Capitalism and Human Nature

Man, there's so much that's been said here. As you'll see from my site, I am a big fan of EP and I think it has a tremendous value to mankind, even if it's fuzzy. I've responded to the post at Mixed Memory. Check it out.

http://www.enlightenedcaveman.com/2005/02/zero-sum-versus-wealth-creation.html

EC

Oh, and didn't social scientists save the Galaxy from thousands of years of barbarism by building a Foundation at Terminus and another one at the opposite end of the Galaxy? Or they would have, if it hadn't have been for the Mule and those long pointless sequels.

Just a quick comment:

China has moved increasingly toward market-oriented institutions, slowly but surely. Were they to do so more seriously, and were they to unleash similar freedoms in research and other places, there is no doubt that they would shoot up the growth curve.

Don't know about the Chinese soc sci community, but given the repressiveness that regime still creates, I wouldn't be surprised if that soc sci community is largely underground and very quiet about conclusions that threaten the power of the Party.

Interesting stuff, Steve and Gareth.

What to make of China's recent economic success? A different path to wealth, or....? They might make it on modern economic institutions alone. Is there much of a Chinese social science community?

monkyboy: I did some work on Victorian intellectual history, and I think the broad acceptance of the ideas of laissez faire among the 19th century elites, and the correlative transoformation of the common law (and, to some degree, the continental civil codes) was a result of the classical economists' influence. Only the British Empire really embraced free trade, but that was a big only in those days.

A lesser example of effective use of social science is the existence of an insurance/ risk management industry. The Cato types won't agree, but I suspect that Keynes' discoveries about aggregate demand have had similar beneficial impacts. If you count epidemiology as a social science, then there's more.

Of course, there are also all the malign effects of false social scientific theories...

Oooooops, that last post was mine.

Monkyboy wrote:

To be sure, a large portion of our prosperity is due to the scientists, engineers and tinkerers who developed the tools that created our affluence.

Many of the social structures required, like the English East Indies Trading Company, were already in place before Smith and Ricardo were born. In a sense, they just commented on what had already occurred.

My feeling is we would still be prosperous without them, we just wouldn't be as sure why...

Sorry, but this won't wash with history. Many cultures had the science etc before we did, but they haven't achieved our affluence. The point is that wealth and its associated well-being comes from innovation, but innovation requires science *and market institutions.* You can have all the brilliant scientists you want, and all the tinkerers under heaven, but unless they have the freedom to explore their ideas and, just as importantly, the freedom to bring those ideas to the market to serve consumers, science will never lead to a higher standard of living.

Science is necessary but not sufficient for the West's wellbeing. Science needs the institutions of capitalism for humans to flourish.

What made the West rich are those institutions, both economic and political, not the scientists. A good non-technical introduction to this argument is Rosenberg and Birdzell's "How the West Grew Rich."

Uh, let's see...we got some nouns, verbs, gerunds....
Less facetiously, Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" is a good book.

Good luck analyzing language into its constituent elements.

Interesting question Gareth. To be sure, a large portion of our prosperity is due to the scientists, engineers and tinkerers who developed the tools that created our affluence.

Many of the social structures required, like the English East Indies Trading Company, were already in place before Smith and Ricardo were born. In a sense, they just commented on what had already occurred.

My feeling is we would still be prosperous without them, we just wouldn't be as sure why...

I'd say you can only understand more complex phenomena in terms of less complex. You can only understand chemistry in terms of physics, molecular biology in terms of chemistry, cell biology in terms of molecular biology and so on.

monkyboy: What about post-industrial revolution affluence? Could we have achieved it without Adam Smith and David Ricardo?

If "you can't understand more complex phenomena in terms of less complex," then in what terms DO you propose to understand it?
Only understanding complex phenomena in terms of equal or greater complexity? This seems self-evidently false.
Although it would make grade-school math classes more fun: "Children, I need you to take this equation and turn it into a much more complicated equation."
English classes would suck, though: "Your book report must be as long as, or longer than, the original book. And you must use more vocabulary words than your author." Though, come to think of it, that seems to describe a lot of po-mo lit-crit.
I just think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
We DO need to beware of 'just-so stories.' Cultural evolution is Lamarckian, not Darwinian. This doesn't mean evolution is false, nor sterile, nor that we can learn and infer nothing at all from our animal heritage.

Hard science has many accomplishments it can be proud of, including the recent landing of a probe on a moon of Satun that's sending back data.

I would be interested to know what Social Scientists, including Evolutionary Psychologists, consider their greatest accomplishments?

I don't know enough about the topic to debate this. My basic point is that you can't understand more complex phenomena in terms of less complex. As you move up levels, the phenomena changes. You can't understand the laws of economics using physics, and you can't understand evolution using chemistry alone. Likewise, as you move from aardvarks to humans, the explanations that work at the other levels don't work. So take trade, the example will uses? Can we identify the selective advantages of trade as accounting for this ability? Or is this ability part of a large set of features that arrived with language? I don't know, but one certainly cannot make a simple equation: trade is advantageous, therefore it was developed through the evoluationary process.

What's in dispute? That humans are animals? I got plenty of evidence for that, and Aristotle's on my side too. You reflect a Judeo-Christian cultural prejudice, possibly caused by the relative lack of primates in Judeo-Christian homelands.

I doubt that language emerged fully formed, and I think that plenty of animals have (undeniably less complex) languages. But, anyway, why do you need language to feel wronged or seek revenge?

Isn't that what's in dispute? As I remember from studying this stuff, language arrived in a flash and fully formed about 50k years ago. No one really knows how or why it developed, so you're just pushing off the issue into the evolutionary past but not really solving it. Until further notice, aardvarks don't speak, and what they can tell us about human beings (and complex behavior like revenge) is pretty limited.

What is gained by studying aardvarks if you want to study men? Well, one thing we know about humans is that they are animals. If studying aardvarks tells us something about the general principles of animal behaviour, then we now know something about human behaviour.

Let me quote Aristotle's Parts of Animals for the argument that if you want to understand human beings, study human beings, not aardvarks:

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/parts_animals.1.i.html

"Another matter which must not be passed over without consideration is, whether the proper subject of our exposition is that with which the ancient writers concerned themselves, namely, what is the process of formation of each animal; or whether it is not rather, what are the characters of a given creature when formed. For there is no small difference between these two views. The best course appears to be that we should follow the method already mentioned, and begin with the phenomena presented by each group of animals, and, when this is done, proceed afterwards to state the causes of those phenomena, and to deal with their evolution."

So that's Aristotle. What is gained by studying aardvarks if you want to study men? I really don't see the explanatory power. I'm not denying human nature, I'm denying that the just-so stories of evoluationary psychology have any explanatory value. I could come up with plenty of stories for stepparent abuse that have nothing to do with evolution. I don't have to dig into the mists of time for a clever just-so story.

If you want to understand human beings, study human beings. Nothing is added to the sum of knowledge by adding at the end "and the reason for this behavior is the evolutionary process.

If you want to understand aardvarks, study aardvarks. But if you want to explain what you have found out about aardvarks, you are going to need natural, kin and sexual selection, evolutionary stable strategies and all the rest of it. And if you start studying aardvarks with a dogmatic insistence that there is no such thing as aardvark nature, and all aardvark behaviour is socially constructed, you are never going to learn much about aardvarks.

If you want empirical findings, here are some:

1. Stepparents are significantly more likely to abuse or kill children in their care than biological parents.

2. Women have higher standards for looks in short-term sexual partners than for long-term mates; men are the opposite.

3. If you prick us, we bleed. If you tickle us, we laugh. If you poison us, we die. And if you wrong us, we seek revenge.

Taking Shylock's laws, it doesn't seem to bother anyone that there is an explanation why we are more averse to poisons that were around in the Stone Age than those that were synthesized after the Second World War. If this fact has political implications, they are liberal ones: environmental regulators should apply stricter scrutiny to recently synthesized chemicals than to naturally abundant ones.

And who is against an adaptationist explanation for skin strength, or blood clotting, or tickling (not that I know one for tickling, but I'd be interested)?

The point of evolutionary psychology is that there is also an adaptationist explanation for the tendency to seek revenge, a tendency which is, at first blush, irrational.

Clearly, you don't need Darwin to know that there is a human nature: Shakespeare didn't. In fact, I doubt anyone denied it until the nineteenth century. But evolutionary psychology is resisted because it deprives deniers of human nature, not just of the position of common sense, but of the higher status position of theoretical sophistication.

Are you building on sand or rock?
Yeah, we can rise above our primal instincts.
I'm all for it.
But, if you try building a society and culture without taking those underlying instincts into account, don't be surprised when it collapses.
Like the U.S.S.R., for example.

Will's article astounded me. Surely it is madness. To cast aside all hope of a sharing, egalitarian society, in which the destitute are raised up with compassion, and resources are shared and divided for the common welfare, and people do not scratch and scrape desperately for status (real or perceived), and the race is united in a sense of shared community -- to cast aside all hope of this because it is not the way animals live, and not the way our ancestors lived, this is madness. We are not animals, and I cling to the desperate hope that we as a species HAVE learned something over the last eight thousand years. Culture, and acculturation, do not count for nothing among humans -- quite the opposite.

I will give concrete evidence that, even if the traits listed in Will's article are indeed part of humanity's bedraggled inheritance, they do not have to be built into the foundations of our societies. I draw this evidence, not from psychological experiments on humans who have been shaped by years of living in a capitalist society, but from my children.

First off, Will does not mention physical violence as a necessary component of human societies, although it's pretty common among animals, ancestors, and children, I've been told. Some of my children have been violent, but none of them are now. It is easy to train a normal child to express frustration properly.

PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE NATURAL. Among my three children old enough to fight over toys, two of them started out being possessive of them (screaming "MINE!" not infrequently). The third did not: she freely gave her toys away. I should be clear that when I say "her toys", I mean the ones she was playing with at the time. With training and encouragement, all three children (including the two-year-old boy) give their toys away and/or share when asked, and frequently when not asked. In our home, for the most part, none of the children "own" any of the toys; all the toys belong to all of them. If there is a disagreement over who is going to use a toy at a given moment, they work it out themselves. I would submit that the evidence here suggests that property rights may be innate, for some people, maybe even most people, but everyone can be trained to share a pool of resources fairly, with no sense of individual ownership.

WE ARE ENVIOUS ZERO-SUM THINKERS. Our six-year-old has grasped the notion that some families have things that we don't have, and her question in these cases is not, "Why can't we take it from them?", but "Why don't we have that, too?" There is no zero-sum thinking here. For her, the world is infinitely large, with unlimited resources. In any case, it seems to me that this "innate predisposition" can logically only arise if people believe in individual property!

WE ARE HEIRARCHICAL. Will's case seems to be that people like to be in charge of other people. I humbly submit myself to the court as a counterexample. Quite against my will I was recently put in charge of three other programmers, and it has been hellish. I do not wish to order people about. I'm not good at it and I'd rather just do my own thing. I think that most people would rather just be left alone to do their own thing. Surely libertarians can sympathize with this? As for my children, one of them definitely likes to be in charge, but the other two don't; they will do as the first one asks sometimes, and sometimes not. We have some more training to do, but I feel very confident that, just as my sister eventually stopped ordering me around, we will train my daughter to leave her siblings alone. It's a matter of maturity and training.

WE ARE COALITIONAL. I can't use my children as an example here, other than to say that they are obviously conscious that some people are part of our family and some people aren't. I will say that last fall, Josh (who was then just two) attached himself to a kindly gentleman who had sat with him on a park bench for three minutes. Unfortunately, this gentleman already had some grandchildren, thank you very much sir, he didn't need another one. So Josh had to come home with us. However, I was myself raised with no particular attachment to America, and while I had some patriotism brainwashed into me in the public schools, after the events of the last decade, it is pretty much gone again. I do not accept the assumption that humans are destined forever to be divided arbitrarily.

This post is already very long, and probably doesn't need much wrap-up. But I think that the ways of being human, while bounded, are a lot more varied than anything we've seen on this young planet thus far; and if we subscribe to the half-baked ideas in Will's article, we're going to set our sights far too short.

The evolutionary-psych approach clarifies and resolves a lot of 'nature vs. nurture' debates.
It gives a reason why, and predicts when, the 'tabula rasa' theory will be wrong about human behavior.
If vertebrates generally exhibit behavior X, then 'tabula rasa' is definitely wrong about that behavior in humans. If just a few other primates exhibit behavior X, 'tabula rasa' is only questionable...if 40% of mammals, if 2 out of 3 great apes: very likely, probably, etc....
Many of the predictions, while falsifiable in princible, are difficult to test in practice, given the moral hazards of experimenting on humans.
That said, there will always be 'just-so stories' made up to 'explain' things in 'evolutionary' terms.
Caveat emptor!
Remember, evolution was a philosophical idea BEFORE Darwin discovered natural selection, and Darwin knew nothing of DNA.

If you want to understand human beings, study human beings. Nothing is added to the sum of knowledge by adding at the end "and the reason for this behavior is the evolutionary process. You see, our ancestors picked berries" etc.

I'm an atheist and a big fan of Darwin, but I don't think of evolution as any more than a pretty good theory. Something that explains most of the data we have gathered so far, but not all.

To take a theory and stretch it to cover all manner of fluff goes well beyond science...it enters the realm of astrology and religion and other nice stories...

bjr:

I think your confusing two kinds of scientific endeavour. The basic principle of evolutionary psychology is that, since humans are animals, the human sciences are subdisciplines of ethology in the same way that chemistry is a subdiscipline of physics or biochemistry is a subdiscipline of chemistry.

A proposition of ethology can be falsified by showing that it is contrary to observed animal behaviour. The animal in question can be a sea cucumber or a human.

Part of scieintific progress is falsifying and refining general theories. But another part is showing that complex phenomena can be understood as examples of more general laws. So when chemists and physicists showed that the behaviour of the periodic table made sense in light of quantum mechanics, they made progress.

This answers monkyboy's point as well. No doubt, some pop evopsych theorizing is wrong or unscientific, but the basic premise -- that psychology is a specialized form of ethology -- can only be denied by denying evolution.

I don't see how you can invent some hypothetical scenario deep in human history to account for some experimental regularity. If people are cooperative, it's ascribed to evolution, and if people are not, that too is ascribed to evolution. I don't see the falsfiability of this sort of armchair speculation.

Wil,

Nice piece. You may want to see some of my musings on that very same Hayek quote here: http://it.stlawu.edu/shor/Papers/JARS-Hayek.pdf You, or your readers, might also find this worth looking at as well: http://it.stlawu.edu/shor/Papers/FunctionsCJE.pdf

Steve

"Ad hominid"
I like that.
I like the article too, "ad hominid" as it may be....

in fairness to communitarians, it was until 1970 than biologists themselves turned their back on "group selection" and "for the benefit of the species" type thinking.

Good article.

Unusually, for Cato, you reference Hayek's melancholy feeling that an aspiration for socialism is natural, even if socialist society is not.

I don't think Karl Marx, as opposed to his followers, rejected human nature. The "ensemble of social relations" quote really means something closer to Aristotle's man is a political animal than a Blank Slate view. (Which is not to say that his vision of human nature was right, just that he had one). The argument is in Geras: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805271821/qid=1108599172/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/103-6848006-6330264?v=glance&s;=books.

Second, construct an ad hominid argument claiming that this trait or behaviour served some functional need for hunter-gatherers on the veldt.

rich, taking the high ground.

in any case, books like a darwinian left, or ideas like geoff miller's that in the mating mind that "pair bonds" have usually resembled short-medium-term relationships rather than lifelong marriages falsify the contention that evo-psych is just a front to "right wing" politics.

if you have a problem with the spin that will puts on the facts, draw your own inferences from them. the laws of physics are universal, but the machines you construct by considering their implications might have different uses.

Oops, must have been some evolutionary survival mechanism that caused me to put in a bad link...

on right wing psuedo-science

on right wing psuedo-science

First, take some human trait or behaviour. Bonus points if it’s something weird like slash fiction that’s likely to attract the interest of the Sunday supplement editors.

Second, construct an ad hominid argument claiming that this trait or behaviour served some functional need for hunter-gatherers on the veldt.

Third, use your findings to justify some right-wing shibboleth or another, showing that hunter-gatherer societies hardwire us for perfectly competitive markets or the like (in fairness, Hagen, Watson and Thomson jr. don’t do this).

Fourth, write article. Repeat as often as necessary to get tenure and/or the attention of the popular press.

though j.m. smith was notoriously cautious about talking about human beings, because experiments are notoriously difficulty, during the initial "sociobiology" controversy he did lean toward the side of the sociobiologists as opposed to lewontin & gould (despite good relations with lewontin, which he maintained).

w.d. hamilton was pretty open to sociobiological thinking, seeing as he popularized kin selection, and his primary popularizer, richard dawkins, also tends to smile upon evo-psych modes of thinking though he tends to focus on non-human ethology.

so there you have two of the primary thinkers in theoretical evolutionary biology in the last generation, who though castigating excessive extravagence upon sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, did not denegrate the the paradigm out of hand like many.

there are some secondary issues about evo psych, like massive modularity, monomorphism on salient behavorial loci and what not that are disputable, but the project of human nature as opposed to a narrow conception proceeds....

Prof, E.O. Wilson, what do YOU think of evolutionary psychologists? ...

Associating a great thinker like Karl Marx with a petty thug like Kim Jong Il is like associating Adam Smith with Ken Lay.

Modern capitalism is the result of the very stuggle between capital and labor that Marx wrote about 150 years ago, not some natural process buried in our Stone Age brains.

As for biological fantasies, the psuedo-scientist in the world of Evolutionary Psychology are the masters. Ask a real biologist what they think of these navel gazers...