Value Competition

Building Better Agents: Modern and Traditional Social Preferences

1.  Now: Tied altruism (valuing to some degree the additional social value provided by work and/or leadership) and competitiveness (wanting to be ahead of the other player) lead to choice of "work" (or "lead") over "don't work" (or "follow").  Positive individual consequence: The altruistic-competitive type gets to lead instead of the egoist.   Positive social welfare consequence: Positive externalities from higher level of work effort. 

Then: Egoism.  Social welfare consequences: Lower level of work effort than with altruistic-competitive social preferences, fewer positive externalities.

2.  Now: Egoism with respect to non-nuclear family.  Positive social welfare consequence: Work and leadership not inhibited by shame at surpassing a member of one's in-group.

Then: Shame with respect to surpassing a member of an in-group.  Social welfare consequences: Reduced level of work and leadership in leadership games. 

3.   Now: Situational, merit-based leadership.  Shame at failing to maximize total returns to players and society by following the lead of the other when that is optimal.  Positive social welfare consequence: More social welfare optima are reached.

Then: Ascribed lead and follow roles based on factors such as age, gender, etc.--altruism, competitiveness, and shame associated with adherence to these roles.  Social welfare consequences: Coordination on lead-follow readily achieved in leadership games; poor incentives for work and enterprise.

4.  Now: Forgiveness of those who fail to make optimal response of trusting in an assurance game.   Positive social welfare consequence: Egoist has confidence that forgiver will trust; egoist will then also trust.  Qualification: Forgiveness does not work well against a competitive and spiteful other who does not care about social welfare and who cares about beating the other player rather than his or her own payoff.

Then: Retribution against those who fail to trust in an assurance game when you have trusted; honor culture.  Social welfare consequences: Those punished who are in one's in-group will trust if signal is sufficiently clear.  Those punished who are in one's out-group will retaliate, resulting in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium for the assurance game. 

5.  Now: Generalized shame reduces the "temptation" payoff for, say, not leaving a tip in a restaurant one will never return to, in a one-shot PD.   Positive social welfare consequence: PD solved some or all of the time for anonymous, one-shot interactions.

Then: Shame is particularized and only applies to interactions within one's in-group.  Social welare consequences: PD solved for one's in-group but not otherwise.

6.  Now: Shirkers/defectors in PD games who are punished respond in some cases by improving their behavior.  Positive social welfare consequence: More PDs get solved.

Then: Shirkers/defectors in PD games who are punished respond in some cases by punishing those who punish them, especially when the punishers are from out-groups.  Social welfare consequences: Difficulty in enforcing norm of cooperation in repeated PDs.

7.  Egoism as governing principle in harmony games in which self-interest of players results in dominant strategies that are socially and individually optimal.   Positive social welfare consequence: Harmony games get solved.

Competitiveness as governing principle in harmony games with a member of an out-group.  Social welfare consequences: Problems in solving a harmony game with a member of an out-group.

8.  Now: Competitive and altruistic feelings based on political ideology that cut against as well as in favor of one's demographic in-groups.  Positive social welfare consequence: Better resolutions of political issues.

Then: Altruistic feelings toward members of in-group and competitive feelings toward out-groups.  Social welfare consequences: Suboptimal group-based politics.

9.  Now: Competitive and altruistic feelings based on compliance with rules and on adherence to cost-benefit analysis that cut against as well as in favor of one's in-groups.   Positive social welfare consequences: Better resolution of organizational and legal issues.

Then: Less well-developed altruistic and competitive feelings associated with cost-benefit analysis.  Social welfare consequences: More rule-oriented, less flexible, less optimal approaches to organizational and legal issues.

10.  Now: Altruistic feeling toward members of ideological in-group; competitive feeling toward members of ideological out-group.   Social welfare consequences:  More optimal solutions to games with members of ideological in-group when ideology is salient.   Conflict with members of out-group when ideology is salient and potential for suboptimal outcomes unless ideological adversaries are accountable to non-ideologues through elections or otherwise.  

Then: Weakness of ideological as opposed to demographically-based political feeling.   Social welfare consequences:  See above. 

11.  Now: Altruistic feeling toward nation and members of national in-group; competitive feeling toward other nations and nationals.   Social welfare consequences:  More optimal solutions to games with co-nationals.   Conflict with other nations and their nationals; potential for suboptimal outcomes through war and otherwise.  

Then: Weakness of national feeling.   Social welfare consequences:  See above. 

12.  Now: Altruistic feeling toward your organization and members of your organization; competitive feeling toward competing organizations and their members.   Social welfare consequences:  More optimal solutions to games with others in your organization.   Competitive feeling toward others may lead to better outcomes through  motivating higher work effort or worse outcomes; interaction here between the individual level  of social preferences and the group and societal level of institutions and whether they channel competitive and egoistic feeling related to organizational loyalties in a socially productive direction.    

Then: Weakness of organizational  feeling.   Social welfare consequences:  See above.   

13.  Now: Low or zero valuation of having higher hierarchical rank than another.   (Decline of hierarchical competitiveness)    Individual advantage for social egalitarian: Doesn’t have to pay a premium for hierarchy or impose it coercively; the social egalitarian thus earns more than the hierarch in a market.  Social welfare consequences:  Less coordination on leader-follower roles, fewer struggles over hierarchical rank (as opposed to leadership).

Then: Strength of hierarchical feeling.   Social welfare consequences: See above.

14.  Now: Low or zero concern about being characterized as dishonorable for violating social codes that do not enhance social welfare.   (Decline of non-utilitarian shame)    Individual advantage for social egalitarian: Doesn’t have to pay a premium to uphold costly social codes or to fight honor battles.    Social welfare consequences:  Optimal outcomes from abandonment of codes that do not enhance social welfare.  Negative outcomes from situations in which codes that in fact enhance social welfare are mistakenly abandoned.  

Then: High concern about being characterized as dishonorable for violating social codes that do not enhance social welfare.    Social welfare consequences: See above.

 

 

 

 

Pinker's New Book

The Better Angels of Our Nature is excellent.  Three reasons why:

1) Pinker's ability to combine his broad argument about the ongoing pacification of the species with telling details is admirable.  For an example of the latter, consider Figure 7-14 on p. 411, showing the overall decline in homicides of intimate partners in the US from 1976 to 2005, along with a much sharper decline in male than female victims, and P's concise and reasonable explanation of the graph on pp. 411-412;

2) P's defiance of the norm that one argues by poor-mouthing the situation of one's own side is refreshing.  It's nice to read a book that decisively rejects the "Things should be at least 50-50 our way, and we've got much less than 50 so give us more!" style in favor of "Peace and reason are winning, and that's wonderful!";

3) Related to #2: P's confidence reinforces the case for the humanitarian values he espouses: Why torture or execute if the bad guys are pathetic figures on the wrong side of history?  Why not be tolerant, mellow, and reasonable?   Why not, indeed?

Pinker's book is as good as it is partly because it should cause readers of almost all persuasions to disagree with at least parts of it.  Three things I disagree with:

1) P suggests that the good Enlightenment of Locke, Hume, the American Revolution, Kant, etc.  embodies the true spirit of modernity and that bad phenomena that have occurred over the last few hundred years such as the Terror, Marxism, Communism, and fascism are atavistic in one way or another and contrary to a basically benign ethos of modernity.   I disagree.  Ideology that is rationalizing as well as demonizing seems to me much more of a distinctive problem of modernity than an aberration from modernity.  After reading P, I remain a believer that modernity as it has developed over the past few centuries involves (among other things) a strong ratcheting-up of ideological moralism that fuses the traditional groupishness of human beings with a rationalized "our values are better than yours" stance.  That rationalized groupish ideological moralism can be found, it seems to me, in the good groups as well as the bad groups of modernity, in classical liberals as well as fascists, in liberals and conservatives as well as Marxists, ultra-nationalists, and Communists.   A view of modernity as Faustian seems to me right; our modern ratcheting up of moralism to include rationalized rather than supernatural ideological value systems brings us a great deal of good in both practical and moral terms--as P very nicely chronicles--but it also risks much.  

2)  P implies--to me at least--that enlightenment can be universal at some point.  I disagree.  I believe that even if the whole world becomes Sweden and Sweden itself becomes the most advanced liberal suburbs of Stockholm, there will still be more disciplined and reasonable people and less disciplined and reasonable people in all countries; that members of certain socially salient groups, such as middle class people and working class people, will on the average be closer to or further away from the rule of reason and nonviolence; and that those who are more peaceful and reasonable will owe that desirable state partly to a group-based sense of moral superiority to their less disciplined and reasonable compatriots.  

3)  P implies--to me at least--that the right substitute for theistic religion is a faith in humanitarian values and human enlightenment over time.   I disagree.  As a politics, belief in humanitarian values and human progress is an agenda I'm very happy to subscribe to.  As a modern religion, though,I would plump instead for a yin-yang faith in opposites and in competing and complementary values in oneself, society, and the cosmos.  If a modern religion of progress and humanity is identified with the political left or center-left, it is too sectarian and too prone to its own demonizing moralism.  If it is identified with three cars in every garage and everyone a college grad, it is too materialistic and mundane to be satisfactory as a religion, much as it may be an estimable practical politics.  If it is identified with the feats of Darwin, James Joyce, Steve Jobs, and other modern gods it is too elitist, too little in touch with the part of the religious impulse that raises up the lowly and humbles the exalted. 

 

 

Three Imaginary Worlds

Many years ago, I read Tolkien and wanted to escape into a world of lore and magic that was gone and never had been.  Some years ago, I read J.K. Rowling to my children.  I wished I could find Platform 9 3/4 and go to Hogwarts, and wished more strongly that they could.  Now I'm reading George R.R. Martin.   He makes me feel one part of love, one part of wonder, and two parts of loathing for a world that was and still is--the pre-Enlightenment warlord and peasant world of honor, betrayal, blood, and dirt that endures in many parts of the world and in a part of every one of us.  I'd still like to escape to Middle Earth, or for that matter Hogwarts.  But I have no more desire to ecape to Westeros than to Afghanistan.  

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society

In his 1958 ethnography of life in "Montegrano," an impoverished village in the South of Italy, Edward Banfield contended that peasants and others in the village were "amoral familists" who acted to benefit the short-term interests of their nuclear families, assumed that others would do likewise, and avoided civic commitments.  Banfield suggested that enlightened self-interest (or what in value competition terms would be called egoistic values) on the part of villagers could help the situation, and made proposals for monitored local government and expansion of education, while expressing pessimism about the prospects for such measures being tried: 

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Backward-Society-Edward-Banfield/dp/0029015103

Assuming the basic accuracy of Banfield's portrayal of uncooperative, often unhappy villagers in Montegrano in the mid-1950s--though there has been a dispute about whether he underrated community networks in the village and by extension in Southern Italy in general http://www.arts.mun.ca/congrips/newsletter/44%20-%20Fall%201995.pdf --there is a question as to whether his portrayal of social dysfunction applies to traditional societies in general.  I'm doubtful that it does; the uncooperativeness, miseria,and strong if inchoate group antagonisms between the peasants and the gentry in Montegrano that Banfield describes seem closely connected to the village being a lagging part of a more or less modern Italian state.

Moral Progress (2)

My former Rutgers Business School colleague Ed Hartman presented on Thursday at NYU's Paduano seminar on Aristotle, virtue ethics, character, and business ethics.  A fair amount of the discussion focused on a decision made in 1977 by a boss of Ed's at a management consulting firm to send him to London rather than a female colleague with stronger qualifications because "the Brits won't work with a woman."  The decision was reversed by a senior partner with more backbone, and/or better judgment; the woman was sent instead of Ed and did very well. 

A value competition take on why the once-controversial idea of treating women equally in business has become an accepted principle in the US, the UK, and certain other parts of the world involves the idea of competing value systems reaching consensus.  As a general proposition, left-of-center economic egalitarianism on behalf of less well-paid groups such as women has not won assent from conservatives.  (Similarly, right-of-center belief in the moral rightness of paying and treating people according to their market value has not won general assent from liberals.)  But on the particular issue of an equally qualified and productive woman receiving equal treatment and equal pay, the way in which a position originally identified as liberal also resonates in terms of conservative pro-market values has fostered a moral consensus.

Managerial Values Come Home for Thanksgiving

The Dining section of the 11/26 NYT has a semi-humorous piece, "The CEO of Thanksgiving Dinner," complete with quotes from HBS professor Amy Edmondson http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facEmId=aedmondson on how the host should choose between a tightly controlled, "organize to execute" management style and a looser, "organize to innovate" style:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/dining/26dele.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Well...perhaps this is an arena in which the host(ess)'s competing managerial values should be active but latent, rather than having one side selected with the clarity Professor Edmondson advocates...

More seriously: The ability of contemporary middle-class adults like those being satirized and lauded in the article to deploy ambivalent managerial values in their home lives and to inculcate these values in their children strikes me as a highly valuable feature of cultural modernity.  It also strikes me as a concern, though, if working-class adults and their children do not have a like ability to swing back and forth flexibly in their lives between the "organize to execute" and "organize to innovate" poles. 

18th-Century England and New Jersey

In a departmental get-together, a new colleague of mine who has taught in the San Francisco and Minneapolis metro areas noted some deficiencies of NJ and the Newark metro area compared to CA and MN, including poor road signs, endemic local corruption, and seriously decayed city neighborhoods.  I'm a strong NJ loyalist who's been here most of the years since 1964--that said, he's right.  One story as to why that also explains some appealing features of NJ, such as its strong localist, village-oriented spirit of self-government: NJ has considerably more 18th century (and earlier) English localism and inefficiency than the more recently settled and rationally planned Upper Midwest and West do.  Just as the US as a whole clings to an obsolete English system of measure abandoned in the UK and the rest of the world, NJ (and other Atlantic seaboard states) cling to a broader set of colonial-era English folkways largely left behind in the old country and never adopted in newer parts of the US.

The value competition take?  A pro-NJ story would be that the state is better run than newer parts of the US because it features more of a fruitful competition between traditionalism and modernity (pharm, affluent commuter suburbs, etc.).  A pro-MN or CA story, which I find more persuasive, is that those states are better run than NJ, partly because their relative modernity itself involves an enhanced level of usefully competing values on matters like efficiency and equity in government.

American Politics in 2050: Thoughts Provoked by Junot Diaz

In Oscar Wao, Diaz's Dominican-American narrator uses the N-word as his general term for Dominicans. That provoked the following value competion reflections:

A bad possibility, per VC: The N-word has become widespread among latinos as well as blacks but remains taboo among whites; this pattern has accompanied a long-term increase in  racial/ethnic polarization in American politics, with latinos as well as blacks voting overwhelmingly for Democrats and whites voting fairly heavily for Republicans.

A good possibility, per VC: By around 2030, working class traditionalist values and middle class modernizing values converge to make the n-word in its "n-a" form an acceptable alternative to "you guys" in addressing whites; after a period of heavy use by younger whites for ten years or so, the n-word declines overall while moving its way up the age spectrum.  Meanwhile, racial/ethnic polarization in American politics declines, and by 2050 blacks as well as latinos and whites support the parties in fairly similar proportions.

A prediction: The fate of the word and of racial/ethnic polarization in U.S. politics hang together.  The word matters, though it may be as a signal rather than as an independent variable.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz's novel http://www.junotdiaz.com/ didn't work for me most of the way through, and then did.  I didn't find the narrator's incessant n-word references to Dominicans--perhaps another post on that theme--or his gangsta, babe-magnet persona persuasive, and the equally incessant Tolkien and other fantasy/sci fi references and analogies--Trujillo as Sauron, etc.-- seemed peripheral, distracting, and/or politically confused for a few hundred pages.  The story coalesced for me with the return of Oscar, the love-obsessed, fantasy/sci-fi-obsessed New Jersey Dominican-born hero, to the DR to meet his doom.  A semi-VC line on why: In New Jersey, the heroic quest of Frodo Baggins and the chivalry of Sir Galahad, and the aspirations of Oscar Wao to follow in their footsteps, are casualties of modernity and its rational culture of efficiency and democracy.  In the more traditional culture of the DR, on the other hand, Oscar in his fatal quest for the love of a prostitute with a vicious police officer boyfriend is more akin to Frodo and Sir Gawain.  Diaz does not make the lot of immigrants from the DR in New Jersey, or the possibility of the DR's becoming a modern, highly productive state like Japan, Norway, or New Jersey, nearly as sad as Tolkien made the passing of the age of the elves and Sauron--hurrah for that possibility, I should say, and I suspect Diaz might agree--but he did in the end make me believe emotionally in the analogy between beauty and brutality intertwined in a traditionalist, fatalist DR and evil and virtue bound together by rings and deeper forces of fate in Middle Earth before the Age of Man. 

Moral Progress

How is moral progress made?   According to the value competition framework, progress comes about when competing values come to an optimal consensus on a particular issue.

An example: Suppose I threaten to commit an action that costs me 10 and costs you 100 unless you pay me 50.  Such a threat is morally condemned by altruistic Benthamites (and other types of ethicists as well), and is characterized as lacking credibility by rational choice theorists, who point out that a rational actor will not benefit from carrying out his/her threat if the other party refuses to cave.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-credible_threats

In the culture of modernity that has risen unevenly around the world over the past few hundred years, there is a lively competition among and within individuals between egoistic, self-advancement "economic man" values and altruistic Benthamite and Kantian values.  One beneficial offshoot of that value competition is an implicit agreement between the competing sides to ostracize those who make value-reducing threats of the "it'll hurt me but it'll hurt you more" type.