« What makes England free | Main | Polemics on payday loans »
Evolution and Moral Community
Paul Rubin argues that our evolutionary heritage biases us against seeing larger moral communities.
Our primitive ancestors lived in a world that was essentially static; there was little societal or technological change from one generation to the next. This meant that our ancestors lived in a world that was zero sum -- if a particular gain happened to one group of humans, it came at the expense of another.
This is the world our minds evolved to understand. To this day, we often see the gain of some people and assume it has come at the expense of others. Economists have argued for more than two centuries that voluntary trade, whether domestic or international, is positive sum: it benefits both parties, or else the exchange wouldn't occur. Economists have also long argued that the economics of immigration -- immigrants coming here to exchange their labor for money that they then exchange for the products of other people's labor -- is positive sum. Yet our evolutionary intuition is that, because foreign workers gain from trade and immigrant workers gain from joining the U.S. economy, native-born workers must lose.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on May 10, 2007 at 02:39 PM in Science | Permalink
Comments
Primitive societies are hardly zero-sum when bounty and scarcity are bestowed by nature. Try again.
Posted by: Lord at May 10, 2007 3:15:03 PM
It is precisely because "bounty and scarcity are bestowed by nature" that primitive societies are zero-sum.
Posted by: ricardo at May 10, 2007 4:18:15 PM
Mr. Tabarrok, I tried to picture what you are writing about in:
"Work"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8-XlWaVahgc
and
"Elementary Social Studies"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Rpv0DoTCag4
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at May 10, 2007 4:18:28 PM
Evolution is why we favor our kin over those with whom we are unrelated. We share genes with our kin, thus we maximize our reproductive success by favoring our kin over outsiders. A similar argument can be made for ethnic groups.
Posted by: Justin at May 10, 2007 4:31:45 PM
There is evidence for trade among very primitive peoples going back quite a long way--for example, rocks, shells, and so forth found associated with human habitation far from their natural areas of distribution. An assertion that our ancestors lived in zero-sum conditions is something that cannot be accepted casually without evidence. This sounds like just another careless bit of amateur evolutionary psychology.
Posted by: y at May 10, 2007 4:39:31 PM
Mark Seecof's comments on EconLog on this topic should be read and pondered by all economists:
http://econlog.econlib.org/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=2481
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 10, 2007 4:48:35 PM
So immigrants are always good for the society they immigrate to? Even when they send the dollars earned back to "my country," in the process draining the host country? Why? I'll tell you why. Because you want it to be so. Sophist.
Posted by: ricpic at May 10, 2007 5:47:05 PM
In the original article, the author uses the evolutionary 'zero-sum argument' along with EP arguments for EP-based 'in group/out group' thinking and EP-based difficulty in evaluating risk and harm. I don't think it's meant as a stand-alone argument.
That said, I'm in agreement with Y above, and would be reluctant to believe that any sufficiently large group of humans living together would stay in a completely static state, with no technology, trade, or social change. Because remember, it takes only a very small bit of 'nonzerosumness' to motivate (at least some) individuals to get past whatever EP-based biases they have.
Posted by: LP at May 10, 2007 6:28:01 PM
ricpic said "...Even when [immigrants] send the dollars earned back to "my country," in the process draining the host country?"
So someone goes to live in another country, and does useful work in exchange for pieces of paper which they then send back to their home country ... sorry, I'm confused, who is it you think is losing out here?
Posted by: Robert Scarth at May 10, 2007 6:54:58 PM
If we're going to talk about evolution, mating will matter more than trade. An increase in out of group mating opportunites is a huge win for both sides, and excessive inbreeding is clearly negative sum.
And in today's world, any evolutionary distrust of trade is IMHO dwarfed by our instinctual love of novelty, travel, and exotic people.
Posted by: DK at May 10, 2007 7:13:18 PM
Wow, not only are Sailer's own posts awful, so are the ones he recommends.
"Even an economist must agree that (a) immigrants themselves only move because they expect to be better off in their new homes than their old, and (b) once they arrive they will compete with natives for existing economic resources."
And of course B is exactly the zero-sum fallacy that Rubin was talking about.
Pondering done. That was fun.
Posted by: Keith at May 10, 2007 8:31:53 PM
Mark Seecof's remarks:
Rubin shows how desperately some economists wish to reinforce their ideological position by borrowing ideas from other disciplines. Sadly, Rubin shows that stealing a few buzzwords from another discipline isn't the same as drawing real understanding from it. Rubin wants to hitch his no-borders wagon to evolutionary psychology, but hasn't read much of it--or he would have learnt that humans are capable (have evolved to be capable) of a variety of more or less selfish or cooperative behaviours. He would also have learnt that groups of humans scattered around the world are very different in capabilities, attitudes, and behaviours and that many of those differences are genetically mediated (that is, they cannot be altered much by economic education).
Rubin's supposition that a world with little sociological or technical change must be one of zero-sum economics is false. All of recorded history abounds with examples to the contrary and anthropologists will testify to the eagerness with which many peoples have traded with outsiders--even in eras of "little change."
Equally false is Rubin's supposition that everyone is really the same, so people viewing others as members of (in- or out-groups) is arbitrary. Evolution depends on differences--it cannot act without them--so any economist who wishes to draw on evolutionary theory must acknowledge and account for real differences among people. At the same time, evolutionary pressures (almost certainly) cause people to vary their amount of cooperation with their degree of kinship. Cooperative phenotypes act on socially-mediated pseudo-kinship as well as actual genetic kinship. It's not hard to get people to cooperate, if you persuade them to treat each other as kin. In fact, that's the point of the Golden Rule.
Look, Rubin's own discipline can explain why many people want to restrict trade. Those who wish to restrict trade are those who expect, personally, to gain by such restrictions! Economists often call them "rent seekers" and they include producers and merchants more often than "common folk." Does the term "Corn Laws" mean anything to you?
Rubin's op-ed falsely suggests that the prejudices of ordinary voters result in trade restrictions, but anyone who looks into the matter will discover that industrial interests drive lawmaking in this area. Virtually every restriction on trade in the USA is a triumph by rent-seeking incumbents in some industry.
We can theorize both "classical economic" and "evo-psych" reasons why people would like to restrict immigration. For the first, people who will personally suffer from immigration (that is, to a first approximation, workers rather than employers) would like to restrict it. This is not irrational, because (Rubin's purely ideological assertion to the contrary notwithstanding), economic gains from immigration are not evenly distributed. As for the second, evo-psych predicts people would be wary of immigration, because most immigrants are not kin (note that this theory perfectly explains the special case of people favoring immigration from their own ancestral regions). Evo-psych predicts, on a very strong basis, that people would rather preserve the economic bounty where they are for their own kin.
Even an economist must agree that (a) immigrants themselves only move because they expect to be better off in their new homes than their old, and (b) once they arrive they will compete with natives for existing economic resources. To genes competing in evolution's rat-race, there is no reason to help immigrants better themselves, and every reason to discourage local competition from immigrants.
(It's true that immigrants may help expand economic resources--in a society where greater availability of labor fuels economic expansion. However, the notion, oft-repeated by economists, that labor availability necessarily fuels industrial expansion is obviously false (if it were true, Bangladesh would be rich). History shows that industrial economic growth depends on high-IQ labor, and is retarded where chiefly low-IQ labor is available no matter how cheaply.
Since IQ is at least 60% heritable, only an ideologically-blinded economist would suppose that unlimited immigration by low-IQ people would certainly fuel economic expansion. In fact, there are strong economic reasons to think otherwise, because in the presence of many low-IQ people, society diverts the labor of many high-IQ people from industry to simply managing (or exploiting) the low-IQ crowds.
An economist who really wants to reconcile his discipline with evolutionary psychology should ask "why should people follow abstract theories rather than behave in the ways that promoted the survival of countless generations of their ancestors?"
He should then return to Rubin's notion of education, but educate people to discern rent-seeking proposals and oppose them.
As for immigration, once the economist clears his mind of the notion that all immigration is an unalloyed blessing, he can promote a rational policy of encouraging immigration only by people who would promote the industrial economy. Those people could/would be accepted as "kin" and so engage our evolved capacity for cooperation.
(Note that demands by particular industries to import cheap labor (regardless of externalities) may properly be regarded as a form of rent-seeking.)
The one area of economics which has been pretty-much zero-sum from ancient times right up through today is competition for land. Even if you slept through everything else I wrote you should agree that to the extent immigrants compete for land, they really are zero-sum competitors and a rational economic actor would seek to exclude them, the more vigorously as he cared more about land. In former times when many people depended directly on their own land for their own and their family's subsistence, both "economic" and "evo-psych" reasons would teach them to oppose immigration.
Only those parts of our modern industrialized economy for which land is not a major factor of production can look upon immigration with complacency. You shouldn't expect (reasonable, as opposed, say, to Marxist) "economic education" to persuade other people to irrationally favor immigrants entering a zero-sum competition for land.
(This is probably why people readily see non-kin immigrants as "invaders." For all time, a bunch of non-kin moving into the area meant greater (zero-sum) competition for food, because food was directly proportional to land. So immigrants are invaders.
(Today a bunch of immigrants means zero-sum competition for pleasant suburban homes. This is why rich people who want low-wage immigrants to serve them favor immigration and everyone else in America rationally opposes it.)
Posted by: jim at May 10, 2007 8:35:06 PM
"It's not hard to get people to cooperate, if you persuade them to treat each other as kin. In fact, that's the point of the Golden Rule."
As somewhat of an aside, I was reading an article in The New Yorker - a feature on Barack Obama who, I will go ahead and assume, is not universally adored by this crowd.
Anyway...he had an interesting quote: "If everyone is family, no one is family." 'Universalism is a delusion.'
We congretate in families, relligious affiliations, political circles, nations, (etc.) because the lack of these structures would render us rudderless as a species. Thus, trade/resource imbalances - and I think most of us understand that they have existed since the dawn of mankind - need not necessarily be at the person level, but are always at least at the group level.
Posted by: fustercluck at May 10, 2007 11:14:12 PM
As biologist J.B.S. Haldane quipped when asked if he would lay down his life for his brother, "No, but I would for three brothers or nine first cousins!" We share 50% of our variable genes with our siblings, 12.5% with first cousins, and so forth outward through the family tree. So, from the point of view of our "selfish genes," we are constantly confronted with deciding between selfishness and altruism, individualism and nepotism, between going it alone and building a bigger coalition. There are no final, always correct answers.
Probably the most instructive book that economists could read to help them develop a more realistic mental model of how the real world works would be Pierre L. van den Berghe's 1981 masterpiece on "ethnic nepotism," "The Ethnic Phenomenon."
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 11, 2007 12:08:27 AM
And of course B is exactly the zero-sum fallacy that Rubin was talking about.
Nonsense. Even the most fervent open borders enthusiast acknowledges that there is some loss in native wages due to immigration. They merely argue that it is worthwhile due to a net gain to the economy as a whole.
It is far more naive to believe that there is no competition than to believe that it is a zero sum proposition. It is elementary after all that for a benefit to ber realized an exchange has to occur (see complementarity).
Posted by: Dennis at May 11, 2007 12:31:52 AM
Why do I get the feeling that when Chinese professors start delivering lectures to American students via the internet for $1 an hour, tenured American professors will start explaining to us why our primitive beliefs are preventing us from seeing the value of destroying the data pipes that connect us to the rest of the world?
Posted by: alphie at May 11, 2007 1:13:43 AM
This post points out a general problem with economists today: they are too quick to expound upon morality before they understand reality. Less moralism and more realism would be a good motto for economists.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 11, 2007 1:32:35 AM
I remember reading something similar on the evolution of "economic" thinking and why economic arguments often dont reach the people: It was argued that 4 major exchange schemes can be identified, e.g. reciprocity, violence, and, as the fourth one, the market mechanism with relaticve prices as major indicator for relative scarcity. Now, the market as exchange scheme evolved, anthropologically speaking, as the last of all schemes and is therefore not (yet) hard-wired into our brains...
Posted by: Stefan at May 11, 2007 4:47:27 AM
Steve,
I do not believe that economists are the "moral" ones. Actually, economists try to disentangle "moral" or "opinion" from facts, which is NOT done by politicians, e.g.
Posted by: Stefan at May 11, 2007 4:50:27 AM
If more people had an economic mindset, the world would be a better place. Jealousy would disappear along with racism etc... Sadly most people, including those who claim to be enlightened and educated are at their core plagued by religious and tribal/national biases. I wonder if natural selection will kill them off or if economists are doomed to live in their hateful world.
Posted by: Chairman Mao at May 11, 2007 6:58:23 AM
Evolution explains our preference for helping kin... and what explains our ability to think this preference might not be ideal? Magic? God?
Posted by: Barbar at May 11, 2007 7:21:53 AM
"Mark Seecof's comments on EconLog on this topic should be read and pondered by all economists:"
Yeah Steve we will all get right on that . Any other recommendations... hold on let me get my pen so I can write this down.
Posted by: GoodnessOfFit at May 11, 2007 9:11:44 AM
Chairman Mao:
And if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass a-hoppin'.
But when the conversation has degenerated to this:
I wonder if natural selection will kill them off or if economists are doomed to live in their hateful world.
it can safely be described as spent. Just as well, I've run out of Kleenex pondering the tribulations of our morally chaste economists. It's all so emotionally taxing.
Posted by: Dennis at May 11, 2007 10:19:06 AM
Justin,
Kin selection doesn't explain ethnic identity the way you're talking about. The math doesn't work out--for a gene under selection, it pays to make you trade X expected offspring to increase your brother's offspring by 2X, because you share half your genetic material. For a second-cousin, with 1/16 shared genetic material, it pays to make you trade X expected offspring for 16X expected offspring.
Evolution gave us ingroup/outgroup distinctions, which get applied across all kinds of categories--my tribe, my church, my family, my race, my party, my nation, whatever. You can't say ahead of time which of these will be more important; that's a cultural thing, at least once you get past close family. Sometimes, nation trumps church, or church trumps race, or race trumps nation, or whatever.
Posted by: albatross at May 11, 2007 10:31:17 AM
Distinguish between:
a. I lose from immigration, but the economy gets better and so the wins outweight the losses.
b. I lose from immigration short-term, but the economy gets better and the rising tide lifts my boat too, so I end up better off.
c. I lose from immigration, and the economy sees no change.
(c) is zero sum, but (a) is certainly an argument for why some people will oppose immigration. A lot of the claim of the anti-immigration movement is that open immigration is a mechanism for redistributing wealth inside the US, from people at the bottom to people at the top.
Another claim, which doesn't fit here as well, is that the effects of added immigration aren't simple additive effects--there's some function of total immigrant population, or unassimilated population, or whatever, that doesn't appear important for individual immigrants, but which becomes important when we get to some threshhold, say by becoming a destabilizing force in US ethnic identity politics.
I'm not sure either of these concerns is right, though it seems pretty obvious that immigration does redistribute wealth within the country in the short run. I don't even know how you'd go about looking into the threshhold ideas.
Posted by: albatross at May 11, 2007 10:45:51 AM
