Like the nature nurture debate, the collectivism individualism debate seems contrived since it blinks reality.

It clearly tickles Brooks’ collectivist fancy “when John McCain talks at a forum about national service.” But that is precisely when McCain exposes his martial animosity to the character of his own country. Brooks may wish to join McCain in an effort to efface the separateness of lives, to degrade the dignity of self-creation and self-command by denying its possibility, to cultivate in Americans the docility of subjects ready to kill and die for the state. In Prussia this may have been a “conservative” project. But this is America. And defending American individualism is my one conservative impulse!

So, David Brooks, here’s a line. Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Garrison, Spooner, Tucker, Twain, Mencken, Hayek, Friedman, Rand, and America are over here on this side. And there’s you over there. You are most welcome to step across and attempt to wrest the individualism from our cold dead fingers. Bring McCain! In fairness, I should say that Emerson is a vicious Indian leg wrestler.

This is in response to a couple of columns by David Brooks that noodle around about Asian values and human sociality.

Goldwater’s vision was highly individualistic and celebrated a certain sort of person — the stout pioneer crossing the West, the risk-taking entrepreneur with a vision, the stalwart hero fighting the collectivist foe.

The problem is, this individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong. . .

Cognitive scientists have shown that our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context — by the frames, biases and filters that are shared subconsciously by those around. Neuroscientists have shown that we have permeable minds. When we watch somebody do something, we recreate their mental processes in our own brains as if we were performing the action ourselves, and it is through this process of deep imitation that we learn, empathize and share culture.

Geneticists have shown that our behavior is influenced by our ancestors and the exigencies of the past. Behavioral economists have shown the limits of the classical economic model, which assumes that individuals are efficient, rational, utility-maximizing creatures.

Psychologists have shown that we are organized by our attachments. Sociologists have shown the power of social networks to affect individual behavior.

What emerges is not a picture of self-creating individuals gloriously free from one another, but of autonomous creatures deeply interconnected with one another. Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.

Of course humans are social animals, pack animals is probably the most apt description, like a pack of dogs or wolves. They are not herd animals like cattle or sheep. But humans are not limited by natural tendencies and have succeeded by managing their natural impulses rather than being ruled by them. There are human societies that are pack-like, or even more separate, and there are societies that are more similar to herds. Some are more wealthy than others, some seem more happy than others, and scholars argue about the whats and whys of it.

What jumps out at me in Brooks' description of what he considers to be human nature is that such people would be incapable of making good group decisions. They'd be victimized by information cascades, the Concorde fallacy, the SNAFU principle, precision, completeness, latency and the Knowledge Problem. By focusing power it is sometimes possible to do huge things, but it is never possible to endure. Collapse is assured. Indeed, that is the historical human condition. Civilizations flared and flamed out, societies collapsed, environments were ruined, and then after a period of savagery another brief civilization might arise.

Fortunately, we have minds capable of partially repressing our more beastly impulses in service of sophisticated objectives. We can even leverage the natural tendency for social unity to hector one another to not give in to those natural impulses for social unity since it is a fatal mistake. What is required is that each person do their share, do their duty, and think independently for the good of society. Harmony isn't the objective, good decisions are the objective, and that is best achieved when people are independent, diverse and decentralized but their judgements can be aggregated. It is critical that they not be influenced by others since we are so susceptible to cascades that blind us to reality and lead to poor decisions. Fashion is a pathology from this perspective, though it is harmless enough in most social contexts.

The reason we must cultivate independence, in spite of natural tendencies to slavish collectivism, is that there are real threats and this is our best method for dealing with them. Waxing nostalgic for some semi-mythical American past and a frontier ethos that many think defines us, or even a studied philosophical position, are weak arguments in the end. They are easily dismissed by others who have different values. But it's harder to advocate collectivism when it is understood that it is a death sentence in the end, that it dumbs down humanity so that it cannot meet novel threats.

Update:

For example:

IEM [Iowa Electronic Market] . . . has correctly predicted the outcome of every presidential election since 1988, and its predictions have been consistently more accurate than the polls. . .

The success of prediction markets is related to though distinct from the success of the "blogosphere" in ferreting out information that eludes the mass media. Both the blogosphere and prediction markets aggregate greater amounts of information than any centralized information gatherer can obtain. In the case of the blogosphere, it is easy to see why this is so. It is virtually costless (except in time) to become a blogger, and among the millions of people drawn to blogging are people with all sorts of pockets of specialized information, which the internet enables to be pooled rapidly. This pooling resembles the economic market, in which vast amounts of information, encapsulated in prices, are pooled (the basic insight of Friedrich Hayek, and the secret of capitalism’s superiority to socialism as a means of optimizing economic activity).

Prediction markets provide an even closer analogy to the market, since they (or rather some of them, for others permit betting only with play money) provide financial rewards for correct information (as blogging rarely does), in this resembling ordinary commercial speculation. Someone who thinks he has superior insight into political processes will have an incentive to place a bet in IEM or some other political prediction market.

The line from the original post - good decisions are the objective, and that is best achieved when people are independent, diverse and decentralized but their judgements can be aggregated - is supported by Posner's take on prediction markets.

This method of aggregating information--call it expert aggregation--is different from public opinion polling, which is based on randomness. . . The idea behind the prediction market is that the opportunity to make money or just the fun of betting on one's insights or hunches (the only reward that the virtual prediction markets offer participants) will elicit expert opinions--more so, certainly, than random polling . . .

The emphasis on the expertise of participants in prediction markets is important to distinguish them from the wisdom of random crowds which, in Posner's words, "is really just a matter of reducing sampling error." Posner also notes that such markets can be gamed, manipulated, by false information but that they do correct themselves.

Becker brings up another concern.

Since bets on political online markets are small, the motivation of bettors can hardly be the amounts they win or lose. Nor can the usual economic theories of risky choices be of much relevance since the risks to bettors' wealth are rather insignificant. These gambles are made because of utility derived from the gambling itself, not because of the amounts won or lost. This has the very important implication that the positions taken by bettors-for example, whether they bet that the Democratic rather than the Republican presidential candidate would win- is not necessarily determined by which one they expect to win. On the contrary, their betting behavior may be in good measure determined by whom they want to win rather than whom they expect to win. . .

Predictions rather than hopes may be of relatively large importance in the IEM and other online political prediction markets because the main bettors have been academic economists and financial experts rather than the general public. . .

If large bets were allowed, some wealthy groups may bet a lot on their candidates in order to exert bandwagon influences on public opinion through their large bets affecting market odds. If so, these markets likely would become less reliable as predictors of outcomes, and hence would have less influence on opinions. To a large extent, therefore, these markets would be self correcting, although online political markets might place various other restrictions on bets, as is common in derivative and other exchanges.

It's tricky. Better decisions come from aggregating expert opinion, but it has to be true judgments rather than instrumental or biased prediction. Lots can go wrong. But, it's a better system than those that rely on centralized decision making or deliberative consensus systems, both of which are more easily gamed, unable to process large amounts of diverse information, and are not self correcting due to sunk cost effects and the social costs of abandoning costly but erroneous consensus.

That's the hard bit for many people. They imagine that they can invent some decision making system that is more precise and controllable. Prediction markets, like any other sort of market, scare them since there's no way to backtrack, no way to explain the logic of the decision since it is never expressly stated. It's sort of a black box that gives answers but never explains methods, and can be wrong.

But, markets are right more often than other systems so we are foolish not to use them. Prediction markets are useful tools.