Why do utopian communities fail?

 

We're still discussing Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. One question I've asked my wife, G, who knows a lot about utopian issues, is why some, or indeed most utopian communities fail.

 

She didn't know of any systematic study. But Haidt points to one explanation when he discusses the role of religion in society.

Haidt has little time for the "new atheists" such as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens who see no useful role for religion at all. It is not a story of rational enlightenment beating back the forces of mysticism and prejudice, he says, or a "parasitic meme" encouraging war and intolerance. Instead, religions help groups stick together.

There is now a great deal of evidence that religions do in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival.

And some of the evidence comes from looking at which utopian communities survive.

The clearest evidence comes from the anthropologist Richard Sosis, who examined the history of two hundred communes founded in the United States in the nineteenth century.. . .For many nineteenth-century communes, the principles were religious; for others they were secular, mostly socialist. Which kind of commune survived longer? Sosis found that the difference was stark: just 6 percent of the secular communes were still functioning twenty years after their founding, compared to 39 percent of the religious communes.

Much of the difference was religious communities appeared better able to solve collective action problems and prevent free-riding, according to Sosis' research. Demands for sacrifice of self-interest could serve as a signal of trustworthiness and commitment.

For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.

Why might this be?

.. when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship.

Religion helps to solve the collective action problem of getting people to work together, trust each other and prevent free-riding.

Incidentally, this reminds me of studies which find that the Protestant denominations which require more commitment and sacrifice are far outpacing the liberal mainline churches. (see this David Brooks column, for instance.)

People are more likely to trust and co-operate with co-religionists, or indeed those who profess a simiar strong ethical code. Religions help sustain those foundations of authority, sanctity and legitimacy that bind a community together, but which liberals find hard to see as anything other than retrograde.

Without such bonds, though, societies might fray and disappear, says (secular jewish) Haidt:

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

I'm not intensely religiously committed myself - I will be in church tomorrow on Easter Sunday, but that is one of the few times G and I will be in a church this year. What I'd draw from this is it is much harder to get societies to stick together or change for the good than most liberals believe. Religion is a social technology, to use the language of some earlier posts.

Our economic problem is one of our most important social technologies - labor exchanged for money - is reaching some limits, as productivity soars and the goods that we want are increasingly non-monetary and non-material. Money can't buy you love, as the song goes.

The challenge is to evolve better social technologies to deal with that underlying reality. And to do that we need to understand the existing social technologies that sustain functional societies, so we do not inadvertently undermine them. There are serious collective action problems in moving to any kind of new economy. That deeper structural reality matters more than the short-run fiscal outlook or Friday's payroll numbers.

 

Haidt and Virtue Ethics

We're concluding a discussion about Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

There are some aspects of the book which I find a little irrelevant. He spends several chapters arguing a technical point in evolutionary theory, namely whether evolutionary selection at the level of groups can exist. Most scientists since the 1970s believe that groups don't have any evolutionary significance, because the math does not work. Selection and competition of individuals within the group will overwhelm any traits which benefit the group as a whole. However Haidt argues sometimes major transitions take place in evolution - from unicellular to multicellular life, for example- at which point it makes sense to talk about larger entities evolving.

I'm still skeptical, or so recent articles in Scientific American suggest.

And it does not necessarily affect his argument that evolutionary change can happen sufficiently fast for us to have innate moral foundations in our psychology, even if we have been living in modern societies for ten thousand years at most, a mere blink in historical time. I've been persuaded on that score by Gregory Clark's book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)(see a short nyt review here).

In the end, Haidt concludes:

If you take home one souvenir from this part of the tour, may I suggest that it be a suspicion of moral monists. Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places—particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation. Human societies are complex; their needs and challenges are variable.

The fact we have six different moral foundations means focusing on any one of them to the exclusion of the others is likely to lead to problems, or so Haidt believes. In particular, systems like Kant or Bentham's ethics try to reduce morality to a single metric and blind us to the complexity of our actual choices.

This is perhaps the great challenge. I've long thought the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin had the best insight into morality, arguing that some of the best things in life and highest principles do not entail each other, are not in harmony, and in fact actually conflict. Trying to achieve a single utopia where all the virtues shine is a recipe for bloodsoaked disaster. (I must look up that exact quote, which is one of my all-time favorites and biggest influences.)

 

And Haidt cites Berlin at the end of his book as well:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrestled throughout his career with the problem of the world’s moral diversity

But interestingly Haidt says (without further explanation) that he thinks virtue ethics is the way to go.

I personally think that virtue ethics is the normative framework that fits human nature most closely.

I increasingly feel that virtue ethics is the way forward as well, even more so than the acknowledgement of pluralism in Berlin.

So overall, I find a great deal of congruence between how I see things and Haidt's book. But it's a starting point. He provides more evidence that collective action problems matter, and a lot of our partisan and practical political problems arise because often we don't even see there are collective action probems to solve.

Our social technologies are fraying. Society and the economy are evolving, and we need to adapt.

 

 

 

Ends and life-chances

Eric Hobsbawm, the famous British Marxist historian, just died. The Guardian reprinted a piece of his from 2009.

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the "capabilities" of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

He is of course right that the main point ought to be "The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people." Economic growth is only a means to an end.

In practice, of course, Hobsbawn was sympathetic with regimes that mostly destroyed life-chances, and indeed lives. Judged in terms of consequences, progressive policy often accomplishes the opposite of what it intends or officially advocates. Lenin offered "Peace, Land, Bread". Russia got civil war and expropriation and famine.

But what this ought to tell us is that if you pretend to be neutral about ways of life, by default you are allowing other people to set the terms of the conversation. You still will have a consequential version of the good life even if you do not intend it.

There is no reason at all why a more concrete focus on the kind of life available to people ought to entail massive shifts towards government. But if all the right has to counter it is a libertarian Ayn Rand utopia, or ignoring the matter altogether, it only makes turgid back-to-the-1970s outcomes it more likely. Romney's libertarian approach is very unconvincing. Arguing about market v government, as this election campaign seems to circling around, is stale and outdated.

We need a more concrete discussion about the good life - the kind of lives we want in practice, the kind of lives we want GDP to buy us. Of course, people will not agree on every detail. But psychology tells us they is more commanality in what people want out of daily life than we usually believe.

The problem with evolution

In was talking earlier (link to come) about how it increasingly makes sense to see the economy as evolving, rather than only a market which returns to equilibrium. So there are books like Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure which see the economy as a process of variation and natural selection.

There is one problem with this approach, however. Biologists have had a long debate over how natural selection actually works. For many years it was actualy difficult to explain why sexual reproduction exists at all, instead of simply asexual budding or splitting of organisms. Any gains from positive mutations might take tens or hundreds of generations to justify themselves.

It turns out the most accepted explanation is that organisms are always in a race with parasites. Species without much natural variability are soon prey to parasites which can unlock somatic or cellular defenses. It is a "red queen" race, according to Matt Ridley in his book The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. You constantly need natural variability not because it will lead to evolutionary advantage sometime in the future, but because it keeps one step ahead of parasites. And because parasites are much smaller and have shorter lifespans, they can evolve and adapt sixty times faster than people can. Hence "superbugs" and antibiotic resistance in hospitals.

So applying this to the economy, adaptability is not just a matter of responding to external shocks. It is a race against maladaptions and exploitative diversions which evolve WITHIN e economy.

And there is an unrelated tradition in economics which is relevant to this, most notably Mancur Olson is his books The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Second printing with new preface and appendix (Harvard Economic Studies) and The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. He argues that the longer societies are stable, the more likely special interest groups are to arise which form "distributional coalitions" to siphon off resources.

They form because small focused groups get more marginal benefit from campaigning for resources for themselves, while the broad majority have little individual interest in stopping that. Steel manufacturers have huge interest in lobbying for limits on steel imports, for example, and will sound a large amount of money to gain what is for them a large benefit. But the average citizen - or legislator- does not have the same intensity of interest in stopping them. Small intense self-interested groups are much easier to from than broad groups which support broad public goods.

This is why, says Olson, even those groups which do campaign for specific policy outcomes often add specific individual benefits to make people join them, like unions offering health insurance or discount cards.

So economies and societies are most often in a race againt their own parasites - distributional coalitions which naturally build up to siphon off resources.

And if that sounds like K Street and Washington lobbying, that's because it IS. Olson notes that societies like Germany or Japan which got devastated in the second world war grew remarkably quickly out of the ruins. Part of the explanation, of course, is that they still retained immense human capital and knowledge. But part of it is also that the pre-war social elite and structure of privilege had been swept away, and with it many of the barnacle-like social rigidities that had impeded growth. Distributional coalitions were set to zero again.

In the past, the US had an advantage in that it had multiple elites spread around the country, with no single centralized privileged class. There was no single elite, like Paris in France or the court in a autocratic monarchy. But that has changed with the growth of the federal government. Resistance by coalitions to public action has grown much stronger. Distributional coalitions always threaten to strangle public goods and growth by diverting resources to their own narrow memberships. And breaking up those coalitions is traditionally one of the real underlying advantages of something like free trade.

How Much is Enough? A very important Skidelsky book

This looks as if is going to be a very significant book for my interests. Robert Skidelsky, the famous and brilliant biographer of Keynes, and his son (I think) have a new book out today, How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life.

There are some strong similarities with what I'm doing on this blog, but also some major differences.

The Skidelskys say in an article about their the book in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The material conditions of the good life already exist, at least in the affluent parts of the world, but the blind pursuit of growth puts the good life continually out of reach. Under such circumstances, the aim of policy and other forms of collective action should be to secure an economic organization that places the good things of life—health, respect, friendship, leisure, and so on—within reach of all. Economic growth should be accepted as a residual, not something to be aimed at.

Over time, such a shift is bound to affect our attitude toward economics. To maximize the efficient use of our time will become less and less important; and therefore "scientific" economics, as it has developed since Robbins, will be demoted from its position as the queen of the social sciences. It can bring us to the threshold of plenty, but must then retire from its oversight of our lives. This is what Keynes had in mind when he looked forward to the day when economists would become as useful as dentists. He always chose his words carefully: It was as dentists, not doctors, that humanity would come to need economists; at the margins of life, not as a continuous, much less controlling, presence.

They have the same starting point as I did - Keynes' essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchilidren". They complain about the current state of economics. And they are argue for more of an emphasis on the Good Life, rather than procedural liberalism. I strongly agree with that. I think a more tangible vision of the Good Life is essential, and I think we've run out of room in liberalism. We need to talk about purposes and ends again, as I've been arguing. We need a more Aristotelian and less utilitarian view.

I'm clearly going to have to read the whole book. But at least from the essay, there are also some important differences between this and what I say. They stick much closer to Keynes original essay, unsurprisingly, and appear to see the issue largely as a choice to emphasize more leisure and less growth. Indeed, it appears to be anti-growth. It is a matter of having less wants, of having a more restrictive view of what we need.

It sounds more like a 1970s environmentalist view at first hearing, a 'small is beautiful' orientation.

I think they are asking precisely the right question. But I don't think they have quite the right answer. I will come back to this in much more detail when I read the whole thing.

 

So what does this lead to?

So let me summarize the ways I very much agree with Sen:

- we have to think about actual lives and realized outcomes, not abstract rules and institutions alone. What matters is the substance and outcomes, not just the process.

- we need to have a wider conception of rationality - reasonableness and the test of public discussion and criticism

- impartiality is important, but not everything

- we cannot simply rule out some of the most important questions - of ends, of purpose, of comparing utility across and between people - on methodological grounds.

- many problems of social choice and collective action come about because we restrict the information about people's purposes and preferences too much. The solution to a lot of social problems (including the limits of voting) is a richer set of information.

Books Index

Some housekeeping. Here's a list of the books I've been talking about, most recent first. As the blog grows I need more ways to find my own way around and remember when I have discussed things. So it makes all the more sense to have more way markets for readers.

The picture links to the amazon page, and the text title links to the discussion in the blog.

Reality is Broken

 

The Hemlock Cup

 

The Bourgeois Virtues

 

Where Good Ideas come from

 

The Promise of Happiness

 

Steve Jobs

 

Thinking Fast and Slow

 

The Better Angels of our Nature

 

 

The Nichomachean Ethics

 

The Gifts of Athena

 

The New Capitalist Manifesto

 

Understanding Economic Change

 

The End of Work

 

The Four Books of China

 

The Lights in the Tunnel

 

After Virtue

 

Race Against the Machine

 

The Joyless Economy

 

The No-Asshole Rule

 

The Experience Economy

 

The Unknown Matisse

 

Bright-Sided

 

After America

 

Chinese Poetry

 

Return to Dragon Mountain

 

Flourish

 

Cognitive Surplus

 

The Idea of Justice

 

Utilitarianism

 

The Challenge of Affluence

 

A History of Florence 1200-1575

 

Lords of Finance

 

The Great Transformation

 

Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money

 

Extraordinary Popular Delusions

 

Manias, Panics and Crashes

 

Anarchy, State and Utopia

 

 

Liberty, Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty

 

A Theory of Justice

 

Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren

 

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

 

 

The Red Queen

 

The Logic of Collective Action

 

Social Limits to Growth

 

Do the Work

 

The Great Stagnation