The Giving Tree Problem

Pols1150 taught me a lot about society. It confirmed for me that there is a standard of social justice that societies should uphold. It also taught me that societies should not trash property rights on the path to social justice, as economic freedoms are as important to a prosperous society as civil and social freedoms.

A good start.

But what about me? What do I do?

Jason Brennan endeavored to address these questions in his lectures on Peter Singer and sweatshop exploitation. The answers, predictably, were ambivalent:

• You should give to charity (if you can), but don't let the market die, because it is good.
• You should oppose poor working conditions in the third world, but watch out that, in doing so, you don't nip impoverished peoples' chance at prosperity in the bud

Qualified, "it depends" answers like these are unsatisfying. It is not that I can't deal with ambiguity. It's just that, between the time the sun comes up and goes down, I will have done X, Y, and Z, and I want XYZ to be moral actions. My economic prosperity means nothing to me if morally corrupt.

It comes down to what I call the Giving Tree problem.

Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree (recorded read-a-loud embedded above) can be interpreted in any of a thousand different ways. The basic story is this: a tree loves a boy, and a boy loves a tree. The boy derives great satisfaction from playing with/on the tree. When the boy grows up, he asks the tree for money, and the tree gives him its apples to sell. As an older adult, the tree generously gives the man his branches to build a house. Finally, as an older man, the tree gives its trunk to the man when he requests a boat in which to sail away. Finally, the man sits on the stump of the tree, and the tree is happy ("but not really"). A bittersweet ending.

From the looks of it, the tree and boy's relationship is a positive-sum interaction. The boy gets the materials it needs, while the tree derives satisfaction from helping the boy it so loves. It's that one line -- "And the tree was happy, but not really" -- that gives the story away. As much as the tree loves the boy, the relationship does not live up to a standard of mutualism. Instead, it is parasitic. The boy leeches on the tree, and the tree, though reluctant to admit it, is sapped of happiness (PUN INTENDED). Strangely enough, the parasitic actor doesn't turn out happy, either. When asking the tree for a boat, the man says, "I am too old and too sad to play. I need a boat to take me far away from here."

This comprises the Giving Tree problem. Thinkers like Peter Singer encourage individuals to be trees, giving of themselves indefinitely, at least within their means. Singer would never expect the tree to do away with its trunk, but he would probably approve of the tree giving away a good number of its branches.

Alternatively, thinkers like Ayn Rand would scoff at the idea of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. Ayn Rand would probably side with the boy, who seems to have an enterprising spirit and who productively milks the tree for all it is worth. Nonetheless, Rand would probably scold the boy for asking the tree to sacrifice for make sacrifices for him. As we know, she has a low tolerance for "moochers." She would applaud him for playing the market well, though.

In practice -- that is, in the book -- neither of these strategies work out. The boy and tree are coiled together in a rope gone slack. Neither prospers. Clearly, if this is the case, neither an exaggerated version of Singer's philosophy nor an embellished Randian ideology is moral.

So what is the lesson from this story?

I think it is this: do not be a parasite, and do not be a parasite's host. There is a medium somewhere between Rand's and Singer's philosophies that places a premium on RESPECT. This middle ground advises that I adhere to both positive and negative versions of the Golden Rule (i.e. both "do to others what you would like to be done to you" and "do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you"). If I treat others as moral equals, it seems I should be OK (morally speaking).

Jason Brennan has said a few times that he lacks egalitarian intuitions. I agree with him in that I lack normative egalitarian beliefs. I do, however, have the empirical egalitarian belief that all humans -- myself included -- deserve the same, basic allotment of respect.

I don't know how this political science course will/has affect/ed the way I conduct myself. I think, however, that any net influence it has had or will have on my present and future prosperity, moral and material, is positive.

The End of the Journey

One of the original purposes of this blog was to find areas of understanding and overlap between the study of biology and the study of human actions and society. One of my big ideas was to draw parallels between the ways different societies are run and the way groups form in nature. Concentrating on the evolution of multicellular bodies, I began looking at intra-organismal policing mechanisms and different ways of ensuring harmony within the body. I then sought to use this as a lens with which to view our own society, asking myself where I saw similar themes- what was different and what was decidedly the same.

Along the way there were roadblocks and frustrations. Despite seeing a veritable glut of similarities and links between these two fields, the potential for abuse was too great. As I noted in my post about the faux pas of social science, biology is all too often applied superficially to explain things we see in society. The most egregious mistakes were often cases of using biology to back a political agenda, citing some trivial fact and claiming biology as proof of an entirely unrelated concept (eg see David Brooks' article). Yet, the misuse of biology to describe society manifested itself in subtler forms as well.

Stimulated by my work in multicellularity, I soon began looking at the evolutionary concept of levels of selection, seeking to understand the conflicts which can occur between individuals and wholes in the formation of a group. In biology, levels-of-selection ways of thinking are crucial to dispelling myths about group selection and understanding the conflicts and policing mechanisms which occur in evolutionary transitions, like the advent of multicellularity. In the spirit of my original goals, I soon tried to apply such thinking to human society, but in doing so ignored a very important, fundamental difference. While nested groupings in nature, such as the organization of genes into chromosomes, chromosomes into nuclei, and cells into bodies, are all necessarily products of evolution, the human societies which we see today are not. Evolution undoubtedly played a role in crafting the societies which have emerged, played out through the evolution of our very brains and the emotions like empathy and morality it produces. Yet, it is not reasonable to look at different types of societies, whether they be conceptions of social justice or systems of free market democracy, and to look at how evolution has shaped them. For this, we have the study of memetics, which I believe will boom in coming years as neuroscience advances and we begin to understand the proximate mechanisms of memory and learning.

Cells do not simply decide to organize themselves into bodies. A wide range of literature in the past fifteen years has begun to address this issue, and there are several main problems to be overcome in the construction of a multicellular body. Not all cells in a body will pass their genes to the next generation. Think of your arm cells for example. What makes them satisfied with your gonads getting exclusive access to the next generation? In the case of animals, this problem has been solved largely through reduction of intra-organismal variation- your arm is okay with your gonads doing all of the long-term reproducing because the genes in your arm and your gonads are ideally identical. In other taxonomic groups besides animals (yes, many other groups exist, like slime molds, chromalveolates and fungi to superficially name a few) this problem has been remedied in very different ways. For example, slime molds are made up of many multicellular individuals aggregating into slithering sluglike forms (they actually do look like slugs, it's very cool). If two of these slugs cross paths, they can mix and reform, with the two emerging slugs having possibly traded segments, or else even have 'stolen' parts from one another. These slime molds really challenge our notions of what it means to be an individual, and the policing mechanisms which have arisen in these slugs differ greatly from those found in our own bodies.

But to return to human societies, people can simply decide to form social groups, there is no conclusive evidence to date that free market democracy is a direct result of evolutionary transitions involving natural selection. As such, these societies do not necessarily operate on the same principles as biological groupings and are not always subject to the same constraints. So how is it anything but glaringly superficial to equate human society with cell society? The parallels between our communities and those found in other parts of nature are truly great, but we must be diligent not to make comparisons where there truly are none, and not to get carried away in our thought experiments.

If anything, maybe it will be useful to recognize precisely this point, that human society does not necessarily need to adhere to the rules of biology. Animal populations which exceed their carrying capacity will crash, and for every animal over this capacity the population will crash by roughly twice this number. However, people (I hope) don't need natural selection to keep our populations in check. We don't need to wait until human populations naturally stabilize (as suggested recently by Mark Koyama) in order to realize that we face an impending problem. Culture gives us the ability to cut off these problems before nature makes us learn the hard way.

Economic growth has undoubtedly led to prosperity, allowing the poor to access a growing array of commodities and raising the living standard so that the lower economic classes of society can live far better lives than Charlemagne ever aspired to. But are there natural limits to this growth, and if not, is there reason to impose them? If there do in the end exist meaningful ways of finding overlap between science and the study of economy and society, then perhaps this is a direction worth venturing towards. If not, then at least the semester-long search for such consilience has been eye opening for one young scholar at Brown University.

The (Potentially) Calamitous Case of the Crickets of Kauai

Field crickets in Kauai are facing a bit of a crisis. Flesh-eating maggots (Ormia ochracea) have invaded the Hawaiian island, and they have begun devouring the crickets -- from inside out. The maggots are only able to locate and parasitize those male crickets that sing to attract females. They cannot find silent crickets.

Imagine you are a male cricket. You are obviously very concerned about your own fate and the fate of your (future or present) offspring. (You are a cricket, mind you, so you probably aren't tremendously concerned about the fate of Uncle Jiminy or his offspring). What do you do? If you keep rubbing your wings together and calling attention to yourself, you'll end up infested and childless! On the other hand, if you stay quiet, you won't become infected, but you greatly diminish your chances of finding a mate. What decision do you make?

You don't decide! (You're a cricket, remember?) Instead, over many generations, the differential survival and reproduction of you and your conspecifics yield an optimal mating strategy. In this case, natural selection has started to weed out singers in favor of mutes. Male crickets with noiseless, female-style wings have become more abundant in the island population.

So now it comes down to a race. If the noiseless crickets can successfully elude the parasites, the parasitic species will go extinct, and the crickets will be left to prosper. On the other hand, the mute crickets may not be able to procreate, and they might go extinct before the population of parasites has kicked the bucket.

The end of this story has not yet been told. For us, the result is not terribly consequential. The lessons embedded within this story are the true take-aways for us humans.

In previous posts, Norian has pointed out that overpopulation is a human dilemma similar to that faced by the crickets (and, for that matter, by the parasites). I think Norian's premise is pretty solid: in a world of finite resources, the current rates of population growth and food/good consumption are simply unsustainable over the long haul. Some might debate what "the long haul" actually means, but the idea of a limit to human prosperity on Earth is ultimately unshakeable.

So, like the crickets, the current course of action -- the status quo -- is a path to the grave. The human alternative -- global fertility police enforcement -- is like the male crickets' alternative -- mute wings -- in that the benefits come at some cost, namely, reduced procreation.

But there are some fundamental differences between the case of Kauai and the case of people. (I have hinted at some of these above in bolded print.)

1. Humans tend to care for other people. Sure, we're not as altruistic-acting as termites, but Americans, for instance, really don't want to see Africans die, and they often spend a great deal of money trying to make sure that doesn't happen. They aren't callous to the suffering of others.
2. For the above reason, we don't want the struggle for existence that would select for certain traits that would help us fix our problems. Struggle for existence = poverty, starvation, disease, and death. Not good. Let's not go there.
3. Unlike field crickets, humans can make decisions, even at the level of nations (though with decreasing effectiveness as we scale up the size of the decision-making bodies). Humans don't have to wait for natural selection to produce favorable results for the species. They can use cognition and communication to cooperate to achieve their ends.

Humans have foresight, empathy, and agency that field crickets do not. Humans can act to steer clear of catastrophes (like maggots) under favorable circumstances.

The current condition of the species is not ideal for cooperation to curb overpopulation. As Norian observed, an outright global population police is probably not a viable option due to a conflict of interest between baby-loving individuals and the baby-loathing groups of which they are a part. In spite of human "altruism," people prioritize themselves and their kids over all else, just like the crickets. So what should be the course of action? How can we harness self-interest for common benefit?

I'm a fan of the "nudging" idea, a concept from the field of behavioral economics. An example of nudging is allowing people to smoke at any age, but requiring them to go through lots of paperwork to get approval. Nudges discourage rather than prohibit less-than-optimal behaviors. In the case of overpopulation, governments might find success in subsidizing abortions and contraceptives while taxing people for having more than X # of children. These initiatives would be easier to implement and enforce than any anti-birth global task force. Also, nudging laws would hopefully allow people to maintain more of their freedom than authoritarian, hegemonic population control.

One final point:

As Norian emphasized, a number of people say that the population will equilibrate on its own. This is a true statement. Norian is right to question whether equilibrium population will be one favorable to human life. Twelve billion people? Really? Is that good for everyone?

I want to propose an alternative equilibrium: 0. No people left. That's equilibrium, too, and about 90% of the species that have ever lived are extinct. Now's not the time for hubris. We don't want this to happen to us. We shouldn't rest on the laurels of equilibrium as an excuse not to think about serious, life-threatening phenomena. The only way to ensure our future prosperity is to look at ourselves in the context history and the context of our earthly and cosmological environments.

Competing Cultures- the Limits of Population Limitation

As you may have gathered from earlier posts, I have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of increasing world populations. The problem is clear to me, but the solutions, as always, are harder to grasp. One idea I had was of counties self policing to decrease their birth rates and keep populations in check. In a recent discussion of population growth rates, it was pointed out to me that world populations will naturally decrease as we reach our carrying capacity, and Italy was cited as an example. Italy does indeed have a very low birth rate, and as an Italian citizen I can assure you this is not due to mass starvation and lack of resources. Is Italy being somehow altruistic (I think not, but it's useful as a thought experiment). Either way, is self-policing by individual countries a sustainable way to keep populations in check.

Unfortunately, I think not. When delve a bit deeper into the matter, it is easy to see why Italy's decreasing population is in fact a grave problem. Although Italy's birth rate is in facts still positive, the percentage of births to Italian households as opposed to immigrants is exceedingly low. Unlike in the earlier part of the 20th century, when Italy was seen as an emigrating country, the last twenty years have been a time of mass immigration to Italy from western European countries such as Romania, Albania, Ukrain, Poland, etc., as well as a heavy influx of Africans and Asians as well.

So what happens if a country were to hypothetically decide to curb its population? It would likely be overrun in a similar way to what is happening in Italy, although due to different causes. Limiting populations as a result of intra-national policing is not a stable strategy, because it is vulnerable to exploitation from outside countries.

It is my view that history can be viewed as a series of transitions between levels of selection. Free floating DNA combined to create chromosomes, which eventually banded together to create genomes inside individual cells. The history of life then progressed along many parallel lineages to form multicellular bodies, many of which then aggregated to form communities of organisms. In some such communities, such as with social insects, policing mechanisms and the division of labor have been so extensive as to seemingly create a sort of 'super-organism'. Other societies, such as our own exhibit high degrees of functional specialization, yet we have not completed the sort of transition that would make, say the United States, into its own discrete level of selection. Or have we?

The history of such transition clearly tells us that that intra-group conflicts are almost always mediated by policing mechanisms put in place by the higher level of selection. Thus, as I see it we have two options. The first option would be to institute a global policing system that would limit birth rates for all countries, thereby keeping world populations in check. This would certainly be an effective mechanism, but it comes at a high price, namely many of the freedoms which we so cherish. It is exceedingly unlikely that there exists enough natural selective pressure as to naturally create such a policing mechanism (since to our knowledge there are not other planets with life and we are not in fact competing on a planetary level, so there is no selection), and so such a policing mechanism would be of our own devise. The second option is to continue on our current trajectory. Populations will grow, and most likely, unless we become adept at terraforming and colonize other planets (which would be really cool), populations will eventually crash as resources remain finite in the light of an increasing global human presence.

History tells us that policing mechanisms are a way to avoid disaster. We are at the crossroads- we have the option of deviating from history by policing ourselves in the absence of any selection, of creating a self-sustaining society without the tools of natural selection. But is that the kind of society we want? Sure, we might eventually have overpopulation and mass deaths, but is this worth compromising our current liberty and natural order? To foreshadow a future post by Chris, we may be crickets, but at least we're happy ones.

Justice Principle Meets Population Growth

Populations are increasing. As the world remains finite in size, new technology is steadily allowing us to fit more and more people on every mile of land. The invention of the Haber-Bosch process of creating ammonia to be used as fertilizers is what sustains a full third of the earth's population. The first thing China did after opening its borders to international trade in the early 1980s was to place an order for twelve enormous ammonia producing factories, which now greatly sustain China's growing population.

Nowadays, industrially prepared foods and genetically modified crops are the new technological driver catalyzing population growth. As we reach our ecological carrying capacity on this planet, time and time again technology has served to raise this capacity. But what happens when we're packed into cities as close together as corn is packed in the fields? What happens to quality of life as the population skyrockets? Some people believe that population growth will eventually limit itself because this is what regularly happens in nature. But in nature, this stabilization comes in the wake of massive death rates which characterize the initial population collapse. This is quite a bleak prospect- now that we have the capacity for thought and concerted population limiting, do we really want to rely on the merciless processes of nature to cut us down?

Rawls' justice principle makes sense in a finite society, or even in one which expands slowly. To redistribute a portion of the wealth and provide safety nets can be rationalized if it is raising the standard of living of portions of society. But resources are limited. Imagine attending classes at Brown if there were twice as many students, or even getting a meal in the dining hall. To simply increase the amount of people is in most cases to fundamentally devalue those resources which we hold so dear. When the world population increases, relatively few people are born into such lives of luxury. Statistically, most births occur on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

So what happens if the 'least well off in society' category becomes increasingly populated? Can we still justify such wealth distribution? Is it really in our interest to detract from our current quality of life to make room for more people? Remember: there is a big difference between wanting to limit future population growth and from withholding resources from those alive today. Rawls' justice principle certainly has its merits, but is it fair to implement it in the light of our growing society? Or can limiting population growth provide a vehicle for continuing to uphold this noble ideal?

Social Justice and the American Dream

The American Dream means something different for everyone, but most people's conception of the Dream involves having opportunities. Economic freedom, freedom of speech, the freedom to life, liberty and happiness, call it what you will, liberty in all senses of the word are exceedingly important to the concept of the American Dream.

So what about Social Justice? Do liberal social democracies, with their steeply progressive taxation, health and education standards and social services in some way stymie the true American desire? Certainly free market democracy, in its attempt to use market mechanisms to produce social goods without democratic control, fits well with our conception of freedom and the American Dream; but it's also important to ask exactly whose freedoms are at risk of being restricted by embracing a system of social justice?

Redistributive taxation may come at the expense of the rich, but the social services and social safety nets it allows for are exceedingly important for those stuck in the lower economic rungs of society. Is it really such a bad thing to restrict some of these freedoms of the disgustingly rich in order to provide the bare systems of support needed by the poor?

The real question is: does the American Dream have limits? Should it? There must be a balance between the opportunities of a free market economy and the guarantees provided by liberal social democracies. Isn't it worth mildly restricting the American Dream of few in order to greatly facilitate that of many?

Shellfishness in politics, and reflections on the role of science

Paragraphs like these make me scratch my head:

Democratic leaders this week pledged to move a comprehensive immigration bill through Congress this year, which would include a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. As a political issue, immigration has potential benefits and risks for Democratic candidates. But the focus by party leaders makes clear they see the it as an overall winner (sic).

Less clear is whether Congress will pass any legislation. Republicans may be hesitant to cooperate if immigration proposals are viewed as a pre-election tactic. Without Republican support, the measure cannot pass the Senate.

That's from today's Wall Street Journal.

What happened to cooperation? Even if the immigration legislation stands to help Democrats in November, why wouldn't the Republicans support it if they believe it is quality legislation? Furthermore, why is the "focus by [Democratic] party leaders" on immigration (probably rightly) assumed to convey the selfish interests of power-grabbing politicians? Why can't it just be a good idea that will help people? Whatever happened to being a servant of the state?

Politics has always been (and will continue to be) a dirty game. But is there any way we can rig incentives such that the interests of politicians better align with the interests of their constituents? How can we make politics more productive toward the end of prosperity?

This is a question into which evolutionary psychology might be able to provide some insight. It is a situation in which the normative claim -- politicians should work with their constituents' interests in mind prior to their own -- is fairly obvious, but also one in which the empirical claims -- i.e. politicians generally serve themselves more than others because xxxx, and doing xxxx will effectively move the system toward the normative standard -- are emphatically not obvious. Science can't answer normative questions, but it can answer empirical ones, and, when looking for the means to achieve normative standards, it is just as important to have the empirical answers as it is to have the normative answers.

The more we learn about our evolved (social) psychologies, the better chance we have at "nudging" ourselves and our societies in the right direction.

Reply to Norian's "Evolution of the Rawlsian Ideal"

A week ago, Norian posted on the biologically evolutionary roots of the the cultural idea of social justice. Specifically, he discussed Rawls's conception of social justice, including the difference principle, which states that the most just society is that in which inequalities benefit the least well-off individuals. His write-up works well for even the condition of material adequacy held up (if discreetly) by libertarian thinkers like Rand and Hayek. Norian asks, "Why would anyone but the poorest in society advocate the welfare state?" At the end, he poses, "Is the most just system that which is most evolutionarily advantageous to its members?"

To answer Norian's closing question, we first have to define "evolutionarily advantageous." One definition is: "Facilitates an individual to produce more high-quality offspring than his/her peers."

Thinking about selection on the level of the individual, Norian's question appears a bit silly. By "its members," I assume he is referring to all citizens of a society. By definition, an evolutionarily advantageous society is one that loads the die in favor of some individuals over others. An "evolutionarily advantageous" society of 100 people cannot be advantageous for all 100. Therefore, it seems at first that no society, no matter how just, would be evolutionarily advantageous to all its members.

But Norian is a smart guy. As he hints in the last paragraph, he's probably looking to higher levels of selection (i.e. the group) when making his inquiry. Indeed, concepts of justice (such as Rawls's) emphasize society as a functional unit. Merely asking the question, "What makes a society just?" suggests that our minds have evolved in the context of selective pressures not just on the individual, but on the group as a unit. If this were the case, then our conception of a just society would be genetically tailored by a history of successful, tight-knit societies that out-competed others in reproductive terms. Consequently, a society functioning on that conception of justice would furnish that society with reproductive advantages over other societies. In this way, "the most just system" could be the "most evolutionarily advantageous."

In support of a group-selectionist argument, Norian writes (with the tip of his tongue in his cheek, I'm sure):

I know what you're thinking. No, if you're one of those people who hears the word 'group-selection' and laughs, you understand nothing about evolutionary biology. They're called different levels of selection, and yes, society exhibits heritability, variation and selection. The science that comes out in the next ten years is going to blow your mind.

Ok, so I don't laugh when I hear the word "group-selection," but in my mind I make the sound that you make when someone tells you a rather shocking bit of news while you're drinking a tall glass of chocolate milk. That's what I think most group-selection arguments are: delicious chocolate milk tragically gone down the trachea instead of the esophagus. It's a good idea, and Norian is right in saying that it can happen. The more vital question is, "Did it happen?"

I doubt that the differential success of ancient hunter-gatherer groups (as units) has much to do with our conception of justice. A lot of the results that one would expect from group selection can be wrought from selection on the individual in a group environment. Since humans are such social creatures, it makes sense that the enhanced (or diminished) reproductive fitness of an enterprising individual will naturally extend to humans of the same group through practices such as imitation. If a young genius invents the wheel, her whole society may benefit. That is not to say, though, that she invents the wheel "for the good of society" in any remote way.

Humans are cooperators. Good cooperators -- people who have entrusted their reproductive success in part to the actions of others -- have prevailed in the struggle for survival. Humans' adaptability is the reason why they have overrun the world.

My theory is that, by looking to improve the lot of its least well-off members, the most just society would be potentially evolutionarily advantageous at some hybrid level between individual and group. By lifting up the poor, a just society produces a group of more useful cooperators. In turn, individuals of all echelons stand to benefit over other individuals by cooperating more effectively than their peers. Through imitation and trade, these benefits come to all individuals, and the playing field starts to level out again. A just society is "evolutionarily advantageous" because it facilitates productive inequalities. These inequalities translate into reproductive benefits for certain individuals over others. The group is instrumental rather than an end unto itself.

Daydreaming prompt: Response

A month ago, I proposed a simple daydreaming prompt. It boils down to this: You can save yourself and nine fellow humans and set up a colony on Mars. The questions are:
1. Who will you bring with you?
2. What will you bring with you?
3. What institutions will you institute in the new colony?
Here are my answers, for the time being:

1. Who will you bring? (This is basically trying to beat natural selection against humanity by thinking a thousand steps ahead.)

First, I will bring my girlfriend (duh). I will fill in the remaining 8 slots based on these criteria:

4 males, 4 females. This 1:1 ratio will accomplish many things:

• Maximize the number of genes inherited by future generations. Heterozygosity (i.e. mutt-character) tends to correlate positively with the health and resilience of organisms, ideal for these do-or-die settlements.
• Minimize the risk of failure. For instance, if I decided to fill the ship with women, and I turned out to be sterile, we'd be in quite the bind.
• More even sex ratios in future generations. Sex ratios tend to be 1:1, but some individuals may have more of a tendency to produce one sex than another. An even number of males and females in the parent generation would be most likely to produce even ratios in future generations.

Maximum genetic heterozygosity (for aforementioned reasons). This could be measured directly through genetic analysis or be looking at phenotypic features such as:

• Body type (Height, BMI, etc.)
  
• Ethnic history
• Hair/eye color
• etc.

Minimum risk of illness. I would choose against individuals with histories of past illness or with family histories of past heritable illness. I would go for people with good eyesight and hearing, too.

Same language (English or Spanish, given what I speak). Hopefully, this would maximize cultural cohesion and cooperation.

Same religion. Also to increase cooperation, especially among men. Religiosity tends to act as a stabilizing force in small communities. (If this weren't the case, I doubt religion ever would have caught on.)

Problem-solving skills/creativity, probably measured by IQ and/or artistic skill. This will be important given the number of problems will face on Mars. (Oh boy, my palms are sweating just thinking about it!)

2. What will you bring?
Of course, I will bring copious amounts of water. I will also bring gas-tight buckets and giant straws for the collection and condensation of polar water.
Food is a must, at least for a while. Potentially, seeds could become a renewable resource in Mars's more-or-less fertile soil. (At least asparagus?) I could maybe bring some earthworms to enrich the soil with nitrogen.
Maybe I'd toss in a Playstation 2 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, too.

3. What institutions would lead to the prosperity of the colony?
I would start with non-coercive anarchy. However, there would be two enforced requirements:

1. Respect the rights of others, in accordance with a basic Bill of Rights.
2. Pray.

A formal intervention of some sorts would need to be enacted to address individuals not complying with these requirements.

The first is important, simply because we do not want to kill each other or get in petty fights. I don't think my comrades or I would disrespect each other, though, at least not at first, because our survival would hinge on our cooperation.

The second is important to prevent existential crises. If one really got down to thinking about it, one might be tempted to abandon this whole humanity thing for good. I am, however, a believer in human life's intrinsic good. I believe that suicide is wrong in most circumstances, probably including the circumstances in which a Martian colonist might find herself. By pointing to a higher power, directionlessness, powerlessness, and overall disillusion might be prevented. (For a case study in how Christmas saved a fictitious Martian colony, watch this.)

Other than that, anarchy would probably fit the bill for the first few decades. The Bill of Rights will also suffice for that time and onward into the future (hopefully).


What's your answer? What did I forget? What shouldn't I have included?

Evolution of the Rawlsian Ideal

Why should the best social system be that which is most advantageous to the least well off? Why would anyone but the poorest in society advocate the welfare state? Why have social safety nets?

For the least well off in society these are no-brainers. But what about for the rich- why would someone in the upper financial echelons of society advocate a welfare state? Do humans have an deeply ingrained cultural sense of empathy and compassion driving them to be altruistic, or are there direct benefits to be gained as well?

One could claim that the rich are afraid they could someday become poor, that the safety nets are a form of insurance. This seems rather unlikely. What about the opposite argument that the rich are completely selfless and support the welfare state even though they have absolutely nothing to gain. This hypothesis leaves just as much to be desired.

One could argue that the poor are just as essential as the rich to society. Without the poor, everyone in society essentially shifts down a notch- imagine society without any of the lowest paying jobs- no factory workers, no mall-cops, no CVS employees, not to mention janitors, trashmen and the other invisible jobs which make society function. It's to everyone's advantage to make society "function", and by and large this means supporting those at the low end of the financial spectrum.

A sociobiologist might evoke a form of societal selection, saying individuals work for the good of society as well as looking out for themselves. I know what you're thinking. No, if you're one of those people who hears the word 'group-selection' and laughs, you understand nothing about evolutionary biology. They're called different levels of selection, and yes, society exhibits heritability, variation and selection. The science that comes out in the next ten years is going to blow your mind.

A sociologist might say that the concept of reputation is at stake. Individuals who are openly altruistic will benefit from getting good reputations, and those who are seemingly selfish (like the miserly fool who rejects the welfare state or the rich man who doesn't give to charity) will suffer from the bad reputations they accrue.

What about the student of animal behavior? She might invoke the Handicap Principle, going as far as to say that philanthropists are showing off, essentially proving that they can get along just fine in society even after giving away large sums of money. This is why peacocks have such elaborate tails and why certain types of gazelles stot, or jump, when chased by a predator instead of directly running away- they are in both cases proving that they are superior to other conspecifics, whether the goal is mate attraction or to make the predator give up and pursue someone weaker. Is this type of human altruism just a showy handicap?

Regardless of which hypothesis you're partial to (and there are many more yet unnamed), it is very unlikely that affluent people would pursue social safety nets were it not somehow to their benefit. Even if this is purely a cultural construct, our brains were created through evolution and there are constraints on what we are likely to think and which ideas we are likely to find appealing. The excuse of human exceptionalism through culture falters, falls and tumbles down the hill. Are social safety nets just? Are they a good idea? The fact that we're even thinking about them means they might be advantageous (the view of an evolutionary psychologist, maybe? ;)

One last idea: is the most just system that which is most evolutionarily advantageous to its members? Remember your levels of selection and the question grows infinitely more interesting.

Neolithic (R)evolution: By Choice Or By Need?

In a political science course at Brown University this spring, philosopher Jason Brennan presented the neolithic revolution as an opportunity to engage in trade. As part of a hypothesis about the Neanderthal extinction, Brennan introduced the idea of Homo sapiens coming to dominance through the establishment of trade and the advent of agriculture. Few would contest the fact that the neolithic revolution led to a transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to more stable sedentary societies, and that this transition was the gateway for market economics, technology, and cultural advancement.

Yet the way professor Brennan posed the question was to ask how exactly our hominid ancestors were able to make this transition, and what factors allowed them to finally make this obviously beneficial transition. But was the neolithic revolution truly based on a novel idea which led to such momentous change, or is it more accurate to say that necessity was the mother of this invention.

The move to agriculture happened all over the globe within a very limited timescale. It is exceedingly unlikely that someone suddenly realized that planting crops would be a good idea, and that the neolithic revolution is simply the spread of this idea. People tended to crops long before they began planting them. The first forms of irrigation were simple modifications of the landscape in order to divert water to patches of desirable plants. People knew about irrigation and the raising of crops long before the agricultural revolution began.

So why wait? Why did the neolithic revolution happen all of a sudden across the globe. I think it was a matter of necessity. As our ancestors proliferated and expanded across the globe, a phenomenon called the Pleistocene Extinctions occured- this was the mass extinction of megafauna which occured in the period leading up to around 10,000 years ago. Although there is controversy, these extinctions were most likely due to overhunting by humans. From moose to mammoths to giant beavers, much of the world's large mammal population was decimated, leaving few large animals to hunt and gather.

Agriculture is really not that much of a good thing. Taking care of crops restricts you to eating only very few types of plants, as opposed to the hundreds of types available to hunter-gatherers. This makes crops easily subject to disease, not to mention the risk of soil demineralization. Any animals that were raised were in close proximity to humans, and many of the world's worst disease have arisen precisely when the disease spreads from animals to humans (think avian flue, swine flue, and bubonic plague for starters). Additionally, by adopting a sedentary lifestyle our ancestors lived in close proximity to their feces, also increasing the risk of disease exposure.

So in the end, was the neolithic revolution a wonderous idea which finally enabled hunter-gathering Homo sapiens to embrace its destiny of trade, economics, and structured society, or was it simply a choice of the lesser of two evils, making the best of a lousy situation when animal food supplies were running short? It is important to consider the past when examining the present, but it is equally important to fully understand the past which we seek to consider.

Gold Pins

In "Notes from Underground," Fyodor Dostoevsky writes:

They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests.

David Brooks could well be the "you" to whom Dostoevsky's apocraphyl speaker addresses this segment of his diary. In "The Sandra Bullock Trade," Brooks argues that "most of us pay attention to the wrong things," such as making money, even though tending to our social and spiritual careers is a far more efficient way to achieve happiness than focusing on our economic careers. Like Dostoevsky's narrator's audience, Brooks is confident in science's ability to turn human nature in a rational, "normal direction," namely, toward the productive pursuit of happiness. He calls those who would consider trading social welfare for economic welfare for "more than three seconds" "absolutely crazy."

As Dostoevsky points out, however, the columnist's rational, science-backed vision of how to produce prosperity makes some questionable assumptions, such as:

1. Happiness = prosperity.


2. People want to be happy.


3. People want to prosper.


4. People will rationally pursue what they want.

Cleopatra did some irrationally cruel things to make herself happy. I'm guessing that Brooks would label her as "absolutely crazy." If he could go back in time, he might even offer her some advice, like telling her that "being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year." Or maybe he at least would have advised her not to marry her brother(s).

It is not that any of the advice Brooks gives is wrong, and I don't doubt the "impressive rigor" of the research on which it is based. But if Cleopatra were so crazy, why would she heed it? By the same token, why would people who are looney enough to choose an Oscar over a healthy marriage -- or commit themselves to a comparably irrational course of action -- take Brooks's recommendations to heart? As Dostoevsky suggests, creatures who err intentionally in the present have no reason to do otherwise in the future. If Brooks already thinks that we pay attention to the wrong things, could we "be compelled" by logical argument "not to want to set [our] will against [our] normal interests"?

This is not to stay that humans cannot put their gold pins in a drawer for a while and behave more in their self-interests and in the interests of others. Reforms like the Civil Rights Act can produce just this effect. In the end, though, any meaningful road to prosperous, rational human society must be paved by science that seeks to understand the proximate and ultimate foundations on which human behavior and psychology are built and by which they are constrained. The goal should not be Brooks's analysis, which tries to uproot "absolutely crazy" psychology; instead, we should endeavor to understand the biology from which constraints to rationality originate and work with the constraints toward psychological freedom, not against them or indifferently to them.

(Paradoxically, assuming irrationality, there's no good reason to expect anyone to take up this noble task, or that it is noble to begin with... though some already have.)

We'll always have gold pins. Let's learn how to use them right.

Merrill Lynch, the Marxists?

I missed the 10:25 pm train, so I was stranded in South Station until the midnight train to Providence. Bummer. Good thing I had my work with me. I sat down at one of the many small tables facing the giant train schedule that hung from the high ceiling.

Every few weeks, South Station -- the whole thing -- adopts a new advertising campaign. A couple months ago, ads for Windows 7 overwhelmed the station. In the past few weeks, Merrill Lynch, the financial consulting firm has taken over. (And by Merrill Lynch, I mean Bank of America, which has recently absorbed the company.)

The ads are really peculiar. They feature men and women (with their heads cut out of the picture) in an office space holding signs that read: "Help 2 retire _________." In the blank space are a word or two -- maybe written by the worker holding the signs -- like "hesitation," "guesswork," "indecision," "distraction," "the rat race," and "the 6 am train."

It would not have been out of place had Merrill Lynch thrown up some signs that said, "Help 2 retire 'alienation,'" or, "Help 2 retire 'the bourgeoisie.'" The company is portraying indecision, distraction, and hesitation as predicaments exclusive to the capitalist worker. The campaign taps into an ubiquitous sentiment that work -- and capitalism in general -- is a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless. This is ironic coming from Merrill Lynch, the brokerage firm whose name has come to be synonymous with corporate greed.

There is an ambiguity here, though. Some of the signs could be referring to retiring from hesitation and indecision in the process of thinking about retirement, whereas others are referring to retirement from the commute to work every morning. Even if the messages were intended by Merrill Lynch to be distinct, the juxtaposition of images makes it so that the ads appeal to the idea that work is the root of most people's problems.

What does Merrill Lynch's campaign imply for democratic capitalism as a set of institutions meant to bring about general prosperity? If work within these institutions breeds psychological and physical discord, what is the point?

But this is probably looking at the issue the wrong way. Maybe we should assume that people under any set of institutions generally dislike working and would rather not be working. Marx was right: people typically don't like laboring for money. Marx idealized the act of working at one's "life-activity," though. Work "can be pretty stressful," even for those who take (disturbing) delight in their vocation, like the cheerful communist farmers.

It is most likely that, by incentivizing work, institutions of capitalism make being productive as attractive and fun as possible. For many people, work still isn't much fun, even with capitalistic institutions firmly in place. We can only imagine what it's like to work in the absence of institutions like private property. Probably doubleplusungood.

Megan McArdle is smart

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2010/03/19/DI2010031903563.html

Appleton, WI: Megan, since you support some form of income redistribution, and seem to support some form of health income supplementation, what is it that this bill gets the most wrong? Or is it simply its irresponsible long-term budget? This seems like an entitlement you support, if there were more first-dollar consumer discretion and funding. Do you really feel in all honesty that this bill will do more long-term harm to medicine than it will do short-term good, with the rate at which technology advances? I just don't see how the poor currently overeconomizing on health care is a positive curb on the system. Please help me agree with you that the bill isn't worth it over any time span.

Megan McArdle: One of the hardest problems that economists deal with is how to weight the interests of future people. The problem is, there are so damn many of them (we hope!). Because the number of people who will be alive in the future is so much larger than the number who are alive now, straight utilitarian calculus can easily lead you to say that people alive now should give up 90% of their income to do anything that increases the income of future people by a penny a year.

The natural answer is to discount the utility of people in the future--in much the way that you discount your own future utility, so that someone has to pay you (interest) in order to get you to defer consumption.

Unfortunately, because the future is very long, even a low discount rate ultimately means that you put basically no weight on people who are alive beyond about 50-100 years from now.

This is a big dilemma for environmental economics, and I think it is also a dilemma here. I am fairly skeptical of the claims that this bill will save thousands, or tens of thousands, of lives a year. (see here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/myth-diagnosis/7905/) But even if you think this is true, placing any value at all on the lives of people in the future means that if you save those lives by causing even a small reduction in the rate of innovation (through price controls or regulation), you will end up killing far, far more people than you save. Compound interest is a killer.

I hope that's not too abstract and boring. It's a really tough, really interesting problem, and at some level, it's simply a value judgement about how to weigh the lives of current and future people.

But I'll note that both sides do this very inconsistently: the left wants a high weight on current lives and a low weight for future lives in analyzing health care, but wants to reverse this for the environment; the right takes the opposite stance. Or, in many cases, they simply deny that there is any possible tradeoff between current and future welfare. I find those denials pretty unconvincing--which is one of the reasons I'm for a carbon tax, and against this legislation. There's also the fiscal problem, which I've addressed in other questions.

Milgram Redux

How do we free our psyches from auto-coercion? How do we avoid becoming Nazis?

This tele-xperiment paints a bleak picture. Still, I want to know about the 16 out of 80 who refused to shock the contestant. What are they like? What education have they had? How were they able to free themselves from the authoritative glare of the camera? Knowing these things might enable us to lead better, more moral lives.

Evolutionary psychology could potentially provide an explanation for why we obey, even when the orders are immoral, and why we sometimes don't obey. It's probable that, in the environment of human societies, (hypothetical) genes that give an individual the propensity to obey were favored by natural selection.

I make this guess based on analogy with other social species, including those in which beta males submit to the alpha male's authority, even to the point of eschewing reproduction. For these males, the net cost of being a member of a society in which they cannot reproduce outweighs the net cost of being cast out to defend against threats all alone. Not to mention, a beta male could one day become the alpha male and find huge reproductive success.

It is likely that our ancestors faced a similar situation. They were probably better off gleaning benefits from authoritative individuals by obeying them than they were by dissenting and facing punishments like execution or exile. I doubt that these speculations are too off the mark.

But what about disobedience? That may have also been positively selected for, but probably on fewer occasions than obedience. Ancient Galileos may have gained reproductive success by throwing off the chains of the powers that be and pioneering more productive, truer ways of doing things. Or they may simply have subverted the ruler's rule and taken over for themselves. This, of course, could also help dissidents maximize their reproductive fitness.

Even if obedience isn't encoded in our genomes, it may be differentially favored within and across cultures. Cultural notions of when it is right or wrong to obey may have evolved by similar mechanisms as in the biological evolution scenarios above. The difference is that cultural concepts of obedience would be transmitted by word of mouth both horizontally (between strangers) and vertically (between parent and offspring) whereas vertical inheritance would be the primary means of biological transmission of a gene that codes for a propensity toward obedience.

By understanding both our cultural and biological histories of obedience and disobedience, we may be able to lower the proportion of individuals who kill others under orders from authority figures and avoid future genocide.

Social Science Gone Wrong- what not to do

In Monday's NY Times, op-ed columnist David Brooks talks about change in the Senate which will make it more like the House. He says the Senate is home to "person-to-person thinking" and that "because one senator had the ability to bring the whole body to a halt, senators had an incentive, every day, to develop alliances and relationships with people in the other party". He contrasts this with the House, which he refers to as embodying a "clan psychology", where individuals have little power and decisions are made on the group level.

He notes that the Senate is becoming increasingly like the house in this respect, despite attempts by prominent democrats, including our very own president, to curtail this change. The problem is that the crux of Brooks's argument hinges on what he calls humans' innate sense of sympathy. It is true that humans, along with many other species, have an internal sense of sympathy or empathy, causing us in many cases to have an internal sense of fairness and to avoid violating the social code. Brooks notes that with the shift from person-person interactions to group-group interactions there comes to a degree a loss of this empathy and natural mimicry.

Brooks uses this to shape his argument, saying that humans are naturally inclined to be sympathetic, and that forming in-groups and out-groups as he notes would happen with the impending shift in the senate would "bleach out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy". To make this argument is to deny that the formation of such groups was a crucial factor in human evolution.

Brooks's argument is riddled with poor science, to a degree that undermines the efforts of many to seek consilience between the sciences and the humanities. It may be true that we should work to stop these changes in the Senate and that to change the current system would be a step in the wrong direction. But what Brooks has done is grab a snippet of science, ignore all context, and mold it to fit his argument. This is what led to the idea of social darwinism. It is also what led to the eugenics movement which, unbeknownst to many, played a prominent role in early 20th century American domestic policy (I would highly recommend this paper).

What Brooks is doing isn't as dangerous as social darwinism or eugenics, but it's a chip off the same block. Poor use of scientific evidence to support policy arguments in appallingly superficial ways has been a giant setback to both the sciences and the understanding between disciplines. Humans evolved, this is clear. As such, it is productive to consider evolution and the forces which shaped animal behavior before the phenomenon of culture got underway. To do this correctly will prove invaluable; to do it sloppily and superficially is an obvious burden to consilience and understanding.

Daydreaming Prompt

A giant asteroid is set for a collision course with the Earth. Humankind has 5 days to get its act together. Fortunately, you have constructed a space vessel just in case this sort of thing were ever to occur. (Needless to say, you are very meticulous and paranoid.) Your fully stocked spaceship is gassed up and ready to set sail for Mars.

The vessel seats 10, meaning one seat for you (I would assume) and 9 seats for whoever you want to bring with you.

1. Who will you invite aboard your space ship? In other words, who will you choose to repopulate and reconstruct humanity on Mars once Earth has been demolished?

In addition to room for foodstuffs, you can bring 1000 lbs. of other stuff on the ship.

2. What will you bring with you to your space colony?

Let's assume that, being the genius captain and engineer that you are, you safely land your ship on the red planet.

3. What institutions will you instate to govern the colony? Will you try to create a lasting constitution for what you hope will be the burgeoning population of [enter sweet colony name here]? Or will you be more flexible? How will you go about sowing the seeds of a prosperous settlement, both in the short run and the long run?

(My thoughts on the issue are forthcoming...)

Relative vs. Absolute

In a free market economy, businesses that do not succeed go bankrupt. The relative success of businesses is a situation much more reminiscent of a zero-sum game than that of countries competing on a global scale. Or so says Krugman.

If relative success at the nation-level isn't really that important and what really matters is your absolute success, then it is possible for each involved party to improve, even though some will grow faster than others. So what would happen if everyone woke up tomorrow and every country in the world were 30x richer than the US? To follow Krugman's logic, this would ostensibly be good for the US; trade and cooperation with other countries would raise the US's level of prosperity, causing the US to be better off than it is today, even if it is the poorest country in the world.

This is tradeoff between relative and absolute success is also prevalent in animal behavior. Dominance hierarchies are perfect examples of relative success being chosen over absolute success. A hiena in a pack which can kill large prey is able to aquire food for itself, and is consequently better off than it would have been by itself. But at the same time, that one hiena might be the lowest notch on the hiena social totem pole.

If the argument for absolute over relative success holds for nations, does it hold for individuals? Would you really rather make $10,000 and be the poorest person in your country than make $5,000 and be one of the richest? If we were measuring in terms of 'happiness' then you might say yes, but if we measure in dollars it's not so clear. Does this mentality hold true across levels of hierarchy? And if so, what units are best to clarify the relationship?

In which I proudly demonstrate a remedial understanding of supply, demand, and economic growth

An asteroid may have spelled doom for dinosaurs. But what do asteroids spell for humans?

In "Space: The Final Frontier of Profit," Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation writes that the cosmos provide endless lucrative opportunities of enterprising individuals. In particular, he appraised "an average half-kilometer S-type asteroid" at $20 trillion. But that's not all. He writes:

...companies and investors are realizing that everything we hold of value—metals, minerals, energy and real estate—are in near-infinite quantities in space. As space transportation and operations become more affordable, what was once seen as a wasteland will become the next gold rush.

I find Diamandis's assertion that "everything we hold of value" can be found in the heavens to be overly cavalier -- as a case in point, (almost) none of us are up there right now -- but certainly "metals, minerals, energy and real estate" are abundant in space.

So what does this mean for us? Is space a money tree? If space becomes our industrial playground, how will this effect our perception of the world? Consumer goods? Productive goods? How will it alter our views of what's important?

Without a doubt, the practical opening of the space market would flood the supply of goods such as platinum and iron. Unlike Spain in the New World, countries that laid claim to a medium-sized asteroid would not suffer from atrophy in other growing industries (like how Spain failed to grow its manufacturing capabilities in the colonial era); rather, space explorers would be advancing the new and profitable technologies of the future. Dutch disease would not be a concern.

Overall, the effect of harvesting space would be to lower the prices of most goods. At first, the depression of prices would seem infinite, corresponding with buyers' expectations of infinite growth and resources. Space's bounty would shine down on humans with the gratuitous generosity of Bastiat's sun in "The Candlemaker's Petition." It is likely that humankind would bask in its light and prosper. By this, I mean that we'd reap the benefits of a higher standard of living and, in general, more time to play guitar.

So maybe space does "hold everything we value."

Some other cool questions to ponder: If we began to colonize other worlds, or even just asteroids, how would we go about exporting our lives and our ecosystems? What role would Earth's biosphere play in the transformation of the solar system? How does global warming's threat to the biosphere affect our future in space? And is space -- an almost infinite resource -- the unique, inevitable path to prosperity? Would it "solve the economic problem"?

Pessimistic Bias, 1995 edition

It's very easy to call this guy stupid. Very easy. But it is just as easy to mock those who are overly optimistic about innovative ideas, like flying cars. So what is the difference? It's probably just hindsight 20/20.

A few of Stoll's predictions have some validity. Consider the final paragraph:

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

Certainly, the internet has made it increasingly possible for people to never leave their homes to shop, work, or even socialize.

At the same time, however, Stoll underrates consumers' sense of their own needs and desires. The internet can and will never devalue human interactions: only people can do that. It is arguably because people value "human interactions" so much that the internet has become such a big deal. Media like Facebook and Twitter have made it easier to arrange meetings and facilitate human contact. They have enabled old friends to keep in touch. One would be hard pressed to find someone who thinks that people were more connected to one another fifteen years ago than they are now. The internet provides an obvious example of the improvements to our standard of living spurred by economic growth and enterprising technological innovation.

Looting, Social Trust, and Social Capital

The generally fantastic Tyler Cowen:

"There is a certain lawlessness in this country that the government enabled," he said in Spanish. "They don't protect people and people don't respect them and criminal elements get out of control. People also have a high sense of entitlement. They expected the government to have water and power and things under control."

There is much more at the link or try this tweet: "The situation in Concepción is deteriorating. Citizens have taken up arms to defend themselves and their stores. 8 PM to 12 PM Army curfew." By no means is it just a bunch of people trying to feed themselves: "...many residents in the most damaged areas have not only taken food from supermarkets, but also robbed banks, set fires and engaged in other forms of lawlessness."

Haiti, on the other hand, remains fairly orderly and there have been reports that police corruption has gone down significantly.

One implication here is that I fundamentally distrust the use of "social trust" or "social capital" indicators in cross-country growth regressions. Repeat three times after me: context-dependence, context-dependence, context-dependence. The lessons for social science run deep.

My deeper worry is that this event will change Chile and set it back more than the damage alone would indicate. It will alter their self-image and national unity could decline. An alternative story is that Chile will become more progressive, as there will be greater common knowledge of income divisions and it will be harder to pretend everything is just fine.

Maybe it is a sign of social health to have some looting after an earthquake. In this part of blogland we do not dismiss the counterintuitive conclusion out of hand. For instance perhaps Haiti is so orderly because a) looters would be killed on the spot, and b) the entire fate of the nation is at stake and thus every small event is taken very seriously. Neither factor is exactly good news.

I'm interested in finding out how the looting that went on in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina compares to both Chile and Haiti. I imagine that Americans would share the Chileans' "high sense of entitlement" in the aftermath of an equivalent event. Is this due to the rise in high liberalism over the past century? I'm guessing it has something to do with the legacy of New Deal paternalism.

Keynes, equilibrium, and the definition of life

In the previous post, Norian compares the formation and collective welfare of human societies to the formation of a multicellular organism through the cooperation of individual cells. He describes the division of labor of cells in a multicellular organism as "more akin to the Platonic division of labor [...] a static system with no changing jobs."

While he's right to say that the division of labor is static, it is worth noting that the biological system we call an "organism" is by no means a "stationary state." The cells in your body are constantly dying and making way for fresh replacement cells. Every 24 hours, upwards of 50 billion of your cells kick the bucket. If your cells were to stop being born and stop dying, you would just die. (Norian notes that cells that refuse to die are called cancer.) As Ms. Bona, my 11th-grade biology teacher used to say, "Equilibrium = Death," meaning that a static biological system is a dead one.

If we compare biological growth to the growth of human societies, we come up with some interesting questions. For instance: Does "Equilibrium = Death" apply to human societies? Is Mill's conjectured "stationary state" desirable, or even possible? And to what extent are the "absolute needs" of humans analogous to the needs of individual cells?

In "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," Keynes divides human needs into two classes: the "absolute" needs that we feel "whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be"; and "relative" needs, which are satisfied "only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows." Keynes writes that, by 2030, humans' absolute needs will be satisfied and the Age of Leisure will ensue.

But what are these "absolute" needs? I'm pretty sure that the most "absolute" need of any human -- or individual cell, for that matter -- is to live: that is to say, to not die. I cannot say with certainty that Keynes did not take this possibility into account when he wrote his essay. He might believe that "technical inventions" and rapid economic growth will lead to the ultimate achievement of immortality for all.

If Keynes were to have recognized living as an absolute need, though, it would come into tension with part one of his four-part prescription for rapid economic growth: population control. The only resolution to this tension would be to abolish human reproduction.

My guess is that a sterile, immortal society would not necessarily be the one most conducive to the practice of "the art of life." Societies, like our bodies, are of a dynamic, generational character. There is no living thing that has ever rightly been ascribed the title of "living" that has lacked biological potential or "desire" to make copies of itself. If the human species were to satisfy its "absolute needs" by forgoing death and reproduction, what would it be? Would it be alive? It is possible that it could be something much better (and more fun) than "alive." Humans might become ultra-happy, ultra-prosperous superorganisms with burgeoning bank accounts and abounding ambition. The one thing they would NOT be able to do, though, is what Keynes says they would be able to do, which is, ironically, to "cultivate into a fuller perfection... the art of life."

I think Ms. Bona is right, even when it comes to human societies: "Equilibrium = Death." Or at least a death of sorts. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that the best way to practice "the art of life" is to reproduce and die, engaging vigorously in activities of purpose for as long as you can. Maybe it's myopic of me to exalt the institution of life and "the struggle for subsistence." Maybe sterile immortality is the way to go. I think, however, that life -- painful, pleasurable, birthing, dying -- is not only the only type of life we've got, but the only type of life we want. Anything else, and we'd be rocks.

(David Brooks is far more eloquent than I. Recommended.)

Growth, Societies, and Organisms

Hey there!

So one of the point of this blog is to discuss the growth and development of societies. As I was thinking about the factors which cause societies to grow, I was drawn to thinking of the factors that enable societies to function in the first place, and so I wanted to kick this off by drawing a comparison between the formation of human societies and the events that took place in the transition from unicellular to multicellular life, millions of years ago.

The initial problems are identical: how do you create a unified entity which is advantageous to all concerned parties? There have been many ideas among political philosophers for why people enter into society, but the underlying assumption is that people entering society will be better off than they would have been in a state of nature. But what if the concerned parties have different definitions of "advantageous"? This is one of the problems posed to the cells which make up a multicellular organism.

Many multicellular organisms have two overarching types of cells, somatic cells and germ line cells. The germline cells are the ones that create gametes, such as sperm and eggs, and consequently they are the cells whose genes are directly passed down to the next generation. The somatic cells function in the creation and maintenance of the multicellular body, but do not directly create sperm and eggs.

Why is this a problem? Well, more often than not it isn't. That's because all of the cells in the body have the same genetic make-up, so the cells in your arm don't 'care' that they are not moving to the next generation directly, because the germ line cells of the body are passing identical sets of DNA to the next generation. But what if a mutation occurs, so that some somatic and germ line cells have different genetic makeups? Now there is the possibility (depending on the mutation) for there to be a sort of 'competition to get into the germ line', that is, a competition during development for certain cells to become germ line cells over others.

This is a similar situation to that of a burgeoning society: if different groups within the whole have different immediate interests, how is overall progress, or growth, accomplished? In this light, a political party which blocks reforms that will bring growth in order to protect its own political standpoint is analogous to cancer within the body; in both cases, selfish individuals are pursuing their own interests at the expense of the whole. Remember- a mutation arising in a cell which causes it to proliferate wildly will cause it to take over the body- cells have no foresight and do not 'realize' that taking over the body is not to their ultimate evolutionary interests. This is why cancer exists, even though it is to the detriment of the body.

Yet another comparison comes through the division of labor. In a society, the division of labor increases productivity, and according to moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith, is also a source of innovation. Yet, to quote Book 5 of Smith's Wealth of Nations:

"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."

It is evident that with specialization, the productivity of the whole goes up, but, if Smith is correct, division of labor in the state renders each component incapable of functioning outside of the whole. Admittedly, under Smith's dynamic and self-generating division of labor, the loss of generalized function of each component would not be so severe. However, the division of labor arising in the multicellular body is more akin to the Platonic division of labor, it is a static system with no changing jobs. This specialization is one of the main reasons why multicellular organisms are capable of more functions than the aggregate sum of their parts.

In fact, one of the main competing theories for the origins of multicellularity, compiled in large part by evolutionary biologist Richard Michod, states that multicellularity, aka the formation of a cohesive 'cell society', occurs precisely when the pressures of selection shift from those of the cell to that of the organism, meaning that when different cell types within the body become sufficiently specialized, it will be evolutionarily advantageous for each cell to remain specialized in this way as part of a larger entity, even though in doing so it loses its capacity to survive outside of the whole.

Is growth advantageous for society? Is the division of labor effective, and is it in fact advantageous for individuals within society to specialize? How does one go about curtailing cheaters and those who would advance their own private interests at the expense of the whole? These are some of the questions I hope we can begin to tackle, and I can't help but wonder if by viewing human society through the lens of nature, this shift in perspective might shed light on a novel and illuminating type of... consilience.

Welcome to Consilience

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "consilience" as "The agreement of two or more inductions drawn from different sets of data."

Here at Consilience: Prosperity and Posterity, we -- Owen, Norian, and Chris -- will synthesize elements of political science, moral philosophy, economics, geography, and biology with the hope that our findings in each field will complement the others.

This blog will run parallel to the political science course in which we are enrolled, POLS1150: "Prosperity: The Ethics and Economics of Wealth Creation," taught by John Tomasi, Jason Brennan, and Mark Koyama. Most of the issues we will tackle here find their origins in our course. We will look at questions like:

• "Why do some societies grow rich while others remain poor?"
• "What does it take to deserve to succeed?"
• "Is prosperity good for humans?"
• "What is fairness?"

Our exploration of these and other questions will generally take the form of a discussion between the authors. We encourage you -- our faithful readers -- to leave comments liberally, as this will help enliven and deepen the conversation.

Stay tuned! The thought-fest will kick off shortly.