horace Slughorn to give up a memory. You can see the results in this bootleg. It looks very much like confidence.

In another scene, Harry pretends to slip some felix felicis in Ron’s drink, to boost his morale before an important Quidditch match. Ron plays perfectly, embued with near-magical powers by his mental state:

The link between luck and confidence is made explicit elsewhere. Taking too much of the potion, we are told in the book, can cause giddiness, recklessness and overconfidence. When Harry does have a sip, Rowling writes:

Slowly but surely, an exhilarating sense of infinite opportunity stole through him; he felt as though he could have done anything, anything at all … Harry got to his feet, smiling, brimful of confidence.

Chance, by definition, is what we cannot control. But luck is not wholly implacable. A little observation of our lives tells us that some people attract more of it than others.

In his book The Luck Factor the psychologist Richard Wiseman describes the behavioural habits “scientifically proven to help you attract good fortune”. Lucky people are “social magnets”, he says, who build “networks of luck”. They have a relaxed attitude towards life. They are open to new experiences. Lucky people listen to their hunches and gut feelings, and they anticipate good fortune in the future. They expect their interactions with others to be successful.

Wiseman erroneously gives a list of actions, instead of the disposition they spring from. But he is correct to say that Fortune has likes and dislikes. Above all, she is attracted to confidence.

The idea that Fortune cannot be influenced comes from Christian philosophy. Ever since the Christian philosopher Boethius first called Fortune the sightless goddess in the sixth century AD, people have liked to imagine that she is thoughtless and indiscriminate in the bestowal of her gifts. In Titian’s painting, Fortune is symbolised by the wheel, turning inexorably, careless of who it crushes.

Classical philosophers saw more clearly. Luck is not blind. As the Roman historian Livy recognised, she prefers certain individuals.

Livy gave us the phrase “Fortune favours the brave”. Courage, however, is not so valuable for us. In our time, Fortune prefers the confident.

Taken yesterday, in Gospel Oak, London.

Lots of this sort of thing around at the moment. As Kirstin put it, in the comments to this post:

People will take just about any amount of contradictory crap. Right now, thousands of fifteen year old girls are sitting in maths, dreaming about the day they’ll have enough money for a boob job and use their new-found confidence to get on the front cover of FHM.

Malcolm Gladwell has a long article in this week’s New Yorker on overconfidence. It doesn’t add much to the points he has already made, although it contains a lot of nice detail, particularly about Bear Stearns under Jimmy Cayne and Alan (Ace) Greenberg.

Gladwell gets a lot of criticism. Some of it is deserved. He’s also fine writer – precise and witty, with a good sense of timing. There are a couple of chuckle-out-loud lines in this piece.

It’s worth a read.

UPDATE: John Lanchester suggests why overconfidence may be particularly prevelant in financial fields:

Artists, sportsmen, surgeons, plumbers, and the rest of us have secret voices of doubt, inner reservations about ourselves, but if you go to work with money, and make money, you can be proved right in the most inhumanly pure way. This is why people who have succeeded in the world of money tend to have such a high opinion of themselves. And this is why they seem to regard themselves as paragons of rationality, while others often regard them as slightly nuts. The chairman and C.E.O. of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, in his no-apologies testimony to a congressional committee after his company’s collapse, gave us a glimpse of this state of mind in its full pomp.

President Obama signed his economic stimulus plan yesterday. It’s the most massive recovery package ever seen. And one of its principal aims is the restoration of confidence. As Obama warned last week in his press conference:

Doing a little or nothing at all will result in even greater deficits, even greater job loss, even greater loss of income, and even greater loss of confidence.

This puts confidence on a par with jobs and income. That might seem odd at first, but it appears to be the general consensus. Certainly according to the entrepreneur Sir David Tang, who writes on the BBC website that “pessimism is the most serious cause of the global economic tsunami”. Even David Brooks agrees.

A contrary view comes from economist Kevin Hassett on Bloomberg News. According to him, confidence – or overconfidence – was the principal cause of the credit crunch. He blames the inflated sense of entitlement felt by the MBAs on Wall Street desk, quoting a study which equated narcissistic traits with leadership potential:

The results of the study had large implications for real-world settings, because “narcissistic leaders tend to have volatile and risky decision- making performance and can be ineffective and potentially destructive leaders”.

It may be that Hassett is referring to a different kind of confidence to Obama and Tang. He’s talking about personal confidence, they’re talking about consumer confidence. But it seems to me there must be a connection – otherwise why use the same word? So who’s right? Is confidence to blame; or is itwhat keeps the economy afloat?

Perhaps – and this is just a thought – both are right. Confidence does drive the global economy. But, like capitalism itself, it is fundamentally volatile. When the going is good, confidence is the rocket fuel of innovation and entrepreneuralism. But it always overreaches, because it is based on a faith in the future that can never be fully realised.

Not evidence for this, but a sign of something: the State Street Index (below) shows a record jump in global confidence in February:

I would ask if the world has gone mad. But I know the answer to that already.