Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (Rutgers Series on Human Evolution) [ペーパーバック]

In good evolutionary psychologist form, Paul Rubin tries to explain our existing political behaviors by looking at the Era of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA). The EEA is the time during the Pleistocene when humans became humans and our ancestors' innate tendencies were etched into our genes. This analysis benefits from the fact that Rubin is an economist and understands how incentives matter in human behavior. Many other writers lack this insight; most notably the great Richard Dawkins who, after articulating selfish gene theory, tries to wish away his conclusions.

It is interesting that Rubin, a professor of law and economics at Emory, was a libertarian when he began to write this book but ended up questioning the rigidity of that ideology. You can see this come through when he begins the book by dispelling myths on both sides of the traditional political spectrum. He explains that the state of nature is a useless metaphor because humans never existed in such an anarchic state, and also that humans are not malleable, but instead have a certain human nature.

Our species' patrilocality is an important theme that runs throughout the book. Male dominance and the ease with which males could form political alliances in the EEA is key, according to Rubin. But while that ease made some males dominant, it also helped those left out to join together to make sure they weren't too dominant. Rubin also distinguishes between male and female evolved risk preferences and how this affects political behavior today.

Economists assume rationality in their models, but empirical studies would suggest that people don't behave so sensibly. Rubin takes a stab at reconciling this bogeyman of economics by positing that behavior that seems unreasonable today may have been reasonable in the EEA. For example, evolving in a zero-sum world leads to a mistrust of capitalism in today's nonzero world. Also other arguably irrational behavior, like religious conviction, may still be useful to genes today.

In sum, the book is a good survey of the evolutionary psychology literature with Rubin's insights about what it means for political behavior. This is decidedly an academic text, but a good one and ou shouldn't be put off by this because it's very readable--especially if you understand the language of evolution and economics. I would certainly recommend it.

Socialism doesn't work. Two large-scale forced experiments, the Soviet and Maoist, failed. Many lesser socialist states have gone bankrupt. These experiments in institutionalized goodness failed because we humans are born selfish. We glorify equality, but down deep we want nothing more than to outshine the others. We deplore poverty and misery, but when the lotto win falls our way, we don't distribute it to unfortunates.

Rubin, a micro-economist, has written a resounding defence of capitalism understood as the system of production and exchange that optimizes the trade-off between selfishness and large-scale social interaction through a win-win system whose participation inducement is reward rather than deterrence. The dazzle of rewards unleashes the flow of human capital that generates economic growth and multiplication of public goods. The core value of the system is individual freedom and autonomy. Rubin undertakes to explain capitalism's evolutionary origin and the psychology that sustains it. He appropriates game theory to explain how the basic psychology of cooperation, including specific traits such as intelligence, might have evolved under selection pressures generated by the evolutionary `arms race'. This abstract computation is given flesh by suppositions drawn from primatology and anthropology. The result is then projected back to the late Pleistocene when the hominid line speciated as sapiens. There is no remedy for this speculative procedure because there is no direct evidence, apart from hand axes, about human behaviour and psychology in `the state of nature'. However, hominid palaeontology is a dynamic field invigorated especially by new findings from China. Homo sapiens continued to evolve after speciation put the large brained biped in place. Racial differentiation occurred; subtle but important behavioural and psychological differentiation may also have occurred. This caveat assumes critical importance because of what happens next--nothing much, until agricultural settlements appeared about 10,000 years ago, which in turn precipitated the gallop to the initial founding of states in Mesopotamia 4,000 years later. This very peculiar pattern calls for explanation, but the author passes it by in silence. For Rubin the entry into political association is positive, in that it commences the advance to capitalism, but it is negative in that it was purchased at the high cost of supplanting the original hunter-gatherer freedom and autonomy for subordination to autocratic rule-a blight eliminated only in the recent past, and then only by Europeans and nations of European descent. The current situation is that the free market/personal freedom combination remains largely European. The Middle East, Central Asia, Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America display a rainbow of free market-autocracy hybrids. In Sub-Saharan Africa political structures are insecure against tribal dynamics. Since that's five-sixths of world population, let's await to see if capitalism really is the culmination of human evolution.

The center-piece of the book is Rubin's game theoretic analysis of the mechanism of cooperation, using Prisoner's Dilemma as the defining matrix. He brings ingenuity and flare to the task, and I enjoyed reading his interpretation. But I'm not satisfied that his analysis advances the art. The first problem is the misfit between evolutionary assumptions about behaviour and PD. On the evolutionary scenario, behaviour optimizes inclusive rather than individual fitness, whereas PD constrains choice to single episodes of individual advantage. Critics have observed that PD is implicitly modelled on exchanges between non-reproductive males who are strangers. A different matrix would be required to model the choices of reproductive males, and a different one again for reproductive females. Secondly, Rubin does not press his analysis forward to collective action decision making. There is a large literature (Olson, Hecter, Taylor, Elster, &c), and any proposed rational choice theory explanation of large scale exchange must cover this territory. Rubin does not. Finally, the standard objection--But what if humans don't choose rationally? Rubin takes note of Kahneman and Tversky's extensive empirical studies which show exactly that. He responds by placing Gigerenzer's Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart on the scale as somehow rescuing rational choice from the demolition. For me that's too little too late. Rubin seems indirectly to acknowledge as much when he expresses puzzlement at the persistence of irrational religious belief, and the irrationality of intellectual elites who reprobate immoral capitalism and espouse government welfare structures (i.e., socialism) to soften it.

Rubin's essay prompted me to pull together my diverse arguments against an evolutionary explanation of capitalism, and for that I am grateful. I close with a telling point that Rubin makes himself. Speaking of the linkage between birth rates below replacement value and burgeoning individualism in leading capitalist nations, he says that `for many people (perhaps most people), biological fitness is not itself a goal' (p. 49). Now hear this: when the freedom and autonomy that he attributes to our species in the late Pleistocene comes to full flower, it supports not fitness but extinction! On that basis his claim that freedom is a basic human desire evaporates. There is a further implication. The importation of labor to make up for the unborn locals has created large immigrant minorities, which, thanks to their high birth rate, will become the majority in the United States and Britain in four or five decades, and a large minority in France, Germany, and Italy. These immigrants insert religious conviction and strong ethnic identity into a capitalist system unfriendly to both. Add to this scenario the possibility that the global warming alarm is real, and the future of capitalism doesn't look so bright. The `end of history' may well be nigh, but in a sense opposite to Darwin's, and Francis Fukuyama's, best of possible worlds forecast.

(...)

As I write this there are two intellectual revolutions that I am glad to say are quickly spreading and gaining momentum(they are a must for the continued prosperity of mankind). One is evolutionary psychology. Anyone who has not read a book by Dawkins(The Selfish Gene, easily the most influential book of the 20th century, it is a permanent fixture amongst many amazon.com best seller lists even though it was first published in 1976), Matt Ridley(The Red Queen, Genome), Steven Pinker(The Language Instinct, How The Mind Works, The Blank Slate), Robert Wright(The Moral Animal), or many other evolutionary psychology related authors out there, simply has little understanding of how human beings really work. The other revolution is an understanding of free-market economics(Capitalism, Austrian economics). The works of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, their students and others influenced by them are finally reaching mass audience(I sure hope so, Capitalism is what we owe our lives to, (...)).

This book shows how our political and economic thinking/instincts evolved in a zero-sum, non-division of labor world, and how those evolved instincts(and many cultural elements as well) are counter productive in our new non-zero-sum, highly specialized division of labor world. (...) Hayek's last book "The Fatal Conceit" also married economics and evolution, but Hayek died before the recent advancements in evolutionary psychology. As Hayek said in the Fatal Conceit p118 "The envy of those who have tried just as hard, although fully understandable, works against the common interest. Thus, if the common interest is really our interest, we must not give in to this very human instinctual trait, but instead allow the market process to determine the reward." . Darwinian Politics has an entire chapter devoted to explaining the evolution of envy and how it is one of the many counterproductive instincts that served us well in the past but don't serve us as well today.

With the disastrous incompetence of the Bush presidency and further government expansion, the Capitalist engine might very well collapse , and the uneducated politicians will try to plan more(which the masses always fall for) which will only make things worse. As Hayek said "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design" . To our problems add religious conflict. Mr Rubin's discussion about the evolution of religions is very good and more important now than ever.

Very few people understand evolution. Very few people understand Capitalism. And obviously an even smaller number understand both. We need both, and this is the best book out there that explains this crucial fact.