Absolutely
fantastic article via instapundit.
Really long, and all of it worth it.. but here are some of what I fund to be key quotes:
Envy, after all, is a deadly sin to many. Aquinas said, "Envy according to the aspect of its object is contrary to charity, whence the soul derives its spiritual life... Charity rejoices in our neighbor's good, while envy grieves over it." That should have given ole Mencken a couple of cosmic points, at least.
There are three primary egalitarian emotions—envy, guilt, and indignation. I call these the “Stone Age Trinity.” These three are connected as facets of the same socio-biological function. To get a better sense of this connection, let’s break them1 down as follows:
• If in comparing myself to you I find you have more, I may feel envy.
• If in comparing myself to you I find you have less, I may feel guilt.
• If in comparing someone to you I find you have more, I may feel indignation.
For Paleolithic Man, this was not just some errant feeling. It provided the basis for survival logic in a mostly zero-sum world. That logic worked for a time and place in which survival depended on sharing and close cooperation.
In most situations there were diminishing returns for hoarding resources. For example, the benefit of going from no fruit to one fruit was bigger than the benefit of going from 100 fruits to 101 fruits. So those more in need would value any hoarded resources more highly than the hoarder. If you (the needy person) could inflict harm through violence, in some circumstances, it would pay for you to try to take the resource from the hoarder (especially if the alternative was starvation). Strangely, it often made sense for the hoarder to tolerate it. After all, the cost of violence is usually greater than the benefit of keeping the extra fruit. In the academic literature, this is referred to as “tolerated theft” and describes a lot of food transfers among diverse animal species, including our forebears. (Could this help explain some of the attitudes towards higher taxation by wealthy elites?)
Evolutionary psychologists have a cynical term for cooperative, procommunity behaviors like buying a Prius or shopping at Whole Foods or carrying a public-radio tote bag: competitive altruism. Cynical, but accurate. As several studies (like this one) have shown, altruistic people achieve higher status, and are much more likely to behave altruistically in situations where their actions are public than when they will go unnoticed. Competitive altruism explains why soldiers jump onto grenades during war (their clans will reap the rewards) and why vain CEOs build hospital wings (they enjoy the social renown that they could never acquire from closing another big deal). In many hunter-gatherer societies, including some Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest, prominent families have staged elaborate ceremonies in which they compete to give away possessions. This reminds me of Warren Buffett’s rather public displays of philanthropy (not to mention sanctimony about higher taxes).
But things got really interesting when Bart Wilson put a meritocratic spin on these classic Ultimatum Games. “If you just bring people in and randomly assign them to be the Proposers and the Responders, the modal offer is about half the pot—$5.00. But if you first bring in people and give them a quiz—and the people who score best on the quiz get to be the Proposers—the offers are much lower and they’re accepted. The rejection rates don’t go up. All of a sudden what’s “fair” now is different. The modal offer is shifted down. ‘Fairness’ is still involved, but it’s not about equity anymore.” It’s about fair play.In this situation, Responders were far likelier to accept lower offers than in the first version because of some concept of desert. Knowledge that a Proposer came to be such due to his or her performance usually muted the Responder’s sense of being entitled to an equal portion. Wilson found the Responders seem to respect the outcome a lot more than in cases where the money is not associated with the participants’ relative performance. I cannot say whether this more meritocratic response is mostly inborn or learned. But the idea of rewarding good performance in the clan group does have its own logic. It would mean communal living with performance bonuses. And that means inequality. “Fairness means a lot more than equity,” finds Bart Wilson, “It’s also about the rules of the game.”
This is the first time I ever heard of such a study. Liberals like to use the ulitmatum game described to "prove" their concept of fairness. Reich used it in his classroom ( as I have mentioned here before) and I have always argued that he should take money out of a students wallet, rather than his own- thereby making the money not a windfall gain, but theft.
Sharing among members of communal groups is known in the academic literature as “reciprocal altruism.” Interestingly, the very idea of reciprocal altruism has some built in Adam-Smith-like aspects. More to the point: altruism is one thing. Reciprocity is quite another. You might be willing to make a sacrifice now, but only if others in the group are willing to make them later. That is why we might prefer the term “delayed trade” or “slow trade.” The system only works if most of the folks are willing to return favors and contribute their part.
Liberals don't have this ethic. They don't believe it is wrong to be dependant upon others, or to leech from them forever. They call for civility, but then act incivilly -- oh , I didn't mean me. They are unwilling to be bound by the rules they impose on others, and think its funny when gullible chumps like us abide by them and keep paying our taxes.
I realize this may not sit well with those who have apotheosized the Stone Age Trinity. But as Steven Pinker points out in The Blank Slate, “the real alternative to romantic collectivism is not “right-wing libertarianism” but a recognition that social generosity comes from a complex suite of thoughts and emotions rooted in the logic of reciprocity.”
I think this is a real insight. Full bore Ayn Rand Libertarians really see no need for charity, and no duty to help the less fortunate ( unless you recognize that doing so will make YOU feel good) I do believe there is such a duty - but it is to be excercised as Christ suggested - with your own money, according to your own conscience and in private. If you think you can use that same $20 to start a business that will employ a poor person for 20 years, you should have the right to withhold that money rather than forced to give it to him now, and be obligated to do so continously in the future.
Before turning to other matters, we should point out a complication. The Stone Age Trinity doesn’t show up in every caveman with the same intensity. It shows up by degrees from one caveman to the next. So in whatever population we’re talking about, we are likely to find a mixture of dispositions, just as we find a mixture of abilities, aptitudes, looks, and other characteristics. And such a mixture creates its own dynamic. “One exception to the rule that selection reduces variability arises when the best strategy depends on what other organisms are doing,” notes Pinker. “The child’s game of scissors-rock-paper is one analogy, and another may be found in the decision of which route to take to work.” In evolution, “frequency-dependent selection can produce temporary or permanent mixtures of strategies.” Over time, whether the strategy is unitary or a mixed set, a period of stability eventually follows. It’s no wonder then that we find a mixture of dispositions today, which could go very far indeed towards explaining differences in political orientation, party affiliations, and other moralistic tribes.
The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. “Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people,” Bill Gross, one of the leaders of a Hutterite colony outside Spokane told me. “When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another.” The Hutterites, obviously, didn’t get this idea from contemporary evolutionary psychology. They’ve been following the 150 rule for centuries. … At 150, the Hutterites believe something happens—something indefinable but very real—that somehow changes the nature of community overnight.
I know of entire businesses based around this rule. I suspect much of it has to do with Sowell's cost of knowledge. At 150, the cost of knowledge about the people in your group goes up, and you can't communicate or interact as effectively because you must now spend time locating the person with the right skills, personality etc to get your job done and then spend further time negotiating the cost of his labor, because reciprocisty is now longer guaranteed. You might never work with that person again, and he might never need something of you.
Stroup and Baden’s work reveals something pretty important: communism works—but only if the commune is small. As a commune grows, free-rider problems infect the labor pool. The commune becomes a “paradise for parasites.”3 These inefficiencies cause breakdown in the colony. Among peoples for whom failure means famine, ensuring the colony doesn’t get too big literally becomes a rule to live by. After all, slow-trade yields pretty slim margins of benefit. As the group grows, these margins get slimmer. The group has to change or die.
arrived and the colony grew, Bradford opted for a change in the rules (the institution of private property) over dividing the colony. When it comes to group dynamics, then, the Hutterite and Pilgrim experiences show that success (growth) can only be managed by changes to the internal rules of organization. In order to get from small colonies to large-scale civilization, you have to adopt new institutions. Much of history is a story about changes in the rules. And these rule changes can sometimes insult our more clannish instincts. As with other Stone Age kernels like sex and violence, having civilization means we sometimes have to check our emotions. Attitudes about property, hoarding, and exchange come to mind. People will start to engage in more direct trade, and they’ll start to specialize more.4 Add currency and a system of prices to the mix and things really start to take off. In the language of complexity, we undergo a series of “phase transitions.” But contrary to the forces of the Stone Age Trinity, when those transitions happen, inequality is a foregone conclusion
What can we conclude from this handful of insights about the Stone Age Trinity? First, the rules, mores, and dispositions ideal for living in civilizations could be very different from the rules, mores, and dispositions for surviving in Paleolithic clans.Second, if our ancestors spent 99 percent of their species history out on the African steppe or foraging near caves, they did not spend very much time in large-scale civilizations or even small city-states. That means our species has not had time to evolve all the dispositions that might have made us better suited to civilization.And finally, acknowledging our Paleolithic brains may help us take a more detached view of the Stone Age Trinity. We can start to look at wealth disparities not so much through the lens of guilt, envy, or indignation, but through the lens of function, form, and fair play. When we do, ethical systems designed to redirect some of our baser instincts will emerge. We may even do well to listen to curmudgeons like H.L. Mencken, who claimed that “the fact that John D. Rockefeller had more money than I have is as uninteresting to me as the fact that he believed in total immersion and wore detachable cuffs.” Entertaining counterintuitive ideas such as those offered by bourgeois economists couldn’t hurt, either.
Any human emotion can become destructive by degree. Economist Young Back Choi thinks that envy is particularly destructive because it “is man's desire to eliminate others' relative gains even if he would become absolutely worse off in the process.” We see this in the original Ultimatum game. And we see it in the brutal consequences of Stalin and Mao. "Because a certain degree of selfless behavior is essential to the smooth performance of any human group,” writes Natalie Angier in The New York Times, “selflessness run amok can crop up in political contexts. It fosters the exhilarating sensation of righteous indignation, the belief in the purity of your team and your cause and the perfidiousness of all competing teams and causes." Understood this way, envy, despite its evolutionary rationale, does not seem very sane. Perhaps we should hope that any given person is likely to be a little better off over time, even if some are a lot better off (even if this goes against the emotional grain). Alas, a positive-sum orientation is neither a feature of the egalitarian ethos, nor any politics of envy. And this is just one aspect of the trouble with the Stone Age Trinity as it gets institutionalized. “Envy is appeased only at equality, regardless of the absolute level of consumption,” adds Choi. “’Only those societies that have been able to develop sufficient means to mitigate the destructive forces of envy have been able to build civilizations and prosper. Anthropologists have documented that two of the most distinguishing features of poor societies are the relative free expression of envy and the universal fear of envy on the part of those who come to have above-average gains.”
This one really hits home with me. I just got back form a Sales conference where I am forced to interact with my Liberal co-workers for 4 days. One co-worker and I got into a discussionon Fairness of dividing a dinner bill - I said fair is either dividing it equally ( in a "tolerated theft" using the newly discovered term above) because its too much trouble to divide the bill based on CONSUMPTION. This is the essence of Rand's "An honest man is one who knows he cannot consume more than he produces" This liberal of course rejected that defintion and said "fairness' is making somone pay based on on consumption but based on production, as in all Rich should pay based on a percentage of their income . I asked him why we didn't do that with the drinks we were having. Of course, he just got angry at that point ( because he earns more than me) Another interesting thing he said was that if the "rich" didn't like paying more.. a lot more, of the total bill, then they should leave the United States - and reitereated Obama's "at some point you have earned enough" (this was after I got him angry). I told him not to worry, and that they will, and take his job and American propserity with them. After all, why make more money when you already have "earned enough" to live in luxury for the rest of your life on a island somewhere? Who cares about the people you employ?
