Value Competition

Reductionism and Reverse Reductionism

A reductionist sociobiological project of explaining sociology and psychology in terms of biology lacks appeal to social scientists concerned with their own discipines.  By contrast, a reverse-reductionist value competition project of explaining pyschology in terms of democracy in the form of competition within the brain has potential to gain support from political scientists, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists.

Falsification and Confirmation

For a human science to work well, it should be able to negate as well as to affirm the strongly held moral preconceptions of the scientist.   I strongly agree with Marvin Harris's criticism in Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture of the Hegelian dialectic in its original form and in its modified forms in Marx and Levi-Strauss as failing under this criterion.  But it also seems to me that Harris's own "cultural materialism" fails under the same criterion.  The absence of an economic analysis of whether particular forms of social stratification are or are not conducive to social welfare allows an anthropologist using cultural materialism to see the world as an endless demonstration of exploitation in action if he is so inclined, just as an anthropologist using Marx's dialectical materialism can.  By comparison, economic analysis with its constant variations on the themes of market success and market failure usefully challenges strong believers in both regulation and markets, in both equality and inequality.   At the same time, economic analysis helpfully offers the possibility of confirmation to believers.   Economists with strong value commitments--such as Milton Friedman with his libertarianism or John Maynard Keynes with his statism--can do fine work that supports their predilections. 

One way to think about value competition is as a subset of economics that deals with collective decision, especially political decision backed by compulsion.  For all their very considerable value, public choice analyses of collective decision that assume rational, self-interested actors are subject to the criticism that they fail to take into account the ambivalence and complexity of human motivation.  By trying to do so, a value competition analysis has something to offer to those with more hopeful beliefs about collective action than appear warranted based on an assumption of rational self-interest.  Because a value competition analysis can also come up with the conclusion that collective decisions and agents vested with discretion will diverge from optimality, the method also has something to offer those skeptical about collective action.  Given that duality, the method has the ability to usefully discomfit both believers in politics and skeptics about politics.

Contradiction: Empirical not Metaphysical

An inquiry into contradiction needs to avoid metaphysical overreach.  An example: Light and dark by themselves are not contradictory, simply contrasting or different.  One can develop a polarity that divides up the cosmos between light and dark, and then proclaim a contradiction.  But unless two more conditions are met, no actual contradiction exists.  First, one's metaphysical system needs to correspond to something outside one's imagination--such as a Taoist shared metaphysics that constitutes a cultural reality, or an actual "light center" and "dark center" in the brain that constitute a biological reality--to be something other than a personal phantasm.   Second, there needs to be a socially understood if not agreed upon argument between the poles--if in the polarity of light and dark neither side makes a moral claim to be better (truer, more virtuous, more beautiful) than the other, no contradiction between the poles obtains. 

Another Take on Abstracts

The categorization of abstracts according to whether they adopt a particular pole over another (e.g., calculation over culture) or mediate between the poles can be seen in relation to an underlying attitude toward dualism involving a clash or contradiction of basic interests or principles.  A given work might fit into any of the following categories:

1) Dualism--partisan for one side;

2) Dualism--negative toward both sides;

3) Dualism--positive toward both sides;

4) Anti-dualism--cooperation rather than conflict/contradiction/clash;

5) Anti-dualism--pluralism--multiple interests, principles, etc.;

6) Anti-dualism--cross-cutting cleavages.

The value competition tilt is toward position 6, with position 3 in practice standing in as a proxy for it.

What's Next

Over the last several hundred years, many members of the cultural and economic elite in wealthy nations moved away from religious faith and a sense of themselves as part of a minority religious elect. The recession of religious belief did not lead to an elite devoid of fighting faith. Instead, it lwent along with the creation of an ideological elite divided into warring left and right camps, with each side fired by by us-them passion and feelings of being part of an elite elect.

Suppose that over the next several hundred years a waning of belief among the elite occurs for left andright political faith in its current form. If left and right faith becomes intellectually counter-cultural in the way that religious faith has, it is likely that those among the cultural and intellectual elite with a gift for us-them moral passion and moral differentiation will come up with a new vehicle for their skills. Three possibilities for what that future new thing might be: a) an opposition between a logic/calculation/science elite and an intuition/pattern-making/arts elite; b) an opposition between a pro-market, pro-growth, pro-meritocratic elite, pro-progress elite and an anti-market, pro-stability, anti-meritocracy, anti-progress elite; and c) an opposition between a pro-elite elite and an anti-elite elite, with the latter identifying itself as the tribune of the people in their struggle with the elite.

Three Advantages of Socialist and Populist Parties Over Liberal Parties

Assume a "natural state" in which elite bargains and clientelist politics prevail.  Assume three types of parties that challenge the natural state: liberal parties that favor elites determined by open competition; socialist parties that favor elimination of markets and rule by and on behalf of the majority; and populist parties that favor rule by and on behalf of the majority.  Compared to socialist and populist parties, liberal parties have the following handicaps: a) liberal politicians will have difficulty establishing themselves as credible agents for the majority given that in many specific instances their policies will be favorable to business and other elites; by comparison, socialist and populist parties can credibly signal their loyalty to the majority by an array of policies including, for example, nationalization, subsidized food, and installation of less-educated leaders; b) liberal parties cannot appeal to straightforward "bring them down" anti-elite sentiment on the part of the less-educated, less-affluent majority in the way that socialist and populist parties can; and c) liberal parties cannot appeal as well as socialist or populist parties to egoistic values associated with a desire to be part of the ruling elite. 

Clientelist Politics

A rational self-interested voter in a system in which his or her vote as well as other indications of support can be credibly signalled will support the side that can provide the indvidual voter or a local group with which the voter is affiliated (family, clan, tribe, etc.) with the greatest personal benefits in return for the vote or other indicia of support.  (If punishments as well as benefits are possible, the voter will support the side that maximizes utility, taking into accoount a desire to avoid punishment as well as a desire for benefits.)    The rational voter will not care about whether the policies of that party are desirable for him or her or for the groups with which the voter is affiliated, because given a sufficiently large electorate the vote has a negligible chance of affecting the outcome.  Hence, the rational vote is a purely quid pro quo vote.  This type of politics, in which a party' and its supporters engage in a direct exchange relationship, can be called clientelist. 

The Suboptimality of a Fixed Elite

Suppose an elite E whose members each have intensity I(E) and a majority M whose members each have intensity I(M).  Participation costs for members of both E and M are P, and I(M) < P < I(E).  The result is that all members of the elite participate, and none of the majority.  That outcome may be suboptimal, since the total amount M has at stake, or M times I(M), may be greater than the total amount E has at stake, or E times I(E).

If P for the majority can be reduced (through, for example, the formation of a majoritarian party whose leaders are reliable agents of the majority) so that the majority participates, M can prevail over E.  In that case, though, there is no assurance that the amount the majority has at stake is greater than the amount the elite has at stake.  To provide that assurance, some members of the elite must not be fixed in their participation for the elite.  If members of the elite have a mutable position, in that they can defect to the majority side or not participate, a signal of the elite's intensity I(E) is sent; without such mutability on the part of at least some members of the elite, no signal is sent, and any overriding of the elite by the majority that takes place may be as suboptimal as the elite's domination of the majority may be.

Problems of a Single Control Center

In the collective model, altruistic and individualistic values/norms come in to optimize the outcomes that would otherwise occur if voting depended solely on preferences/interests.  In the individual model, I think such values may come in at an earlier stage.

The beginning of the story: Assume there are two major kinds of suboptimality that a learning and decision center within an organism will be prone to.  First, the center will not work hard enough, because the benefits of work by the center will be in large part external to the center itself.  Second, the center will work to benefit its own particular limited interests rather than those of the individual as a whole, much less those of the surrounding social system.

Two numerical examples: The control center will not carry out an action that costs it 2 and that then benefits itself 1 and the external system (the individual in which the center is housed plus the social system in which that individual is embedded) 5.  Nor will the control center carry out an action that costs it 2 and then has negative consequences of 1 to it and positive consequences of 5 to the external system.

One model: Suppose learning costs for the control center are 1, 2, or 3, with all three costs equally probable.  Suppose costs and benefits for the control center are likewise an equally probable 1, 2, and 3 randomly distributed with respect to learning costs, and further suppose that the control center will not work unless expected benefits to it exceed its costs.  The result is that the control center will only work in the low cost cases in which benefits are expected, since only in those cases do expected benefits (1.5) exceeed costs (1).

Now suppose that positive or negative consequences for the external system are 5, 10, and 15 and are uncorrelated with the consequences for the control system.  Under this pessimistic framework, the work of the control center left to itself has no tendency to benefit the external system.  If the external system could affect the incentives for the control center, its work could be made beneficial to the external system, since the center is capable of learning that brings benefits of up to 15.  One way to do that would be by flooding the control center with "altruistic" signals that cause it to internalize the benefits to the external system; if that were done, the control system would work in medium and high cost cases as well as low-cost cases with anticipated benefits to the external system.  That seems to me an implausible assumption, though, because there's nothing in it for the control system.  It becomes more plausible if there is something in it for the control system, in the form of the external system flooding the control center not only with altruistic values but also with egoistic values that give the control center an ability to overcome possible problems with short-term bias that lead it to work less hard on its own behalf than it will with egoistic values.

In the end, though, I don't see the single control center model as optimal in practice.  It's analogous to a political model in which a dictator is allegedly motivated optimally by the proper compensation package, as detemined by the populace.  To make the dictator's incentives optimal, it's necessary that he be removable, and so too, I believe, with an internal control center, in which some process of competition for control seems to me a requisite for an optimal system. 

Sociobiological Modelers

I've been reading/dipping in Evolution: the First Four Billion Years, a collection of essays and encyclopedia entries edited by Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis.  What follows is a partial list with notes on major figures in the field who seemed from their brief bios to combine sociobiology/evolutionary psych or work relevant to it with optimality modeling of some kind; omitted are people like E.O. Wilson, Dawkins, Hamilton, and Trivers whom I've already got some kind of line on:

 1.  Richard Alexander--Darwin and Human Affairs (1979); The Biology of Moral Systems (1987); UMIch emeritus--morality as indirect reciprocity; level and type of tech unclear from bio;

2.  Luigi Cavalli-Sforza--Cultural Transmission and Evolution (1981); The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Population in Europe (1984); Stanford emeritus--in addition to the distribution of genes work I associate him with, C-S has modelled cultural transmission; level and type of tech unclear;

3.  John Gillespie--The Causes of Molecular Evolution (1991)--uses mathematical models to contend that variable environments strongly affect molecular evolution, thus countering "neutral theory"; no direct connection to social behavior; high tech;

4.  Motoo Kimura--The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution (1983)--the flip side and predecessor of Gillespie; uses math to advance neutral theory, i.e., the idea that most DNA changes are random rather than adaptive; high tech;

5. George Williams--Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966)--criticism of group selection, progress, increased complexity claims--level and type of tech unclear.