The Very Long View

One person, one vote; no more, no less

2011-10-09T16:40:00.009-04:00

The brutal version of Capitalism implemented in the 21st c US has generated terrible outcomes; our economy is at a treacherous nadir and what little we have we've distributed more inequitably than ever. Further, the Right is waging a winning war to further immiserate the middle and working classes in the US. In the post-War, Social Europe has struggled with real and difficult challenges trying to negotiate and sustain the social welfare state and social safety nets as a quid pro quo for the taming of unions and the revolutionary left. With the apparent extinction of the Soviet threat as a revolutionary alternative, the European Right has begun to renege on that quid pro quo just at a time when the world economy has had its powerbase shifted Eastward. But in the US, we have not even tried to strike up such a bargain. Our corporate-government alliance and our far-right-of-center mainstream have acted throughout the Cold War as if Socialism was never really a negotiating threat of the American Left. So working people in this country have had, since at least 1975, neither sufficient union power nor social safety nets to protect them. It is not surprising in that light that the real incomes of most Americans have fallen for 35 years: they have had no power in the bilateral bargain.

Further, in the US, the Right brilliantly formulated an immensely successful rhetorical strategy in the 1990s. (Lakoff, Moral Politics.) In a democratic system you need 50%+1 to support you at the polls. What hope does a party representing the economic interests of 1-5% have? Surprisingly, a lot. By creating false and tenuous connections between the tax and corporate policy needs of the wealthy and powerful and the values of social conservatives, the hidden oligarchs have managed to get working class whites to fight passionately to keep federal income tax rates on the top 1% at near-historic lows. Social conservatives think they are fighting for eliminating abortions, gay marriage, and social safety nets that interfere with what they think of as essential individual accountability but what they are getting is a tax code that makes sure that corporations are first class citizens and they come second. In the end, whether or not what social conservatives want is something you value or find repugnant, they are being cheated by a clever oligarchy that has their vote but not their interests at heart.

The Left faces a different challenge. While the leadership of the Left is not nearly as clear about what it wants as is the Right, they are also disorganized about how to organize and negotiate. President Obama bought into Boehner's used car salesmanship and let Boehner anchor the negotiations on a far-right opening bid. Instead of seeking to re-anchor the negotiations on the far-left and fight his way to the middle, Obama thought he would try to "be reasonable" and "be liked" and so "build a working relationship." When I overpay for a car, the auto salesmen likes me too and he's not unhappy to see me again in a few years, either. The GOP leadership secretly likes -- no loves -- Obama for making their lives so easy. But they know well it doesn't serve them to admit to this; their desire for more is insatiable, so they start anew with demagoguery and hard bargaining, and the leadership of the Left behaves like so many forlorn and naive schoolchildren wondering how the Right can be so mean and unfair.

The intellectual Right would have you think this is a choice between Keynes and Hayek; a choice between liberal fiscal stimulus, big government and the path to serfdom, on the one hand, or a slow and begrudging recession/depression which needs to be suffered until the working classes accept significant declines in their standards of living in exchange for a new capitalist market equilibrium of near-full employment at vastly lowered real wages. American business is competitive again on the backs of the working poor, but that's all the poor deserve for, as Cain says, if you are not rich it is your own damn fault. American capitalism had a place for you at the dais if you only behaved the way you should. The PR men on the Right keep the details quiet; promoting the idea that the market will "solve" these problems in the long run apparently meets their personal standards for ethical communication. It is, after all, true that in the long run, the poor will be beaten down enough to go back to work at vastly reduced wages and so unemployment will indeed decline to its 'natural' levels. But in the long run, as their arch nemesis famously said, we're all dead.

The intellectual Left seems unable to articulate its position. Some, e.g., Krugman, remind us that a 3 trillion dollar recession needed a whole lot more stimulus to have a chance. Even if hundreds of billions sounded like a surreal package, it was too small. Others, like Reich, remind us that the only other time we had this level of inequality in the US was at the onset of the Great Depression. The Communist Left died off when Krushchev aired Stalin's dirty laundry, and the Socialist Left refused to learn the lessons of 1919-1954, and decided to start anew in the 60s calling upon only not much more of the lessons of the left than Brown v Board of Education, Topeka, KS. Years later, having won only some of the much needed civil rights gains to which the Left aspired, they find themselves without the class tools to actually wage the class warfare they badly need and of which, ironically, they are accused.

All this said, I think supporters of Occupy Wall Street should rise above the pettiness of the Fox News's contrasting views of this movement and the Tea Party. Both movements include some good people honestly and legitimately fighting against power. (Both movements include some who are confused, too.)

The Right has always been inspired by a distrust of government power; the Left of corporate power. Where is the place or party for those of us who despise and fear all brands of power?

The problem is concentration of power, whether it be corporate or government. If the corporate media and the framing right oligarchs were not in charge of the our mindsets, Tea Partiers and 99%'ers would see that they are in the same boat, and have much the same enemy: manipulative power interests who remain unaccountable. Both Leftists and Rightists should be taking both the Tea Party and 99%'ers seriously, for at the core they are both right: a democracy cannot function if there is any principle higher than one person, one vote.

The End of Us

2011-08-02T00:21:00.001-04:00

At the end of the American Empire, we decided to fiddle while Rome burned; go out with a bang not a whimper. No quiet, decent, honorable exit for us, no. We got good and drunk and forced the bouncer to throw us out on our asses. Will the dollar remain the world reserve currency for even another year? Will Congress ever really function without extremist threats, brutal calls for casting aside our fellow citizens, and wrestling in the mud? I once thought that pure, cold-blooded racism would undermine President Obama's presidency, but now I think it is something else.

Pure, cold-blooded stupidity.

There you have it. I've said it. I'm sorry if you think it elitist, but it's true. We died of a form of rabid stupidity that grew out of a political discourse that was meant to fool the working class white male into thinking he'd be better off supporting the wealthy than affiliating himself with a rainbow of people who ruffled his sensibilities and offended his sense of God and Country. If they weren't freaking out about blacks and gays they were feeling inferior to Ivy Leaguers. And so the ideators on the Right made up ridiculous but powerful labels like "tax and spend liberal" at just a time when their hero, Ronald Reagan, was taxing and spending at a rate vastly in excess of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. (Reagan cut taxes once and raised them many times, yet he increased spending so much that despite the tax increases he increased the debt four times more than did Carter -- and he did it in two terms. Carter meanwhile alienated progressives by refusing social spending demanded by his base because he was so fiscally tight. But who cares about the truth?)

They paraded out their Stern Parent frame to rile the sensibilities of people who were both righteous enough to resent freeloaders and naive enough to believe that the recipients of social services (who were largely the elderly and the sick and children) were indeed freeloaders. I would find it personally easier to find 535 freeloading legislators than 535 retired elderly who don't deserve their social security checks.

Don't get me wrong. The Left takes some blame here. Not only did the Left fail to see the successful framing game working against them, but they got caught up in their own form of labeling -- political correctness -- and then followed this by cutting off serious disagreement amongst themselves. Leftist errors are personified by NPR's tossing Juan Williams to the wolves and handing him over to Fox News who could play the "fair and balanced" game with their very own black, immigrant liberal on the payroll.

Soon there were just two little red books: the Republican Party Song book and the Democratic Party Song book. No discourse allowed within, no discourse possible across the aisle.

But then it blew up. A third red book came along: the Tea Party Screed. And now guys like Rove see that they are the Dr. Frankenstein and they have created a monster that cannot be contained no matter how firmly they tell the likes of Palin, Bachmann, and Ryan to get back in their tea crates. The Tea Party -- like the Minutemen on the border with Mexico -- started out as healthy protest movement but quickly attracted the very ugly and the very manipulative. The guy who started the Minuteman confessed recently that the violent members who joined were far worse than the immigrants crossing the border he used to fear. Now the many senior Tea Partiers have to face up to the fact that their mob violence has left their own just rewards -- social security and medicare in their old age -- wrecked. They were just played for stooges. The real payola is in the hands of the mega-wealthy and it is moving out of US dollars as we speak.

Fiddle and dance, it's over.

A thought in honor of my father who has suffered another medical setback

2010-10-30T20:26:00.004-04:00

I go on left wing internet sites and everyone is screaming that people on the Right are idiotic sheep serving someone else's interests, disinterested in facts and illogical to the bone. Then I go on right wing internet sites and everyone is screaming that people on the Left are idiotic sheep serving someone else's interests, disinterested in facts and illogical to the bone.

Hmm. I can't tell any difference.

Perhaps there are two distinct media realities, two sets of facts? Sure, some people on the Right really are Nazi, racist morons who also think Al Gore invented global warming. Sure, some people on the Left really are treasonous socialists who also want to send Fundamentalist Christians to re-education camp. (On the other hand, there are NO socialist, muslim presidents supporting gay marriage, a wacky oxymoron of the first order.) But most people probably share more with each other more than they think. Much more! (Almost everybody loves the smell of puppies, for example. Or everyone would give a dollar to a starving child rather than see her die on the street. Right?)

How bad does it have to get before it gets better, or is this all there is? The Oxymoronic Age is here? Is there any way out of this horrible mess?

We need another Abe Lincoln! Who else could hold this Union together in this time of incredible anger and fear AND MISUNDERSTANDING.

I do fear for this nation. The way out is NOT to shout and scream and "pick sides." The way out is NOT to say "this is not a time to compromise our values." The way out is clearly to seek to bridge this huge chasm of misunderstanding. Can anyone really believe that half of all Americans (the half on the "other team") are really as stupid as they seem? How about trying to reach across that chasm and try just a little harder to understand each other?

Do you know that if I know a person's age, gender, color and zip code I can predict their political color (red or blue) with close to 90% accuracy? So how much of this is independent reasoning? 10%! How much of this is immediate environmental socialization and bias? 90%! If I can tell you what you think if I know your neighbors, especially those who look like you and drove a similar beater for their first car, what does that tell you? You're not reasoning your way to your positions, especially not to your anger -- you're singing a team chant.

Whether I am on a leftwing or rightwing web site, I try to be respectful and ask questions to help me understand. But I am almost always rebuffed with nasty expletives, with angry invective, and with warnings to shape up (as in 1984 -- learn the party song) or go. Is that what the Right really wants? Is that what the Left really wants? To scream themselves hoarse while the other team does the same?

One lefty asked how it was that any right winger could fail to see that Pres. Obama has many good qualities. I sadly replied that the right winger, just like the left winger, was now a rabid sports fan (in this case, of the red team). Asking him to say nice things about President Obama was like asking a crazy Steelers fan to say nice things about the Packers QB right before the big game. It was no longer in his emotional vocabulary.

My old man voted for Adlai Stevenson in '52, watched Eisenhower run the country well, and switched his vote in '56. He was damn proud of Eisenhower in Little Rock! Men like my old man are leaving us -- now we have diehard reds and blues who can't even admit to a few good qualities in the leaders of the other side.

But it is even worse than that. Has anyone really thought about the vicious things being said about our First Lady? When did a First Lady become a legitimate victim of such vulgar abuse? My mother would have slapped my face, and quite rightly, if as a boy if I had said disgusting things about Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, or Lady Bird Johnson. And if you were born before 1968, I bet your mother would have done the same. So what happened to our common decency?

To this day, left wing websites continue to shout about bringing war crimes charges against Cheney. And right wing sites admit to treasonous intentions with respect to the current president of the US. Who said this is okay?

And the rest of the world (I teach global economics, so I hear these things every day) thinks America has become a nation of 300 million stupid, hooligans trampling people at a soccer game we happen to call politics. On many serious discussion forums, people from Western Europe, Turkey, and elsewhere will dismiss the opinion of a policy maker by saying, "He's just an American." That is, "He's just a rabid, self-referential egomaniac who can't name the countries on a world map." Meanwhile, it was American technology and gumption that saved those Chilean miners. But the way we act in our political sphere more than offsets the good we do in the world's eyes.

I am not denying that one side may be right and the other wrong, perhaps dead wrong. But until we bridge this horrible chasm and try to understand one another, cooperate to solve large and urgent problems, we are stuck in the middle of the road with four flat tires. So the task ahead is to reject obstructionism and angry invective and look for some middle ground on which we can walk together and get to work.

Please forward this to whomever you think could possibly care enough about this country to try just a little harder to understand the other side. I know it's hard. I am thinking of a legislative leader of the "other" team and trying to think of something nice to say, and I'm not coming up with anything... But we have to try! My old man would find something nice to say. I know it.

The Clinton Global IQ Quiz

2009-10-19T16:37:00.000-04:00

I have been away for too long, but like many busy teachers with too little time to write lectures, today I am going to play a movie:

http://www.clintonfoundation.org/globaliq/

Make sure you check out the Clinton Climate Change Initiative web pages, as well.

How Might a World of Altruists Function Economically?

2009-09-30T22:50:00.004-04:00

In my last posting, I noted that one of my readers, Annie, a biologist, suggested that as long as we were hypothetically splicing altruism into our genome, we might as well make it dominant. In that posting I evaluated research bearing on that issue, and concluded that the dominance of an altruism gene may well matter, but it is not conclusive. See Altruism and Tipping Points for that discussion: http://theverylongview.blogspot.com/2009/09/today-i-turn-to-comment-made-by-annie.html

As promised, I said I would later turn to her follow-up questions. Paraphrasing, Annie reflects: would a fictional future world of altruistic humans then implode under the weight of the sort of forces that thwarted past efforts at creating Utopian communities? That is, once H. sapiens was stripped of his single-minded selfishness, doesn’t social science theory, especially economics, predict that he will fail to have the incentives to make an economic society function effectively? Might we see altruistic humans gravitate first to socialism, and then to the dismal denouement of past socialist experiments?

I have spent a bit of time reflecting on this knotty set of questions, and cannot promise a comprehensive answer, but will try to do some meager justice to these questions today.

The main idea, as I understand it, is this: doesn’t economics (a la Adam Smith) say that it is not through our mutual benevolence, but instead through our collective self-interest at work in markets, that leads to the greater good? And, if we cannot any longer count on self-interest exclusively driving our behavior, might we not then lose the benefit of market systems, turn perhaps to socialist alternatives, and then fail for the reasons that socialist systems generally fail (in part due to a poor alignment of incentives between effort and reward)?

I think the answer, simply, is that this is actually not something to worry about. Unfortunately, the argument is complex and a bit long-winded.

First, indulge me in a quick review of Adam Smith, the broadly acknowledged founder of economics. Students of economics know that in 1776 Smith published his Wealth of Nations, in which he argued against Mercantilism and in favor of a market-based system that encouraged and rewarded productive economic activity (as opposed to the accumulation of precious metals and other accounts reflecting long-term trade imbalances). Smith is unfortunately remembered for having famously said:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

This was a bold assertion, and a brilliant one. Economists spent the following century or two showing that an economic system that met certain qualifications – for example, one in which rational self-interested people interact without compulsion and with all the information they need to conduct their work related affairs – had the potential, quite remarkably, to do as well for society overall as any other system could possibly do. With the help of late 19th century engineers, the mathematics employed in this so-called general equilibrium analysis was sound, and the result was downright Panglossian; this is the best of all possible worlds. In formal, mathematical analyses of this problem, the equilibrium result was actually called – and I am not making this up – “the bliss point.”

And all of this without an altruistic gene in sight.

There may be no more powerful idea in the history of political economy. That a society could actualize its economic potential without calling upon its citizens to do any more than selfishly interact in the marketplace is, not remarkably, quite palatable. Smith’s original idea that selfish individual behaviors could lead to a collectively moral result has great appeal – as selfish behavior is surely easier to count on than altruistic behavior.*

Again, this was a bold assertion, and a brilliant one – but also one taken terribly out of context.

Adam Smith held university teaching posts in logic, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy – economics was not yet an academic discipline. Before The Wealth of Nations, Smith had written the critical and well received Theory of Moral Sentiments in which Smith had very carefully examined the philosophical question of human virtue. This is not the place, and I not expert enough, to do justice to Smith’s contribution to this branch of philosophy. Suffice it say, he rejected his teacher, Francis Hutcheson’s, idea that moral virtue constituted a sixth sense, and replaced that idea with one of an internal spectator – what we might today call a conscience. Smith thought that people are concerned with how their conduct will be judged by others and they sought to anticipate moral condemnation by reflecting in advance on the likely reactions of others to their social and economic conduct. While Smith did recognize that there was a risk of partiality (what we today may call motivational bias) that might lead people to judge themselves too lightly, Smith felt that human beings were by nature invested with an “original desire to please” and an “original aversion to offend.” Smith in fact argued that men became fit for society only when they learn to control their self-regarding passions in favor of social rules of conduct. In his writings on jurisprudence within TMS, Smith clarifies this for me by arguing that justice “is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice” and the rules of conduct with respect to justice are actually the clearest. (Smith argues that the rules of justice are comparable to grammar while the rules of virtue are more akin to an aesthetic code. If he had access to Chomsky two centuries later, he might have pursued the analogy further, and asserted that the desire for justice is hard-wired into human beings. I suspect Smith believed this.)

Adam Smith felt that these desires were so strong that when he wrote the Wealth of Nations seventeen years later, he may have worried that the altruistic tendencies of people would be so strong as to possibly interfere with their economic activities. On the other hand, Smith did not appear to doubt that if their economic system failed to be just, men would not rush to remedy those injustices. Smith was never remotely what would be later called a Social Darwinist; Smith did not imagine that injustices wrought by markets were somehow virtuous, nor, as far as I can tell, did he think that his followers would ever come to such a crude and selfish belief.

There are two points I must make at this juncture. One, the use of Adam Smith today to justify the idea that men are selfish, and this is as it should be, is very sad, as it is a terrible misreading of Smith. For anyone to argue that free market capitalism, as they imagine was described by Smith, is meant to rule out universal health care, or economic injustices of any sort, would mortify the old professor, who argued that justice was the number one concern of any civilized society – he felt it was in a category of its own. In modern political discourse, in which we are asked to choose between the Right’s emphasis on liberty and the Left’s emphasis on justice, Smith sided with today’s Left. It is an interesting intellectual twist that he is a hero of the Right.

Two, Annie’s point has deep intellectual roots. The very man who gave us homo economicus (or economic man, as we understand him today) thought long and hard at the outset about whether or not excessive moral sentiment (a form of altruism) might interfere with economic activity.

Unfortunately, as I understand Smith, he never answered the question. For an answer, I need to move ahead from the late 18th century and discuss markets and incentives. Remember that the question is this: even if we could all become altruists in time to solve our biggest problems, won’t that interfere with the workings of our political economic systems and lead to ineffective results anyway?

Let me first look at the question of markets and when and how they work (and when and how they fail).

When do markets work? They can work when the social and private marginal costs and benefits are equal. That is, when all the costs and all the benefits of an action accrue to the decision-makers involved. When two people are trading money for product, and the total costs of producing the product – and earning the money to pay for it – are fully internalized by the two parties, markets can be best. If social and private costs diverge, as in the case of pollution, markets can still work as long as taxes are used to re-align those diverging costs. If polluters pay a tax that reflects the cost imposed on those not party to the transaction, then the market can still work. If social and private benefits diverge, as in the case of providing music on the town green for which villagers pay and outsiders do not, markets will provide the right amount of music if it finds a way to charge the right sort of fees to the outsiders. (And the challenge of doing so is not actually easy.)

If innovation leads to market share, profitability and value – those who paid to innovate capture the benefits and pay the costs – markets can work, but even then they may not. Sometimes the fixed costs of the innovation are very high and the actual cost of disseminating the benefits after innovation are marginally low (think pharmaceuticals) – so the needs of the market to fully internalize costs and benefits leads to an inadequate provision of the product (e.g., medicine) to the poorest segments of the market.

Markets tend to fail outright in many cases. They fail to provide for so-called public goods. The classic example is National Security: free riding would be too easy, as those who did not pay would be protected by the same intelligence and military system protecting those who purchased national security in its market. National Parks suffer, but not as dramatically, as do the Arts. Clean air and water suffer greatly, as they are obvious public goods. The cost to me of cleaning the waterways in my community far exceeds the benefit to me individually, or to all the people I could charge in a private market under most circumstances. Markets also fail in cases of so-called Natural Monopolies, in which the optimal scale of the firm is so large that it would dominate the market and distort the allocation of benefits through its pricing power.

But markets have even a smaller chance when some of benefit and cost devolves to participants who have no say at all. They have no say because they have no role in the market. This can be because they have no money (markets are “one dollar, one vote”), they have no right (perhaps they do not have citizenship and therefore cannot participate in the provision of the public good), or they are not yet born. Climate change due to carbon emissions is imposing its burdens not only on those of us emitting lots of carbon, but on those who are too poor to emit much carbon at all but are unable to force us to behave (poor sub-Saharan farmers may pay the starkest price during the next forty years, and they have had little capacity to influence the US into signing the Kyoto protocol). The least able to speak up are those who are not yet born. Our great grandchildren will pay a significant price for our pollution today, and in what market in 2060 shall they impose a cost upon us today?

Keep in mind those Seven Generations and the Iroquois who did keep them in mind (if we can believe them). It is not free enterprise that solves intergenerational problems of distributive justice. While one may believe that socialism is in theory capable of it, only the very young at heart could hold out hope for a socialist solution. If there is an alternative way to that end, we have not yet discovered it.

Today we sometimes witness a nearly religious version of market fundamentalism. Many politicians and businessmen are in this camp, and this fervor has recently been at the forefront in the health care insurance reform debate. The idea that collective good can come from individually selfish behavior, while an arguably good thing, does not imply that additional good cannot come from selfless or at least socially aware behavior. Somehow, many market fundamentalists adopt the view that if selfish behavior is good, unselfish behavior is somehow bad. There is no need to treat the common rhetoric behind this convoluted idea, but we do need to deal with their strongest case. Their best argument is that the attempt to implement selfless behavior will distort market incentives and push us away from the bliss point. This idea connects back to Annie’s idea that incentive structures may fail if we navigate away from selfish interactions in market based systems.

So what do we expect would happen if altruists took over? Would markets fail?

What is the argument that they might? We do know that when selfish individuals interact (although, descriptively, we do not know if there has ever really been a case of purely selfish people interacting in a market for long) markets can only do their magic if at a minimum the costs and benefits devolving from market actions accrue exclusively to the decision-makers. That is, there are no externalities. This applies to labor markets, of course, so people should be rewarded in proportion to their efforts for optimal labor supply to be induced. (According to economic theory, markets can at best reward workers in proportion to the value of their marginal labor productivity, which is not the same as effort. It is a function of a host of individual factors, as well as a host of other factors completely out of the control of the worker. So a perfect alignment of effort and incentive is not ever really feasible.) The Marxist maxim, “to each according to his ability, to each according to his need” violates this principle, at least in spirit, as the ablest are presumably subsidizing the neediest in such a system. The long term implied effect, in a world of selfish individuals, would be that the ablest would withdraw some of their effort as they perceive that it is not fairly rewarded. But, it also has to be noted that Neo-Marxians spent considerable time arguing that such slacking occurs in capitalist systems, too, so this is not actually a condemnation of socialist work relations per se, although most economists would still argue that the misalignment of compensation and productivity was indeed greater in socialist systems, and so slacking was a greater problem there than elsewhere.

Modern theorists such as Herbert Gintis make a point of asserting that a descriptively accurate view of H. Sapiens must account for some altruistic tendencies but it need not abandon the notion of optimization. What this means is that while honest researchers must accept the definitive conclusion of a generation of behavioral science research that has shown that most people are not maximizers of a personal utility function which is purely selfish in content, researchers need not abandon the convenience of optimizing behavior altogether. Annie’s query about the future of markets and politics in the face of an onslaught of altruists has actually received some attention in this limited sense. Folks such as Gintis have been asserting that assessing the behavior of economic agents who optimize a more complex utility function – one that is partly selfish and partly something else – is not insurmountable. In fact, they have begun that work. While there is no evidence that they have gone so far as to help us with Annie’s question, they have given us a good starting point.

That starting point is this: if we place our optimizing agents into formal models – replacing selfish agents with altruistic agents – what really changes? The mental experiment might go like this. Our new agents care about their own well-being, to be sure, but they also care about other things. We know they care about fairness. They care about justice of both process and outcome. They don’t want to see some people suffer terribly. They care about those whose voices are too weak to be heard by markets and politicians – the poorest, the outsiders, and the unborn. If we simulate this model, what might we expect to change – now and in the long run?

In the short run, we expect that optimizing altruistic agents will expend somewhat less attention on the maximization of their income, and more to advance their values. They will remain committed to the desire to have their rewards respond to their efforts: this is critically unchanged. Now, however, they perceive reward more broadly, so whereas the purely selfish agent might care only about his personal compensation, our (optimizing) altruist will be well motivated if his self-interest plus his other values are advanced in proportion to his labors. When they discuss their own labor contracts, they will show a tendency to favor a fairer distribution of rewards (say bonuses or use of sick days) than they did before. To the extent that they are altruistic, they may even be willing to sacrifice something small in order to advance a fairer distribution overall. Just as in the case of purely-selfish workers, they may slack off in their efforts if they perceive that their work effort is not being fairly rewarded (unless their altruism takes the form of an enhanced work ethic – which there is little evidence to support). Or they may wish to reciprocate good behavior on the part of others, even if this means some self-sacrifice to do so. Further – and this is a topic I have not yet addressed in this Blog – altruism, in the formal sense, also means that people are willing to pay something to punish those who violate their values. (This is actually a critical part of the theory of altruism –altruists are good enforcers of social norms, and they both reward and punish.) So in a world of altruists in power, the huge Wall Street bonuses might have encountered even more of the resistance the House Republicans and Blue Dogs gave to the proposed bailouts under Bush 43 and early Obama – as they clearly violated most people’s sense of fairness. (We only gave in because we were told we had to in order to avoid even worse consequences. No one argued it was fair. A so-called reciprocal altruist would have been willing to pay an even greater cost, let's say in terms of time to economic recovery, in order to punish Wall Street than would purely selfish people. Think about that.)

On a public level, our society of altruists might promote more progressive taxation, more justice in foreign policy, more environmental conservation on both individual and political levels. It might also involve more social safety nets for the neediest, so in some ways it will certainly resemble a more socialistic approach, but the key difference is that the system is now meeting their desires more than such a system would serve purely selfish egoists.

So far, so good, I think. In our mental experiment, a world of altruists would have the private impact of making compensation systems more just and public investments both more just and more far-sighted. We would probably come to resemble Sweden’s social democracy over time. One cannot say ex ante that these changes would not for the good. I am inclined to think they would be.

In the long run, the critical question seems to be whether a polis of altruists would choose entirely different social-economic methods or even systems. Would they fall prey to a form of naïve socialism in which they come to believe, as did many economists at one time, that they can do a better job of planning for the general well being, including the future, than does the market-based, socially-oriented, altruistically-motivated democracy at their disposal? I don’t see why this would be a risk, but perhaps it is. An old adage is often mistakenly attributed to Churchill, but the real idea was written by Francois Guisot (1787-1874): "Not to be a Republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." A contemporary of Churchill, Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), revived it: "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." I assume it goes almost without saying that Guisot’s double entendre works better in his era than did Clemenceau’s careless adaptation in his.** I need to share Clemenceau, however, as my question is this: would our world of altruists be so “full of heart” that they are “young at heart," and thus vulnerable to the naivete that leads to optimism about socialistic arrangements? And if so, what would be the likely result?

There are two questions relevant to our argument. One, would altruists be inclined to choose to abandon a Swedish style social democracy in favor of a socialist planning system and, two, would socialism fail in the hands of altruists?

I have no answer for the former, although I see Annie’s point. If the level of altruism was sufficiently other-regarding (and self-sacrificing) I suppose such a society might choose to believe that the vagaries of the capitalist business cycle is such – and their sense of the injustice of some paying a higher price than others so great – that they wish to do what others have done before them, and seek to isolate themselves from a capitalistic, globalized world. I do not find this compelling, and imagine that a world of good hearted people are not so naïve as to ignore the lessons of the past, but that is not to say that this fictional society would not come to believe that they, in all their goodness, could do better than Soviet or Chinese style socialism – and better than being part of a market-based world system in which others, less generous than they, have great influence on the state of their economy.

Would socialism, if adopted, fail in the hands of altruists? Even modern (or even futuristic) altruists – who would presumably avoid the temptations of unequal access and privilege that has plagued socialist systems – and have at their disposal the best super computers, would probably fall prey to the informational burdens of socialist planning. See http://theverylongview.blogspot.com/2009/09/today-i-turn-to-mitchells-second-major.html for a more detailed argument. In this case, the road to hell may well be paved by the very best of intentions, but the outcome may still be unfortunate.

In the end, however, even if altruists tried to make socialism work and failed at it, would they be inclined to stay that unfortunate course? I would like to think that such a society, one in which every member cares so much about the well being of each other, would be moved to try something else. Further, along another line of thought, the best arguments for socialism have to do with the removal of a socio-economic system from the world wide forces of capitalism and its business cycles. But true altruists care about future generations, and if they are thinking clearly, they would realize that worldwide, multilateral cooperation is necessary to stem climate change sufficiently to assure future generations everywhere of a habitable world. Even if a society of altruists were perfectly clean and green, they cannot save the planet without moving others to their cause. This would mean that altruists would need to stay actively engaged, and not withdraw. I know this no proof, but I think that it is most likely that a world of altruists would not be likely to withdraw unproductively from the world economy, and neither would a market-based democracy implode due to poor incentives. Further, I think the logic is good that altruists would not find market incentive systems incompatible with their well being. They would revise those incentives, favoring values such as fairness and justice, but this would not be at all harmful.

So I think the Blog's "case" remains that one, altruism is both necessary for successful climate change policy, and two, not incompatible with economic effectiveness long term, as long as we are hopeful that altruists would not be both youthfully naïve and stubborn about the dangers of planned economic and social systems.

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* Nonetheless, this moral idea held little sway with Smith’s contemporary Scottish enlightenment moral philosophers.
** Other versions are easily found on the web: This one is common. Not to be a Democrat at twenty shows lack of heart, not to be a Republican at forty shows lack of head, and attributed to Churchill, who might have thought the terms meaningless in this context.

Altruism and Tipping Points

2009-09-19T18:31:00.000-04:00

Today I turn to the comment made by Annie Rhodes on the first posting on this Blog (Disappearing Bonobos and Our Faint Hope for Altruism). Recall that in that post I recalled a conversation with John, the molecular biologist, in which we speculated about the possibility of splicing the altruism gene (recently found in our closest cousin, pan paniscus) into the human genome. (In subsequent posts I have argued that altruism is necessary to rally us to make the sacrifices clearly needed to leave the planet in shape for future generations. No known form of cooperation or reciprocity will do. Altruism is necessary, although not sufficient.) I also noted in that first post that if the altruism gene is somehow successfully introduced in H. sapiens, it would then have to be isolated and protected, as ordinary humans would surely eradicate our better brethren before they could reach critical mass and make a difference.

Annie, also a biologist, suggested that as long as we were hypothetically splicing altruism into our genome, we might as well make it dominant. But then she poses the very creative follow-on question, and I am paraphrasing: would a fictional future world of altruistic humans then implode under the weight of the sort of forces that thwarted past efforts at creating Utopian communities? That is, once H. sapiens was stripped of his single-minded selfishness, doesn’t social science theory, especially economics, predict that he will fail to have the incentives to make an economic society function effectively? Might we see altruistic humans gravitate first to socialism, and then to the dismal denouement of past socialist experiments?

This is an immensely creative and challenging set of questions, to which I do not wish to imply that I have answers, at least not to the whole of it. But I am excited to try to break this problem down into its parts.

First I will look at the premise: would making the altruism gene dominant change the likely result that the good guys would be killed off by the rest of us before they could save us? To examine this question, I need to backtrack and return to one of my favorite topics these days – my idea of a Cooperative Tipping Point or CTP.

Imagine a structured social experiment in which there are only two types of people. The first type is the Pure Competitor, PC, who is rational, self-regarding and competitive, and seeks only to maximize his own payoff. The second is the Contingent Cooperator, CC, who also seeks to maximize his payoff, but is aware of social norms or understandings that may create opportunities for expanding the set of opportunities available to engender cooperation, and so enhance the well being of both him and others simultaneously. (This experiment can be written down mathematically, and can be played experimentally, and both have been done many times, so this is not remotely speculative.) Note that the CC player is not a glutton for punishment. He wants to maximize payoff to himself, just as the PC player does. But he is willing to take a chance and initially offer to cooperate at some cost to himself. If accepted, he will continue to cooperate, but if rejected, he will compete. In Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, this strategy is famously called Tit for Tat: TFT cooperates if his rival cooperated with him last round, and competes if his rival competed with him last round. Not a noble affect, but one that experimentally does the job quite nicely.

The way this experiment is usually designed, the PC player ties other PC players (they compete with each other throughout their time together). The PC player also beats the CC player (the PC player takes advantage of the CC player in their first interaction, and afterward they compete with each other – but the PC player retains the small upfront gain). Hence, the PC strategy is a dominant strategy in the parlance of game theory: it is the better strategy against other PCs and it is the better strategy against CCs.

Yet, in a wide variety of social and experimental settings, many people “irrationally” behave as if they are CCs – Contingent Cooperators – rather than PCs. Further – and this is the big kicker – they often do better than the “rational” competitors in the long run.

It is actually not hard to see why this is true. Imagine a version of this experiment in which two people meet and earn $1 for competing, $3 for cooperating, and $5 if one competes and rejects the cooperative advances of the other. The rejected cooperator earns nothing in such an interaction. If people live in a large, anonymous society in which they never meet the same person more than once, the only sustainable behavior would be non-cooperative. If you think the next stranger to come along will compete, it is better to compete as well ($1>$0). If you think the next stranger to come along will cooperate, it is still better to compete ($5>$3). No matter what that next stranger will do, you do better not to trust him, and to just compete. You – and everyone else eventually – earns $1 per interaction.

But what if society is smaller than this? What if you can be expected to meet people on ten occasions, and they will remember how you last treated them? As so many academic disciplines know well, the size of the social unit and the values placed on one’s reputation in that group, are critically important on many levels. To see how it might matter here, think about it this way. Now a PC earns $10 in total from his long term relationships with other PCs ($1 each of ten times). He earns $5 the first time he meets a CC, but then $1 afterward for nine interactions, for a total of $14 (=$5+$1(9)). The CC in turn only earns $9 from his interactions with PCs (as he loses a dollar trying to solicit cooperative behavior unsuccessfully each time he meets a new PC, but then he competes with him when he meets him again). Note that the PC earns $10 from other PCs and $14 from CCs. The CC earns only $9 from interacting with PCs but what does he earn in his relationships with other CCs? When they meet, they both tentatively cooperate, hoping against hope, and they each earn $3. Having learned the other was willing to “irrationally” cooperate, they continue to do so, earning $3 each time they meet, and thus $30 overall.

Assume further that if one strategy proves better in a given environment than the other strategy, then a selection mechanism akin to evolution takes place, and the less successful strategy is partially replaced by the more successfully strategy and the next phase of the experiment begins.

What happens in our experiment? We know that PCs do somewhat better against one another than CCs do against them – as the cooperators get at first taken advantage of at some cost to themselves. But the CCs do much better with other CCs than the PCs do with CCs. Even though the CCs tie each other, and the PCs beat the CCs, the CCs do so much better with one another that they do much better than “winning” competitors do against them. So it should be clear that if there is a critical mass, or tipping point, of cooperators in society, then cooperation will thrive.

In our example, it turns out that as long as the initial population of CCs is greater than about 5.9% of the population, the cooperators will do better than the competitors. (Do the algebra for yourself; it is not hard.) After all the dust is settled, some competitors will “go extinct” (convert to cooperation) and the share of cooperation will go up. What happens then? Well, the more cooperators, the better it is for cooperation, so cooperation evolves even more dramatically in later phases of the game. On the other hand, if at the outset the population of cooperators is less than 5.9%, then the PCs will do better, and in the next phase of the experiment, there will be even fewer cooperators. This makes it even worse for cooperation, and in each subsequent phase the share of cooperation shrinks even further.

This is an unstable equilibrium. This means that if cooperation begins with a share of behavior above the cooperative tipping point (which in this example is somewhat small), cooperation eventually takes over, and you have a very rich cooperative society with an average income of $30 per lifetime interaction. If, on the other hand, cooperation is just a small share of the initial society, it doesn’t stand a chance, and eventually dies out, leaving you with a poor, purely competitive society, with everyone earning $10 from each interaction. Everything depends upon the good luck of having a critical mass or tipping point of cooperators at the outset of the experiment. Too few, and society becomes aggressively competitive; more than enough, and society moves to a blissfully cooperative equilibrium. Further, a completely cooperative society is stable against invasion: there is just no point to a cluster of PCs to jump in, as they will do less well in the minority than they would do if they cooperated like everybody else.

Before I move on there are interesting points to be made. First, I would argue that this example does not excessively value reputation, and hence cooperation. I think it is quite common to interact personally and professionally many more than ten times with others in one’s community. So the CTP may well be overstated: perhaps only 1% of a society needs to begin cooperating to lead the way? The actual % is impossible to pin down, but cooperative tipping points, as critical as they are, may be quite small. Two, the payoff figures I used are not entirely arbitrary: they are the numbers used in thousands of such experiments. Nonetheless, one should care about whether the results are robust to changes in those numbers (for example, what happens if PCs earn $2 from each interaction?) Some simple algebra will show that the CPT is still rather low. Three, the size of the community is critical. In very large societies, random meetings of strangers occur frequently and the number of expected interaction with most people is low. This makes cooperation harder to sustain. In small communities it is easier to maintain the like-mindedness and high levels of interaction needed to sustain cooperative behavior. The folk myth of the small town life, or the ethnic enclave, is actually based in solid theory. Four, and this is a more subtle point, one must not forget that the CCs above are contingent cooperators, meaning they cooperate long term only with those who cooperate with them. They are not unnecessarily self-sacrificing (although they take a chance at first). If they were universal cooperators, UCs, and cooperated with everyone, without contingency, the results would be very different. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, UCs cannot survive against PCs in any number, and if an invading force of PCs comes upon a happy community of UCs, the result is a disaster for cooperation. The only way universal cooperators survive is by isolating themselves. Think of the Amish for the clearest example of this (and think of the character John book in Witness for a brilliant example of how an outsider to that value system cannot in the end conform, despite great motivation to do so.) Five, and this is related to the last point, universal cooperators, UCs, actually make it harder, not easier, for CCs to survive. Imagine a small wagon train of UCs come upon our earlier experiment of CCs and PCs and ask to join the society. You might think intuitively that this will advance the cause of long term cooperation – after all, a wagon train of Amish are surely not going to advance the cause of competition, are they? But you would be wrong. Keep in mind that the CCs only lose a little bit in their interactions with the PCs ($5) and gain a lot from engendering maximal cooperation with their own kind ($20 relative to PC-PC interactions). But UCs are easy prey for the PCs, and vastly increase the payoff to their non-cooperative behavior. PCs earn $50 against every UC they meet, but CCs only earn $30 (they treat them as cooperators, not suckers). After the UCs arrive, the CTP goes up! There is even a chance that a community formally destined to be fully cooperative in the long run will now, instead, plummet towards pure competitive behavior.

For an example of this, consider a city plagued by street crime largely consisting of the mugging of defenseless victims. Suppose the police successfully reduce the levels of muggings (with police decoys, for example -- woe be the mugger who tried to outrun Dennis Pelkey, formerly of the Schenectady PD, as Dennis was many times the police world champion in the sprints). And then imagine that overnight a flock of defenseless old ladies took to the streets with their life savings in their pocketbooks. You can see that the mugging life strategy would be re-invigorated by a new and more profitable incentive structure.

There is a sixth point I need to make of a different sort and most relevant to our discussion. I have not even defined altruism technically, but I ask that you consider the following suggestive idea first. Consider the community in which cooperation is below the CTP. That is, cooperators are doing worse than competitors, and expect that in the long run, unless things radically change, they are doomed. But they stick it out, anyway, perhaps because they are “activists” hoping to change the hearts and minds of a critical mass of others. In so doing, they may actually believe that they will, even selfishly, profit from their hard headed commitment to cooperation, even when it doesn’t pay.

Or they may feel, as did Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963 that they would not get to the Promised Land themselves, but they had to sacrifice to hasten the arrival of others. In other words, early below-tipping point cooperators may actually be altruists. They may be sacrificing their interests now and even long term to keep up hope. After all, every contingent cooperator makes it more profitable for and likely that the next one will come along. My very first comment came from Anonymous, who said rightly, I think, that some people are now clean, green vegetarians not because they think they can themselves save the planet, but because they know someone must be first – and altruistically blaze that path for others.

In this sense – the sense that below-tipping point cooperators (such as people who are still fighting to create multilateral, effective climate change action plans against what our commenter Richard rightly noted were astonishingly bad odds) – might be altruists holding on for the rest of us to join them. In that sense, Annie’s idea that making the gene dominant – which would obviously vastly increase the share of population expressing the gene – might get us over the tipping point and make all the difference in the world. So by this version of altruism, I think it can be said that Annie may be right that the dominance, or increased expression, of altruism could well matter.

I must not deceive, however, and this is not the ordinary use of altruism in the research literature. What most researchers mean by altruism is that altruists care about themselves, but they also care about other things. Just what those other things are varies by research project, but common ideas include these ideas: one, altruists care not only about their own direct well being, but they care about the fairness of the process by which people are rewarded; two, altruists care about the fairness of outcomes, whatever the process; altruists care about the well-being of others enough to at least pay a small price to make a big difference in the lives of others. These are just a few, and the most interesting definitions of altruism I will actually save for another posting, as they need more preparation to be understood. But for now let me be clear that altruists are not identical to cooperators (who see a chance to profit themselves by expanding the capacities of human relationships to create win-win situations). They are instead willing to pay a price out of their own rewards to serve other ends (such as fairness). In more experiments than can be recounted, it has been shown that people of all walks of life from all over the globe refuse to take what they consider an unfair share of the rewards, even if they have the power to do so without fear or any recrimination. Not everyone, of course. But most of us care about fairness, and in this sense must of us are altruists. There is hardly a reader among you who has not watched the tearful fundraising efforts of charity groups soliciting your coffee money to save a child from a harsh existence in the slum of a developing nation. The appeal is clear: won’t you give up something small to make a big difference in the lives of someone else? This is an appeal to altruism of the third type.

Some people still argue that altruism is not real, that people behave altruistically in order to capture reputation effects, for example. (When a beautiful female student plays class games with a nerdy male quant, I have not failed to notice that the male often bends over backwards to play nicely, and I have not ascribed those results – at least not entirely – to altruism.) But the evidence is actually quite clear that even when no one – not even the researcher himself – can know of one’s actions, people still sacrifice substantial portions of their own rewards to satisfy notions of fairness of process or outcome or both.

There’s hope here. But if the hope is that the share of altruistic behavior in society is large, is that enough? The first part of Annie’s dominant gene argument suggests that if we can increase the share of altruism that could be what is needed.

Unfortunately, unlike contingent cooperation, and more like universal cooperation, altruism is not very stable. That is, even large communities of altruists – much like large communities of universal cooperators – do not generally do well against invading competitive behaviors. In most mathematical models of altruism, altruists are not ESS (evolutionarily stable strategies). That is, they cannot defend themselves well.

The exceptions involve a less extreme form of incubating altruism entirely in isolation. The idea is that altruists need to find themselves in communities where they can identify one another readily and interact with one another much more than they are forced to interact with the rest of us. For reasons that I should put off until later, these altruists have internalized norms and beliefs that create a values-based community that tend to restrict both their interactions with others in both number and nature. You should be thinking of religious enclaves embedded within larger cities, as a good example. If the number of costly interactions with outsiders can be kept small enough, and the nature of those interactions structured in ways that minimize damage to the community’s values, then the altruists can survive and resist invasion by competitive behaviors that would ordinarily wipe them out.*

In this sense, Annie’s creation of a dominant gene for altruism would do three things: one, insure that everyone in the altruistic enclave carrying the gene expresses the behavior, thus increasing the behavioral intensity and therefore the “profits” from their altruistic interactions; two, identify anyone not carrying it (those not expressing it) and somehow cull them from the population; and three, increase the growth rate of the enclave population, and thus the share of the total population. All three might help, but none actually guarantees the success of altruism.

Altruism is a delicate behavior, unlike Contingent Cooperation. Unfortunately, CC is not helpful for behaving in ways that reflect caring for future generations. For that, altruism is needed.

In a future posting I will turn to Annie’s additional and very creative questions about what social science theory has to say about a society of altruists constructing and running an economic society. This is an area in which I believe very little research has been done to date, which is quite a shame, as it bears in one way or another on much of what is going on around us in today's virulent political climate as well as on our prospects for putting aside our trivial bickering and get to work on what truly matters. We will not get away with rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic much longer.

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* See Gintis, Herbert, "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Altruism," Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2003.

Shall We Give Up and Fiddle While Rome Burns?

2009-09-14T23:17:00.000-04:00

In this post I would like to turn to the comment Richard left in reply to the post The Problem is Unilateralism, not Ideology. Richard advances the rather compelling view that the problems of multilateral cooperation are so huge, and so dizzying, that there is really little reason to maintain very much hope. Rather than invest in a futile task, Richard suggests that we might accept our fate and fiddle while Rome burns, concentrating on playing a pretty tune.

I will take his argument even further. First, the timetable is short. Technically, our climate models are not precise enough for us to know just when, if ever, we will deal with a catastrophic change (examples touted include a 14 C increase in global temperature in a single decade which would make unprepared human life unsustainable). So we do not actually know precisely how much time we have. But as we know it is possible that the critical timeframe is short (on the order of fifty years) it might seem prudent to act as if our problems have to be under control in that timeframe, or give up entirely. This is not an airtight argument, but it will do for now. Second, if the US has to take the lead in dealing with climate change, a review of the state of our political environment is not promising. Currently, the far right fringe of the US, a group that might, frighteningly, be as much as one-quarter or even more of the voting electorate, appears to be following religiously the rantings of hate-mongerers such as Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, who are far more interested in disrupting Obama's White House than in solving problems. (Let me make clear that I am not referring to legitimate conservatives who have a very important role to play in American politics. I remain confused as to why Conservatives have not yet abandoned the GOP, especially after the smirking treatment from GOP leadership dealt out to Ron Paul in the party debates.) Placards being waved around in DC this week reveal that many people, virtually all white, who did not read the 1,017 pages of HR 3200 -- thus joining the outspoken Steny Hoyer, Mitch McConnell, and other congressional representatives who said this week that they don't read bills, either -- are nonetheless convinced (is it by Beck and Limbaugh?) that the Health Reform bill wants to euthanize their grandmothers and drive them into the equivalent of Nazi Youth Parties. Further, and this is partly the fault of the bill writers, one has to read all the way to section 246 of HR 3200 to discover that the bill does not intend to subsidize illegal residents of the US. In section 152, it says that one cannot be discriminated against in the provision of insurance, so for 94 sections, readers dying to know that their hard earned cash isn't going to be used to help sick, undocumented aliens, have to sweat it out. If they don't get to section 246, they remain unhappy. In any case, there are millions of Americans today who think they are being taken for a ride by Obama and his secret plan to serve illegal aliens looking for a health care handout. (The fact that HR 3200 has been criticized by the left as a combination of Romney's health care system with McCain's tax subsidy plan, is not part of this discourse.) As well, people who could not possibly define "Marxist," "Socialist,"or "Communist" are for all appearances nearly rabid in their peculiar accusation that President Obama is all three -- and a racist traitor, to boot. If we tried to bring Limbaugh, Beck, and other influential rightists on board for a collaborative solution to climate change, we would have to first get Al Gore to recant global warming. And even then I am not hopeful.

I am also unclear about Obama's committment to solving climate change. I just don't know if Obama would advocate strongly enough if his hands were not tied by the real or apparent need to screw his courage to the sticking point and try to hold this political maelstrom together -- is secession in the works? (If so, I wonder if we should let the red states go this time.) But as it is, we certainly cannot count on him to do enough. Obama's climate change legislation earlier this year was tepid and there is no sign that more is forthcoming soon. And just this week, Obama chose to impose a tariff on Chinese tire imports -- on the face of it, because tire manufacturers in the US are suffering economically and Chinese tires appear to be cross-subsidized by complex and opaque Chinese economics -- which immediately set off a wave of Chinese Glen Becks on Chinese TV, vociferously slamming the US and demanding that the government dump all its US government securities overnight. I don't even want to think about the repercussions if that were to happen. As I hope to make clear to those who do not yet understand this, cooperating with China on climate change is absolutely essential if we are to succeed. The bottom line here is that I don't think H. sapiens (and many similarly situated species who will live or die with us) can depend on US leadership or on the state of the US - China relationship today.

Finally, we may wish to reflect on a portion of Annie Rhodes' comment in reply to an earlier posting (Skin as Thick as the Bark of a Pine). In that comment, she advances the idea that we have already passed the tipping point, that we cannot avert climate change. We can merely learn how to cope with it (and presumably mitigate it). There is more to Annie's comment relating to the capacity of capitalist systems to solve these problems, but those issues need to be addressed in a later posting.

Nonetheless, despite the heavy burden of the argument, I am going to offer an argument that we should not fiddle while Rome burns. I offer this argument largely for the sake of discussion, but also because of its enormous import.

One, think back on the short-lived but brilliant polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). For the first half of Pascal's life, he made enormous contributions to mathematics. Then, following a religious conversion, he wrote in the fields of philosophy and theology. Apparently, despite his self-proclaimed faith, Pascal was first and foremost a logical fellow. In explaining why everyone should have faith in God, and perhaps so explaining his own turning away from a lucrative career in mathematics, Pascal presented what has been known ever since as Pascal's Gamble. Pascal figured that we all faced a simple choice: you could believe in God, or not. And you could turn out to be right, or wrong.

If you chose to believe in God, and you were right, Pascal thought that the rewards would be significant. Eternal salvation and all that. (Please forgive me for ignoring the important theological niceties here -- I am just trying to convey the Gamble itself.)

If you chose to believe in God and you were wrong, the costs were low (you missed out on a little dishonesty, gluttony, wine and women, perhaps, but compared to what could happen in an infinite afterlife, this wasn't very important).

On the other hand, if you choose not to believe in God, and you were right, the rewards were just those cheap and insubstantial rewards I noted above. (On the other hand, Woody Allen might say that as cheap and insubstantial rewards go, they are some of the best.)

Finally, and this is the biggie, if you choose to not believe in God and you are wrong: watch out! This is expected to be a big, negative payoff. In fact, Pascal asserted that the positive benefit of believing in God and being right, and the huge cost of not believing in God and then being wrong, swamped the other outcomes. The wicked are illogical. The faithful have made the right choice.

Note that Pascal did not have to attach probabilities to his model. That is, the expected(average)payoffs of behaving logically (believing in God and taking your chances) were asserted to be larger than the expected (average) payoffs of behaving illogically (not believing in God and taking your chances) whatever the degree of belief you attached to God's existence. For this to be logically coherent, one had to actually believe that eternal salvation was of infinitely positive value, or eternal damnation was of infinitely negative value, or both. But in any of those cases -- and they are not unreasonable assumptions -- believing in God was the logical thing to do even if you thought there was only an infinitesmal chance that God existed. To believe in God logically did not require that you thought God was definitely real, or even that there was a better chance that he existed than not. To believe in God logically only required that you thought there was a tiny chance God existed, nothing more.

This is actually a compelling case for belief, as modern epistemologists, as I understand it, argue that one cannot prove that God exists, but neither can one prove that God does not exist. The only truly logical belief state is agnosticism. That is, you need a divine revelation to believe in God with certainty -- and you need a divine revelation to be an atheist (a case that should give you a headache). Agnosticism, of course, means you attach a probability of between zero and one to the existence of God -- not zero, not one, but something in-between. This is also the conclusion of modern-day Bayesian reasoning if applied to faith in God. According to Bayesian logic, no rational person ever attaches zero to the probability of any hypothesis which is not on the face of it logically false. (An example is 2 + 2 = 5.) If you attach a probability of zero to an hypothesis (for example, that Zooey Deschanel is going to walk up to you tomorrow and give you a big kiss) then this hypothesis can never logically be changed -- even if Zooey Deschanel approaches you on the street tomorrow with outstretched arms and puckered lips, you cannot raise your probability that you are about to be, miraculously, smooched. In class I call a null hypothesis with probability zero "a pig" and the idea is that no matter what new information comes along that bears on the likelihood of a porcine hypothesis, you cannot change it. (I should probably have named it a corpse, instead, as it cannot be revived, but it is too late now.) I have named this the Lipstick on a Pig Lemma. That is, no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it is still a pig.

Belief in God cannot be an hypothesis of this sort, for if God or an angel or other divine intervention appears to you tonight, you will surely want to upgrade your probability of belief.

But by Pascal's argument, if you attach any probability greater than zero to the existence of God, you must logically believe in him.

What does this have to do with the choice to fight on in the face of terrible odds with respect to climate change? Well, it all depends upon how severely you weight the risks of extinction of the human species and many other innocent species who will be carried along. If you attach an infinite cost to that scenario, then no matter how small a probability you attach to it -- and anyone logical by 17th century much less Bayesian rationality standards must attach a positive probability to that scenario -- you must conclude that it is worth believing in the possibility that we can avert at least the extinction scenarios.

This is a big assumption. I understand that without altruism, some people may not attach very much weight at all to the extinction of H. sapiens and many other species, and certainly not an infinite weight to that case. But if you attach a very large negative payoff to human extinction (which, according to catastrophe experts at Oxford, means we are left with fewer than 100 humans afterward -- and I think they are optimistic that 100 remaining humans can survive as hunter-gatherers in a horribly parched environment) and you also attach a non-trivial probability to catastrophic climate change, you must also join the cause of screwing your courage to the sticking point and fighting on.

So much for Pascal's Gamble. My second argument is this. Imagine the following scenario. You are standing in the hospital ER with your grand-daughter and the doctors give you sobering news. She may die despite their best efforts but there is a chance they can save her. They can't actually estimate the probabilities of life or death at all, as it is a brand new procedure. (You are thus aware that there are also positive externalities: if the procedure works on your grand-daughter, others are more likely to be saved.) It will be costly, but to you, not her. She will feel no additional pain and suffering. In fact, if the procedure fails, nothing more will come of it. But if it succeeds, she will live an ordinary life, filled with all the happiness and pain you yourself endured. The price to you? No more than 3% of your lifetime income -- say one year's earnings. Perhaps as little as one third that if all goes well.

Before you rush to answer, there is a catch. You need to collect signatures from all sorts of people, all over the world. They all must agree to do the same if and when their grand-daughters are in trouble. Meetings will be arranged with Wen Jiabao, Manmohan Singh, Angela Merkel --please don't massage her without her permission -- Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and Dick Cheney (just to make it disagreeable to everyone), and, of course, Ban Ki-Moon. The hospital in the meanwhile will cryogenically store your beautiful granddaughter for 50 years, and will give you a wonder drug that keeps you alive for another 51 (so you can have a little time with her if and when she recovers). Your travel expenses will be paid in full, but you will still be obliged for the treatment costs (again, up to one year's earnings).

I would argue that you should take the petition and begin the task. If you agree, I think it is unarguable that this scenario is closely although not precisely analogous to the situation we face. Recall that Sachs has said that it will take no more than 3% of GNP to avert the worst of climate change. If you disagree with this, and with the application of Pascal's Gamble, I have only one more argument to make.

Three, I point you to Peter Ward's Medea Hypothesis. In this provocative work, Ward argues against the prevailing view, widely known as the Gaia hypothesis. In the Gaia hypothesis, earth is a system analogous to a loving mother. In the strong version of the Gaia hypothesis, the earth is functionally homeostatic; that is, seeking over time to rectify disturbances to the overall environment and regaining healthful equilibria. In the weaker version, the one to which most of us probably subscribe, Gaia is a balanced, harmonious ecology, only upset by deeply upsetting factors (such as industrializing pollution). In this view, if we can only stop making a mess of the planet in time, and let nature take its course, we will live on, clean and green and happily.

No such luck, says Peter Ward. Our earth mother is far from the loving Gaia, but is, instead, the child killing Medea. Life is its own toxin, according to Ward, and life itself is fundamentally limiting. Life brings its own death. Ward admits freely that carbon emissions are killing the habitat, but he argues this was inevitable.

Ward's main advice to us is, at least implicitly, to stop feeling guilty that we are killing ourselves off -- and taking thousands of species with us. He argues we were all doomed anyway. In fact -- and this is the clincher -- Ward argues that instead of thinking of the human species as the planet killer, we should reverse that idea and recognize ourselves for what we really are: life's last hope. That is, Ward argues, all life on Earth will kill itself off unless human beings do something to save themselves and those they care about. Human beings have for the first time on the planet demonstrated that they just may have the technological wherewithal to save us from our terrible earth Mother, Medea.

Although Ward is apparently turning ecological wisdom on its head, for most of us the course of action offered is not so different than it was before. Mankind must still mobilize. But if we think of ourselves as the planet killer, we can imagine that the sort of soulless, selfish monsters that got us here can't change overnight and get us out of here. On the other hand, if we realize that all life on the planet was going to die off sooner or later (the Sun only has a finite lifespan with perhaps another five billion years, for example) then we do not need to look for a miraculous transformation. In Ward's view, we were destined to face just this life-saving choice in just this dark forest. And if it is our fate to be the one species on the planet capable of fighting off mass extinction, why give up before the battle begins? What if there is even a very small chance that we can win?

I know what Pascal would have said.

If that doesn't compel the most reluctant to follow along, I am afraid I cannot offer much more. I do hope some of my readers may add to the cause if they see even more reason to hope.

In the Middle of the Journey of OUR Lives

2009-09-14T20:52:00.000-04:00

The term has just begun and, after a term on medical leave, the return to work is both enriching and exhausting. Further, my daughter has surprised me with a side trip from her studies in Cuernavaca, Mexico to El Salvador, where Anti-Americanism is admittedly low, but violent street crime is “critical” (in the official language of the US State Department) and this has distracted me for a few days. And so I am already behind in responding to seven serious comments.

I do not wish to ask my readers to endure a disjointed response to them all at once, nor do I dare try to weave them together into one unified reply. I have neither the talent nor the energy to pull that off. So I will jot off a few short postings, dealing with them individually and in natural bundles.

In response to my last posting (The Problem is Unilateralism, not Ideology), Annie Rhodes, an MIT-trained biologist who has lived and studied in Italy, noted that a literal translation of Dante would be “In the middle of the journey of our life…” I had translated the line more cautiously as “In the middle of the journey of life.” I am quite pleased that this point has been noted. As my wife, Carol, can testify, I agonized over this very word in the draft of my post. While it is clear that “nostra vita” should be transliterated as “our life” – and therefore gives even more weight to Dante’s prescience (or at least relevance here as Annie points out) – I failed to note this in my original posting, and I owe you my reasoning now.

Dante was literally inventing the Italian language in the La Divina Commedia. In fact, it may be safe to say that this is the very first sentence ever written in Italian; at least we know it is the first written sentence preserved until today. Therefore, as the true meaning was seven centuries removed, I could not decide if “our” life was standing in for “life” generally, for Dante’s life (as it seems in the Canto), or for the lives of all of us when he hit the middle of our journeys (or even our collective journey – here, the journey of H. sapiens on planet Earth). So I took to the web, checking on multiple translations, and to my dismay, most of the standard translators chose to pass over “nostra” and use the first meaning, instead. I fell in line, disappointed, and changed it from the clearly trans-literal “our life” to the weaker usage, “life.” My father always said the scholar of highest integrity presents the weakest, not the strongest, version of the evidence that clearly support’s one’s position. To this day I try to convey to my best students that if one’s case can be advanced with the sparest, least controvertible form of the argument, it is made most convincingly, even if less flamboyantly. And I have had the lifetime habit of discounting researchers whose literature review bypasses the strongest criticisms of their positions.

But there is nothing whatsoever wrong if a careful and astute reader notes that you have left out something that seems to advance the case on some important level. So I am thrilled that Annie, whose Italian is far better than mine, has given me a chance to raise the point more strongly: perhaps Dante was telling us that in the middle of our collective life we come upon a dark wood (a deeply obfuscated decision) and must make our way – with significant consequences if we get it wrong. Shall we choose the wrong path and enter El Infierno?

For untrained readers (as am I), Dante appears deeply sympathetic to the sufferings of many of those he encountered in the Inferno. Modern critics have a long tradition, however, of criticizing naïve (soft-hearted) readings such as my own, arguing that Dante presented the cases of the condemned impartially and generously not to evoke sympathy from us, but to invoke a greater conviction among us that the sins were real and the punishment correct.

Which brings to mind two things. One, my father apparently learned something important from Dante, as the less inflammatory path was thought to be the more compelling. And two, according to whose diety shall we expect sympathy for ourselves if we condemn future generations to a severely damaged environment?

The Problem is Unilateralism, not Ideology

2009-09-07T17:51:00.000-04:00

Today I turn to Mitchell's second major point: that while the nature of the system of government might be expected to matter, the realpolitik suggests otherwise. Mitchell is probably right that it is not the nature of national government that stands in the way of solving the biggest problems we face as a world community. Indeed, our focus should be elsewhere.

Nonetheless, I think at least a handful of readers would not prefer that I dismiss this issue out of hand. For example, one cannot deny that there is still a surprisingly active, ongoing investment in advancing the merits of competing political ideologies and their respective systems of government.* This remains true twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failures of Soviet-style socialism in Eastern Europe and Russia became plainly visible to those of us in the West. A system of government that was in theory meant to wrest the control of the means of production from a privileged class and instead advance broader social, communitarian and national interests did not work in practice. While there was an ostensible improvement in the distribution of wealth and income behind the Iron Curtain, there was a distribution of privilege that was unequal enough to rival the grosser inequities of capitalist systems, and the overall quality of life was far worse than we might have expected.** We knew it wasn’t working much earlier, of course, but the first few years after the fall of the Wall confirmed that something had gone terribly wrong with Marxism-in-action. It is noteworthy here that even the environment, a resource shared by the community and therefore expected to be more effectively protected by socialist regimes than by systems of private property, was in a shambles. Air and water quality was horribly decayed in much of Eastern Europe by the late 1980s.

So much for the hopes of the intelligentsia. The historian Eric Foner wrote that his thesis advisor (the late historian Richard Hofstadter) reported that when he graduated from college in the 1930s, every thinking person asked: Shall I subscribe to liberalism (in the broader sense than we mean it today) or communism? (Hofstadter first chose communism, then switched.) Lionel Trilling’s post-War novel The Middle of the Journey is set in the 1930s, and Journey’s young intellectuals anguish over the hopes and fears they have for socialistic alternatives to the cruel capitalism of the Great Depression. Trilling’s title is, of course, a reference to the opening line of Dante’s Divine Comedy:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.

In the middle of the journey of life
I came upon a dark forest.

I share the rest of that opening line to make a point. For Trilling, I would hazard a guess that the implied “dark forest” is that which obfuscates our troubling choice between opposing ideologies, between giving first priority to freedom on the one hand or to justice on the other. Hofstadter, Trilling, and throes of 1930s intellectuals turned away from socialist hopes of justice (in favor of democratic capitalism’s freedoms) during or shortly after WW II. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts only a few years later (ironically following the abandonment of communism by most former party members in the US) must have made them wonder if pinning their hopes on US-style capitalist democracy was correct. (When we fail to protect the First Amendment rights of even our most strident dissenters, we fail to live up to the promise of this system of government.) Nonetheless, while there has been a small contingent of American radicals who have flirted with communism since (for example, during the Vietnam War), communism has never been a political force in US politics comparable even to its relatively small role in post-War Western Europe. Even those with the least market pressure to change, academic Marxists, have in large numbers de-emphasized their old texts, or have even more substantively changed their focus (some quite productively), since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I am an economist and have a duty to discharge. Economists have a precise but limited view of the comparative merits of socialism and capitalism. If you ask a traditionally trained economist if the failure of socialism was surprising, you can expect to hear something akin to this: Quite to the contrary, the failure of socialism was to be expected, and this “problem” has a name. It is called the socialist calculation debate. A century ago economists worked out a mathematically elegant system to describe the state of an entire economic system, a method of analysis called general equilibrium. At the same time some economists, noting that unfettered market systems were both unjust in the distribution of rewards, and ineffective at allocating resources and setting prices in markets in which there was not a perfect alignment of private and public interests, thought that the mathematics of general equilibrium could, at least in theory, allow good economic planners to replicate the results in a non-market system. This would be what socialist planners would do, but they could do better than markets because they would have the interests of everyone, not just the owners of capital, in mind. The success of nations (all capitalist systems at the time) at suspending normal market activities and replacing them with planned war efforts during WWI emboldened these proponents of socialist planning. As late as the 1930s (when Hofstadter and Trilling came of age) – when an alternative to the apparently cyclic, painful capitalism was desperately sought out – it was still thought that this could be done well. (For example, Oskar Lange was still maintaining this view in his On the Economic Theory of Socialism in the mid to late 30s, but apparently no longer after the war.) Some went so far as to argue that properly trained socialist planners could do as well or even better than capitalist-market systems, with the chance for improvement invested in the prospect of better aligning private and public interest in markets subject to externalities or spillovers. These spillovers by the way are central to our worries about climate change. The idea here would be that a planner could explicitly weight the importance of a clean environment for future generations whereas a private market will only give priority to those who have cash in hand today. In this sense, then, the system of government could matter, and matter greatly, for a problem such as global warming.

Critics however launched a number of attacks against the feasibility of good socialist planning. The arguments were usually but not exclusively mathematical and nuanced. The critical thrust of these arguments was aimed at the informational demands of a system of planning that lacked market prices as critical guides to action. How could socialist planners create a system comparable to a market system when markets are the equivalent of gigantic information-crunching machines and planners are merely people with far more limited capacities? In today’s terms, market systems are the equivalent of chess playing super computers and socialist systems are human players. The latter may be able to guide the process with greater intentionality, but the former will ultimately win because they can evaluate trillions of positions in the time their human counterparts can evaluate only a handful. (What needs to be remembered is that it is only recently that machines have beaten the best human players. Thirty years ago, when I was in graduate school, even I, a player of no special merit, was able to beat the Harvard Mainframe Chess Program in a match that dragged on into the wee hours of the night. Luckily for me, I had an appreciative audience, ignorant of the likely course of future computing power. Today there exist many PC-based programs that can thrash me quite handily.)

Proponents of socialist planning argued in return that the tools of (then) modern economics could stand in for markets and work just fine, as long as certain conditions could be met. (For example, as long as socialist manufacturers could be directed to minimize costs. It turns out, quite clearly, that this simple directive was not generally adhered to in socialist regimes, and although I can say that this was a serious deficiency of socialist planning, I cannot say why it happened.) Further, these proponents argued, the separation of control of capitalist enterprises between their owner and their managers – an increasing phenomenon with the growth of large firms – meant that capitalist systems would not solve the correct problems anyway.

Critics of socialist planning fought back and the determination and talents of one in particular, Friedrich Hayek, left many with the ultimate impression that the socialist calculation debate was won by the critics of socialist planning. It would surprise most economists today, but the debate was never actually concluded on the informational (calculation) terms on which he had been conducted.*** The determination that socialist planning would fail because the informational demands would exceed the capacities of any planner in a non-market system was never actually proven mathematically. It was merely asserted. Although fans of Hayek may say even today that his arguments on the need for market prices qua information were compelling, I think it can be said that Hayek actually won the debate by broadening the debate to include something at least as important. Hayek addressed the larger humanistic issues in works such as The Road to Serfdom, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” and Individualism and Economic Order – work that conveyed Hayek’s deeply felt sense of human nature and what (socialist planning) power would do to people. That is, Hayek felt strongly that such enormous power would prove dangerous and lead to totalitarianism.

It may be said that Hayek was right, not on the narrow grounds of the economic debate, but on his sense of what socialist planning would mean for the agglomeration of power in a few hands. Whereas capitalism may well be characterized by the troubling adage, “One dollar, one vote,” socialism may be characterized by the even more troubling “One seat in the Politburo, one vote." And the effects go far beyond economic decision-making, of course. As we saw in Russia, Eastern Europe and in China, control can, and perhaps must, extend far more deeply into social, cultural and religious experience. If society invests in one’s education and then pays a below world-market wage for educated services, can society then allow the educated and well-trained to leave for greener pastures? A closing of borders follows. Borders are also closed to trade flows (imagine the challenges of predicting what needs to be produced after trade?) If the plan calls for more tractors and fewer passenger cars because of the relative social weight placed on agricultural productivity and domestic convenience, there is not much that even pent-up demand for passenger cars can do if trade is blocked. (When the Berlin Wall fell, in the DDR there was a waiting list for passenger cars – and we are talking about a queue for terrible little Trabants and Wartburgs – that was fifteen years long. That queue disappeared overnight – and so did the Trabants and Wartburgs – when East Germans were freed to buy VWs and Opals from the West.)

Many may agree with me that this leaves us with democratic capitalism. Not necessarily or even likely US-style democratic capitalism (in which social safety nets are small and aggressively fought over) but some sort of social democracy, perhaps along the lines of the Scandinavian model. The pain of experience tells us that the forest is really not so dark anymore; our path is clear. Unfortunately, just because you can see where you are going, it doesn’t mean that you like where you are going. Democratic capitalism in its current, nationalistic forms is not terribly promising. The bottom line is that it doesn’t much matter what sort of political ideology motivates our national governments as we have global problems that need to be addressed with complex, cooperative problem-solving tools, and so far it is not clear that national governments can learn to coordinate well enough to deal with challenging global problems. Our problems require that we communicate and understand the true risks we face as a species, and in our current environment our information flows are (ironically, given the nature of the debate waged over our political ideologies) heavily distorted by a pernicious politicizing of our science, technology and policy. Further, our capacity to solve multi-lateral global problems has, at least so far, proven to be quite challenging in the current environment of competing, national entities.

But there are still many who hold out hope that there is still time to solve the biggest problems facing us as a world community. Sachs paraphrases JFK in reminding us that our greatest enemy is cynicism. If we have no hope of solving our problems, we cannot solve them. Further, there are many cases of successful global problem solving that we must remember and from which we can learn valuable lessons. Those of us who read comic books as children can’t fail to recall that in the world of our comic books, our civilized, advanced future (one we fully expected to have as we did not yet fear for our very existence) was governed by a global government of erudite, soft-spoken, reflective, peace-loving men and women. (If it was an interplanetary government, it included non-humans, as well.) It’s too bad we didn’t get there in time, but it appears that we are going to have to solve our current global problems without the global government (although the UN is trying to help) and without the erudite, soft-spoken, reflective and peace-loving leadership (although some of you may beg to differ).

The global problem solving challenge falls instead upon national governments (of varied ideologies), the UN, enlightened corporations, enlightened individuals (such as Bill Gates and, depending upon your tastes, Al Gore), NGOs, including academic institutions, professional organizations, and a wide variety of activists, working in a complex web of organizations and movements. The tools for communication and organization are expanding rapidly; the internet and now social networking has made it much harder for political or corporate interests to dominate public discourse. Scientists have been trying much harder and much more successfully of late to get through to us that we face a number of serious risks (climate change being only one of them). Dr. Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti, Jacques d’Amboise’s work raising money and consciousness in youth dance circles for African aid, Muhammad Yunus and the micro-finance revolution that has had an astonishing impact on the lives of poor women around the world. The trend to more energy-conserving automobiles has recently spiked. Who can doubt that something important is happening? And who can deny that each of us could do more (I have been a vegetarian for over 25 years, but I still don’t drive a hybrid vehicle)?

The European Union offers a promising model, this one an example of rapidly improved cooperative decision making over a small period of time. There, the deficiency of old nation-state negotiated solutions to continental problems led to a surprisingly easy and significant transition to much greater regional integration. Few would have imagined even a generation ago that European nations would be able to cast aside their independence for this level of cooperative integration.

It may be said by some that the UN (as articulated in the Millennium Promises) is overly focused on the solving the problems of the poor and indigent and insufficiently motivated to focus on the survival of the species on the planet, and I think there is some truth to that. But Sachs, who has historically been at least as invested in poverty policy as he now is in climate change in his work at the Earth Institute, has argued that mitigating some of the worst problems in Africa (and in the rest of the impoverished world) is not only a matter of moral compulsion, but it is an essential part of the solution to climate change. The carrying capacity of the planet is about 8 billion and without population control in the poorest parts of the world, we will overshoot the planet’s limit. If we do reduce unwanted pregnancies in places where contraception is scarce, it has been estimated that we can reduce the number of births by 75 million per year. As I have written in other media, this is just about what is needed, in total, to prevent us from overshooting our planetary limit. Further, the greening of the planet needs to include the greening of the poor. Deforestation accounts for about 19% of the damage leading to global warming but in Africa forests are cut down not even to provide building material, but to burn for fuel. Increased incomes and the use of sustainable energy can therefore help doubly in the poorest parts of the world.

As you think about the challenges of dozens of competing governments seeking to advance a cooperative solution to problems such as climate change, think about this technological advance: e-Parliament. This project is trying to make it possible for legislatures everywhere to meet simultaneously with a strong videoconferencing platform and make collective, cooperative, coordinated decisions. These are decisions that will require sacrifice for the greater good, and are therefore likely to break down due to mistrust if one government needs to commit in advance of others. (This creates incentives to defect – a well understood phenomenon in economic theory.) Instead, we may see the day when every civilized government in the world (and we have to work hard to make sure the US government is one of them) can agree almost simultaneously to a cooperative, coordinated solution that will cost each of us something (about 1-3% of GNP according to some estimates) and will lead to a better long term outcome for all of us.

I have gone on much too long today. I will return to some of these themes soon. Until then, let me remind my readers that activism is being heard in all corners of the world. There has been real progress – a reason to hope that we can do this in time. I am not sure that I would go so far as to say I have the audacity to hope, but I am open to arguments from my readers that I should. As Bill Maher has said, he's tired of the audacity to hope and he thinks its time to hope for some audacity. I will lend a hand and make this more specific: the audacity that we are hoping for is the sort that will compel our political leaders to put aside their pretensions to cultural superiority, their nationalistic impulses, their distrust, and their ideological biases, in order to get to work cooperating multi-laterally to solve the problems facing all of us. That takes some audacity, I know, but what's the alternative?
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* See, for example, below which argues that all systems of government thus far tried are capital-centric. The conclusion is that the alternative, a labor-centric system, has not yet been given a fair chance. http://www.progressiveliving.org/economics/capitalism_socialism_communism.htm. For a more immediate and compelling debate about the merits of and role for government policy within capitalist systems, see Krugman’s recent piece (How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?) in which he lays out the gross failures of Chicago-style Anti-Keynesianism and their overly accommodating rivals, the so-called Saltwater Neo-Keynesians, who failed to stick to their guns well enough to protect us from a second global depression in eighty years. Krugman’s piece can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?pagewanted=8. Finally, it must be noted that one of fastest growing economic powerhouses in the world today is the People’s Republic of China.

** All aspects of life were not worse under Soviet-style socialism. Athletics, the Arts, and some aspects of education were well supported by state systems.

*** See this simple summary of the debate for details: http://homepage.newschool.edu/het//essays/paretian/social.htm.

Narcissists and Their Problematic Leadership

2009-08-31T18:29:00.000-04:00

In the next two posts I would like to comment on a couple of Mitchell's challenging hypotheses. One, that while the ideological underpinning of the political system (e.g., communism or socialism versus capitalism) should on the face of it matter, the realpolitik suggests otherwise. Two, that narcissism in corporate and political leaders distorts and harms our capacity to solve large, multi-stakeholder problems (a key example of which is anthropogenic -- man-made -- climate change). This is the order in which Mitchell treated these issues, but my reply will be in the reverse order. Today I will discuss the idea of narcissism and how it relates to the theme of this blog.

As Mitchell noted in his post, my graduate course in Failures and Crises, which is drawn from the managerial, technological and problem solving research literatures, did not attend to the important idea of narcissism in our business and political leaders. (The course will include narcissism the next time it is taught.) Narcissism is important on a number of levels, and is as relevant to this discussion of altruism as it is to a theory of failure.

First for a useful definition: Narcissists suffer from overconfidence bias; that is, they believe that they perform better than objective measures of their success indicate they do in fact perform. Most of us suffer from some degree of overconfidence bias (the exceptions appear to be people who actually do perform especially well -- they often underestimate their capacities), but narcissists dangerously combine overconfidence bias with a desire for power and a lack of empathy or concern for perspectives and well-being of others. Narcissists are clearly not altruists; they function as self-centered, self-advancing agents in their interactions with others.

If narcissists were transparent to the rest of us, we might safely harbor them among us, but they are far from innocuous. In fact, it might be said that the main problem with narcissists is that they take a disproportionate share of leadership roles in business, education and politics. In fact, cognitive psychological research has shown that in a variety of settings people who score high on measures of narcissism both seek out and successfully achieve leadership roles. It is not merely that they invest heavily in self-advancing promotions, either. The rest of us are complicit, too, and fall prey to the narcissist's self-serving positive attributions and help them advance to such leadership roles. See this popular Science Daily online piece describing at least three such studies: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081007155100.htm . As this survey of the research adds, even though we consistently help narcissists advance to leadership, narcissists are not better than the rest of us at leading (although they believe they are and convince us of this clearly controvertible view). Why we keep falling for them is a question for which I have no good answer (but would like to hear from readers who think they may know.)

Further, I would argue that narcissists are often less effective at leading us, and this is seems especially important when the decisions to be made require an open-mindedness to changes in the decision environment or to the possibility that they were wrong in their earlier assessments of a situation. Narcissists should also be expected to be particularly poor at seeing beyond narrow self-interest and embracing, for example, community and other stakeholder positions or interests or needs. (Community service will seem midguided to a narcissist, and s/he would need to rationalize such spending or energy in terms of self-serving gains through, for example, improvements in PR.) Narcissists should be expected to be less able to tolerate organizational gadflies who disagree with them -- those modern-day Socrates our business and political organizations so desperately need to remind us to confront Groupthink and question intuitive but false organizational rhetoric before they develop momentum and do us harm. Narcissists hate being told they may be wrong. See Gladwell's "Cocksure," the New Yorker piece cited by Mitchell Belgin, for a poignant reminder of just how vociferous and even vulgur a high powered executive can become when confronted.

As a former strategy consultant, I worked with over fifty presidents and chief executives of corporations, cooperatives and other organizations, and I witnessed such narcissism far too often (although certainly not always). My major role with one client evolved into the job of interrupting the bright but overly powerful CEO and forcing him to politely listen to the concerned opinions of his senior executive team. (As the outsider, I could afford to be the gadfly who need not worry about his long-term survival.) In other organizations, it became vividly clear to me (as it was to all those who paid attention, frankly) that the organizational leader was selected for overconfidence bias, if not for full blown narcissism. One president with whom I became painfully involved was a personally neat fellow, never a hair out of place, and the hottest day of the year could not provoke him to loosen his tie, and to the chagrin of his organization it became his mission to tidy up his organization on every level. His obsession did the organization some harm before he jumped ship, taking over the reins of another place presumably in even greater need of tidying up.

How does this happen? Let me digress briefly and remind my readers of the concept of The Winner's Curse. You may perform the following experiment if you like (it has been performed many times before). Take a big jar full of pennies and show it to your class -- or to any reasonably large gathering. Ask them to guess the number of pennies -- that is, guess the value of the contents of the jar. Here's the wrinkle: the person who guesses highest (places the highest value) buys the jar for the price of his or her guess. If, say, a class of students guess, and those guesses range from $4.82 (482 pennies) to $9.77 (977 pennies), then the student who guessed 977 pays $9.77 and gets the jar. Unless the jar itself has non-trivial value, it can be said without further ado that the student who bought the jar most likely overpaid for it. He or she fell victim to the Winner's Curse. The distribution of guesses surely ranged from below its real value to above its real value. This is a general principle that bears out far more often that it fails.

And it doesn't just work for students and penny jars. It applies to multi-million dollar investment projects, too. If many vendors bid for a public project, the winner is very likely to overbid, suffer the Winner's Curse, and lose money (unless the contract allows rectification later). In Pankaj Ghemawat's terrific 1984 Journal of Industrial Economics paper on DuPont and the Titanium Dioxide industry (I cannot remember further details, but will provide them later),** Ghemawat showed that the entry decision making process of even very sophisticated industrial rivals fell prey to a Winner's Curse. In this case, each rival would essentially "bid" on building the next plant (and thus taking that market share) by announcing a start date. The earlier the start, the longer the period of losses before the plant turned a profit. Everyone would like to wait until demand truly justified the plant's additional production, but waiting meant risking that a rival would jump in and take that share. So the rivals consistently bid for share by building plants ahead of need -- and the end result was that virtually every entry investment made in the industry over a long period of time was so early that it was a money loser. Even DuPont was consistently victim of the Winner's Curse.

So what does this have to do with our theme? I would argue that candidates for senior executive positions also "bid" for their jobs during the interview process. The interview team sits back and the candidates bid in this way. The first candidate shows a lot of excitement for the potential of the organization and claims that he can add three development projects and grow the business by 10%. The next candidate ups the ante and offers four projects and a 12% growth. A third throws in some re-engineering with a 20% cost savings on top of the growth value. Whether or not they are internal candidates, the interview team is biased by the overconfidence of the candidates (whether real or postured for the sake of getting the job). In the end, the most optimistic candidate often sells the hiring team -- at least long enough to get the job. When the job is for the chief executive's office, the candidate who has not only promised the most but also presumed the most -- jumping to "solutions" far too early, before having spent a single day on the job actually analyzing the problem -- often not only gets the job, but is then held to his promises in the sense that he needs to push this premature, rushed vision onto the organization. And many people who could have informed the strategy are passed over in the process.

Our political leaders do much the same. Last October, when the economy finally gave way and the market tanked, the presidential candidates (in an ideal world) would have stepped forward and announced "All bets are off. Forget all those promises I made. It is obvious that I will be far more constrained than anyone realized, so I must go back to my priorities and figure out what can be done now, and what may have to wait, and what may never get done." Instead, our candidates rushed forward to tell us that they were the right candidate to "solve" the impossible set of challenges ahead. And voters wanted (over)confidence -- I do not believe a candidate who showed humility and caution would have seized the attention of the US voting public.

There was a time in American politics when it was the convention that a candidate did not seek out the office, but the office sought him out, instead. When told (in writing!) of his nomination, Polk replied (also in writing): "It has been well observed that the office of President of the United States should neither be sought nor declined. I have never sought it, nor should I feel at liberty to decline it, if conferred upon me by the voluntary suffrages of my Fellow Citizens." As in so many other cases, it appears our Founding Fathers were on to something: if you let candidates seek out the office, you will need to sort the humble and capable leaders from the narcissists, and you are not likely to succeed. In fact, by a form of Gresham's Law* of politicians, narcissistic politicans will drive out the good ones, and all you will have left to choose among are narcissists. (What person without a drive to power and overconfidence could withstand the race for the presidency today?)

Many climate change and poverty policy researchers are of the public view that the George W. Bush administration threw away absolutely critical time and resources needed to stem anthropogenic climate change. Many who were still hopeful in 1999 have given up hope. See Sachs (Common Wealth) for a sober critique of the price we have paid for egoistic unilateralism, military excesses, and denial of the need for and our responsibility to address climate change. This was narcissism of a high order, which ultimately encompassed an utter disregard for responsibility not only for others around the world who did not look and talk and worship as we do, but a disregard for the well being of our own grandchildren. We have to hope that Obama and his vastly improved multilateral skills can help reverse this course, as the US is a necessary but not sufficient player in the solution. His focus on health care reform, while commendable, may ultimately prove problematic, as we are losing still more time and he may be dissipating political capital needed to forge multi-lateral solutions to climate change and to other global problems.

To those I will turn next time, when I address Mitchell's theme of political ideologies, systems and the realpolitik of global problem solving.
_____
* Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. Sir Thomas Gresham was a financial advisor to Queen Elizabeth. He argued that multiple forms of currency, some with intrinsic commodity value (say coins made of precious metals) and others of no commodity value (say coin made of less expensive metals) could not co-exist for long, as the former (the good money) would be taken out of circulation for their alternative value and only the bad money would remain. Narcissists are thus, by analogy, silver-coated copper coins, while the leaders we need are pure silver -- gone but not forgotten.
** Here is the full cite: Ghemawat, Pankaj, Capacity Expansion in the Titanium Dioxide Industry, Journal of Industrial Economics, December 1984. I am happy to discover that this fine paper is still being taught in graduate programs.

Political Ideologies, Unintended Consequences, and Narcissism -- Guest Posting by Mitchell Belgin

2009-08-30T11:16:00.000-04:00

A fine graduate student of mine at SUNY-ESC, Mitchell Belgin, sought to make this very substantial comment recently, but the system's character limits prevented him from doing so. Mitchell then emailed me the missive directly. I have chosen to post the entire comment as a Guest Posting, and I will address the key issues in a subsequent posting. Note that I have adopted the convention of using only first names, but in this case his authorship of so substantial a comment suggests a surname is also appropriate.

Comment by Mitchell Belgin:

The discussion parameters of altruism and egoism bring immediately to mind the polar economic ideologies of communism and capitalism. As history has shown us, the ‘altruism’ of pure communism readily brings about (at least until the present) dictatorships, and not benign ones, either of individuals or of bureaucratic entities, whereby the good intentions become hell quite quickly. As well, that ‘altruism’ has thus far produced little empathy to the ‘fate’ of our planet. Capitalism, on the other hand, brings about egoistic entities whose sole purpose is to create profit from labor and resources, responding to environmental and health issues only when those issues are threatening the profits of the entity. Judicial and regulatory apparatus are in place to varying degrees in nation states to regulate those behaviors. In the present world economy, the ability to regulate transnational corporations is constantly being addressed, while global hegemonies and monopolistic practices as well as intellectual theft still go on quite rampantly. At the very least, attempts are made to rein them in. Socialistic democracies have paved a path to this altruism, but they are often in countries with basically mono-tribal dominant cultures (e.g., Sweden, Denmark). Welcome to the USA my friends, we got issues here. And guess what, they’re starting to get them there (again) too. The Nazi era could be thought of as just another of Europe’s ethnic cleansing wars. It’s easy to wish well for your countrymen when you think they’re somehow related to you. That isn’t exactly the case in other important locations, thence the problem with world government.

In the gulf between these two extremes we find ourselves attempting to find a way to develop a world economic order that can address the perilous issues we face as humans have brought humans to the edge of calamity, perhaps with the help of some mold and fungus. I refer to the 5/25/09 New Yorker article “The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert. As Kolbert points out, we may simply be the carriers of our own downfall, as we inadvertently transport mold and funguses into virgin territories as we expand our traveling capacity vectors and continue to invade the world’s habitats. Curiously, she points to the prime carriers of this mold as doctors, an extreme example of the law of unintended consequences.

As poignant is the inability to adjust ourselves to evidence that contradicts our assumptions and vested views. Many other logic of failure symptoms are exposed. We presently find ourselves in another extinction of sorts, whereby a chain of ‘brilliant’ fools in a chain of linked economic hedging megaliths played liars poker until the house could no longer back its stakes. Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article “Cocksure” (7/27/09) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/07/27/090727fa_fact_gladwell points again to the familiar theme of hubris, but as well elucidates the issues of the necessity of hubris in the world of finance.

In my recent class (Failures and Crises) with Dr. Fortunato, we read several books that exposed the chain of behaviors in failure. I posed in my papers that the one issue I did not see mentioned was narcissism, not merely as a psychological trait, but as part of a range of personality disorders, thus pathologies, that infect the structures of our economies. Gladwell touches on the issue of psychology as a missing topic when discussing corporations-- I agree. We are also missing in this altruism versus egoism discussion the issue of power- a necessary but potent issue, at the root of all psychology in my opinion, and the question of how to direct it in a socially beneficial way. As we see from John Cayne’s example, we send a bigoted narcissistic ‘killer’ (albeit an economic killer) to lead a corporation. How can we expect ‘good’ corporate behavior from that? Clearly we are at a brink, and we wonder if perhaps a benevolent dictator could do the trick. That problem of benevolence and dictatorship, however, is a doozey. It begins with people, homo-sapiens, in groups with other homo-sapiens. It is psychological, it needs therapy, and it is analogous to mature adulthood and the psychiatric socialization steps involved. And yet, as Leonard Cohen sang 15 years ago, “Democracy is coming to the USA!” He sang, I think, in jest, but perhaps he was a fortune teller. On the other hand, the hour is getting late.

Skin as Thick as the Bark of a Pine

2009-08-27T18:13:00.000-04:00

I am very pleased with the first comment made on this Blog (from Anonymous, see below). The author is thoughtful, well-informed and raises a few excellent points, surely worth addressing in today’s post. As Anonymous is familiar with both the longstanding debate regarding the roles of genes versus culture and with the capacity for economic incentives to alter outcomes, I hope my general readers will indulge me if I reply to the comment at the level it deserves. That comment once again:

“Altruism (genetically programmed or culturally derived) may not be necessary to foster cooperation and avert planetary disaster. It seems that systems could more easily be put in place to reward good behavior and penalize the environmentally destructive, thus tapping self-interest to foster good. How about huge tax breaks for not owning cars...or for having two or fewer children? Add special taxes for meat purchases (raising "food" animals has created an environmental disaster). Provide free public transportation. How about huge incentives for green companies (e.g. no taxes for five years)?

Some willingly try to live green for altruistic reasons and others could be moved by policies that tap self interest for the greater good.” - Anonymous

First let me say that Anonymous is absolutely right – at least in theory. There is nothing in the current state of the theory that rules out the possibility that a purely cooperative solution among otherwise self-regarding (that is, non-altruistic) individuals might be fostered and, further, be dramatic and timely enough to lead to a sustainable planetary solution. In fact, there are many research models that show that if the conditions are right, cooperation can indeed become the one surviving behavior in what appears to be a stable equilibrium (at least nothing going on within the “society” will change it). In some cases, these cooperative outcomes will even prove resistant to “invasion” by less desirable behaviors from the outside or through mutation; these especially robust solutions are Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESS). See Hauert’s interactive website: http://www.univie.ac.at/virtuallabs/PublicGoods/ or Nowak’s beautifully diagrammed Evolutionary Dynamics (2006) for examples of the sorts of models with just this sort of cooperative promise. Self-regarding egoists who are smart enough to see the profit in engendering cooperation with others can flourish, and the whole society flourishes with them – without an iota of altruism in sight. In my own research, I am currently intrigued by what I am calling Cooperative Tipping Points (CTP) – sometimes surprisingly small but absolutely essential levels of cooperative behavior that trigger long term growth in those cooperative behaviors and improved outcomes for all. In simple models I will be happy to describe for interested readers, I can show that if the social group (say, a society or an organization) begins with enough cooperation to be beyond the CTP, then the long term prospects for cooperation are excellent. If, on the other hand, the social group has the misfortune to start off below the CTP, all is lost, and a defective outcome will eventually obtain. My former teacher, dear friend, and colleague, Ralph, agrees with my observation that the tone set by entrepreneurial leaders upfront often lasts for a long time. These leaders are fulfilling what I consider a critical obligation of leadership by encouraging the first generation of employees to move beyond the CTP, and hence lead the organization to long term cooperative outcomes. For another example – a kind reader, Sheryl, conveyed the need for more of them – I would suggest that the adoption of the Bill of Rights as an appendage to the US Constitution set in motion a set of ideals that pushed us ever so slightly beyond a political CTP and hence helped set in motion a “rights” evolution that may someday fulfill Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of an “arc of history [that] bends towards justice.” (See Foner’s essay on “Blacks and the US Constitution” in Who Owns History? for the frustrating details of that slowly bending arc.)

Anonymous’ final note that “some willingly try to live green for altruistic reasons and others could be [so] moved” is reminiscent of those few in my models who push us over the CTP in the initial condition and so “lead us” – through their shining examples – to long run cooperation.

Altruism -- loosely, the proclivity to act as if (not necessarily intend that) the welfare of others matters to us enough to pay at least a small price to advance it (not as some mistakenly believe, the tendency to obliterate one’s one interests for others)– is not an essential feature of most of these models of cooperation. Although I may need to remind my readers that those who cooperate in defective environments (environments in which it would be more personally profitable to join the defectors) may need a bit of altruism in order to persist, and possibly inspire others to join them bending the arc of justice.

To take stock: I cannot reject out of hand, at least on theoretical merits alone, the optimistic claim of Anonymous that cooperation can be created and sustained at levels sufficient to avert calamity without hoping for or counting on a mobilization of altruistic people to lead the way. Nor do I deny that the solution ultimately resides in the right sort of incentives to be green and clean.

But I must nonetheless disagree. I disagree that we can hope to adopt the sort of economic incentives described by Anonymous – without first undergoing a major change in attitude of people on this planet towards one another and, more critically, toward the young and yet unborn. That is, without a transformative revolution in our consciousness that leads to the understanding of our interconnectedness and responsibility towards one another – i.e., without Altruism – I am doubtful that we can succeed in moving forward with the sort of incentive schemes being offered.

The basis of my disagreement with the optimistic idea that we can do this without altruism is not so much theoretical, as it is practical. I refer my interested readers to Sach’s Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet for some of the details I will be recounting below. (I might note that Jeffrey was a classmate of mine in graduate school, but he was so brilliant that he passed his comprehensives – I think they took him six weeks – and was on his way before we ever got to know each other.) I must also thank my beleaguered wife Carol for taking the long dog walk that provided me with the sounding board I needed to flesh out this argument.

The gist of the argument is this: we have very little time to accomplish an extraordinary amount. We have belatedly discovered that we are actually at the eleventh hour. The party is over, the guests have gone home, we just woke up drunk on the couch – and the last bus leaves in three minutes. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen from its pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm to current levels above 380 ppm. That 100 ppm increase has been associated with a 0.8 C (1.4 F) increase in average global temperature. The impacts of climate change already are multi-faceted and are far more complex than just global warming. As Sachs describes so well, we are facing rising ocean levels, habitat destruction, increased disease transmission, differential and inequitable changes in agricultural productivity, changes in water availability, increased natural hazards, and changes in ocean chemistry. The list is not just meant to be alarming; it is meant to remind us that the problems are complex and anyone who asserts that we can ignore the risks is doing so at your peril, as we cannot understand how these changes interact and how those interactions change as global carbon and temperature continue to rise. We have many reasons to believe that the interactions will be nonlinear, and possibly worse than we are projecting now.

There are many estimates of just how high we can afford to let atmospheric carbon dioxide go. Few but the most severe back-to-nature Luddites ever expect to see a return to pre-industrial levels below 300 ppm. Not many expect that we can keep levels below 400 ppm. What is the threshold beyond which irreparable and devastating damage to the planet’s many ecosystems are expected? Hansen of the Earth Institute has concluded that levels well below 560 ppm (twice the pre-industrial level) must be achieved, and it would be ideal to try to stop levels at 450 ppm. The consensus of scientists around the world is that we must not let levels get above the range 450-560 ppm. The upper limit, twice the planet’s natural level, of course, comes with greater risks.

So what sort of changes will be needed to achieve these goals and on what timetable? Here, the answers may be somewhat shocking. Within the natural lifetime of my daughter (now in college), the world economy may increase by a factor of six. Increases in industrial and consumption pollution will increase by a factor of six if we do not improve the way we produce, transport, and consume, and we do not improve what we consume and how. Doing nothing is simply not tenable; business as usual could raise planetary temperatures to potentially catastrophic levels within forty years. Note that we can barely afford a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide for pre-industrial levels (about a 50% increase from today's levels) – so the bottom line is that for every unit of production in the world economy in 2050, we must somehow produce it and consume it at a vastly reduced level of pollution relative to today, or we must not produce it at all. By my ad hoc calculations, we need to quadruple the gas mileage on your car -- and do the same to everything else at the same time.* On the face of it, this is obviously a huge task. Even if we in the Industrialized West were willing and able to put an end to all economic growth that does not come cleanly – that is, hold our current levels of carbon emissions constant – we still have the problem of a rapidly industrializing China and India. We had our turn at prosperity, so who are we to deny them theirs (even if we could)?

To return to Anonymous: just what sort of economic incentives does the world need to put in place to accomplish these draconian changes in worldwide behavior? Let’s be specific: what will it take to eliminate the deadly notion that continued economic growth is good (it is not feasible) – and who is going to convince the rapidly-growing Chinese, Indians, and others that we ran out of ice cream before they got to the table? Let’s be even more specific: what would it take to impose such incentives in the US alone (after all, with 5% of the population we create 25% of the mess)?

As Anonymous suggests, we could tax and subsidize intensely. Fossil fuels account for about four-fifths and deforestation one-fifth of the problem. We could impose huge taxes on the use of fossil fuels in electricity generation (one third of the problem in total), transportation, residential and commercial heating and cooling; similarly we could impose large taxes on meat consumption and paper products – major sources of deforestation. On the flip side, we could subsidize activities that promise to get us away from fossil fuels: we could become as green as the Wicked Witch of the East. But no matter how draconian we set those levels of tax and subsidy, how much can we really change? What will we tolerate?

My point is that politicians would have to enact such legislation. We are asking congressional representatives -- who now blow with the wind for a few lobbying dollars -- to so completely change their ways that they are willing to thumb their noses at their irate constituencies. When gas prices at the pump rose in the summer of 2008, even a presidential candidate of some integrity (McCain) was transformed within weeks into something of a buffoon, singing “Drill, Baby Drill” alongside his attractive wife (the apparent object of attention) at a Bikers' rally. At the Republican National Convention, the candidate was more balanced:

“We will produce more energy at home. We will drill new wells offshore, and we'll drill them now. We will build more nuclear power plants. We will develop clean coal technology. We will increase the use of wind, tide, solar and natural gas. We will encourage the development and use of flex fuel, hybrid and electric automobiles.”

Green investments not withstanding, the thrust of this remark was to differentiate the GOP from the Democrats in their willingness to drill more wells now. An absolutely horrific idea, of course.

McCain could not resist the political pressure to pander to those who were so worried about tomorrow’s commute that they were willing to damn their grandchildren to a much reduced existence – so who can? Obama’s first climate control legislation was, by the standards of most environmentalists, far too tepid. Nonetheless, even this weak legislation faced a taxpayer’s revolt. See: http://energycitizens.org/?gclid=CPDnutDmxJwCFdFL5Qodl2fHmA. There are plenty of so-called think tanks that will be employed in the war against environmentally sound legislation, even going so far as to deny the problem itself. E.g., http://www.heritage.org/press/commentary/ed051508b.cfm

Sachs is notably more optimistic than I. He argues that for a price of somewhere between 1 and 3% of world GNP – and a lot of perfect policy and technological development – we may indeed stem the tide of climate change. This is not on the face of it infeasible. But this is also not trivial – for the average American family this might mean a “tax” of $2000 a year –and we cannot swallow this bitter pill until we acknowledge that is far worse to leave our children and grandchildren compromised than to take our medicine.

I think it is too much to expect that in the absence of a transformative revolution in the way we think about our role on this planet and our responsibility towards one another – and towards future generations of humans, much less animals – our legislators will lead the way to the solution of the problem. This might bear repeating: if we are not in agreement that some sacrifice is needed today in order to preserve the planet for our grandchildren, how can we expect politicians to enact very severe, truly draconian legislation that will incentivize us to do the right thing? Anonymous is sound in his or her thinking that harnessing the private interest for the public use through taxes and subsidies is worthwhile, and is the right means to the ends, but I remain highly doubtful that we as a society, much less a world population, are ready to give our politician the leeway to act in the interests of non-voting children – and non-voting future generations, yet unborn. Politicians cannot be expected to get way out in front of us; at best, they can represent us. Of course, if we collectively decide to sacrifice for future generations; that is, if we become altruistic in our relations to future generations, our politicians may do what we ask (if we can make it worth their while and stem the pressures of lobbyists who do not share our interest in the planet). We cannot perform the implementation plan suggested by Anonymous until we are willing as a world society to support policy makers to trade off our current interests for future planetary well-being. And without a groundswell of human understanding, compassion, and a willingness to act, and then the activism to get it done, I do not think the political system can do any better at solving the "problem of seven generations" than can the market. In fact, it may bear paying special attention to the Great Law of the Iroquois: “In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation... even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine." [Italics mine.]

That is, to care about the future means to accept a price to ourselves – and that is as it should be. That’s altruism, and I think it is needed.

Thanks once again to the comments by Anonymous. Further, this posting is dedicated to my mother who remains adamant that human ingenuity can and will ultimately save us from ourselves.
_____
* In my original posting, I believe I had underestimated this factor; the current text reflects a corrected estimate.

Disappearing Bonobos and Our Faint Hope for Altruism

2009-08-22T21:40:00.000-04:00

Not long ago I was chatting with an old college friend, John, who was trained as a molecular biologist. John and I had discussed cooperation and altruism models before, so it was natural to discuss the exciting and surprising recent discovery of an altruism gene in the Bonobo (pan paniscus, the smaller and more peaceful of the two chimpanzees). Primatologists have long understood that while the African chimpanzee (pan troglodyte) and Bonobos diverged late in evolutionary history they remain nonetheless palpably distinct in their levels of aggression and cooperative behavior. At the risk of gross simplification, it can be said that in the face of great stress, the African chimpanzee reacts with displays of anger, while the bonobo reacts with displays of physical affection (and often the consummation of sexual activity. See for example: http://bonobohandshake.blogspot.com/2009/06/update-from-nick-dsouza.html ).

John had long maintained the jocular but sobering view that humans, having branched off before this evolutionary break, chose the wrong path.

Our learning of the new research led to some quick and casual theorizing. John threw out the idea that the apparently #1 problem of humanity – how to foster cooperation among humankind sufficient to avert planetary disaster – might now be “solved” genetically. Using modern techniques, one could splice out the gene for altruism from our cousin the Bonobo and splice it into a cluster of human beings. After a brief moment of reflection, John reflected a deeper understanding of the science of altruism and added this sobering rejoinder: but we would of course have to then protect that new sub-species of “good” humans from the rest of us, because we would wipe them out long before they could grow to critical mass and make a difference.

There’s the rub. So far, the science of altruism and cooperation has come a long way, and in those studies have been many glimmers of hope: humans are often more concerned with equity and fairness than economists would have us believe; cooperative solutions that have the promise to make a big difference in the long run are not so complex that humans cannot often find them; that despite the many ills that plague us mentally, there are times and places when humans actually engender far more cooperation than do players behaving “rationally” (in a narrow self-interested sense) and end up doing better than the theoretically “optimal” solution. Alas, these are but glimmers of hope, for a prominent result in the literature seems to be that for altruism to survive, it must be quarantined, separated from competitive, self-regarding egoists. The self-interested egoists usually wipe out the altruists and then a world of purely egoistic agents go to work to make a big mess of things, driving the society to a dismal, competitive equilibrium.

If you have a modicum of training in economics (but no recent behavioral study) you may find this especially surprising for two reasons. One, in what sense is a behavior (such as pure egoism) defective if it is so much stronger than a behavior such as altruism? Shouldn’t we prefer people to behave in ways that prove most competitive? (The answer to this one is a resounding no, but the answer will take some time to explain. For now recognize that many behaviors that seem to work well in the short run fail in the long run – a prime example is our overreliance upon fossil fuels.) Two, is not a purely competitive equilibrium brought about by purely competing agents a good solution – isn’t that what markets do? (The answer to this one is “sometimes not,” and while this is what markets do – and you may have been taught that markets are good – in the long run unfettered markets can do great harm. The Great Recession of 2007-? is just one such example of the disease of market fundamentalism. This is another long story I hope to get to later.)

Note that John’s thought experiment suggests something absolutely critical. Those of us teaching and researching in the area of altruism and cooperation usually imagine that if we could just figure it out – well enough if not perfectly – we could teach a few people how to behave in ways that increase the odds that we make it on this little, warming planet, and they would go off and spread that lesson. Yet John’s Bonobo gene splicing thought experiment suggests that even if we could hardwire altruism into some of us (a form of nearly perfect teaching), it is not likely to matter, as the competitive egoists are generally strong enough to kill off the incipient population of altruists. Altruism must not only be taught (or genetically programmed) but it must be cultivated, fostered, protected in order to be sustained.

How do we do that?