Narcissists and Their Problematic Leadership

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.
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* 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

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

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.
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* 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

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?