111. Righteous Mind Follow-Up

Note: This post is the one hundred and eleventh in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Previously, I reviewed Jonathan Haidt's 'The Righteous Mind' in a series of posts, noting at one point that, "Like so many others, Haidt never considers the possibility that morality might be context-sensitive, not just in the sense that some morals might be more useful than others in certain cultures (which he does acknowledge) but that even within one culture some actions might be moral or immoral depending on the context."

I was reminded of that when recently  I was reading an interview between Tyler Cowen and Jonathan Haidt and came across this quote from Haidt, which is still stuck in the 'one set of morals per culture' mindset, but comes closer than he did in The Righteous Mind to seeing the commerce driven and context sensitive nature of different morals.

"If you have a warrior culture, if you’re constantly being attacked, boy, is it going to build on the loyalty, the authority, the sanctity ones, to create this tribal consciousness. You can see that in a joke form in fraternities. Fraternities, even on a secular campus, fraternities will build on those tribal foundations.

 Whereas, if you go to, say, Amsterdam, or New York, or places that are port cities with a lot of variety, diversity, commerce, those tend to thin down the moral domain. They don’t tend to do a lot with group loyalty and hierarchy. They tend to focus more on, “I’ll tell you what, you don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you. You honor your contracts, I’ll honor mine.”

This is a more appropriate morality for diversity and for commerce."

The above passage could almost be a direct quote from 'Systems of Survival'.
 

105. The Righteous Mind - Part 2

Note: This post is the one hundred and fifth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week the topic is the book, "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the NY Times review of it as an excellent summary.

Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in this earlier post which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.

Today's post covers the first of Haidt's three main arguments, that:

1) People don't make rational decisions to decide what is moral, but instead have instinctive reactions regarding morality and then rationalize their instinctive reaction after the fact. Haidt likens the rational, conscious part of the brain to a rider sitting on an elephant (the part of the brain which makes the instinctive moral judgement) and argues that the rider has little control.

In fact, Haidt argues that the primary function of the ration part of the brain is not to conduct dispassionate analysis, but rather to come up with reasons to support whatever instinctive judgment the elephant (the intuitive part of the brain) has already come up with. Haidt recounts a number of experiments which support his thesis, including one where people were hypnotized to have negative associations with certain words, and then read passages describing moral violations some of which included the code word and some that didn't. The researchers found that passages containing negative code words lead to stronger negative reactions from the readers. To their surprise, even a story which didn't describe any moral transgression at all, and simply said either that, "Dad tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion, or the same thing but worded so that "Dan often picks topics" found that in a third of respondents, inclusion of a negative code word lead them to morally condemn Dan. The researchers had asked people to explain their reaction and those who reacted negatively to Dan said things like, "Dan is a popularity seeking snob' or "I don't know, it just seems like he's up to something."

Haidt argues that the intuitive part of our brain is always active, instantly judging everything and everyone we come across as favourable or unfavourable, and then the 'rational' part of our brain steps in to provide reasonable sounding arguments to support this position. In one study, (echoed in the news recently), researches found that people who were more intelligent were able to come up with more reasons to support whatever position they held, but greater intelligence did not help at all in coming up with reasons for the opposing point of view. In other words, being smarter just makes you better able to rationalize your own intuitive reactions, not better able to understand other opinions.

Haidt figures that in evolution, it was more important for people to be able to maintain their social reputation (by explaining their actions, creating arguments to support their gut (intuitive) reactions and so on) than it was for them to come to accurate conclusions about what was true.

Haidt does allow for some capacity of the rational part of the brain to do more than just support the intuitive part. He cites a study in which if people were forced to wait 2 minutes before responding to some stimulus, then they would be less likely to just go with the gut reaction and more likely to come to a reasoned conclusion. But mostly Haidt is pessimistic about the ability of the individual to question their own biases or challenge their own intuitive reactions and beliefs - he believes that we need other people to challenge us and that society needs a back and forth between people of different viewpoints in order for people to be exposed to multiple viewpoints and have a chance to update their opinions based on competing arguments rather than just constantly searching out more supporting evidence for what they already believe.

In the last chapter of the first section of the book, Haidt has a list of bullet points summarizing the argument so far, that we care obsessively about our reputation, that conscious reasoning is like a press secretary that argues on our behalf, not a scientist searching for truth, and that reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion because we ask, 'can I believe it?' about things we want to believe and 'Must I believe it?" about things we don't.

But I wanted to focus on his last bullet point which is as follows:

"In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team."

Atrios expresses this in characteristically pithy fashion, as "It's tribal." an further notes that, "Policy preferences mostly aren't about narrow personal economic considerations, even for the rich."

It's interesting that Haidt focused in on the political realm, home to the guardian syndrome, which is filled with interpersonal ethics such as 'be loyal' as compared to the commercial syndrome where the duty to other people is pretty much limited to not screwing them over (foregoing force and fraud). In this he is echoing some of the earlier works we have encountered such as Hans Ritschl, Howard Margolis and Plato.

Disappointingly, Haidt does not really delve into the question of how or why commercial activity or science might lack the groupishness or tribalness that is present in morality (as seen by Haidt) and in politics, or why politics in particular sees this tribal behaviour.

104. The Righteous Mind, Part 1

Note: This post is the one hundred and fourth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week the topic is the book, "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the NY Times review of it as an excellent summary.

Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in this earlier post which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.

The Righteous Mind has three main arguments:

1) People don't make rational decisions to decide what is moral, but instead have instinctive reactions regarding morality and then rationalize their instinctive reaction after the fact. Haidt likens the rational, conscious part of the brain to a rider sitting on an elephant (the part of the brain which makes the instinctive moral judgement) and argues that the rider has little control.

2) Rather than seeing people as having no morality at all and being solely self-interested or even just having a moral system oriented solely around not doing harm or being unfair, Haidt argues that in addition to caring about care/harm and fairness/cheating, people also care about freedom/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt compares these moral senses to tastebuds, and according to his studies, people that are "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) tend to to focus more on Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating and Freedom/Oppression, while Conservatives have a wider range of moral values (note: you can take Haidt's test here (registration required) - I tried it and scored higher than both the typical American liberal and the typical American Conservative on care, fairness, loyalty and authority, and lower than both on sanctity - even though I am Western, Educated, Rich and Democratic, perhaps my lack of exposure to Industrial workplaces made the difference :)

3) That people are 90% chimp and 10% bee, meaning that people are a mix of self-interested and group-interested. I won't recount the old arguments about how on the one hand, being selfish helps individual genes reproduce while on the other hand cooperative groups can outcompete selfish ones, but Haidt offers lots of support for the notion that evolution offerred ample opportunity for humans to evolve a nature that is at least partly group-interested rather than being purely self-interested.


I do recommend Haidt's book, it is easy to read, entertaining, covers a lot of ground, and will change the way you interpret other people's (and perhaps your own) expression of opinions and moral views.

Additionally, Haidt is well read, marshals lots of empirical evidence for his arguments, doesn't seem to be following a rigid ideological agenda and seems willing to consider new information and change his views accordingly.

The next few posts will look at some of Haidt's arguments in a bit more detail and get into some of the areas where, in my opinion, there is some room for improvement in his thesis.

103. Facing Limits

Note: This post is the one hundred and third in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.


"Hope you don't think users are the only abusers niggaz
Gettin high within the game
If you do then, how would you explain?
I'm ten years removed, still the vibe is in my veins
I got a hustler spirit, nigga period
Check out my hat yo, peep the way I wear it
Check out my swag' yo, I walk like a ballplayer
No matter where you go, you are what you are, a player
And you can try to change but that's just the top layer
Man, you was who you was 'fore you got here
Only God can judge me, so I'm gone
Either love me, or leave me alone"

From "Public Service Announcement" by Jay-Z

----

"It all belongs to Caesar, It all belongs to Caesar
Go to the bank, Go to the bank
We're going down to Mexico
To get away from this culture
Go to the bank..."

from "Go to the Bank", by James¹

----

I've been reading through the archives of Morris Berman's blog.

Writing this series of posts has led me into a habit of automatically classifying people as commercially or guardian minded (remarkably few people seem to manage to see both sides on a regular basis) and Berman is one of the clearest cut cases of a Guardian thinker I've come across. Whether he's decrying the building of a casino at Gettysburg (lack of respect for tradition), supporting efforts to take vengeance against the current U.S. elite (encouraging people to vote for Sarah Palin to speed up the collapse, for example), or recounting the loss of community in the face of a relentless self-interested thirst for more consumption, he is consistently singing from the Guardian songbook.

Berman is best known for a series of books on the decline of the American civilization, the most recent of which, "Why America Failed" traces the roots of America's cultural decline to its origins as a nation of 'hustlers' and the eventual takeover of the nation by commercial (hustling) interests.

Of course, there are lots of folks out there commenting on the decline of our civilization, and lamenting the commercial takeover of our communities. But it was one post in particular, that I wanted to mention here, the reason being that in this post Berman comes quite close to recounting some of the main points I've been circling here.

In this particular post, Berman likens humans to frogs:

"[In] An experiment with frogs some years ago ... [they] were wired up with electrodes in the pleasure center of the brain, and could stimulate that center–i.e., create a 'rush'–by pressing a metal bar. Not only did the frogs keep pressing the bar over and over again, but they didn’t stop even when their legs were cut off with a pair of shears."

Berman does allow that some of us frogs are a bit smarter than others:

"The first intelligent frog who comes to mind is the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, perhaps most famous for having been married to Margaret Mead. For Bateson, the issue was an ethical one. As he himself put it, 'the ethics of optima and the ethics of maxima are totally different ethical systems.' The ethics of maxima knows only one rule: more. More is better, in this scheme of things; words such as 'limits' or 'enough' are either foolish or meaningless. Clearly, the 'American Way of Life' is a system of maxima, of indefinite expansion."

Berman links the notion of respecting (or not) limits, with the goal of maximization vs. optimization, and from there, with the difference between individual and collective decision making:

"the economist Robert Frank, writing in the New York Times (12 July 2009), argues that 'traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. For instance,' he goes on,

'a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.'"

The problem is that what was rational on the individual level was irrational on the collective level, thus leading to a systemic collapse.

We are thus led, quite naturally, from a consideration of optima vs. maxima to the question of individual vs. collective behavior."

Berman goes even further to note that democracy is a more tenuous method of transforming individual preferences into collective behaviour vs. dictatorship:

How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries–the Scandanavian nations come to mind–where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for most of Latin America, is the United States, where proposed “changes” are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 306 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones–Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al.–aren’t going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."

...

"Of course, authoritarian systems don’t have these problems, which is a good indicator of how things will probably develop. Under the name of 'harmony', for example, China regulates its citizens for what it perceives to be the common good. Hence the famous one-child policy, introduced in 1979, supposedly prevented more than 300 million births over the next 29 years in a country that was threatened by its own population density. In the case of the United States, the imposition of rules and limits on individual behavior to protect the commons is not, at present, a realistic prospect; the population is simply not having it, end of story. But how much longer before this freedom of choice is regarded as an impossible luxury?"

So, just in this one post, Berman covers quite well one of the main areas that separates the guardian syndrome from the commercial one, the ability to deal with / impose limits. The commercial syndrome prioritizes individual competition which prevents collective (cooperative) decision making, which can work in an unlimited domain where maximization is the goal, but fails when faced by a limit because it becomes impossible to constrain individuals to respect the limits and to optimize rather than maximize, and to allocate shares within the limit rather than everyone just taking as much as they can.

And he raises an interesting question, if the citizens in a country face real limits, but would rather pretend those limits don't exist and will only elect politicians who act as if those limits don't exist, will democracy survive?



---
¹As an aside, I was looking up the lyrics for the James song I referenced at the top of the post, and ended up at the song meanings entry for a different (but similarly themed) James song, "Lost a Friend (to the sea)" about a man trying to free a friend from living in the world of television and bring them back to reality. While there, I found one of those occasional nuggets of gold that one gets if you sift through enough of the mountains of dirt that make up most comment sections on the web, a comment from 'draven66':

"I logged onto facebook.com for the first time yesterday and realized that I have lost my friends to the sea. A sea of electronic lies, bloated materialism, and denial that hides their suspended disbelief that modern western lifestyles of decay are not only consuming them but everyone we kill under "foreign policy" to maintain this sick way of life. You've seen it before .. those tired sore smiles that say "I am hypnotized, and adequately, even willingly! desensitized, and sedated! Please don't let my suspicions be true, please just give me another hit. The worst part is when everyone can capture it fifty times a day, digitally. This life was made possible by FUTURE SHOP, keep on pretending you sad empty sheep, you are owned and cultivated and laughed at! GOD I feel so alone.

Nice song though."

102. The Republic, Part 1c

Note: This post is the one hundred and second in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Note also: this is a continuation from post 100 and post 101.

Note finally: Quotes are taken from this version of The Republic

After Glaucon and Adeimantus make their case for justice being just a means rather than an end in itself, they ask Socrates to convince them justice is more than that, and to show them how living a just life makes a man good and living an unjust life makes a man evil, regardless of what benefits or honours might flow from just or unjust behaviour.

Socrates suggests that they search for an answer by examining the state, rather than the individual since the truth will be easier to find in the larger case. What follows is the longest section of The Republic, where Socrates outlines the ideal state.

Initially, Socrates constructs a small state which is enough to satisfy man's basic needs. But Glaucon argues that people need more than just their basic needs, they need comfort as well,

"you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style."

Socrates sees where this simple, but potentially unlimited desire for comfort will lead,

"Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever-heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of life. They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured."

Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is
no longer sufficient.

...

And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants
will be too small now, and not enough?

...

Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture
and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves,
they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the
unlimited accumulation of wealth?

...

And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?"

(emphasis added)

From the desire for luxury, from always wanting more than what is currently had, comes conflict, and with conflict, the need for guardians to protect the state.

Note: Der Spiegel had an interesting interview with economist/philosopher Tomas Sedlacek the other day, "Greed is the Beginning of Everything," which touched on this theme repeatedly.

---
Socrates explains that the guardians must have a somewhat philosophical nature, since they must welcome knowledge, since they will need to be gentle with their friends whom they know, while remaining ruthless with enemies, who are strangers.

Socrates identifies loyalty as a primary job requirement for guardians,

"Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should any word be said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one another, for they are not true."

A little later on, he also notes that lying is not always a bad thing,

"the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in dealing with enemies--that would be an instance; or again, when those whom we call our friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to do some harm, then it is useful and is a sort of medicine or preventive"

Later on, Socrates emphasizes the importance of only people with the right nature being in the guardian class (and vice-versa),

"Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed."

(emphasis added)

Socrates emphasizes that in order for guardians to be true guardians, they must renounce greed and a desire for material possessions,

"In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand."

Later on, Socrates defines justice as each man sticking to his own line of work and not meddling in areas he is not suited for.

"Think, now, and say whether you agree with me or not. Suppose a carpenter to be doing the business of a cobbler, or a cobbler of a carpenter; and suppose them to exchange their implements or their duties, or the same person to be doing the work of both, or whatever be the change; do you think that any great harm would result to the State?

Not much.

But when the cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a trader, having his heart lifted up by wealth or strength or the number of his followers, or any like advantage, attempts to force his way into the class of warriors, or a warrior into that of legislators and guardians, for which he is unfitted, and either to take the implements or the duties of the other; or when one man is trader, legislator, and
warrior all in one, then I think you will agree with me in saying that this interchange and this meddling of one with another is the ruin of the State.

Most true.

Seeing then, I said, that there are three distinct classes, any meddling of one with another, or the change of one into another, is the greatest harm to the State, and may be most justly termed evil-doing?

Precisely.

And the greatest degree of evil-doing to one's own city would be termed by you injustice?

Certainly.

This then is injustice; and on the other hand when the trader, the auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice, and will make the city just."

The final key element is that Socrates now explains that, like the state which has a philosopher at its head, loyal guardians protecting it and supporting the ruler, and a mass of citizens who seek to satisfy their desires for comfort and convenience, a man is the same, with a tri-partite nature, and that, like the state, a man is just when the rational part of his brain is in control of his material desires, with his spirit supporting the rational part of his brain in suppressing the material desires of his body from interfering with his pursuit of justice.

"now model the form of a multitudinous, many-headed monster, having a ring of heads of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, which he is able to generate and metamorphose at will.

...

Suppose now that you make a second form as of a lion, and a third of a man, the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the second.

...

And now join them, and let the three grow into one.

...

Next fashion the outside of them into a single image, as of a man, so that he who is not able to look within, and sees only the outer hull, may believe the beast to be a single human creature.

...

And now, to him who maintains that it is profitable for the human creature to be unjust, and unprofitable to be just, let us reply that, if he be right, it is profitable for this creature to feast the multitudinous monster and strengthen the lion and the lion-like qualities, but to starve and weaken the man, who is consequently liable to be dragged about at the mercy of either of the other two; and he is not to attempt to familiarize or harmonize them with one another--he ought rather to suffer them to fight and bite and devour one another.

Certainly, he said; that is what the approver of injustice says.

To him the supporter of justice makes answer that he should ever so speak and act as to give the man within him in some way or other the most complete mastery over the entire human creature. He should watch over the many-headed monster like a good husbandman, fostering and cultivating the gentle qualities, and preventing the wild ones from growing; he should be making the lion-heart his ally, and in common care of them all should be uniting the several parts with one another and with himself.

So, to summarize Plato's argument:

A state functions best when the three classes each stick to their own work. A philosopher to rule with wisdom, a guardian class to serve with honour and courage, shunning all material possession and desire, and a trading class to pursue material comfort and provide for the basic needs of the state. Mixing people into the wrong tasks is, by definition, injustice, and will lead to the destruction of the state.

And a man is the same, his sense of reason must be the primary decision maker, his spirit or passion acting in service of reason, and the insatiable desire for material wealth and comfort must be tamed and controlled so that it does not exceed it's natural domain.

96. Guardian free zone?

Note: This post is the ninety-sixth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week I'm going to cover a thought experiment I've been turning over in my mind for the last few days. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs explains that Communism is what results when the guardian syndrome takes over the commercial syndrome. With the breach in the 'shun trading' precept from the Guardian syndrome, the Guardians took control of commerce leading to a failure of the commercial precepts (innovation, efficiency, honesty, dissent, etc.) as they were superseded by Guardian precepts such as (make rich use of leisure, be fatalistic, be exclusive, etc.) But what I wonder is, what would happen in the reverse scenario? What if a group of people decided that they would be governed by commercial principles only rather than guardian ones?

My first thought was that, since one of the commercial precepts is to shun force, the only way this community could survive would be to completely avoid all guardian types who would be willing to use force to seize any wealth generated by the commercial activity. Thinking of this I was reminded of the origins of the great trading nation of Venice, in an out of the way lagoon that was safe from the marauding guardian types running rampant in those days. Of course, any member of our hypothetical non-violent commercial society could take over the whole enterprise if they resorted to force, given that the commercial folks would be unwilling to use force to resist. So the commercial society would have to be extremely careful about who was allowed in, since only 100% acceptance of their morals would be a stable situation.

Given the constraints on the use of violence, it seems completely infeasible to me that a pure commercial society could exist for any length of time, or even form in the first place.

In order to make the commercial society at all viable, there needs to be some mechanism for dealing with those who would use force against it. A location with natural defenses (such as an island in the case of England, another great trading nation) would help, but could never be a complete solution. The logical commercial solution would be to hire mercenaries to enforce the rule of non-violence, much in the way that medieval aristocrats had stewards to trade on their behalf.

Of course, the difficulties of this approach are obvious and were well explained by Machiavelli. The mercenary, must be at least two things: willing to use force, and motivated by wealth. It seems clear that the mercenary will eventually decide that they can make more wealth by turning on their paymaster than by simply accepting their pay.

Another option would be for the commercial folks to make an exemption in their rules of non-violence to allow for vengeance to be taken against acts of force or fraud. In other words, when dealing with a person who does not follow their commercial code, they in turn would choose to use a different moral code, one that condones violence as an act of vengeance against those who initiated violence. But this still causes some issues. A google search for the term 'costly punishment' will uncover lots of academic work which has focussed on the question of whether it makes sense, from the rational commercial syndrome point of view, to take vengeance against someone who has used force against you. The trouble is that the act of taking vengeance benefits the whole commercial society by protecting it against the incursions of someone willing to use force, but the cost of taking vengeance (punishing the perpetrator) falls solely on the person who does the punishing.

Researchers starting from a premise of rational self-interested behaviour have struggled to explain why people are willing to go beyond what is 'rational' in their willingness to punish those who have wronged them. But of course, if people have a moral value of taking vengeance this puzzle disappears, much as the Mancur Olson explained that a moral value of loyalty or cooperation could mitigate the puzzle of how collective action can be sustained by large groups.

You can see where this is leading, I'm sure. The commercial society has two options if it wants to survive: the corrupt, unstable, syndrome-mixing solution of hiring mercenaries, or the establishment of a second set of morals, one based on a willingness to take vengeance, even when it is not in your own self-interest to do so, one based on a willingness and an ability to use force effectively.

There seems to be an asymmetry between the two syndromes, reflecting the lack of proportion between the armed and the unarmed that Machiavelli described. The guardians can take over the commercial syndrome and society can still run, albeit not as successfully as it would with the two syndromes kept separate. But the commercial syndrome simply can't exist without guardians. Seen in this view, much of the structure of our government, from the Magna Carta on down, can be seen as an elaborate scheme devised by the commercial folks to maintain the existence of guardians while constraining their ability to interfere with the commercial syndrome as much as possible. Balance of powers between legislatures, senates and executives, term limits, constitutions backed by legal systems, democratic elections, media watchdogs, etc. all serve (or at least can serve, if circumstances are right) to constrain the ability of guardians to take over the economy.

Beyond these institutional mechanisms, I see two other bulwarks against the guardian takeover of the commercial syndrome. The first is simply strong guardian morals. The shunning of trade by guardians, the fortitude that disregards material wants, the willingness to sacrifice for the community, all of these traits serve to prevent the guardians from using their privileged position to enrich themselves at the expense of the economy. The second is the existence of competition between nations. This seems a bit counter-intuitive, since competition between nations can take the form of war, which is the most guardian of all activities, but war requires resources to be prosecuted successfully, and a country which maintains a strong commercial culture will have more economic resources to devote to the war effort. And aside from war, the citizens of the country with the weaker economy will naturally want to see their country imitate the country with the stronger economy. We could see both of these forces at work in the Soviet abandonment of communism in favour of capitalism.

Similarly, it seems to me that two of the great flourishings of commercial life occurred in Greece and in Europe, and that both of these emerged from geographical areas where the terrain, combined with the technology of the time, favoured the creation of a number of small competing states.

Anyway, this was just another random train of thought post, the next post will examine the source of this bout of meandering.

95. Beyond Guardian and Commercial Ethics

Note: This post is the ninety-fifth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week's topic is German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his efforts to discover a 'genealogy' or origin for our moral sentiments.

The first time Nietzsche takes on this question is in 'Human, All too Human,' in the chapter, "On the History of the Moral Sensations." There's two main passages in this chapter that seem relevant to our series on ethics.

The first, is paragraph 94, 'The three phases of morality hitherto':

"It is the first sign that animal has become man when his actions are no longer directed to the procurement of momentary wellbeing but to enduring wellbeing, that man has thus become attuned to utility and purpose: it is then that the free domination of reason first breaks forth. An even higher stage is attained when he acts according to the principle of honour; in accordance with this he orders himself with regard to others, submits to common sensibilities, and that raises him high above the phase in which he is diverted only by utility understood in a purely personal sense; he conceives utility as being dependent on what he thinks of others and what they think of him. Finally, at the highest stage of morality hitherto, he acts in accordance with his own standard with regard to men and things: he himself determines for himself and others what is honourable and useful.; he has become the lawgiver of opinion, in accordance with an ever more highly evolving conception of usefulness and honourableness. Knowledge qualifies him to prefer the most useful, that is to say general and enduring utility, to personal utility, general and enduring honour and recognition to momentary honour and recognition: he lives and acts as a collective-individual."

There are a couple of points to highlight here. The first is the notion of patience or prudence, favouring the long run over the short run as central to morality, in particular to personal morality that maximizes one's utility. The second is the division of morality into a personal stage based on utility and an inter-personal phase based on honour. How similarly this resembles our split between a guardian syndrome filled with precepts governing our relations with others and a commercial syndrome which is primarily concerned with maximizing our own utility (although the commercial syndrome also covers inter-personal relationships manifested via trade).

The second passage is paragraph 45, 'Twofold prehistory of good and evil':

"The concept good and evil has a twofold prehistory: firstly in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. He who was the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and also actually practices requital - is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful - is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad. As a good man belongs to the 'good', a community which has a sense of belonging together because all individuals in it are combined with one another through the capacity for requital. As a bad man belongs to the 'bad', to a swarm of subject, powerless people who have no sense of belonging together. The good are a caste, the bad a mass like grains of sand. Good and bad is for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave. On the other hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. ... Our present morality has grown up in the soil of the ruling tribes and castes."

Unlike the previous quote, which is never really revisited much in Nietzsche's writings, this notion of the twofold origin of good and evil will be discussed in much greater length, first in the chapter 'The Natural History of Morals' in 'Beyond Good and Evil' and finally at book length in 'The Genealogy of Morals.'

As he moves along, Nietzsche seems to become less certain about the morality level of Europe, and gradually begins to attribute the growing prevalence of 'slave' morality in Europe as being due to religious influence, from Christianity and Judaism. But the notion of two different systems of morality, one based on the ability and willingness to take vengeance and one based on non-violence persists in his thinking.

In 'The Genealogy of Morals' Nietzsche identifies certain cultures as 'noble races' that hew to 'master race' morality such as the "Roman, Arabian, German, Japanese nobility", as well as the "Homeric heroes and the Scandinavian vikings." This is contrasted with primarily the Jews, but also on occasion the Chinese as cultures with primarily 'slave' morality. It seems unlikely to be coincidence that the two cultures that Nietzsche identifies as being emblematic of a 'slave' morality that doesn't use violence or take vengeance are two cultures that are renowned the world over for the commercial success of their citizens.

Having said that, Nietzsche never really identifies salve morality with commercial culture. At first I thought that maybe that was just because Nietzsche was so guardian minded that he didn't even acknowledge the existence of commerce (even a guardian-type like Aristotle deigned to denigrate commercial ethics as base and shameful). But as 'The Genealogy of Morals' goes along, Nietzsche shows his awareness of commercial culture as he traces our notions of guilt and personal obligation and even justice back to the "...oldest and most primitive relationship between human beings, that of buyer and seller, creditor and debtor." So it wasn't that he was unaware of commercial ethics, he just didn't link it up with 'slave' morality explicitly.

So, it's not a perfect match, by any means, but still the notion of two ethical systems, one based on 'noble' races that are barbaric and love conquest and take vengeance and have good manners and one based on 'slave' races that shun violence, don't (can't) take vengeance and is associated with successful commercial cultures certainly lends some support to the notion that Nietzsche was working his way towards the notion of Guardian and Commercial ethics, although his remarkably strong guardian mindset may have skewed his observations somewhat.

94. Elements of a Simulation

Note: This post is the ninety-fourth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week, I just wanted to think out loud about what elements would need to be included in a simulation designed to test Jane Jacobs' theory about the 'Systems of Survival'.

The three basic elements I think we need are land, stuff and people.

Based on the territorial nature of the guardian syndrome, it seems as if we need a model that allows for people to interact in a 2 dimensional territory in order to replicate whatever it is about managing land that lends itself to guardian activity.

The interesting variations in the nature of the land that I see are that it could either be finite in size, infinite or it could be finite and also contain various natural boundaries (rivers, mountains, etc.) that would tend to foster distinct political groups forming.

In addition, the land needs to support some sort of resource production, since we will need something for our people to take and trade.

As for the people, they are more complex.

First of all, people will need to have various ethical approaches open to them. Looking at Jacobs' list of precepts, I see the following minimum requirements:

Use force and fraud (take) / Shun force and fraud (trade)
Work hard(er) / Take more leisure
Be obedient / Make your own decision about what is best
Be loyal / Be selfish
Be exclusive / Be open to dealing with strangers
Consume now / Invest to consume more later
Share wealth or dispense largesse / Hoard wealth
Compete / Cooperate

Naturally, putting these options into concrete terms that can be coded into a simulation will be the tricky part.

In addition, for obedience and dispensing of largesse to make sense, we'll need a concept of hierarchy or rank.

For definitions of loyalty and exclusivity to make sense, we'll need a concept of groups or identity.

If taking is an option, we'll need some sort of conflict resolution method, involving individual strength for our people as well as some logic for measuring the increase in combined strength that comes from cooperation. Note that relative strength could also function as a resource which is finite in quantity (although absolute strength would not be).

If trading is an option, we'll need at least two different goods or resources in circulation, that are valued differently by different people. It may be interesting to add another element that is finite in quantity (besides land) to see if it is treated differently.

If investing is an option, we'll need a function that translates investment of time and resources into more/different resources.

People will also need an objective so that we can rank how 'well' they are doing in the simulation. Some possibilities:
Maximize wealth
Maximize consumption of comfort and convenience (resources)
Maximize rank
Maximize status
Maximize honour
Maximize population
Maximize some combination of these.
And of course any of these objectives could be for the person themselves, for the group they belong to or for all people in existence.

Lots of possible combinations - you can see why economists like to simplify and pretend that people only care about their own personal wealth, but clearly this approach will be too limited to either represent reality or to help us develop a simulation that will incorporate the ethical choices listed above.

Finally, we'll need to define how our people's behaviour works over time. Do people just have a fixed set of ethical behaviours and we see who does best. Or do we allow people to modify their behaviour based on the context (trading vs. taking), or to modify their behaviour based on the success of those they encounter, can a leader cause them to change their ethical approach, or do we just introduce random mutation into people's behaviour patterns and see how things evolve.

Obviously, the number of permutations is large, even leaving out all the elements I've no do doubt overlooked here. It seems like it would be best to start with a simple scenario and then gradually elaborate it to take more elements and more complexity into account. But that's a task for another day...

93. Left and Right

Note: This post is the ninety-third in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs defines two distinct syndromes, one covering commercial ethics and one covering guardian, primarily government, ethics.

The last few centuries of politics in western countries has been dominated by a battle between two rival ideologies, the left and the right. It's always seemed a bit mysterious to me that certain groups of policies would end up neatly packaged along an ideological spectrum like that. Given the similar structure of the syndromes and the left-right political spectrum, I naturally wondered if there was any connection between the two syndromes identified by Jane Jacobs and the left-right political divide.

Thinking about it a little, I don't think that an analogy to right vs. left really works, but maybe there is some connection to the distinction between conservatism and liberalism.

The defining element of Conservatism is respect for tradition (a guardian trait) while Wikipedia defines a concern for equal rights which lines up with the commercial ease of collaboration with strangers and aliens, and contrasts with the conservative respect for hierarchy. Similarly, classical liberalism emphasized the role of free markets and that government needed the consent of the governed (respect contracts, come to voluntary agreements). Wikipedia says that, Edmund Burke, a famous conservative, "insisted on standards of honor derived from the medieval aristocratic tradition, and saw the aristocracy as the nation's natural leaders."

When I think of our modern political parties of the left and right, however, even though the names Conservative and Liberal remain, there seems to be some drifting from the traditional Conservative and Liberal roles. The current 'Conservative' party is actually descended from the 'Reform' party, a movement which wanted to fight and overturn the existing hierarchy, and which wants to dispense with tradition in many ways, from the role of the Governor General to the Senate.

Similarly, old-style conservatism involved the concept of noblesse-oblige, in which there was an obligation of the wealthy to help the lower classes, but in modern politics it is the left-wing which supports the lower classes, while right-wing policies generally favour the wealthy. Meanwhile, the Liberal party favours far more government intervention in the economy than would have been considered under classical liberalism.

Looking back at the twentieth century, it seems that the World Wars and great depression led to a new political model, known generally as 'the welfare state' in which government directed a significant percentage of spending in the economy. Since then politics has divided between those who want to continue or expand that trend and those who want to go back to the 19th century of a much more limited government role in the economy.

On the one hand, Jane Jacobs identified mixing of the morals from the two syndromes as the primary form of moral corruption. But on the other hand Jacobs identified a number of examples where government and the commercial sphere could use their respective strengths to accomplish things that otherwise couldn't be done.

At any rate, words like Liberalism and Conservatism have so many meanings these days that maybe this post is just a waste of time, but it seems as though with the emergence of capitalism and the growing importance of the commercial syndrome, there was a period where the new commercial ethics and old guardian ethics battled it out in the political forum but in more recent years the lines have been re-drawn partly along class lines instead with the battle between the classes replacing the earlier battle between Liberalism and Conservatism.

Of course, there is no reason why a party couldn't support implementing Jane Jacobs ideal vision of both syndromes in force, complementing each other as necessary, and kept separate where appropriate. But I guess figuring out just what that last part means exactly isn't so easy.

92. Information Sharing

Note: This post is the ninety-second in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

A number of posts ago, I discussed an essay by Joseph Heath in which he posited that there are 5 distinct types of cooperation: Economies of scale, trade, risk-sharing, information transmission, and self-binding.

This week I wanted to go into a bit more detail on the differences between information transmission and what we normally think of as trade, using the essay, "The Next Economy" by Brad Delong and Michael Froomkin as a starting point.

Delong and Froomkin set out 3 primary differences between information and more typical physical goods:

1) Information is non-excludable - Once a piece of information exists it is hard to control who has access to it (recall the friends episode where Chandler and Joey try to figure out the path that the information that Ross slept with someone else will take to get to Rachel). The primary implication of non-excludability is that goods might be under-produced (as compared to the socially optimal level of production) because people won't be forced to pay a price for the information that is commensurate with the value that information has to them (i.e. somebody might be willing to pay a high price for the latest Sufjan Stevens album, but instead just download a free copy off the internet).

Society has generally responded to this lack of excludability by trying to restore it via copyright and patent laws that go after free riders.

As Delong and Froomkin note, this is a balance between the costs of enforcement and the reduction in information sharing on the one hand, vs. the added incentives to generate valuable information on the other.


2) Information is non-rival - You can't really transfer possession of information from one person to another, you can only share it. Unlike, say, a chair which only one person can sit on at a time, an effectively infinite number of people can have access to the same piece of information.

As the authors say, "the existence of large numbers of important and valuable goods that are non-rival casts the value of competition itself into doubt."

In a goods market, when sellers compete on price they allow more people to benefit from the product being sold by reducing the price to their marginal cost. But with non-rival goods like information, the marginal cost is zero and if competition was to drive the price down to 0, the producers would go out of business. In this environment, competition might end up taking less beneficial forms than lower prices (e.g. methods to lock customers into your product and prevent them from having access to other providers).


3) Transparency: When you're buying a chair, you can usually get a pretty good idea of the quality and comfort of the chair before you buy it. But with information, this is much more difficult. If you don't have the information, how can you judge its value. If you do have the information, why would you pay someone else for it. Information is the side product that allows you to value other products before you buy them, but it is hard to make it work on itself.

---
We can see that the unique nature of information undermines some of the traditional commercial virtues that make up the commercial syndrome.

The benefit of competition is reduced with information. Both from economies of scale (people are better off browsing a single large library than they are searching through a million little ones.) and from the hazards of price competition in an environment where marginal costs are zero.

The (financial) incentive to innovation and industriousness is lowered by the lack of rewards that may come for your efforts.

The benefit of being honest is less when it is difficult for people to tell ahead of time if you are lying or providing a poor quality product.

Respect for contracts is undermined by a legal system that places artificial restrictions on sharing of information that reduce overall social welfare and technology that makes evading those restrictions easy for anyone to do with little consequence.

---
On the other hand, some commercial syndrome elements seem even stronger when it comes to information - shunning force makes even more sense when there is so little to be gained through the use of it (see the widespread disdain for industry groups that sue their customers).

Collaboration with strangers has flourished in an era of information transmission.

The quick transmission of information has led to a high regard (some might say too high) for inventiveness and novelty.

---
With respect to the guardian syndrome, information does have some of the characteristics of public goods, meaning that there are social benefits to government ensuring there is adequate production of them. And indeed government funds most basic research and takes a major role in transmitting information (via education) to each generation of citizens.

But information sharing is no place for the use of force, or respect for tradition, and individuals and companies that spend their time in the world of information generation and transmission often seem just the opposite of stuffy government rules and procedures - so clearly information sharing is not a typical guardian activity.

---
To be honest, I'm not sure quite what to make of information as an area of cooperation that seems to be distinct from both the traditional commercial syndrome ethics and from traditional guardian ethics. Maybe the unique nature of information demands its own set of ethics but the relatively new importance of information in the economy means that this has yet to be fully developed.

91. Another View on the Evolution of Cooperation

Note: This post is the ninety-first in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

I happened upon an interesting article the other day by Daron Acemolgu.

Acemolgu points out that researchers often use coordination models to study the level of cooperation in society because these models allow for multiple equilibria - i.e. one with cooperation, one without¹

"Why do similar societies end up with different social norms, and why and how social norms sometimes change? A common approach to answering these questions is to use coordination games, which have multiple equilibria corresponding to different self-fulfilling patterns of behaviour and rationalise the divergent social norms as corresponding to these equilibria. For example, it can be an equilibrium for all agents to be generally trusting of each other over time, while it is also an equilibrium for no agent to trust anybody else in society. We can then associate the trust and no-trust equilibria with different social norms."

As he goes on to point out, this isn't a very dynamic analysis, in the sense that it doesn't answer the questions of why or how we get from one equilibrium to another.

"Simply ascribing different norms to different equilibria has several shortcomings, however. First, it provides little insight about why particular social norms and outcomes emerge in some societies and not in others. Second, it is similarly silent about why and how some societies are able to break away from a less favourable (e.g., no trust) equilibrium. Third, it also does not provide a conceptual framework for studying how leadership by some individuals can help change social norms."

I didn't spring for the $5 required to download the full paper, but from the article it seems like one mechanism posited by Acemolgu for society to move from one equilibrium to another is if a 'prominent' person influences other people with their own behaviour.

"A particularly important form of history in our analysis is the past actions of "prominent" agents who have greater visibility (for example because of their social station or status). Their actions matter for two distinct but related reasons. First, the actions of prominent agents, impact the payoffs of the other agents who directly interact with them. Second, and more importantly, because prominent agents are commonly observed, they help coordinate expectations in society. For example, following a dishonest or corrupt behaviour by a prominent agent, even future generations who are not directly affected by this behaviour become more likely to act similarly for two reasons; first, because they will be interacting with others who were directly affected by the prominent agent's behaviour and who were thus more likely to have followed suit; and second, because they will realise that others in the future will interpret their own imperfect information in light of this type of behaviour. The actions of prominent agents may thus have a contagious effect on the rest of society."

What strikes me, coming back to the discussion about coordination, is all the words we have that, in the right context, mean the same thing: coordination, cooperation, correlation, collaboration, etc. Naturally, the trick with a coordination problem is to somehow coordinate everyone's behaviour. A hierarchical structure can create a monopoly in which one entity/person controls all, thus greatly simplifying the problem of getting everyone to sing from the same songbook. When putting leviathan in charge isn't feasible or isn't desired, then it becomes trickier to get a bunch of independent actors to coordinate on a particular outcome.

The 'prominent' person is like a soft version of the leviathan - not forcing everyone to go along, merely setting a good or bad example and hoping the ripples of that behaviour are enough to 'tip' society from one equilibrium to another. I didn't read the paper so I shouldn't really comment, but the notion that something like JFK asking people what they can do for their country is going to lead to a widespread change in behaviour seems hard to swallow for me. To me it seems more likely that levels of cooperation will be driven by a combination of history (as Acemolgu acknowledges) and changes in fundamental factors like technology (e.g. the medium is the message) and the natural environment (along the lines that I discussed in my last post).


***
¹Note: The Stag Hunt, that we discussed back here is an example of a game theory model with more than one equilibrium.

90. Peak Oil and the Commercial Syndrome

Note: This post is the ninetieth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

I guess it took a little longer to get back to the blog than I was expecting, due to post-vacation fatigue and busy-ness. It will be a short post this week as well, as I work my way back into the blogging flow.

While I was away, I was thinking about the relationship between energy supplies and the commercial syndrome. There is certainly causality in one direction as the innovation inherent in the 'Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' unlocked the energy in first coal, and then oil (not to mention natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, etc.), as western civilization leaped ahead of the rest of the world in technological progress and material standards of living (i.e. comfort and convenience).

But what about the other direction? What if innovation fails in the face of our current energy requirements and the amount of energy available per person starts to decline for the first time in a number of decades/centuries?

The commercial syndrome is based around win-win transactions, but to keep the engine of trade and innovation going, new inputs are always needed. It seems logical to me that the commercial syndrome will flourish most when energy inputs are rising and economic growth is strong. In these circumstances, people are less concerned about distribution and more concerned with just improving their own lot.

But if I consider my limited knowledge of the history of civilization, the current strength of the commercial syndrome seems like a bit of an anomaly, with the guardian syndrome dominant in most times past (although part of that may just be that the guardians wrote more stuff down about themselves and built bigger monuments and so on).

I'd always figured that, even if we struggle to find enough oil or replacements for oil to avoid a downturn in our energy consumption, there's so much inefficiency in our economy that we should be able to manage reasonably well just by not wasting so much energy. But I worry that in an energy downturn, there will be less of a sense that all boats can ride a rising tide, and there may be a tendency to revert to guardian-style battles over distribution of the no longer rising tide of pies.

Looking at the rise in inequality and drop-off in wage increases that occurred in most Western countries around the time of the first oil crises in the 70's, it's possible that we've already been in this situation to some extent for decades now.

Anyway, this is just a train of thought and I certainly wouldn't come to any conclusions based on it, but I do worry that if we can't continually increase our energy consumption, we'll run into serious political problems that will aggravate what would otherwise be manageable energy issues. Certainly our non-response to the threat of climate change doesn't offer much reason for optimism in terms of how well we will deal with any sort of limitations on our insatiable quest for comfort and convenience.

89. Moneyball

Note: This post is the eighty-ninth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Just a short, light-hearted post this week, as vacation calls (next post will be on May 17).

I've been reading the book 'Moneyball' by Michael Lewis. When I started reading it, I didn't do it with the intention of relating it to this series of posts, but I couldn't help myself (yes, it's possible that I should seek help of some sort).

Moneyball tells the story of how the Oakland A's were able to succeed at Major League Baseball, despite having less money to spend on players than their competition, by innovating in their approach to winning games.

Baseball, like most sports, is in essence a guardian activity, fulfilling the guardian precept to 'make rich use of the leisure', by the same token as the 'shun trading' precept led to the establishment of the Olympics only for amateurs, not for professional athletes. Of course the Olympics is a long way from only allowing amateurs to compete, and professional baseball is even further away from shunning trading in any form.

But still, there is certainly respect for tradition in baseball, and deceit for the sake of the task (hiding signals, stealing bases, etc.), loyal fans, fortitude, fatalism, hierarchy and so on.

But out of the pro sports, baseball least resembles a traditional battle for territory where strength and perseverance in the face of the opposition is required. To a large extent, baseball consists of specific tasks that don't involve direct contact with the opposition players and which are amenable to detailed statistical analysis.

In Moneyball, we see how the management of the Oakland A's takes advantage of the statistical nature of baseball to introduce rational commercial syndrome analysis in order to be efficient at the business of translating dollars into wins.

An early chapter, "How to Find a Ballplayer" outlines the clash between the traditional way of scouting and the new, disruptive, innovative approaches taken by the A's.

"Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball."

"Billy had taken to saying, "We take fifty guys [in the draft] and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for fifty a success? If you did that in the stock market you'd go broke."

"It was only baseball tradition that allowed scouting directors and scouts to go off and find the ballplayers on their own without worrying too much about the GM looking over their shoulders. And if there was one thing [scouting director] Grady knew about Billy, it was that he could give a fuck about baseball tradition."

It's not just tradition vs. innovation, there was also the related battle between guardian virtues of loyalty and presenting a united front vs.the commercial precept of dissent for the sake of the task

"The old scouts aren't built to argue; they are built to agree. They are part of a tightly woven class of former baseball players."

One of the key points the A's focussed on was to look at the actual factual record of each player's accomplishments rather than focussing on how much they 'looked' like an athlete, like someone you'd wanting fighting with you in a war, as opposed to someone who can stand in the batter's box and tell balls from strikes.

"Over and over the old scouts will say, "The guy has a great body," or "This guy may be the best body in the draft," And every time they do, Billy will say, "We're not selling jeans here"

A final element of the commercial syndrome was 'Collaborate Easily With Strangers and Aliens.' The first person to send the A's down the road of change was Sandy Alderson. In describing t

he difficulty in changing the way things were done, Alderson explained that, "I had credibility problems. I didn't have a baseball background."

So I found it interesting to see the same inroads made by innovation into the traditional way of doing things that Weber described in 'The Spirit of Capitalism' echoed so closely in a book about baseball.

But for all that, the most compelling part of Moneyball as entertainment is a chapter entitled, "The Human Element" which follows A's general manager Billy Beane as the A's, looking to set a record for consecutive wins, first take the lead in a game 11-0, then end up tied at 11 and finally win 12-11. Even in a story about the rational, commercially minded approach of investing in players who are productive, and being innovative and throwing tradition away and being efficient and thrifty, it's still the dramatic elements, the moments when rationality fails that draws us in and moves us. Moneyball works, but it's just business.

88. All's Fair in Love and War

Note: This post is the eighty-eighth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

"She cried, "Hold me back!
Hold me back, take away my gun
Hold me back, hold me back
Somebody won't you please hold me back
Don't let me do what must be done"

- Michelle Shocked - Hold Me Back

First question: What would cause a person to enter into a transaction that makes them worse off?

The most obvious possibility is that they didn't have a choice. Is someone pulls a gun on you on the street and takes your wallet, you have entered into a transaction that made you worse off, but you did it involuntarily. So transactions involving threats of violence are one possibility.

Another possibility is that a person gets tricked into making a bad transaction. For example, they bought something that turned out to be fake, or were promised something that never arrived. So fraud is another possibility.

And of course, people often do things that they themselves regret later. Even things that they know they will regret later as they are deciding to do them.

Now here's the follow-up question - in what cases are win-lose transactions beneficial to society?

Some might respond that taking something by force or fraud is never beneficial to society, but when faced with a situation where police are trying to capture a dangerous criminal or their military is fighting in a war, I think most people come around to the notion that there are situations where force and fraud are for the best and are morally justified.

The two examples above provide different cases for where we see the win-lose transaction as an overall benefit.

In the case of the police, we acknowledge that we are doing harm to the criminal, but we do so for the greater good. If a person has shown that they are willing to commit win-lose transactions that benefit themselves but hurt society (i.e. stealing) then we reason that the harm done by locking them up is outweighed by the harm prevented by keeping them from making more win-lose transactions.

Note that in order for this logic to work, the person doing the enforcing has to be strong enough to impose their sanctions on the criminal without effective retaliation. If criminals are able to retaliate effectively then our attempts to control crime will just lead to more and more violence. Only when someone can establish a monopoly on violence so that retaliation is futile can this cycle be broken. This was basically the main point made by Hobbes in Leviathan.

In a war, the reasoning is a bit different. Typically we rationalize the win-lose transaction in this case by simply not counting the impacts on our enemies in our calculations (or by calculating them with the reverse sign so that any harm caused to them counts as a good thing.)

True, any war effort usually has rationalizations that will justify it as being for the greater good (i.e. preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction), but the reality of war is that the calculus is generally in terms of our country not in terms of the total welfare of the two countries.

So in terms of modelling the win-lose transaction as a net benefit, I see two possibilities. One, based on an us vs. them distinction where we either don't count the harm caused to the other party or treat it as a good thing, and one where we count it, but we use an analysis of the total result over time to show that this particular harm is justified because it is outweighed in the long run by the benefits to society from causing the harm to the particular individual.

Of course, it is also possible that humans are programmed (genetically disposed) to take the former approach (treating harm to the enemy as a good thing) because it works out best for us overall.

A final case that I touched on earlier, is the case of a paternalistic decision where even though one person to the transaction wants to go through with it, another party prevents them from doing so because it is not believed to be in their best interest. For example, someone might want to ride their bike without a helmet but there is a law against that. Not because the person riding without a helmet is causing harm to others, but because we believe they may cause harm to themselves. As we saw previously, hyperbolic discounting (where people do things now that they will regret later) is a major cause of these sorts of situations. Of course trying to establish that society knows what's best for a person better than they do can be a tricky proposition. I'm not going into more detail on paternalistic transactions at this point (maybe in a later post), I just wanted to highlight them as another form of decision that might be regarded as 'win-lose' by some.

86. Casts of Mind, War and Peace Edition

Note: This post is the eighty-sixth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Paul Krugman had a post up recently about the U.S. Civil War and some of what he said struck me as relevant to his cast of mind, in the sense that some people have a 'guardian mindset' and some people have a 'commercial mindset.' Economists are typically the purest examples of the commercial mindset.

Here's a few quotes from his post,

"It’s the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War ...I’ve long had a special fascination, not with how the war began, but with its end. ...mainly, I think, it’s because of the symbolism of that final surrender: Lee the patrician, in his dress uniform, surrendering to the not at all patrician U.S. Grant, still muddy and disheveled from hard riding. It was, in a very real sense, the victory of modern America — of a democratic nation, in manners as well as politics — over an aristocratic ideal.

And the way modern America won was characteristic. Southerners were better warriors — man for man, they almost always outperformed Union armies, although the gap narrowed over time. But the North excelled at the arts of peace — that is, in industry and ability to get things done.

America’s other great moral war, World War II, was similar. ... the truth is that Americans were never as good at the art of war as the Germans. What we were good at was the art of production, of supply.

...

So anyway, I’m devoting a bit of time today to thinking about the muddy roads south of Richmond where, 146 years ago, the seal was put on creating the kind of nation I believe in."

It's a bit of an odd sentiment - the nation Paul Krugman believes in is one that is good enough at the Commercial life that it can 'buy its way to victory' in the Guardian world of warfare.

It's clear that Krugman understands the distinction between the Guardian approach of the patrician South vs. the Commercially minded North and that he prefers the Northern approach, but he doesn't spell out why - maybe because it was successful in the Civil War and World War II?, but you get the sense that his loyalty would remain the same even if the North had lost the Civil War and the U.S. had lost World War II.

Of course, it's also not really clear that it was the economic strength (per person) of the U.S. that was decisive in World War II. The Soviet Union was communist at the time, not exactly conducive to the kind of nation that Paul Krugman would believe in, and yet they seemed to do quite well in World War II as well.

Anyway, people can and do quibble endlessly about who accomplished what in past wars, but what is interesting to me is that Paul Krugman views democracy and strong commercial activity as going hand in hand in opposition to an aristocratic (hierarchical) society which is better equipped with warrior virtues, and that in his mind one (commercial society) is preferable and modern while the other (aristocratic society) is inferior and pre-modern.

In 'The Republic' Plato outlined how one type of government leads to another, with the aristocratic type giving way to a capitalist type which gave way to Democracy which finally gave way to tyranny, so that is consistent with Krugman's view that democracy and capitalism should be successors to the aristocratic type of society - although I doubt he'd agree that tyranny will be the new modern, leaving behind the old outdated democracy (or maybe he would, he's been paying as much attention to U.S. politics as anyone over the past decade).

Anyway, this is a bit of rambling post, the main thing I wanted to do was highlight how a commercial vs. guardian mindset lurks behind much of what is written on the topics of politics and what course society should take. Once your mind is tuned to look for the undercurrents of commercial syndrome or guardian syndrome casts of mind, you will see them everywhere (at least you will of you are like me, anyway).

85. Treasuring Honour

Note: This post is the eighty-fifth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

I've spent the last week thinking about what is meant by 'honour' - it's not as easy to describe as some of the other guardian precepts such as 'be obedient' or 'dispense largesse' and this might be a bit of a muddled post due to the lack of clear understanding on my part.

At any rate, looking at the Wikipedia entry for 'honour' it covers a wide range of topics, with a relationship to the guardian syndrome seeming to be the only common thread. After thinking about it for a while, the common thread that I came back to was similar to Wikipedia starts with, "Honour is the evaluation of a person's social status as judged by that individual's community."

After thinking about it for a while, I came back to 'Systems of Survival' and was reminded that Jane Jacobs had gone through a similar thought process,

"I put [honour] last .. because it's such a catchall. What does 'honour' mean? It's not honesty, with which it's often vulgarly confused. 'On my word of honour' can solemnize almost anything, including a promise to cover up the truth, or to lie if pressed. Even children know that. 'Honour among thieves' is not an oxymoron.

...consider what, if anything, the following have in common: the members of a monarch's annual honours list, students in a high school honours course; recipients of honourable discharges, honoraria, honorary degrees, and honourable mentions in competitions; bearers of honorifics such as the Honourable Member, the Honourable Penelope So-and-so, the daughter of a titled aristocrat, an honourary chairman, and His Honour, the mayor?

It comes clear once we recognize what dictionaries themselves tell us. Honour is recognition of status and the respect owed to status. It's much the same as 'face' in China.

Here is the crux, for either honour of face. The respect is owed, and the self-respect earned, because honour implies moral obligations, and it's possession certifies that the obligations attached to a position - whatever they may be - are honourably fulfilled."

We know that the Guardian syndrome is hierarchical, and that the hierarchy gives those on top power over those below and we saw how this can be mitigated by the precept of 'dispense largesse'. Honour serves as another bulwark against abuse of power by those at the top of the hierarchy. Those below don't have the power to affect the comfort or convenience of those above, but they do have some power to bestow or to withhold honours from their leaders.

The wording of the precept by Jane Jacobs, not 'Be honourable', but 'Treasure Honour' is interesting. It almost makes 'honour' sound like a quantity to be accumulated or hoarded, in the same manner that an avaricious person would treasure treasure.

The conclusion I'm led to is that, in somewhat the same manner that 'comfort and convenience' serves as the end goal for the Commercial Syndrome, the accumulation of honour serves as the goal for guardians. I say 'somewhat' because 'comfort and convenience' is the end goal for the commercial syndrome, while for the guardian syndrome honour is a personal goal for the guardians themselves - something that will keep them working towards the end goal of the guardian syndrome (the common good?).

It makes me think back to Howard Margolis' 'Fair Share model' in which people try to maximize two functions, one which represents their personal welfare and one which measures the welfare of the social group they are part of.

Still, trying to come up with an analytically workable definition of honour is difficult. It seems that honour increases with the level of power/status obtained and decreases to the extent that any abuse of that power or failure to use the power successfully (i.e. losing a war) takes place. Now all we need to do is measure all of those things accurately!

84. Hierarchy, Obedience and Largesse

Note: This post is the eighty-fourth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Last post, I talked about how we model the precept of 'Be loyal'. This week, let's look at a cluster of other Guardian syndrome precepts, 'Dispense Largesse, 'Respect Hierarchy' and 'Be Obedient'

In a lot of ways, the Commercial and Guardian syndromes are opposites. The commercial syndrome shuns force and upholds honesty while the Guardian syndrome lauds force and deception when used to advance our shared interests. The Commercial syndrome calls for efficiency while the Guardian syndrome calls for rich use of leisure and so on.

The topic of hierarchy is another instance of this opposition. While the Guardian syndrome includes military-type hierarchical precepts such as 'Respect Hierarchy' and 'Be Obedient and Disciplined,' the commercial syndrome calls for 'Dissent for the sake of the task' and 'Come to Voluntary Agreements.'

In what sort of situation is a hierarchy useful? As Joseph Heath points out in 'The Efficient Society' it seems like there are a lot of such situations, as most of our life, our working life in particular, revolves around hierarchical structures. Heath figures that the hierarchy is more efficient and that, "The most effective hierarchies are ones in which subordinates have enough loyalty to the organization and to its leadership that they obey without needing to be forced" (emphasis added).

Heath adds that hierarchy's core virtue is that, "it helps us to avoid collective action problems"

By 'collective action problems' Heath is referring to prisoner's dilemma situations with multiple participants.

But what is meant by more efficient. In his book 'The Efficient Society' Heath generally means Pareto efficient (meaning some people are better off, nobody is worse off) but he's not specific in his discussion of hierarchy.

The classic prisoner's dilemma looks like the following:



Let's assume for now that without a hierarchical structure, Bob and Doug would end up in the uncooperative outcome with a total result of 2 (1 each) but that by forming a hierarchical structure with Bob in charge, now they end up at the 'cooperative' outcome with a total result of 10.



But whereas in the standard cooperative resolution the fruits are divided based on some predetermined formula, in this case the person at the top of the hierarchy could, by virtue of their superior rank, simply take the whole 'cooperative' result for themselves. If this were to happen, then the final outcome would still be efficient in this sense of achieving the best total result possible, but it would no longer be Pareto-efficient in the sense of providing a gain to all involved. The sucker at the bottom of the hierarchy ends up worse off than before.

Within the altered world of hierarchy, it makes sense for Doug to cooperate, even getting nothing out of the deal (because now Bob is his superior/boss and can punish him if he doesn't cooperate), but he'd be better off scrapping the whole notion of the hierarchy (i.e. starting a revolution) and going back to how things were before.

Commercially minded folks (e.g. economists) will be thinking to themselves that this can't happen because then the underling will just go somewhere else where they can get a better deal. But that's commercial thinking - in the guardian world, there is no 'competition' and there is nowhere else to go

In the Guardian world, the recourse is not to competition, but to force. In order to secure continued obedience Bob could resort to force as well, but it would probably be better for everyone if he instead decided to share some of the cooperative gain with Doug.

Thus brings us to the final precept I wanted to discuss in this post, 'Dispense Largesse.' The current round of uprisings in the Middle East is showing the difference between places (Oman, Jordan, UAE) where leaders practiced the guardian precept of dispensing largesse and places like Tunisia and Libya where leaders instead accumulated billions of dollars in their own private bank accounts (obviously there's a lot more going on, but I feel confident that the role of largesse is certainly a factor).

In game theory terms, the largesse plays a critical role in securing buy in (obedience and respect for) a hierarchical arrangement which is more efficient in dealing with Prisoner's Dilemma type situations. We end up with something like the following:



Maybe it doesn't seem completely fair (who put Bob in charge, anyway?) but everyone is better off (in absolute, if not in relative terms) under the new hierarchical system than they were in the old uncooperative outcome.