Value Competition

A Self-Correction on Game Names

Since 2010, I’ve classified symmetrical 2 x 2 games into four categories: Harmony games, Trust games, Cooperation games, and Leadership games.   That terminology is reflected in any number of posts on this blog, as well in other matrix-based work I’ve done.

I’m still very good with Leadership, but now have a quibble about Trust and bigger problems with Cooperation and Harmony.

The idea that hit me earlier today and that led to my sense I’ve got some of the names wrong: Games can/should be labeled on the basis of the attribute on the part of one or both of the players that is efficacious in optimizing in the game.

Applying the idea to the four basic types of games:

Leadership is a good term for the class of games such as Battle of the Sexes in which the best or equal best outcome is achieved through leadership by one player that is respected b y the other player.

Trust is an all right but less than best term for a class of games such as Stag Hunt in which the best outcome is achieved though one player being able to assure the other that he/she will play the jointly maximizing strategy that is best for both players.   Trust can be reasonably taken to imply a reciprocity that is not necessary for the optimal outcome in these games, in which only one player need assure the other of his or her intentions.   Assurance gets at that unilateral concept better than trust, and is hence a somewhat better label  for these games.

Cooperation with its highly generic, imprecise associations now strikes me as a weak and overly general term to apply to a class of games consisting of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and one version of Chicken.  In the PD and the relevant type of Chicken, the distinctive game property is that altruism on the part of both players solves the game cleanly.  Absent mutual altruism, these games are very tough ones.  The term for these games that now seems right to me is thus Altruism, or—to be more precise if also clunky about it—Mutual Altruism. 

Finally, Harmony seems like a weak way to describe the games in which the dominant strategy for egoists results in the jointly best outcome.   Simply put, the attribute that works to solve these games is Egoism.  (Note: Altruism fails to work well in a number of them, though it does solve a number.)   Hence, I would call these games Egoism games.

So, the new tetrarchy of labels for games: Egoism, Altruism, Assurance, and Leadership.

We’ll see how long this typology lasts :)*

*Maybe not too long...it occurs to me that using Egoism and Altruism as names for games creates an issue.  In a few easy games both altruism and egoism solve the game; calling all these games egoism games involves an arguable bias in favor of that attribute.  We could call those games Rationality games to indicate that either egoistic or altruistic calculation works to solves these games.  In that case, the tetrarchy becomes a pentarchy, with Rationality added to the other four qualities that solve games.  That seems right, foir now :)

Reflections on an Unread Book

Off to board for PDX in a half hour...the comment the other week on Charles Murray is still on my mind...Murray has an exceptional gift for provocation, and the theme of his new one--the moral collapse of the white American working class over the last fifty years--indeed provokes me, even or perhaps especially since I haven't read it...

One reaction/thought embodied in a pompous title I just drafted for this post and then scratched: A Dream of a Better Future for a Distressed Working Class: Politics as the New Opium of the People and Why That's a Good Thing.

The thought: Instead of banging on about decline and decay, we need to think about what can give a renewed purpose to the lives of people in the American working class. 

I completely respect the claim--I take it this is M's own normative position--that if the American elite starts affirming the socially conservative values by which it lives that that affirmation might help the working class.  The elite believes, and the people follow.

Fair enough--but I just don't think that claim corresponds to a big part of social reality in which non-elites need to define themselves against elite ideology rather than simply adopting it.

Thus my line: Just as the recession of certain elites from religious belief centuries ago opened up space for a popular embrace of religion that helped people down the socioeconomic ladder at one stage in history, a recession of certain elites from political belief now could open up space for a working class embrace of politics.

Currently American elites dominate the ranks of true believers of both red and blue stripes.  I am highly hopeful that if that became much less true, the prospects for working class people in our country would become much better.  If blue faith and red faith became the heartland properties of people in the lower ranks of our society instead of those at the top, the worrisome features of contemporary working class life would have a much better chance of turning around than under our current regime.  Or so it seems this morning at Newark airport :)

 

 

Mixed Nash continued

Following up on the four-person game analyzed in the previous post...

Memo to self: If the Pascal-Bentham-Whitman-Nash type that optimizes in two-player games and holds its own against egoists is a truly groovy type, it should also optimize and be an evolutionarily stable type in the four-player game in which you play either 2 or 10 and get either $2 or $10 except that if all four choose 10 no one gets anything.

As a two-person game, this is a leadership game, and I'm morally sure (that is, I think I know but don't really know) that P-B-W-N will optimize because the game is similar enough to ones I have analyzed.

As a four-player game...well, I haven't really thought about multi-player games for P-B-W-N purposes, basically because the tech gets out of my league...

A note or two...the .928 probability of playing 10 that is mixed Nash for four egoists is decidedly suboptimal...a little SAT-style plug-in suggests that the optimal level of playing 10 is somewhere between .5 and .75...so P-B-W-N if it is an optimizing type in the 4-player game should play 10 at that lower level...to meet the criterion of being an evolutionarily stable strategy, it should also be resistant to egoism...

I'm genuinely interested (i.e., no moral certainty here) as to whether P-B-W-N is optimizing and an ESS in the 4-player game...a to-do for when some time opens up after getting my SBE paper for 3/1 done...

 

 

How much do you believe in mixed Nash?

Hat tip to my son for telling me about the game below...

Suppose there are four players who can independently choose either 2 or 10 and will receive $2 for 2 and $10 for 10 EXCEPT that if all four choose 10 they will all get zero.  

In that game, three players choosing 10 and one choosing 2 is Nash, in that no one has an incentive to deviate knowing the other's choices.  Working out mixed Nash is trickier...the intuition is that if the others play a strategy mix that leaves you with a payoff of x from playing 10 and the same payoff of x from playing 2, that mix is Nash...so let's see...your payoffs are equal if there is a .8 chance the others will all choose 10 and a .2 chance they won't...the tech is then that the others "should" play 10 with a p = p to the third power = .8 or about .928 if mixed Nash is treated as normative.

Now, I personally believe in mixed Nash as a powerful guide to unlocking social reality.  (Maybe that belief is quite wrong--but it makes sense given the academic project I'm engaged in, which tries to marry mixed Nash with social preferences like altruism and competitiveness.) 

Give a belief in mixed Nash and egoistic preferences, one would expect that a lab experiment would show people playing 10 a bit over 90% of the time.   My intuition is that that would in fact be borne out. 

(A qualification to reflect my strong belief in analyses that consider social preferences: The prediction above is dependent on the framing of the experiment implying that self-interested preferences--as opposed to social preferences of one kind or another--are the relevant ones in the situation.)

 

Reflections on 21st Century Integration

I was born in 1955, and will be forever shaped by the struggle for integration in schools, businesses, housing, and society that I read about as a child—police hoses turned on children in Birmingham, the passage of the Fair Housing Act in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and many other moments that were simultaneously inspiring and tragic.  As an adult, I see myself as trying to carry on a version of that struggle for integration in the much less dramatic and tragic setting of two affluent suburban communities near the poor, majority black city of Newark.  

Over time, I have become much more optimistic about the prospects for integration both in my community and more broadly.   When my wife and I and our young children moved to our community from Newark twenty years ago this year, I saw the community as an imperiled island of integration in a sea of segregation to our east and west.  When I was running real estate tests and helping to set up a pro-integrative loan program for a local pro-integration organization ten plus years ago, I worried about whether the community would be able to maintain long-term integration in the schools, and was very pessimistic about the prospects for two integrated suburbs near us that were less affluent and highly-educated than our community.   Nowadays, a huge influx of people from around the world, especially Asia, Latin America, and Africa, has transformed the university in which I work, has transformed the two nearby suburbs I just mentioned, is beginning to transform my community (in which 27% of the residents with family origins in Africa were born overseas per the 2010 census), and I believe will continue to transform the place where I live and am active.  

I am extremely positive about the ongoing changes in America, New Jersey, my university, nearby communities, and my own community that have made these places a magnet for people from around the world.   Last year, I helped found a non-profit civic organization devoted to celebrating and promoting my community as an international one, and I remain strongly committed to that vision and to that organization, in which I serve as president.

Much as I am impressed and grateful at the rise of an open-to-the-world country and community, there are some thorny issues both at the political level—it is very important, I believe, to keep sight of the traditional integration issues involving blacks and whites in America that I grew up with—and the personal level. 

It is fine, I believe, if my faith in an international present and future for my community inspires me to work harder and more effectively as a school board member and candidate for reelection this year.   It is not fine at all if my official position is misused in an effort to gain benefits for my civic organization.  Nor is it fine—and here the lines can be subjective and trickier to draw—if my civic activism leads me as a board member to support positions that I think are good for the cause of a global present and future in my community but that are not good for the children in the schools and the taxpayers.   Governmental bodies like school boards can benefit from the energy of people like myself who have strong value-based commitments that are expressed in activism in religious groups, civic groups, and other kinds of non-government organizations.  But there are rightful expectations that people in government are obliged to represent the broad public interest, not a sectarian or organizational interest, no matter how worthy the interest may be.

Altruistic Values by High and Low Productivity Employees

Under Bob Frank's model of relative position, more productive employees pay for their higher position relative to their less productive peers.  The result is that pay within a group of employees, such as faculty in an academic department, is substantially more compressed in an egalitarian direction than their productivity.  The microfoundational basis for why higher productivity employees pay is that they value deference and higher rank, which they cannot get as effectively by banding together with other high-productivity employees as they can by working with peers who are less productive.  Although Frank's model can be understood in terms of pure egoism, it offers a much more powerful lens into reality if one accepts the assumption--a highly plausible one, in my view--that people have competitive preferences as well as egoistic ones. 

The interaction between the high productivity employees and their low productivity peers can be modeled as a leadership game.  We may assume that both players do badly in the event of a leadership conflict in which they cannot agree on whether, or how much, the high productivity player pays for rank; the leader does best and the follower does adequately if they agree on an arrangement favoring either the high or the low productivity player; neither side does too well or too badly if neither side asserts itself.  

It is intuitive that if either side can commit itself to leading, it has an advantage over the other.  On the face of it, the reverse is true for a player who embraces the idea of following the other player's leadership.  Such a player--a high productivity player who likes the idea of paying a high tax for his or her rank or a low productivity player who believes that the high productivity player should not have to pay for a leading position--would seem to be at a major disadvantage in the leadership game.

The altruist who values following the other's leadership is indeed at a disadvantage if his or her preferences cause her to play following as a dominant strategy.  But it is not likely that valuing the other's leadership will in fact produce that counterproductive result.  If the other player follows, the altruist may be assume to have a preference for leading, just as the egoist does. W

What valuing following the other's leadership is very likely to do is to create a game in which the other player realizes that the altruist has a very large difference between his or her payoffs when the other leads and a smaller one when the other player follows.  The counterintuitive logic of mixed Nash equilibrium leads us to expect that the other player will therefore follow most of the time, resulting in the altruist receiving substantially better payoffs than the other player. 

Hooking back to Bob Frank and his model: Bob himself is a highly productive academic who seems very much fine with a high tax.  Some of us--no names mentioned!--aren't as productive and have ethical qualms about a tax paid by the highly productive.  The suggestion here is both the altruistic highly productive employee--RF we'll call him or her--and the altruistic less productive employee--WE we'll call him or her--may have a belief system that plays out to their advantage.  The altruistic and highly productive RF may find himself getting a bigger raise from the faculty peer evaluation committee than if he were an egoist; the altruistic and not so productive WE likewise may do better in exacting a tax from RF that goes to himself than he would if he were egoistic.

Kahan and Our Town: Thoughts on Making Science Wars Gentler

As one who for whatever reasons gets very bothered by what comes across to me as poor science driven by ideology I'm a big fan of Dan Kahan, whose work--though hardly without its own ideological overtones--strikes as a really excellent effort to (among other things) sympathetically explore motivated reasoning by both conservatives and liberals, as explored in this Chris Mooney post on a recent Kahan study on climate change.

What follow are a few brief Kahan-inspired thoughts on making "science wars" over the use and misuse of scientific analysis less hostile and more constructive.  The context is my own community, in which I've run for the school board in 2006, and will be running again in 2012.  In both cycles, science-related conflicts have been one feature of the local landscape.  One purpose of the reflections is to reflect on my emotions and what has inflamed them and calmed them, with the hope that doing so may be useful at least for myself as I prepare to enter the electoral lists again.

The first thought is directed at those of us who find themselves/ourselves agitated by what they/we perceive as biased, flawed use of science by the other side: If at all possible, do your own independent, separate analysis on the same or a different issue, rather than simply criticizing the other side.  Having done so, you are much less likely, I think, to be locked into a defensive, "the other side is grossly misusing science" mindset.

A story as to how that can work from my past experience: There was an issue in 2005-2006 over the effectiveness of the school district's efforts to detect and remove non-resident students.  I was unhappy about claims that a responsible analysis of data would show there was not a problem of any real magnitude.  In classic "science warrior" fashion, I couched my objection as itself grounded in science: I didn't necessarily believe there was a big problem, but I strongly objected to what I perceived as misuse of science to show there was not one.  What made me less agitated was the following: A town official who wanted to pass an anti-fraud ordinance persuaded me to do my own study suggesting there could be a substantial number of non-resident students in the system.  Through feeling qualms at the leaps, the uncertainties, and the arguable unfairness of my own study, I became less agitated and righteous in my feelings.  Even as I campaigned against him, I found myself respecting the incumbent board member who had carried out the analysis that had originally driven me around the bend.

The second thought is for those of us whose scientific analysis is being emotionally criticized by some for defects and for failing to respect proper boundaries between facts and values: Whether or not the critics come up with their own alternative analyses as suggested above, consider doing your/our own alternative study, either publicly or for oneself and one's team.  Such a study could be highly useful for oneself or members of one's team to the extent we/they are too full of righteous passion tied up in defensiveness about being criticized by the other side. 

The issue I have in mind: There is a current "science wars" stir in my town related to data analyses of test scores before and after a partial deleveling in one middle school grade and to a study of college readiness that used grades and level placements as indicators of readiness.  The study strongly bothered people concerned about the "correlation does not equal causation" point that putting students in higher levels (or deleveling), much less giving them higher grades, is not shown to be good policy by the data. 

I feel myself to be responsible for the controversial studies as an incumbent board member.  I think there is a good case that all of us who, whatever the nuances of our feelings, were not deeply bothered by the work as it was generated internally and then presented publicly--for me, for my board colleagues, and our district administration--not to say it is the responsibility of the other side that was greatly agitated by the work to come up with their own analyses.   Rather, I believe those of us on the inside should strongly consider doing our own independent studies.   That would not necessarily be a corporate project--board member A may feel differently from board member B, who in turn feels differently from administration--which leads to its own tricky problems.  But it does make sense, I believe, for those of us who are insiders to reflect as individuals or with others by coming up with our own alternative analyses of what we did originally.

A final optimistic thought on the science wars writ large and writ small: For all the unpleasantness of the politically-charged passions that may arise, lucky is the country and the town in which people's energies are channeled into doing science and questioning it.   I've spoken with a church friend about her experience on a school board in a nearby community in which value-laden science wars are absent and the everyday reality is one of patronage and perks.  Compared to what she experiences as a board member, I feel extremely lucky to be in a community where civic-minded people with strong moral and political values and a strong commitment to scientific analysis--people like the board member I described running against in 2006, the administrators who did the college readiness and effects of deleveling studies, and a community member who criticized those studies and who is now joining me in my 2012 run for the board--are a major part of the scene.  

One may hope for a more forgiving, gentler way to discuss the ties that bind science, ethics, and politics.   One may also be very grateful to the other side for its passions, its skills, and for being different from oneself and in doing so making oneself better.  

 

 

 

Carol Gilligan at Paduano: Reflections on the Possible Darwinian Logics of Gendered Ethics of Care and Duty

After just writing a conference paper the other week on five forms of selective altruism that can be related to the work of Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Adam Smith, and Carol Gilligan, it was a very pleasant surprise to learn that Gilligan was coming to the Paduano seminar.  (The others on my list were unavailable, as one of the seminar organizers quipped to me.)

I thoroughly enjoyed her presentation and the questions yesterday afternoon.  I felt myself some distance closer to appreciating rather than being disturbed by the cross-currents of moral passion and moral skepticism that run through modern politics and science and that I felt both in Gilligan (advocating an ethic of care that simultaneously is its own form of passionate moralism and a form of questioning passionate moralism) and in her questioners (e.g., a man asking whether the ethic of care properly understood suggests opposition to abortion, a woman asking about early-appearing differences between boys and girls). 

CG's account of a gendered split, coming at a young age for boys and at adolescence for girls, between an ethic of care and an ethic of rights-duties made me wonder about various Darwinian stories one could tell about the split and their relative merits...

Story 1: "The split is in some key ways advantageous for men.  Allowing that it has serious negative psychic and practical repercussions for them, it also gives them the figurative and all too often the literal whip hand in human affairs.  For women, for children, and for society, on the other hand, the consequences of the split are clearly negative, even it contributes to reproductive success for people who follow the approved gender scripts.  The question is whether we can join together to overcome a painful split that in the end is harmful for all--very much including men--in favor of a better way of life that liberates people to live in plurality and that elevates democracy over patriarchy."

Story 2: "The split is against our interests as individuals.  We would be richer, fuller, happer people if we did not find ourselves occupying boy-man rights-duties roles or girl-woman care-nurturing roles.  But it is important in raising children to have a friendly opposition between the two ethics.  Just as the opposition between liberals and conservatives makes modern democracies work, the opposition between a male ethic of duty and a female ethic of care has made human child-rearing work for millennia.  The split, painful as it is, is in the interests of children and of society.  One can improve how the split plays out in people's lives, but one needs to respect its underlying logic for our children and our species even as one laments its limiting effects on men and women as individuals."

Story 3: "The split and its associated gender hierarchy is desirable in Darwinian reproductive terms for parents, children, and society as a whole.  More than that, it makes sense at psychic and practical levels.  In order to resolve basic issues of leadership in as effective a way as possible, it makes sense to have people perform their core activities in gender-mized groups--families--with an "A" gender in the family that is the default leader though not necessarily the leader in a given case and a "B" gender that is the default follower though not in all cases.   Making gender hierarchy less rigid may be very useful, but the fundamental idea of gender hierarchy makes sense in evolutionary and practical terms, disturbing as it also is to part of our moral sensibilities."

Story 1 is more or less Gilligan's; Story 2 is what I was spinning out as I was listening to her; Story 3 is one that I just spun out. 

I'll forbear comment on the normative merits and demerits of the stories in favor of a note or two on their scientific issues.  For Story 2, there is an interesting theoretical-practical issue as to how evolution has succeeded in getting us to overcome our individual inclinations toward union in the interest of a split that helps the collective; my quick take is that the problem is not such a big one, since Story 2 relies on an effect on one's offspring that fits fine into mainstream Darwinian reasoning.  For Story 1, the reliance on a split between what works in Darwinian terms and what is actually good for individuals and the species strikes me as fine in theoretical terms.   For Story 3, there is an issue with how the collective benefit of clear leadership works its will on the assigned followers; that doesn't seem like a big problem, though, given a linkage in followers' and leaders' reproductive success through families.  

In other words, all three stories strike me as fine in Darwinian terms, much as they all may reasonably raise hackles for other reasons.  Person A may be bothered by a tendency toward complacency and resignation in Story 2, while Person C worries about demonizing and lack of common sense in Story 1, and Person B is annoyed by what feels like chauvinist piggery in Story 3.  All fair enough--but on the face of it I don't see a basis for A, B, or C trashing their disfavored stories as poor science.

 

 

Who Gets What: Social Preferences, the Creation of Social Surplus, and its Division among Managers, Workers, Shareholders, and Society

[Notes for a paper to be written with the above title...]

The Owner-Manager Plays the Insist-Yield game with His Employees

The key to prevailing in the game is a credible commitment to insist, against which the other player will rationally yield.   A "this business is mine," "my way or the highway" state of mind comes more naturally to the owner-manager, it is reasonable to assume, than it does to the employee-centered manager or the shareholder-centered manager.   Accordingly, one expects more credible commitments based on owner-managers having that kind of unyielding character than from the other types.

The problem with a "this business is mine" commitment to having things the owner's way is that it may well not be seen as ethically acceptable by the employees, in which case conflict is likely.  The contentious and occasionally bloody history of nineteenth century capitalism may be seen as involving exactly that type of conflict, with owner-managers who strongly asserted their prerogatives giving rise to angry movements of workers fighting against total control by owner-managers. 

A second, gentler way to prevail in the insist-yield game is to value the other side's payoffs in the situation in which both of you insist on getting your own way.  By doing that, you can wind up in the same place as the dognatic "I will always insist" player, but without the unpleasant, conflict-provoking dogmatism.

So which side is better equipped to value the other's payoff in the insist-insist situation?   Though  no absolute answer can be given, I would suggest that workers in the owner-manager business are in better shape to appreciate the owner's payoff for insisting than the owner-manager is to appreciate the worker's payoff for being feisty.

As long as the owner has not marked himself as unreasonable by being dogmatically insistent, it is not a difficult stretch for workers to understand and even feel for an entrepreneur-owner who has created a business.  It is a much  more difficult stretch for the owner-creator to feel a parallel empathy with the payoffs of rebellious workers.

If the foregoing is correct, it is harder for the owner-manager who has built a business to have a character that is altruistic in a useful way than it is for the worker.  The owner-founder, altruistic as he or she may be in certain ways in caring about the welfare of others, is likely to have difficulty in empathizing with workers who rebel. A  limited caring about the owner helps the workers to get their way against the owner, whose difficulty in  caring for the workers leads him to lose out in the "gentle commitment" game.

 

 

How to Overcome Obstacles to Broader Entrepreneurship: Another Contentious Answer

[The following perspective on what needs to be changed to get us to a better Smith-Hume future matches the one in the previous post, but with an anti-right instead of an anti-left valence...]

"First, we need to open up the possibilities for economic entrepreneurship by decisively blasting out hierarchical conservative practices and values that consign some people and some groups to passive, acted upon status while elevating others to dominant, active, innovating status.

Second, we need to open up the possibilities for cultural entrepreneurship by moving away from a stolid, deadening conservative traditionalism that puts people into boxes, with only a few people seen as artists, scientists, and as creators more generally, and the rest of us classified as mere workers of various kinds.

Finally, we need to open up the possibilities for social entrepreneurship through thrusting aside conservative norms of deference and passivity in the lower orders in favor of feistiness across the social spectrum.  As to the theory that opening up opportunities for political entrepreneurship for those further down will be enhanced by diminished political faith among those at the top: The idea is a dubious one--there is a certain unpleasant, resentment-based quality to it.  But even if its premises were granted and we wanted to reduce elite political faith, it is reasonable to think that elite conservative disdain for liberal hopes and elite conservative market evangelism are bigger problems to be addressed than hopeful elite liberalism is."

Two observations: 1) I take it that the relative merits of the contentious center-left claim as to the way forward and the previous contentious center-right claim are only determinable empirically rather than in some more sweeping fashion; 2) it's interesting (if not surprising) the way the aspiration to take down politics a peg among the elite to give more space to the people has its own competing political interpretations.

 

How to Overcome Obstacles to Broader Entrepreneurship: One Contentious Answer

[The following argumentative answer to what blocks a better future and thus needs to be changed is one that has considerable personal plausibility to me as a 1977 graduate of Harvard University and a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School.  That background conditions me to see the current order of the world as one in which the attitudes of people within my old school and others like it occupy a central position, and a potentially better world as one in which those attitudes have undergone substantial rectification. 

At the same time, I strongly believe that the way the world looks to me, though one hopes not altogether detached from reality, captures only a part of reality of what the world is.  If Smith-Hume for the 21st century is to be a viable vision, it needs to be one that works for people who see blockages to progress in places other than the ones my personal experiences and my personality incline me to see them.  So if you find yourself irritated by the grafs below, fair enough...stay tuned for the next post...]

"First: To encourage econonomc entrepreneurship and accomplishment among more people all across the economic spectrum, a key thing that needs to happen is the blasting out of the antipathy to money-making as a goal that was at the core of Marx and that remains intertwined with the way many left of center people think and feel.  Only if deep-seated left ambivalence about economic entrepreneurship can be firmly consigned to the scrapheap of history as decisively as the old, dead vision of a nationalized, post-capitalist economy has already been can we really move forward. 

Second: To encourage cultural entrepreneurship and accomplishment among more people, a key thing that needs to happen is the blasting out of a unionist, "it's just a job," clock-oriented mentality.  Though that reactionary, resentful state of mind is found among all kinds of people in all kinds of positions, its political home is on the left and its practical base lies in teacher's unions and other groups allied with the left. 

Finally: To open up more room for people lower down in the socio-economic spectrum to be social entrepreneurs, it would be a very good thing if the elite in our society turned their moral fervor away from politics toward some other arena.  Just as the decline in religous faith among the elite empowered ordinary people, so too with an elite decline in political faith.  The heart of elite political fervor lies on the left, and so here as in the other domains it is encrusted left ideology that presents the greatest obstacles to a more open, more entrepreneurial, more successful future."

 Stay tuned for an opposing approach...

 

Carrying Forward the Practical Utopianism of the Scottish Enlightenment

Let us assume that Smith and Hume basically got the path for social progress right in the late 18th century: The way forward is to blend practicality and aspiration in a way that is conducive to the expansion of opportunities and accomplishments for and by a widening circle of people.

What follows for us?  Three major things, it seems to me.  First, in the area of economic productivity, we need to figure out ways for many more people to enjoy the ongoing sense and reality of creativity and innovation that a relatively small proportion of people now do.  We don't want as large a majority of our population a hundred years from now to be, say, highly paid but perhaps disillusioned cogs in big corporations, government offices, or professional firms who do not themselves engage in entrepreneurial economic activity.  Not everyone could or should be an economic entrepreneur, and we should be deeply grateful for the rise of organizations that have freed people in wealthy nations from grinding micro-entrepreneurship--and yet, a better future will be one in which a much larger proportion of people than now are economic entrepreneurs in at least a part of their lives. 

Second, in the area of cultural productivity defined by often hard to monetize accomplishments in the arts and sciences, we similarly want to have a substantially larger proportion of people who are cultural entrepreneurs.  Not everyone could or should be a cultural entrepreneur painting pictures, writing songs, conducting scientific experiments, and so on--and yet, a better future will have such activities being a part of the lives of a much larger proportion of adults than is now the case. 

Third, in the area of social productivity defined by morally infused activity with other people and individually, we could similarly use a broadening of entrepreneurial spirit and a resultant expansion of social accomplishments.  Again, we will not all be social entrepreneurs--but it would be very nice indeed if a significantly higher proportion of us took on the role for part of our lives.

Let's assume (a big assumption, to be sure) that that 21st century reformulation of Smith and Hume in terms of expanded economic, cultural, and social entrepreneurship is a good form of practical utopianism.   That leads to two matched question: What are the obstacles to getting there?   And how can we overcome those obstacles?  

It seems to me there are two (no doubt more) plausible responses...I'll try to lay them out in the next two posts...

 

 

 

 

 

North, Wallis & Weingast on the Natural State and the Open State

Violence and Social Orders is not a good book formally, in that its sometimes intensely detailed micro-level history on matters such as English land law mixes uneasily with its sweeping macro-level perspective, announced in the subtitle: "A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History."  (I deeply empathize with the problem, having tried unsuccessfully to write a book on political ideology that blended narrative historical sweep, case studies, and modeling.)  It is a good one substantively, though.  The account it gives of the transition from the elite bargains of traditional or "natural" states to a more open order of perpetual organizations and widespread competition is a worthwhile contribution to the Adam Smith-Charles Tilly-Francis Fukuyama tradition.

I have an issue, though.  The open access order we live in feels to me not like the end of history but like a yet more mature natural state, with all the segmented, bargaining elites--academic, religious, military, financial, manufacturing, etc.--of the old order mitigated by greater impersonality and access, but still very much present.   There are a lot of different 1 percents (or .01 percents), but the world we live in is very much a world of elites and others.

Maybe that is not something to be grumpy about.  But maybe it is...[to be continued]

 

NJ Transit Conductors: The Rule-Followers and the Relaxed

The conductor on my train from Newark to New Brunswick today didn't charge me the $6 step-up that railroad rules say is supposed to be charged when a rider shows a pass for South Orange to Newark, which is my regular commuter route.  That's a frequent occurrence, and it leads me to wonder about the degree to which the relaxed attitude of many of the conductors toward the rule is part of an optimal "yin-yang" balance with their many colleagues who do follow the rule...

My intuition is that a revenue-maximizing railroad does want some nonenforcement, partly for practical situational reasons, such as a crowded trains with a short time between stops.  I also suspect it should want some level of broader, "we're mellow and not enforcing the rule" nonenforcement.  The basic point is that rule enforcement creates in some cases a high level of tension between the RR and the patron.  Patrons who are aware that the RR makes errors in their favor are likely to be much mellower and less likely to abandon or otherwise dis the RR when it makes rule-enforcing errors against them, as will inevitably be the case. 

That's the way it works for me.   Some of the time, conductors misread their cards and charge me more than $6--for some reason, $9 is the usual erroneous figure.  I don't complain by pointing out the right number and embarrassing them in front of other riders.  I would if some conductors didn't let me off the hook altogether.

So is the level of nonenforcement optimal?  I have the "reform government" intuition that it's not.  My guess is that I get away w/ not paying the step-up substantially more than I should.

I also intuit/guess/suspect that if NJ Transit had a better labor system instead of the "job security after a probationary period" system I suspect it has and shares w/ most government agencies, the proportion of conductors enforcing the step up rule would go up by a fair amount.

At the same time, I don't think the optimal rule enforcement rate is close to 100%.  Even in a hypothetical world where all the conductors have all the time in the world to enforce the rule, are indefatigable workers, and don't mind doing the enforcement and taking the heat at all, the rule should sometimes not be enforced.  The RR has an interest in having some conductors who are mellow (and/or conflict averse) and let the riders off the hook some of the time. 

 

 

 

The Division of Leadership between the Visionary and the Executive

Some morning-or-two-afterthoughts in relation to the selective altruism paper...possible material for including in a revised version for journal submission...

First (and maybe last) thought of the day: Does the selective altruism analysis cast any light on the standard business practice of having both a big picture CEO and an executing President (as well as having a policy-making board and employees of the firm; corporate life can be described as a nested series of visionary-executive combinations), and on parallel practices in politics (e.g., political appointees and career employees in agencies) and in the government and non-profit sectors (e.g., policy setting school boards and implementing superintendents)?  

A subquestion of particular interest to me as an administrator in a business school department that has a major concern with operations issues:  Does selective altruism cast any light on the reality that it is the visionary as opposed to the executive who is at least nominally on top in all these dyads?

Okay...let's think...

Maybe selective altruism does shed light here, at least in regard to the second question.  A key issue with the selective altruism model of leadership, as with others, is whether one can in the end prevail on everything as a leader, or whether there is a division of labor with the preferences of the follower prevailing on plenty of things or even most things.  The second view seems plausible to me for normative and practical reasons.  Selective altruism I believe should take that into account.  Servant leaders and the other types don't simply win by their selective altruism, as in the paper.  Some of the time they actually do wash the feet of the followers.  Otherwise, it is hard to see how in the end all the types avoid collapsing into the masterful leader, who for all his considerable virtues is also a troubling character and whose consistently commanding style should be only one way to lead, not the way.

So, on why the executives report to the visionaries rather than the other way around: It is plausible to me that a commitment to lead based on one or another character type is less abrasive to others when it relates to intangible matters of vision than when it relates to concrete matters of operations.  Relatedly, it is plausible that a character type with a commitment to lead as to vision finds it easier to pass the screen of ethical acceptability than a type with a commitment to lead as to specifics.  The latter type has some obvious advantages in the struggle for life, and we should expect it to be an important character type with a number of variations.  But it is a type that finds it difficult to pass the screen of ethical acceptability.

Another way to put the point: Egalitarian, forgiving, sympathetic, and servant leadership are all readily translated into types of visionary leader that pass an ethical screen, bu are not so readily translated into operational leaders.   The masterful leader is the reverse: very easily translated into operational leadership, but with greater difficulty in passing the acceptability screen. 

One way for masterful leaders to pass the acceptability screen is by getting extraordinary results; that greater pressure on the masterful type to perform to overcome its ethical deficiencies leads to an empirical prediction that the results associated with masterful leaders will be better than those from the other selectively altruistic types.  I hasten to note such an empirical relationship would not necessarily show that organizations should prefer masterful leaders; what the hypothetical relationship would show in my view is that masterful leaders are more likely to get weeded out when they perform badly, not that the type is better at the creation of value than other leadership types.  It does seem to me, however, that such an empirical relationship could lead an organization in that direction; a boss who is masterful would more readily be held accountable all else equal than the other types of selective altruists and thus should be preferred in hiring and promotion.   The counter I take it is that compared to a Smithian sympathetic manager who cares about highest joint value outcomes, the masterful leader is likely to entrench himself and to in fact be difficult to remove.  Accordingly, certain other types of selectively altruistic leaders may wind up being more accountable.

Much as submissiveness and deference are very important parts of our makeups, human beings are nitty about being ordered to do things.  The visionary leader who avoids that type of direct order is thus advantaged as a type over the operational leader. 

Violence and Hunting as Leadership Games

Instead of seeing violence as an outcome of a PD in which both players have a predatory incentive to kill and steal or of a Trust game in which both players fear that the other will be aggressive, violence can be seen as an outcome of a Leadership game in which the players will do best if one of them leads and the other follows, adequately but not well if neither one leads, and disastrously if they fight one another for leadership.  Sample payoffs for such a "Lead or Yield" game are shown below:

                                                  Other

 

                                  Yield                               Fight to Lead

    Yield           Non-violent Disorder (0, 0)           Order (5, 10)

Self

  Fight to Lead        Order (5, 10)                Violent Disorder (-50, -50)

In a Leadership game, your best response to pacifism or aggression by the other player is opposite what it is in Trust.  In Trust, the best response to aggression is aggression, while in Leadership the best response is to yield.   The best response to pacifism in Trust is pacifism, while in Leadership the best response to pacifism is aggression--or assertion, if one wants to use a more positive term to reflect the value added by the combination of leadership by one player and following by another.

Hunting can also be modeled as a Leadership game rather than a PD or a Trust game.  The best results from the hunt come from one player leading and the other following, with worse results if there is no leadership or a leadership struggle.  Sample payoffs are below:

                                                   Other

                               Yield                                         Lead

    Yield           Lack of leadership (2, 2)            Organized hunt (5, 10)

Self

  Lead               Organized hunt (5, 10)          Leadership struggle (0, 0)

 

 

 

Hunting as a Trust Game or a PD Game

Important as it is, the negative-sum violence game just described is, one hopes, less common than positive-sum games such as trading or hunting in which the players are likely though not certain to achieve a positive payoff of some kind.

Below is a hunting game in which both players face a choice between cooperating and finagling, and the payoffs follow the PD:

 

                                                                          Other

                                                Cooperate                             Finagle

                Cooperate                     5, 5                                   0, 10

Self    

                 Finagle                       10, 0                                   2, 2

As always in a PD, you are better off finagling no matter what the other player does.

Now, the hunting game with Trust payoffs:

 

                                                                         Other

                                                Cooperate                             Finagle

                Cooperate                    10, 10                                   0, 5

Self    

                 Finagle                          5, 0                                   2, 2

Here, as in Trust games in general, both of you do best by cooperating; you have a reason to finagle only if the other player is going to finagle.

Compared to the violence game with its relatively clear picture of aggression, the meaning of finagling or cheating in a hunt is open to interpretation.  If finagling is outright theft of the killed animal, the PD payoffs work in immediate material terms.  But in that case, I would suggest that the future-discounted payoff for the thief may well be lower than the payoff when both players cooperate, given the likelihood that the hunters know one another very well.  In that case, the game is a Trust game, not a PD.  In any case, in the hunting game as in the violence game, the players are unlikely to see themselves as having PD payoffs.  They are likely instead to see themselves as having Trust payoffs, and as feeling pressure to finagle not because they can get their best outcome from doing so but from concern the other player will do so and leave them with their worst outcome.  (Obviously, both players cannot successfully finagle by stealing the captured animal; one way to interpret the situation in which both finagle is that they abandon cooperation in favor of pursuing lower-value game individually, which makes the game a Stag Hunt, one of the variants of Trust.)

Instead of outright thievery, finagling in the hunt game can be interpreted instead in terms of harder to detect "cover your ass" or CYA behavior that minimizes the risks for the CYA player, who, say, does not take the same chance of getting gored by the tusked boar that the cooperator does and in doing so makes the hunt more dangerous for the cooperator and less likely to result in success.   If finagling is CYA behavior rather than outright thievery, the immediate material payoffs for the players as well as the future-discounted ones are likely to follow Trust rather than the PD.  The finagler lowers the probability of success to a degree that hurts him as well as the cooperator; that means his payoff for taking advantage of the cooperator is less than his payoff for mutual cooperation; that in turn means the game is Trust and not the PD.

My intuition is that hunts by our ancient ancestors and by ourselves are more likely to feature finagling in the form of CYA behavior than finagling in the form of outright thievery.   Accordingly, it seems to me that the immediate material payoffs associated with cooperating versus finagling in a hunt are usually better described as Trust games than as PDs.   Further, even if the immediate material payoffs of cheating are accurately described by a PD, the future-discounted payoffs seem likely to be better described by Trust than by the PD.

 

 

 

Hunting as a Trust Game or a PD Game

Important as it is, the negative-sum violence game just described is, one hopes, less common than positive-sum games such as trading or hunting in which the players are likely though not certain to achieve a positive payoff of some kind.

Below is a hunting game in which both players face a choice between cooperating and finagling, and the payoffs follow the PD:

 

                                                                          Other

                                                Cooperate                             Finagle

                Cooperate                     5, 5                                   0, 10

Self    

                 Finagle                       10, 0                                   2, 2

As always in a PD, you are better off finagling no matter what the other player does.

Now, the hunting game with Trust payoffs:

 

                                                                         Other

                                                Cooperate                             Finagle

                Cooperate                    10, 10                                   0, 5

Self    

                 Finagle                          5, 0                                   2, 2

Here, as in Trust games in general, both of you do best by cooperating; you have a reason to finagle only if the other player is going to finagle.

Compared to the violence game with its relatively clear picture of aggression, the meaning of finagling or cheating in a hunt is open to interpretation.  If finagling is outright theft of the killed animal, the PD payoffs work in immediate material terms.  But in that case, I would suggest that the future-discounted payoff for the thief may well be lower than the payoff when both players cooperate, given the likelihood that the hunters know one another very well.  In that case, the game is a Trust game, not a PD.  In any case, in the hunting game as in the violence game, the players are unlikely to see themselves as having PD payoffs.  They are likely instead to see themselves as having Trust payoffs, and as feeling pressure to finagle not because they can get their best outcome from doing so but from concern the other player will do so and leave them with their worst outcome.  (Obviously, both players cannot successfully finagle by stealing the captured animal; one way to interpret the situation in which both finagle is that they abandon cooperation in favor of pursuing lower-value game individually, which makes the game a Stag Hunt, one of the variants of Trust.)

Instead of outright thievery, finagling in the hunt game can be interpreted instead in terms of harder to detect "cover your ass" or CYA behavior that minimizes the risks for the CYA player, who, say, does not take the same chance of getting gored by the tusked boar that the cooperator does and in doing so makes the hunt more dangerous for the cooperator and less likely to result in success.   If finagling is CYA behavior rather than outright thievery, the immediate material payoffs for the players as well as the future-discounted ones are likely to follow Trust rather than the PD.  The finagler lowers the probability of success to a degree that hurts him as well as the cooperator; that means his payoff for taking advantage of the cooperator is less than his payoff for mutual cooperation; that in turn means the game is Trust and not the PD.

My intuition is that hunts by our ancient ancestors and by ourselves are more likely to feature finagling in the form of CYA behavior than finagling in the form of outright thievery.   Accordingly, it seems to me that the immediate material payoffs associated with cooperating versus finagling in a hunt are usually better described as Trust games than as PDs.   further, even if the immediate material payoffs of cheating are accurately described by a PD, the future-discounted payoffs seem likely to be better described by Trust than by the PD.

 

 

 

How the Trust Game Can Replace the Prisoner's Dilemma

One may fear that the other player sees the violence game in the PD terms Pinker postulates.  If one is facing a player who sees violence in PD terms and for whom aggression is a dominant strategy, aggression is the optimal strategy for oneself. 

The higher the payoffs for ongoing mutual cooperation, the less likely it is that victory through smash and grab aggression will yield a higher return than mutual cooperation.  That should increase both players' confidence that they are playing a Trust game rather than a PD game. 

Pinker represents the effects of commerce as a lifting of the upper left payoffs for both players so that they exceed the payoffs for victorious aggression.   In other words, the game is now a Trust game, not a PD.  

The same conversion of a PD to Trust can take place when the underlying game is a positive-sum cheating game as opposed to a negative sum violence game.   To be continued...

Pinker's Violence Game and Mine

A key issue in considering social preferences and advantageous altruism is whether one sees the basic state of individual-individual and group-group interactions in terms of a Prisoner's Dilemma game or a Trust game.   My own belief is that the Trust game is often a better representation of reality than the PD game.  Further, Trust represents players as motivated in a way that the players themselves would likely accept, while the PD takes a cynical view that the players themselves would not likely accept, much as it may be true for certain individuals and situations.

Let's make the point concrete by considering the basic violence matrix that Pinker introduces under the label of The Pacifist's Dilemma (Figure 10-1, p. 679); your payoffs followed by the other's payoffs are shown in the parentheses:

 

                                                       Other

                            Pacifist                                   Aggressor

    Pacifist         Peace (5, 5)                     Defeat/Victory (-100, 10)

Self

  Aggressor    Victory/Defeat (10, -100)         War (-50, -50)

This negative-sum game is a PD, in that no matter what the other player does, you are better off being an agressor.  You get 10 instead of 5 if he is peaceful, and -50 instead of -100 if he is an aggressor.

Now consider a Trust game, which I'll call Trust or Fight:

                                                        Other

                            Pacifist                                   Aggressor

    Pacifist         Peace (10, 10)                     Defeat/Victory (-100, 5)

Self

  Aggressor    Victory/Defeat (5, -100)         War (-50, -50)

 

The payoffs here are the same as in Pinker's game with the significant exception that the best outcome for both players is peace between them rather than victory over a peaceful other. 

The Trust game accords with what a great majority of modern humans (and I suspect a large majority of current and ancient hunter-gatherers as well) would be willing to describe as their payoffs.  Successfully raiding a neighboring band to kill the men and steal the sheep and the women is not a higher payoff outcome than living in peace.  By contrast, the PD weighing of violent victory as the most preferred outcome defies what people would claim about themselves--which I believe is true most though not all of the time for the vast majority of humans.

It is quite right that some of the time the PD captures the potential for violence in a given dyadic interaction in a way that Trust does not.  But far more of the time, I believe Trust captures the reality and the PD does not.  A very large majority of the time--certainly now, and I believe for all the time modern homo sapiens has wandered on the planet--people do not follow a psychopathic payoff function of valuing the killing of innocent others and the theft of their possessions over peace.  It is certainly true, as Pinker writes, that some portion of the time people are violent and attack others, impelled by pure predation, by a righteous downgrading of the other, or by fear of the other.  But that violent state strikes me as the exception not the rule.  Human beings are so made, I would suggest, such that predatory violence is not appealing to most of us most of the time.  Rather, most of us most of the time would prefer to live in peace with the other, even if we knew we could get away with killing and robbing him. 

Or, to put it in terms of the Republic and Glaucon's questioning of Socrates: For most of us most of the time, the best outcome is not to do injustice to another successfully, but to live justly with another who lives justly with us.  The psychopath's perspective that a violence game based on the PD implicitly adopts is one very important reality of human nature in the past and the present.  But the ordinary person's perspective that deeply fears the worst outcome of being killed and robbed and that does not value killing and robbing the other over peace is a much more common and also highly important feature of human nature.  My personal preference is for a Trust game modeling of violence that adopts the ordinary person's self-professed payoffs as the norm, rather than a PD modeling that eschews the payoffs ordinary people would profess in favor of payoffs psychopaths would profess.

None of the foregoing is meant as an empirical point about the historical changes that are the focus of Pinker's book.  It is possible that I am right about the Trust game as the better one to describe the problem of violence in all or most modern societies, while Pinker is right about the PD as the better one in classical Greece and all other societies circa 300 BCE.