I'm too busy to think and write but still read. There's been a cross media discussion about envy, spite and redistribution for a couple of days that was mildly interesting. Today Don Boudreaux gets to the meat of the nut. Status Won't Go Away.

Alex, Arnold, Greg, and Megan each mention solid reasons for questioning the wisdom of reducing envy by taxing the rich and giving the proceeds to the poor. (Brad DeLong recently offered such a proposal.) . .

Back in April the New Yorker magazine ran this interesting article by John Cassidy in which Cassidy used evidence of social hierarchies in some animal species to suggest that we humans should "redistribute" income. The specific evidence was that animals low on the totem pole were more likely to get sick and die than were animals in the same group but higher up the social pecking order.

A few weeks later the New Yorker published this letter of mine in response:

. . . Because status among humans is determined not only by income but also by traits such as political power, athletic prowess, military heroics, intellectual success, and good looks, equalizing incomes will intensify the importance of these non-pecuniary traits as sources of status. And there's no reason why persons with low status in these non-pecuniary categories will not suffer all the stress and envy now allegedly suffered by people with low incomes.

This is obvious I think. What I don't understand is how others fail to grasp this. They don't even need to look at non-human animals, just look at people, especially children or infantalized humans (prisons, communes, schools etc.) and you can see all of this clearly. That it is as true with other animals is hardly surprising.

Nonsense ideas like the ones Delong and Cassidy advocate are more of a mystery. How do seemingly intelligent and informed people speak such transparent nonsense that can so easily be refuted by even the most casual observation? Herb Gintis once spoke about such things in a mailing list. I lost the link but still have the text. Gintis replied to this Steven D'Aprano statement:

The widespread existance of grossly irrational and false, yet somehow plausible, beliefs is an important phenomenon that requires explanation.

Gintis replies, based on his Hitchhiker’s Guide work:

First, two basic cultural transmission mechanism lead humans to accept statements that they do not personally subject to scrutiny for factual validity. One is conformist transmission, whereby people see what the majority are doing, and copy it (Boyd and Richerson, 1985, Henrich and Boyd 2001). When there is much to learn and the cost of testing is high, this is a fitness enhancing strategy for a large fraction of the population, especially when the costs and benefits of different behaviors do not change rapidly over time. The other is the transmission by socialization, through which new members of society are induced to accept norms and values that they choose to follow. Norms and values cannot be scrutinized for truth value, since they have none. But, people can generally believe that those who subscribe to the norms and values of their society have higher fitness and well being than those who violate these norms. Moreover, this believe that "those who do good will do well" is generally true in most societies, so this belief can be personally validated.

Second, there is no guarantee that these two cultural transmission mechanisms will produce fitness enhancing beliefs. People can conform to grossly inaccurate and harmful practices (e.g., blame sickness on an enemy who invoked a hostile spirit to harm you), and they can have beliefs that lead to the very demise of a society. See, for instance, Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies (New York: The Free Press, 1992). Norms and values can similarly be deeply fitness reducing for a society---a grim example being the way values have led many nations to respond suboptimally to the AIDS epidemic.

Third, these two cultural transmission mechanisms lead human societies to have a very low within-group variance of behavior, thus enhancing the power of between-group selection. Specifically, groups that have fitness-enhancing cultural forms are likely to expand (through war, imitation, and population growth) at the expense of those that do not. It is this between group selection process that leads cultural forms to be fitness enhancing.

One beautiful example of this is the tendency for the world's great religions (as measured by number of adherents) to embrace prosocial values (e.g., love Thy neighbor, honesty will open the doors of heaven to you) as opposed to the myriad of religions and cults found in small-scale societies, many of which have deeply fitness-reducing aspects).

Fitness enhancing, however, does not always mean true in the scientific sense. Thus, many untrue beliefs have proliferated in even the most advanced societies.

Fourth, advanced intellectual sophistication is not a counterweight to any of the above assertions. Think of our own society, where the most educated classes have believed such things as (a) autism is cause by poor mothering, (b) fat is bad for you and carbohydrates are good for you, (c) colds are caught by sitting in a draft, (d) second hand smoke is so bad for non-smokers that smokers have absolutely no right to smoke in public. And so on. Not to mention whole ideologies, such as Freudian psychology and Marxian political theory.

Fifth, humans, like all other animals, do not maximize fitness, but rather an objective function (which may be called a preference function) based on immediate costs and benefits, that has evolved to correspond to fitness enhancement. For this reason, a mutant human who does not believe the dominant myths and does not accept the dominant norms and values of society need not prosper, unless he can accurately distinguish which among the cultural forms he faces in fact enhances his personal fitness, and which do not. But agents do not choose to maximize fitness, but rather utility, as prescribed by their preference function. There is no way to achieve accuracy in assessing fitness effects , in part because humans (like other animals, although much less so) tend to have preference functions that are excessively present-oriented, and so undervalue behaviors with long-term payoffs (Google Ainslie, Laibson, and Loewenstein for documentation). Cultural beliefs and values that counter this tendency (e.g., be slow to anger, invest in good hunting skills) are fitness enhancing but will be judged to be welfare reducing by the sociopath who assesses them according to his own preference function.

It follows that the widespread existence of false beliefs and personally harmful values, despite producing major maladaptions in many cases, nevertheless contributes to the success of Homo sapiens. In particular, the above-outlined mechanism allow for the evolutionary stability of altruistic cooperation and punishment, which are the basic underpinnings of social cooperation in humans

Delong may be dead wrong but being dead wrong in the company of many others can still be beneficial for humans in the long term if Gintis is to be believed. I have some doubts. When even longer time frames are considered it seems that such idiocy can lead to societal or even global collapse. It is my hope that fewer episodes of mass delusion such as the Freudian psychology and Marxian political theory that Gintis mentions will occur as the speed and scope of communication increases. Such ideas need a certain amount of protection from the light of reason to flourish. Both conformist transmission and transmission by socialization are more difficult in open societies where contrary views and analyses are more difficult to filter out.