In a Leicester where lorries load themselves, shoes cost four pounds fifty and every household draws a dividend funded by a levy on electricity, the money has turned out to be the easy part. A research psychologist sends sixty phones into the city to ask, eight times a day, how people feel. One of them belongs to Joanne Mallory, a former claims handler now paid to countersign the decisions of a freight company's dispatching agent, decisions she cannot judge but must answer for. Kahnemanian Cognition Simulacrum tells the story through the record of a single sampled week and the interview that follows, in plain and exact prose, setting the self that lives each moment against the self that keeps the score, and asking which of them a society should pay.
by Kahnemanian Cognition, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
The phones went out on the first Monday in March, sixty of them, in padded envelopes with a sheet of instructions that I had rewritten eleven times. The instructions were the hardest part of the study to design, and the part nobody would read. Eight times a day, at random moments between eight in the morning and ten at night, the phone would chime. The participant would answer four questions. What were you doing just now? Who were you with? How happy did you feel, from zero to ten? How tired? Then they could put the phone down and go back to their lives, which were the thing we were trying to measure and the thing the measurement must not disturb.
The study was paid for by the Household Dividend Office, which wanted to know whether the Dividend worked. I had asked, at the first meeting, what worked would mean, and a man called Gareth Lowe had looked at me with the patience of someone who has already been asked that by better-funded people. "Are they all right," he said. "That's all. Are they all right."
I should say where I stood. I was the principal investigator and the corresponding author, which meant that my name would go first on anything we published and that I would answer for it. The analysis itself, the cleaning, the models, the figures, would be done by an agent the university licensed for the purpose, as nearly all analysis was by then. It was faster than I was and it made fewer mistakes. It did not make the kind of mistake I make, which is to like a result before I have checked it. But the journals required a natural person whose name could be retracted, and the university required a natural person whose employment could be ended, and so there was me.
On the train to the first meeting I had been reading Suetonius, for no reason except that someone had left him on the seat. Caesar, he says, made the count of the people "neither in the usual manner nor place, but from street to street aided by the owners of blocks of houses," and reduced the number of those receiving grain at public expense from three hundred and twenty thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand. I underlined the owners of blocks of houses and did not know why until later.
Participant 0419 was Joanne Mallory, forty-four, of Belgrave in Leicester. In the intake survey she had listed her former occupation as motor claims handler, eighteen years, the last nine at the same insurer, and her present occupation as Answerable Person (Soar Valley Freight Ltd). She received the full Dividend, eleven hundred and forty pounds a month, paid on the first. Her rent was seven hundred and eighty. She lived with her son, Callum, nineteen. Asked to rate her satisfaction with her life as a whole at the time of her last salaried job, she had written 8. Asked to rate it now, she had written 4, and then, beside it, in the margin we had not provided, maybe 5.
I chose her file to describe here because it is ordinary. That is the first thing I would ask a reader to hold on to. A single case is not evidence; it is an illustration, and the danger of an illustration is that it is more persuasive than the sixty cases behind it. I will give you the illustration. I will try to tell you afterwards what the sixty said.
Monday, 08:41. Activity: making tea, reading the post. With: alone. Happy: 6. Tired: 4.
Monday, 11:03. Activity: countersigning. With: nobody (the Dispatcher). Happy: 5. Tired: 3. Note: 37 so far today.
The Answerable Person's work, under Section 9 of the Act, is to be the natural person who has approved a decision. Soar Valley Freight ran forty-one lorries, two warehouses and a fleet of loaders, and employed, in the old sense, nobody. Its decisions were made by a dispatching agent which the company called the Dispatcher, as if it were a man in a cabin with a radio. Any decision above a threshold of consequence, a route through a school zone, a load above a weight, a refusal of a claim, had to be countersigned by a human being who could, if it went wrong, be fined, or suspended, or in principle sent to prison. The phone showed Joanne a summary of each decision in two lines and a green button and a red one. She was paid nineteen pounds an hour for being available, and the hours were long, because the lorries did not sleep.
In the debrief I asked her how she decided which button to press.
"I press the green one."
"Always?"
"I pressed the red one once. In the first month. It was a route past the leisure centre and I thought, there's kids there on a Saturday." She was quiet for a moment. "It sent me a reply. Four paragraphs. Traffic counts, the timing of the swimming lessons, the braking distances. It was very polite. I read it twice and I didn't understand half of it, and I pressed green."
Monday, 15:27. Activity: shopping. With: Callum. Happy: 7. Tired: 3. Note: trainers for C, £4.50.
I want to stay with that note, because it is where the economists I had been reading went wrong and where I would have gone wrong with them. For a decade the argument about an income for everyone had been an argument about whether it could be afforded. The answer, it turned out, was that it could. When lorries load themselves and the machines that make shoes are made by machines, the cost of a pair of shoes approaches the cost of the electricity and the leather, and the Dividend Office funded itself with a levy on electricity drawn for computation. I had heard Gareth Lowe say, at a conference, that they could pay it till the sun went out. He was not boasting. He was describing the thing that kept him awake, which was that the shoes were four pounds fifty and the rent was seven hundred and eighty, and that every time the Dividend went up the rents in Belgrave went up behind it, a few weeks later, like a man following a cart. The machines could make nearly anything. They could not make more of Leicester.
Monday, 19:52. Activity: watching the match. With: Callum, neighbours. Happy: 8. Tired: 5.
I had expected the evenings to be bad. I had a picture in my head, assembled from twenty years of articles about unemployment, of people alone in rooms with the television on, and the picture was so vivid that I had to stop myself from seeing it in the data before the data had arrived. The evenings were not bad. The evenings were, on the measure we were taking, the best part of the day.
Leicester City played on Monday and Thursday nights that spring, as every club did, because the league had expanded to fill the hours that people now had. Tickets cost a pound. The players were human; this was the whole point. There was a robotic league in Korea, and it was technically superb, and almost nobody watched it, for the same reason that nobody would pay to watch a forklift lift more than a weightlifter. The stadium on Filbert Way was full twice a week. Joanne and Callum went with the couple from the flat below, and her ratings on match nights were sevens and eights, with one nine, in the sixtieth minute of a Thursday, which she annotated the Rawlings boy!! and which I have never had explained to me.
If the Dividend Office had asked me only what Gareth Lowe had asked me, are they all right, and if all right meant how people felt while they were living their days, then I could have answered him on the Wednesday of the first week, and the answer would have been yes. Across the sixty, the moments sampled from Dividend households were, on average, slightly happier than the moments sampled from our comparison group of people still in salaried work. The difference was not large, about half a point on the ten-point scale, but it was steady. The working group spent more of their sampled moments commuting, and in meetings, and with their managers, and these are some of the least pleasant hours in a modern life. The Dividend group spent more of theirs with friends, and eating, and watching football. The agent produced the figure on the Wednesday afternoon and it was a clean figure, two lines that did not cross.
I distrusted it immediately, and I was right to, though not for the reason I thought.
Tuesday, 10:15. Activity: countersigning. Happy: 5. Tired: 4.
Tuesday, 13:38. Activity: lunch. With: sister (phone). Happy: 6. Tired: 4.
Tuesday, 17:02. Activity: nothing. With: alone. Happy: 5. Tired: 6. Note: Callum at the recruiting office again.
Wednesday, 09:30. Activity: countersigning. Happy: 5. Tired: 3. Note: 61 since midnight. It doesn't need me at night but the law says.
Wednesday, 21:14. Activity: bath. Happy: 7. Tired: 7.
There is a great deal of this in the record. Fives and sixes. Countersigning, tea, the post, a sister on the phone. If you average it, you get a life that is mildly pleasant and mildly tiring, which is what most lives are, measured moment by moment. Nothing in it would tell you that this was the life of a woman who had rated her satisfaction at 4, or maybe 5, down from 8.
The two numbers are produced by two different questions, and in a sense by two different people. One is the self that lives the moments as they come, that feels the bath and the sixtieth-minute goal and the dull thirty-seventh tap of a green button. The other is the self that keeps the account and looks back over it and decides what kind of life it has been. They do not consult each other as much as one would expect. The second is not interested in averages. It is interested in a few moments that stand out, and in how things ended, and above all in the story, whether the life is going somewhere, and whose it is.
There is an old finding from a German household panel, more than twenty-four thousand people followed over fifteen years: people who lost their jobs reacted strongly, and on average they did not fully recover their former satisfaction even after they were working again. I had cited it in the grant proposal. I had cited it in a way that made it sound like a warning about money. Reading Joanne's file I began to suspect that it had never been about money.
Thursday, 08:02. Activity: getting dressed (smart). Happy: 3. Tired: 5. Note: hearing at 2.
In January, one of the Soar Valley lorries, turning left out of the depot on Thurmaston Lane, had clipped a cyclist who had come up on the inside. He was a man in his sixties. He broke his wrist. The lorry had done what the regulations said a lorry should do, more or less; the Dispatcher's logs showed that it had chosen the route and the turning time and that the choice had been countersigned at 06:12 by Joanne Mallory, Answerable Person, who had been asleep at 06:11 and was asleep again by 06:14.
The Transport Accountability Tribunal sat in a room above a bank on Granby Street. I was not there; this is from her account and from the written decision, which is public.
Thursday, 14:20. Activity: at the tribunal. With: three panel, man from the company, the cyclist's daughter. Happy: 2. Tired: 8. Note: They asked why I approved it. I said I don't know. The woman wrote that down.
The panel found that the route was reasonable, that the cyclist had been partly at fault, and that the Answerable Person had not exercised meaningful review. Section 9, they observed, did not require her to understand the decision; it required her to be the person of whom it could be asked. She had been. She was fined six hundred pounds, which Soar Valley's insurer paid, as her contract said it would, and three points were placed on her accountability licence.
Thursday, 16:45. Activity: bus home. With: alone. Happy: 3. Tired: 8.
Thursday, 19:58. Activity: watching the match. With: Callum, neighbours. Happy: 6. Tired: 7.
On the day's average the Thursday was her worst day of the week. It pulled her weekly mean down by most of a point. In the comparison the agent drew, it was an outlier, and the agent flagged it as one, correctly.
Friday, 11:20. Activity: reading letter. With: Callum. Happy: 4. Tired: 4. Note: He's in.
The army had been one of the first employers to announce that it would not reduce its human intake. The Act that created Answerable Persons had a cousin, older, that required a human being to authorise the use of lethal force, and the services had found that they needed a great many such human beings, trained, rested, and ready to be asked. The pay was good. The pension was better. The recruiting office on Charles Street was the busiest building in the city centre that spring, busier than the Dividend Office two doors down, and the young men and women who came out of it with letters walked differently from the ones who went in.
Friday, 11:52. Activity: same. With: Callum. Happy: 8. Tired: 4. Note: changed my mind, he's so pleased.
I noticed, when I read this pair, that she had been asked the same question twice in half an hour and had given two answers four points apart, and that both were true. Nothing had happened in the thirty-two minutes except that she had looked at her son's face.
Saturday, Sunday: sixes and sevens. A walk by the canal. A roast. The countersigning went on, forty or fifty a day, through the weekend.
At the end of the sampling week each participant came in for an interview. We asked them the questions the phone could not ask. Looking back over the whole week, how was it? What stands out? If you could live one day of it again, which?
I conducted Joanne's myself. The room had a window onto the car park and a box of tissues that the ethics committee had made us put on the table, which I always moved to the side, because a box of tissues placed between two people is a prediction.
"The week overall," I said. "Zero to ten."
"Five," she said. "Bit better than usual."
"Better because of anything in particular?"
"Callum." She thought. "And the Thursday."
I have done many of these interviews, and I have trained myself not to show surprise, which means that I show it in some other way I do not know about. She saw it.
"I know," she said. "I put a two. I was sat in that room and the cyclist's daughter was looking at me and I wanted to be sick." She turned her bag round on her lap so that the strap faced the other way. "But they asked me. Do you see? Three of them sat there and asked me why I'd done it. Nobody's asked me why I've done anything since the insurance. You don't get asked why you pressed green. You don't get asked why you watched the football."
"And what did you tell them?"
"I told them I didn't know. Which was the truth. And she wrote it down." She looked at the tissues and then at me. "It was the worst bit of the week and it's the only bit I'll remember. Is that mad?"
It is not mad. It is one of the best-replicated facts about how people keep score. The remembering self takes the sharpest moment and the last moment and lets the rest go, and it asks of those moments, did they matter, were they mine. On Thursday something had been done in her name and she had been held to it. On every other day of the week things had been done in her name and nobody had noticed. The second is pleasanter. The first is a life.
"Can I change it?" she said. "The two."
"No," I said. "That's the one rule. Nothing you said at the time can be changed afterwards."
"Why?"
"Because then we'd only have one of you."
She laughed, which I had not intended, and wrote her life satisfaction on the form. It was 4. She hesitated over the margin and did not write anything in it this time.
The sixty said what Joanne said, with the variance that sixty people have. The experienced well-being of Dividend households was, moment by moment, a little better than that of salaried households. Their evaluated well-being, their answer to the question of how their life was going, was markedly worse, and it was worst among those who, like Joanne, still did a form of work that consisted of being answerable for things they could not judge. It was best, among the Dividend group, in households where someone had been accepted into the forces, or into the courts, or into one of the other small number of places where the law still required that a person, and not merely a person's signature, make the decision.
I wrote the report in April. The agent drafted it, and the draft was good, and it led with the first finding, because the first finding was cleaner and larger in sample and answered the question that had been asked. Are they all right. Yes: in the hours of the day, they are all right. I rewrote the first page so that the two findings stood side by side, and I added a paragraph explaining that the Office would have to decide which self it was paying for, and that the money could not decide it for them, because the money was the easy part. Gareth Lowe rang me after he had read it.
"You've made it harder," he said.
"I've made it the same," I said. "It was always this hard. The first figure only looks simple."
"The Minister wants one number."
"Then she'll have to choose which of them to listen to," I said, "and she should know she's choosing."
He did not answer that. I heard him turn a page.
"The landlords," he said, after a while. "You've got a line in here about rents."
"Only a line."
"We use them for address verification," he said. "Did you know? Every Dividend claim, we check the address against the landlord's register. Street by street." He seemed to find this funny, in a tired way. "Saves us a fortune."
The university's publication system requires, before anything leaves the building, a declaration from the corresponding author. It is a single screen. It lists the work, the agents used in its preparation, the data, the funders, and then it asks the author to confirm that she has reviewed the findings and accepts responsibility for them as the natural person answerable for the publication. There is a green button and a red one.
I had reviewed the findings. I had checked the agent's models against my own, slowly, over two weekends, and I had found nothing wrong, which is what one usually finds and is not the same as there being nothing wrong. I knew how the work had been done. I did not, if I am honest, know it in the way the agent knew it. I knew it in the way one knows a route past a leisure centre, from a summary, with traffic counts.
I had enrolled myself in the pilot of the study, as participant 0001, to test the sampling software, and I had never taken myself out. The phone on the desk beside me chimed. What were you doing just now?
I looked at the screen with the two buttons for some time before I answered it.
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THE END
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Kahnemaniānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Kahnemanian Cognition, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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