Is Homo Economicus a Psychopath?
forbes.com
forbes.com
For the second time today, I get to point out that in economics is neutral about "best interests" and is metaphorically happy to accommodate people whom consider happiness or other such "soft" things as part of their personal value function. If your definition of "homo economicus" is a psycopath... well, you're the one who stuck a psychopath there, so ultimately this is a circular argument in which one asserts that economics is based on the idea of a psychopath that you put there in the first place. Not exactly a surprising result there.
There is absolutely no contradiction between "most people act in what they believe to be their best interests" and "most people take care of their family", because obviously most people consider "taking care of their family" to be in their "best interests".
Homo Economicus is still a fictional being, but it's not because "not everyone is a psychopath", it's because not everyone is perfectly rational all the time, and humans do have some weaknesses on the rationality front. It was (and really is) a good approximation because on the whole, people do act amusingly rationally in a surprising array of situations. (I say "amusing" because they will often act perfectly rationally in some circumstance, then cite as their reason some astonishing bullshit reason. Nevertheless, their actions are often quite rational.)
It's still supposed to be "Homo Economicus" and not "Robo Economicus" or "Vulcan Economicus".
There are plenty of ways to interpret the models that economists create - if the Price equation can model altruism in terms of game theory, you're perfectly correct that the definition of "best interests" is a variable.
Taking care of an ailing parent is in no way connected to maximizing one's returns on anything (except maybe fulfilling a sense of what you "ought" to do).
NB: Economists largely study specifically monetary interest because it's something they can measure. A number of criticisms can be made about this, but there isn't a good alternative.
A principle assumption of many of the models underlying economic theories (including, but not limited to, rational choice theory) is that there is a unidimensional quantity, "utility", that aggregates a persons preferences and which individual decisions increase or decrease by definable amounts. Because money is widely fungible, and utility cannot be measured directly, money (e.g., the money people are willing to pay to get something they want, or the money they demand to do or give up something) is often used as a proxy for utility by economists, with the idea that all decisions have an (potentially zero) utility impact, and that utility impact can be stated in monetary terms.
The concept is that while you can't do so directly, the degree to which you value these things can in principle be quantified monetarily by the monetary value of the things you can buy with money that you are willing to forego in order to attain the things that cannot be bought with money, allowing money to be used as a tool to quantify utility even for things which it can't buy directly.
Its certainly consistent with preference being transitive (since it is intimately tied in with cardinal utility, which is a much stronger position which includes transitive preference.) Transitive preferences in a poset aren't sufficient to support money-as-general-utility-scorecard, however.
I meant that it isn't consistent with people's observed preferences being transitive; if they are, then there is no need to make the inferences you suggest. But of course you were talking about things that can't be traded for money, not things that people refuse to because they value them more, so ignore my criticism.
Actually, that makes me realize that I need to change the edge criterion in my previous comment.
So what is the "utility" (sorry, I couldn't resist) of this term? It seems to be a tautology - what else could people pursue besides their "interests"? It seems circular - by definition anything people consciously do is an "interest", because humans are rational, because they pursue their interests...
It's not a perfect model because people's preferences are not necessarily totally ordered, and people are not always consistent, and preferences change in interesting but sometimes inconsistent (and often predictable) ways. But it's pretty good.
I think it's a great way to think about things because it makes no judgements about what your actual goals are. After all, people have different preferences and interests, and that's fine. More importantly, this also means you could reuse the same ideas perfectly happily for corporations, organizations, societies or event AIs and still draw interesting conclusions. It also lets us create systems that can successfully cater to agents with wildly different interests and get them all to cooperate willingly—that's one of the most important features of our market system and capitalism.
You can either use utility as a technical and unassailable term, taking it as axiomatic that humans are utility-maximizers. As a consequence, the term becomes vacuous, because whatever any human does at any point in time, well, it must have been because she or he had some unobservable notion of utility that was maximized by whatever they happened to be doing at the time. So you end up with a "scientific theory" that does not actually allow you to make any predictions, which makes it totally worthless.
Furthermore, facts that seemingly contradict utility-maximization are easily argued away: For example, the fact that humans' behaviour does not appear consistent over time is explained by utility functions change over time.[1]
Once you accept the notion of utility based on this technically unassailable approach to it, however, people have a tendency to subtly shift what they mean by utility, sneaking a hidden value judgement into their argument that might be hard to catch (of course, that value judgement always tends to boil down to: the utility that should be maximized is somewhat equivalent to monetary value). [2]
Yes, there may be a small number of genuinely well-meaning academic economists who do this. However, public discourse has very few well-meaning economists[3], and even fewer academic ones. Given the difficulties of the term, it would be a pragmatic move to eliminate it.
Frankly, I think the main reason that eliminating the notion of utility is so difficult is that eliminating that term leaves a vacuum that is difficult to fill. Explaining human nature is an extremely tough problem, which we are basically unable to solve today. Rather than acknowledge that they are unable to do it, economists worship their variant of the "god of the gaps".
[1] Actually, this is very reminiscent of discussions with people who believe in the existence of a god. Whatever fact one points out that either contradicts or does not fit the existing (non-)evidence well, believers just tend to retreat to a technically unassailable definition of god that ends up making the statement "god exists" pretty vacuous.
[2] Again, this is very reminiscent of discussions with people who believe in the existence of a god. Once one concedes that yes, a god whose existence is so vacuous might well exist, they will at some point switch their definition of god back to one which implies that their god can affect the physical world.
[3] The problem is similar to regulatory capture, an idea expressed here: http://physicsoffinance.blogspot.de/2014/11/has-big-business...
Unless that act teaches your own children how to treat you later in life.
I disagree, and would almost go so far as to say making other excuses, like following a "moral call to selflessness" or following "sociocultural norms" is more sociopathic.
I value my family, so I'd take care of them if they needed it. No other reason than I value them being around.
Breaking it down and saying, "I need to make it look like I follow sociocultural norms, so I'm going to do this, just to fit in," seems more sociopathic, IMO.
for example, this is why an interaction with a large (inter-)national bank is often very different from the local credit union. a credit union may give you a break on fees or on check clearing times because they see you standing in front of them in need and they're sympathetic to your situation, but at a major bank, policy decisions are made in private offices far from contact with everyday customers and are simplified into a cold hard calculation about how much profit can be extracted from you.
also i'd posit that not only are humans sometimes not rational, but that humans are commonly irrational. rationality derives from a useful simplification of the world that helped us survive against bigger, faster & stronger animals. we've stretched rationality marvelously to make it a useful model of a wide range of relatively simpler macro-phenomena. but it's a poor model for complex actors like people, who exhibit a much wider degree of freedom and range of action. rationality necessarily assumes that a single best choice can be made in any situation (rarely, two or more choices might be equivalently good but that's not relevant here) and that all relevant factors can be incorporated into that single decision. this is almost never the case in real life, except maybe in the problem sets assigned in school.
it's as likely that a rational model is designed to coincide with the center of a distribution of decisions made by real people, as it is that the model has explanatory power about that distribution. people are incorporating an astonishingly vast array of information in their decision-making that is very unlikely to be considered by a rational economic model, so those "astonishing bullshit reasons" shouldn't be so surprising really if you don't conflate the modeled behavior of the population with that of the individuals.
Which economists have that point of view? Some have accused Smith of this, but it is plainly untrue, as made clear in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments".[1] Austrian economists such as Mises (who few would call socialist) criticized even the cardinal utility model, and argued that only lists of ordinal utilities are useful.[2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Money_and_Credit
von Mises is unusual in expressing the view that human utility cannot meaningfully be known and understood except through preferences expressed by [economic] action but that's merely a stronger version of the same principle that the price system is a way of linking people's preferences [purely ordinal, in von Mises' case] with a [symbolically cardinal] monetary value.
Though economics is value-neutral when it comes to what individuals define as their best interests, institutions have their best interests defined quite explicitly, and are often indifferent to any other outcome. Applying the rational actor model to such institutions provides a great deal of cover, if not active encouragement, for maximizing the acquisition of power and resources with little regard for the irrational human processes of morality, responsibility and decency.
To which the answer is: yes, it is. Classical economics does not actually assert that individual humans behave in a purely rational and fully-informed manner.
A more accurate premise is that groups of humans tend on average to act at least somewhat as if they were rationally well-informed. We have tools to determine what "rational" behavior might look like and that turns out to have predictive power as applied to human behavior because responding appropriately to incentives is one of the inputs that (in some contexts) shape how people act.
This idea that economists are stupidly assuming all people are rational is a myth. People who want to attack "neoclassical economics" should find some other pretext for doing so.
As an entirely separate matter, economists all the way back to Adam Smith have known that humans have "fellow feeling" - how other people feel is one input to our own utility functions. The idea suggested in OP that rational behavior must be entirely greedy with no regard for others is also not an inherent part of classical economics. If that premise is used in some strategy calculation, it's rebuttable.
To say "people aren't perfectly greedy, so economics is broken" is a bit like assuming in a physics model that bee wings don't flex, proving they can't fly given that assumption and thereby concluding not that the assumption turned out to be inaccurate in this context but rather that physics itself is broken.
> To which the answer is: yes, it is. Classical economics does not actually assert that individual humans behave in a purely rational and fully-informed manner.
(Actually, classical economics does, in the sense that markets follow a price-demand curve rather than a wiggle as seen experimentally.)
Worst yet, though: it's sheer lunacy. In the words of Steve Keen:
> Consider, for example, your regular visit to a supermarket. The typical supermarket has between 10,000 and 50,000 items, but let’s segment them into just 100 different groups. How many different shopping trolleys could you fill if you limited your decision to simply whether to buy or not buy one item from each group? You would be able to fill two to the power of one hundred shopping trolleys with different combinations of these goods: that’s 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 trolleys in total, or in words over 1,000 million trillion trillion shopping trolleys. If you could work out the utility you gained from each trolley at a rate of 10 trillion trolleys per second, it would take you 100 billion years to locate the optimal one. Obviously you don’t do that when you go shopping.
The only part of your comment that addresses the actual point of disagreement is "(Actually, classical economics does.)"
As an aside, Keen's argument is silly. "Rationality" does not require that one must perform a search through every possible permutation of items. One might as well claim that it's impossible to draw a straight line from A to B because there are infinitely many lines from A to B we must search through to find the one we're looking for.
And yet you - or someone, inevitably - is also going to claim that markets are somehow magically "efficient" precisely because they're capable of usefully approximating exactly this kind of optimisation.
So which is it? Is "market efficiency" rational or not?
As for the original claim - of course it's true. Any sane study of the financial industry should make it obvious that the last people you want to manage anything are those who are motivated primarily by profit - precisely because they inevitably lack empathy and awareness of the social costs of their "rational" decisions.
This is clearly silly, because I ignore all the other algorithms for sorting such an array--I assume that the only available option is something comically inefficient. In just the same way, when Steve Keen argues that it's impossible that my purchases are rational because choosing rationally requires me to iterate through every possible bundle and select the best one, he is making big assumptions about the type of problem I face, the tools available, and the meaning of rationality.
> And yet you - or someone, inevitably - is also going to claim that markets are somehow magically "efficient" precisely because they're capable of usefully approximating exactly this kind of optimisation.
As others in this thread have explained, question of whether markets usefully approximate this kind of optimization is distinct from the question of whether individual people perform this optimization successfully. Deviations from efficient markets absolutely occur--the question is what my priors should be. The fact that, for example, it's extremely difficult to reliably identify and profit from financial market inefficiencies suggests that, in fact, markets really do behave astonishingly well, given all that we know about human irrationality.
> And yet you - or someone, inevitably - is also going to claim that markets are somehow magically "efficient" precisely because they're capable of usefully approximating exactly this kind of optimisation.
I don't see the problem. To me, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that people (and the market) can usefully approximate the optimization in question, and therefore do not have to search through every possible permutation. That is, I see no contradiction between your quote from the GP, and the efficient market hypothesis (at least, the EMH as a useful approximation).
> (Actually, classical economics does, in the sense that markets follow a price-demand curve rather than a wiggle as seen experimentally.)
That's the difference between the limitations of an idealized model and the limitations of experimental process. That doesn't mean that either one is "wrong", any more than it would in the physical sciences.
> Obviously you don’t do that when you go shopping.
Correct - classical economics describes the behavior of rational actors with perfect and symmetric information. In this case, there are significant, non-zero costs to obtaining perfect information. That doesn't mean that the principles behind classical economics are false, were those assumptions to hold. And it doesn't mean that the model is useless even absent those assumptions.
Just as physicists can reason about frictionless vacuums and use that to inform their understandings of the real world (with friction and air), economists can reason about perfectly rational actors with perfect and symmetric information, and use that to inform their understandings of the real world (with possibly irrational actors and asymmetric and/or imperfect information).
Where does it describe the problems this way? Smith's "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" is not a theoretical exercise in a moral and emotional vacuum, but an explanation of how development and prosperity come to be in the real world.[1] There are some examples laid out by classical economists which make the assumptions that you describe, but those assumptions were not key tenets of the classical school. Men like Ricardo and Bastiat spent their time addressing the real world, with all its corn laws, broken windows, and import tariffs; instead of the physicist's "friction-less vacuum".
The rational actor model underpinning classical economic theory (and much other social science theory) does, in fact, assert exactly this. Of course, the rational actor model is widely-understood to be at best a useful approximation to explain both baseline situations and against which real situations can be contrasted to understand how they should vary from the predictions of the model. (OTOH, challenges to the rational actor model as a baseline in economics and other social sciences argue that its not particularly good even at that.)
> A more accurate premise is that groups of humans tend on average to act at least somewhat as if they were rationally well-informed.
An even more accurate premise is that in some common and important interactions, people tend to be on average be approximately well-informed, and in those interactions, rational choice theory usually seems represents a tolerable approximation of the resulting behavior, suggesting that there are at a minimum important situations in which rationality is a tolerable model for behavior. (Frequently repeated transactions whose utilities and costs are immediate and obvious without obscure, time-delayed, or hard-to-assess utilities or costs resulting from the transaction seem like they should fall into this category, though because utility is not itself directly measurable but is usually inferred from behavior on the assumption that the behavior is rationally motivated, there are some problems with assessing whether this is the case and even whether situations actually fall into this group -- and the inability to measure utility directly risks making rational choice theory something of a just-so story which explains people's behavior as attempting to maximize whatever it is that their behavior actually maximizes. Which ends up not being as much of an explanation as a tautology.)
I think that's often an unwarranted step to take - I'm MUCH more comfortable with the "act as if" formulation than I would be asserting that people actually are even approximately "well-informed" in most contexts. (Or "rational", for that matter.)
To illustrate the problem, consider an industry which is at least somewhat competitive. There is a wide range of available business strategies. Some of these strategies are dumb, but it might not be obvious which. Companies still have to make decisions, so they pick strategies. They might copy a market leader, flip a coin, hire physicists, hire astrologers...but somehow they PICK A BUSINESS STRATEGY.
After a few years, the businesses that happened to pick a particularly DUMB strategy go bankrupt; their businesses collapse and get bought; resources get reallocated to better use.
After many rounds of this game, a LOT of fragile, unlucky, or dumb business strategies have failed. A few remain that seem to work pretty well, and every company still going is trying to follow one of the more-successful strategies.
We now have some idea which strategies work but don't necessarily know WHY. There is institutional wisdom ("we've always done it THIS way") in the winners that they themselves might not understand.
In short, the economic environment (given some simple premises) tends to select for being efficient, regardless of whether people understand why what they are doing is efficient. Figuring it all out does probably happen eventually, but the order of cause and effect might be reversed - you try out the strategy, see that it works, scale it up and perhaps THEN figure out why it works. That's why I can describe companies as acting "as if they were rationally well-informed" even though I know that the individuals involved not only do indeed have a bunch of random "behavioralist" biases (the usual criticism) but in many cases they may actually lack conscious deliberate knowledge of why they do what they do.
That's a wigglier definition of "rational actor" than neoclassical economics actually admits.
More precisely, neoclassical economics posits that economic equilibriums are the same as they would be if humans were rational actors. Random irrationality doesn't affect the equilibrium, but systematic irrationality certainly does.
Showing that people are systematically irrational about many things, as for example the work of behavioral economists does, certainly is not an unjustified attack on neoclassical economics.
Actually, you don't have to be a behavioral economist to find the kind of assumptions needed for macroeconomic modeling pretty dubious. Modern Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models typically take a couple of agents, multiply them by a million and call it consumer demand. The kind of assumptions needed to make this leap have nothing to do with greed and instead concern income distribution and the way it affects demand. It's called the aggregation problem if you're interested.
All of which is to say that the economics profession is by no means united on this question. Most microeconomists I know think that microfounded macro models are a joke. For this reason Cal Tech doesn't even teach macro anymore.
The sad thing about this is that fundamentally, the Lucas critique has a lot of merit. It's just that what macroeconomists used as "microfoundations" is basically a joke because, like you explain, they aren't true microfoundations.
Furthermore, even if the kind of aggregation that "microfounded" macroeconomics always does would lead to reliable predictions, there is still the issue that aggregation makes the hidden value judgement that issues of distribution and fairness don't matter. After all, when you aggregate, you only see the averages.
Part of the problem is that the important problems of economics - i.e., macro-economic problems - are genuinely hard[1], but public economic discourse acts happens as if much more were known than really is. When it comes to the economy, it's as if we were trying to fly to the moon without knowing about Newton's laws of motion, while at the same time there are powerful and wealthy interests trying to convince everybody that the earth is a disk.
[1] They're not hard in the sense that research problems in mathematics are hard; they're hard in the sense that there is a crazy number of hard to measure variables, there's no way to run repeatable experiments, and so on.
An ideal HE behaves rationally, yes, but that doesn't tell the whole picture; being rational is about discussing with oneself all the possible behaviours, choosing the one that gives him the outcome closest to his desires. But also, and this is very important, it seems like the only thing an HE cares about is his own benefit, especially his own monetary benefit. So he has friends only because "who you know" is valuable and can help him get more money; he doesn't care about poor people because their misery doesn't affect him; the welfare of society in general is not relevant unless he can benefit from it; etc. Many people, including me, find all this very troubling, since this is the kind of people that makes this world far worse than it could be. And yes, I would say that it's clearly psychopathic behaviour.
Some economists that present, either tacitly or openly, the HE as a positive ideal, try to hop over this troubling issue by using the ill-defined term "utility", saying that an HE is someone who maximizes the perceived utility; and then they proceed to basically define the behaviour of the HE as economically-oriented, making the whole "utility" concept useless.
Contrast with this Marxist slogan: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. One can be perfectly rational and follow it; it's just about using reason to fulfill a completely different goal. So being rational is about means to attain a goal, while being an HE also includes the goal of hoarding money and not caring about what happens to other people.
And note the Marxists then wish to slide in the idea that they ought to get to set your value function, when you aren't looking. (Which is part of the silliness at the core of the whole idea when they think they can set the same valuations for everyone, because, again, the math stops making sense and, what a surprise, indeed systems that truly attempt to function in a fully Marxist manner really do break down in a horrifyingly complete manner, as if they were trying to build an economy on the proposition that 1+1=3.)
The strawman idea comes from the Marxists, who generally don't want you engaging with capitalist theory particularly fairly, since they would lose a big rhetorical weapon if you do.
You can not understand the anger about HE until you understand that Marxists desperately need humans to not behave "slightly irrationally under some circumstances" (the real scenario) but need humans to be profoundly irrational, so they can justify their handing over all sorts of power to the government so they can save everyone from themselves. Of course explaining exactly how the government will transcend being made out of irrational humans is conveniently left unexplained, since that is impossible. But, if humans were really profoundly irrational, we wouldn't be having this argument, because our species would be long dead. People who want to believe that people are profoundly irrational on a massive scale must grapple with the problem that such behaviors lead to death in the real universe, and tend to be evolved out pretty quickly. (This is where the "amusing" comes from in my other post; humans are not entirely rational, but we've been tuned to be surprisingly rational in many ways... our claimed reasons however have not been so tuned.)
So the problem with HE isn't that he's utterly, utterly nonexistent... the problem with HE is that it's a slightly imperfect model, and iterative systems like the economy being what they are, that imperfection can end up magnified in surprising nonlinear ways and have bizarre consequences, in a system that often has nonlinear and bizarre behaviors even if everyone was totally rational. So it important that science is done to determine the ways in which real humans deviate from HE... but these will generally be in relatively small ways, rather than the massive total failures of the model that the Marxists are searching for.
You had me until that sentence. I don't think the Marxists need humans to be profoundly irrational, they need humans to be profoundly exploited, and for the exploiters to be rational. That means that you can't appeal to the exploiters to stop, because continuing is in the exploiters' best interest; you can only stop them with force.
I agree with your overall conclusions (that the Marxists were/are the ones pushing the HE strawman). I just think that you're off in your next-to-last paragraph. In fact, I think that the psychopath claim (which you cite in the first paragraph) is in contradiction with your argument in the fourth paragraph.
One of the reasons the Marxists see this is that they see a trade in which one side benefits "more" than the other according to one scale, and scream "exploitation!" But... it's still a trade that benefited both sides. It may indeed still be a bit exploitative (and our laws have cases to cover this) if for instance one side is a monopoly or something; capitalism does not begin and end with microecon 101, after all [1]. But it's a different character of exploitation than one in which one side fails to benefit, and Marxist theory has a major hole in it where it has a really hard time explaining why an agent would enter into a trade in which it comes out behind by its own value system, when one can visibly see that no force is being applied. (Let me also forstall the fact that there are cases where force has been applied, but I'd say those are nowhere near sufficient to explain the modern economy.)
[1]: And let me underline that. Microecon is not the beginning and the end of capitalism, and it's not as if it has no problems. I'm interested in informed discussions of capitalism's problems, but one must start from a proper understanding of what it really is. In a more neutral context, one can argue about whether "real" numbers actually exist and whether they should be used mathematically, but this argument is not helped by getting wrong what "real" numbers are from the getgo.
That assumes that you have a better alternative. My alternative to being exploited by the greedy capitalists is revolution, but for that to work, a bunch of my fellow oppressed have to agree. My decision is (normally) whether to hopelessly revolt and get crushed, or to make the best of it and go along. In that context, going along is probably a rational choice.
> ... and it's really not rational to be in an exploited minority.
Marxism says that the exploited are the majority, not the minority.
Look, I'm not an apologist for Marxism. I don't want a Marxist revolution, and I don't want to live in the aftermath of one. But I think you're a bit mis-characterizing their position. (Once you characterize it accurately, then disagree as much and as eloquently as you please.)
The real irony is that if governments are rational actors, and power is in their best interest, then the Leninist insistence on the need for proletariat dictatorship as a step to true Communism (where the government isn't needed) is undermined by the rationale that the government won't give up power.
Which is of course what has happened with every state that has tried it. Marxist Communism on a state level has never been reached, merely various forms of socialist dictatorship that claim to be working towards it.
Well, maybe not require, but
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Marx/Engels -- Manifesto of the Communist Party
Oh but they have more then abundant evidence that capitalism was brought into being by war an conquest, not because it's some law of nature.
http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/jferguson-1039684-c...
Albert einstein:
"The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.
But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future."
The ironic thing is that it's one of those things that is so blatantly obvious and right in front of people's face that they can't see it; the proverbial forest in spite of all the trees.
The prisoner's dilemma is an interesting game because it is extreme: people are able to lower the total welfare while raising their own.
But classical economics asserts that these situations arise only when there are externalities or market frictions, and only in proportion to how large these are (there are also issues of wealth distribution, but this could be thought of as a friction to perfect taxation).
If there were no market frictions, and people could be taxed according to their innate ability to earn money, then it wouldn't matter whether people aimed to maximize their own utility, or the sum of everyone's utility: they would engage in exactly the same actions.
Altruism vs selfishness only becomes an issue when there are externalities or frictions. E.g. do I choose to pollute a stream, even though I know I won't be punished. Or do I choose to work less than I would otherwise, because some of my income is taxed (if people didn't work less for this reason, we could have a tax system with much more redistribution).
So neoclassical theory isn't nearly so tied to the idea of selfishness as people think. One thing it does do, is make very clear that people are selfish. I could buy a coffee every day, or make a donation that would (on average) save one life in Africa. And yet I chose to buy the coffee anyway. As a believer in classical economics, I have to conclude that I am that selfish.
Homo Economicus according to the article "is a creature of coldly calculated selfishness, dispassionately maximizing its best interests even if that comes at the expense of others".
The researchers concluded: "We see a person who is intelligent, driven to excel and to dominate other people, and capable of impulse control and of working toward long-term goals. In other words, Homo economicus is the prototypical member of the social and economic elite."
I wish the researchers went further and went back to the biographies of their participants to evaluate whether or not their conclusion fit the participants' social and economic standings.
Nonetheless, this is one of the few better-controlled and quantified studies I've seen about the over-representation of sociopathic and psychopathic traits in leadership. Keep this in mind the next time you work under/alongside them. Many hackers tend to have a meritocratic ideation of how the world should work, but the reality is sociopaths and borderline psychopaths are mostly the ones that rise to the top, and many a hacker is easily taken advantage of until they learn how the world really works (for now, at least).
Given that it was a game, and they knew they were being tested, I would have thought that "appearing generous and well-disposed to the testers and other participants" (even if they were not like that in real life) would benefit their self-interest more than "winning fictional money" (and risking looking like a self-centered person). The first benefit is small but takes place in the real world, the other one is bigger but fictional.
I must be missing something. It seems to me that in order to maximize your benefit in such games the obvious and selfish thing to do is appearing infinitely generous.
According to another notation out there...
* the 16% HE+qHE's are called "Sociopaths"
* the 60% ORD's care called "Clueless"
* the 25% CC's are called "Losers"
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/bulletin/homo-...
Not helpful. All the A-hole jock-types have hot girlfriends and wives.
Uber/Travis and his execs seem to demonstrate the belief that they are "overmen" in that they seem to believe that they transcend the rules of society and are destined to shape society and its values rather than the other way around (probably something not too uncommonly shared with HN readers…).
A few fun/funny/serious examples (in no particular order):
1. They outrightly express resistance to laws-as-is, and regularly threaten to ignore and sometimes do break those regs as necessary to conduct their business / benefit themselves and their consumers.
2. They hire lobbyists and other high-level political actors to change the laws they don't like and/or influence lawmakers - not atypical for a large company, but they did this earlier than most companies at their stage, with much more specific agendas in place and with a lot more PR surrounding it (the last may or may not have been their doing, hard to say). They have a belief (probably well-founded) that they can use the political process to make the law bend to their will. “Creating New Values” as any good uberman should.
3. They call their central system “Godmode” which implies that they, the viewers, are like God (a bit of a stretch I know…couldn’t resist)
4. They are proud that using the data in Godmode they can track, predict and identify specifics of other human being’s behavior.
5. The whole “we’ll pay our own researchers to smear journalists” thing - another good example of Creating New Values and constructing narratives.
6. The general feeling that Uber (perhaps correctly) operates against “states” and “sovereigns” and “systems” more than corporate competitors (who even writes about Lyft anymore these days…)
The funny thing is that after thinking this through, all (good?) CEOs of major corporations basically operate like this (and so do many other tech-leaders - it is often associated with libertarian-leaning individuals like P. Thiel, etc.) - the difference is that Uber (1) has a name that calls it out and (2) seems to be especially prone to doing this in public and (3) sometimes appears to relishes their “overlord-iness” a little too much. You can call it being crass or being honest.
In any case, they seem to be getting hip to the system and playing nice which of course can be viewed as just another level of the game, etc. - still, glad to see them do it because I overall think that playing nice is best (especially when you can afford to do it) and with a $40b val. and a couple billion raised, I think they can spare some good behavior, at least for now =)
Note on Uber: I think Uber is a great business and has a significantly net-positive impact on society, and I reserve judgment w/r/t whether TK and the other Uber execs are good or bad people - I can't conclude they are good because they run a good business, and I can't conclude they are bad because they say stupid things in public.
Note on Nietzche: In Thus Spake Zarathrusa, the "uberman" concept is (maybe) considered a positive that humanity should work towards in the absence of belief in God, and I think it can still be understood as such. The fact that history has attributed some very negative actions to the belief in this concept (Hitler, Leopold & Loeb's murder, etc.) is, in my opinion, not definitive but at the same time not entirely insignificant, but I'm also a Christian that believes in capital-M Morality so I'm biased against nihilism in general.
The problem is that, in the absence of God, there is no absolute morality that is not the result of an arbitrary choice. When the "uberman" arises, he/she creates a new morality, which is needed in the morally nihilistic vacuum that arises due to the absence of God. But because there is no objective basis for morality in the absence of God, that means that the new morality is the result of the "uberman's" arbitrary choice. Is that going to be the magic spark that leads us into a golden age? Only if we get very, very lucky in the "uberman's" arbitrary choice.
I'll avoid a Christian-love-based-rant here =) Suffice it to say I was trying to be objective/forgiving/understanding of the uberman concept, but end of the day I'm pretty sure it's a bad deal for everyone involved haha
Seems likely what we really have in the words of the gods is simply a collection of more uberman psychopathy. Which leads us right back to the inevitability of lack of absolutes.
Maybe we would be better off dealing with this as is?
To me, this weird alignment of the interests of self and other is pretty counterintuitive and only proven through its exercise/practice, but in any case seems pretty magical/mystical/awesome. I think the fact that a good chunk of modern social structure/law/convention is built on the restraint of the self for the benefit of others (which itself translates into net gains for society overall - magic!) is a manifestation of this fact, and also rears its head in Christianity and almost all other religions (though of course like everything in life, the good is mixed in with some fucked up stuff too).
I can’t really say I have evidence for this other than personal observation of contemporary experiences, historical analysis and my own mind’s logic, but based on those it seems to me that (1) people who treat other people poorly or indifferently seem to be relatively unhappy/dissatisfied and do not feel self-realized and feel disconnected/alienated from those around them and still yearn for more power, wealth, etc. even in spite of the fact that they have more than most and (2) people who treat others well seem to be happy and self-realized and connected to those around them and seem to be relatively satisfied with relatively less power and wealth, etc.
Similarly, societies wherein those in power treat people (relatively) fairly seem to thrive more than societies where those in power treat people unfairly - it seems that this also applies in some way to those who hold the power when comparing relative situations: would you rather be [enter name of random hundred millionaire in America] (who owns only a small portion of American wealth) or Mugabe (who owns/controls half of Zimbabwe)? (cherry-picked that one...haha but still, I don't think it's too off-point)
This is of course assuming that being happy, satisfied, connected and self-realized are in fact, things that are good and that people want, but still, it seems to hold true in my mind through my observation and experience - I’d say I started paying attention around 14, and I’m 29 now, so that’s about a 15 year experiment, and it’s been trending pretty steadily in that direction.
But you must admit, there are no shortage of psychopathic uberman talking about love and goodness to further their own ends....
>This is of course assuming that being happy, satisfied, connected and self-realized are in fact, things that are good and that people want
Unfortunately, we have a society that largely encourages people to want hierarchical domination, when what's actually good for them is all that stuff you said.
There's not really any way to avoid the necessity of making an arbitrary decision about which values to promote and live for, because even to stick with the status quo is an arbitrary decision to live by originally arbitrary values.
There is no way to avoid the necessity of making a value decision. Even if one chooses the "will of god", they still are making an arbitrary choice. (Never mind at this stage in history the vast smorgasbord of "divine wills" to choose from...).
It all comes down to human valuation. Create your own or follow someone else's. Inevitably.
Aside from the fact that such conclusion (which I assume is based on logic/rationalism - but you can pretty much sub any other scientific/philosophical concept here) itself appears to be as constructed (aka. arbitrary) as any other value system, I also think that while arbitrariness may be a logical conclusion when viewing experience/existence/etc. in abstraction, I would argue that at the very least, experience/consciousness gives humans some evidence/reason to believe that value decisions are not or may not be arbitrary, and I consider our direct experience/consciousness to be a very significant data set to consider in spite of how non-rigorous it might be. Put another way, through observation I have concluded that while many people do say all value systems are arbitrary, I have yet to see one person who I would say lives their life as if that were actually true - even my most sociopathic friends (dead writers or real people I know haha) appear to have a strong preference for self-preservation or rationalism.
I'm mostly interested in the concept of self-preservation, aka. the assumed value in continuing one's existence in the first place - I would argue that almost everyone I know makes decisions assuming that their life has value, and that such value decision does not feel arbitrary at all even if logically it seems that way - I think this conflict drives a lot of very smart people crazy or at least annoys them, and to me the existence of this conflict is not insignificant.
As I've said before, I started paying attention when was I 14 and I'm 29 now, so my 15 year data set trends strongly as described =) Of course yours or any other persons experience of consciousness may differ greatly, that's the crazy part about it all I guess.
Simply wrong. Morality is either absolute, in which case it binds God Himself in the first place, or it is meaningless, unworthy of being called morality, mere signaling.
Of course, I'm a stark-raving realist on the matter, but it really depends how you define the word. It's only my preference to be realist about everything, to define my words so that they point at things whose existence does not depend on the words.
Here, I found another arrogant law-defying übermensch-wannabe for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi
Distinction here for me is that Gandhi and/or MLK and/or Pussy Riot relied on and broke certain social rules based on what I consider to be moral abstractions that (I would argue) (1) pre-existed their own thinking and receive validation from a separate pre-existing moral code (love, human rights, spiritual dignity, etc.) and (2) the realization of which benefit others as equally as they would benefit the leader, if not more (Gandhi was, relatively speaking, part of the educated elite, and could have enjoyed a decent life under the status quo).
On the other hand, I would say that ubermen are (at least by FN's definition) wholly the creators of their moralities, and often are opportunistic in how they use moral abstractions, and (most interestingly) often tend toward creating moral systems that coincidentally(?) benefit themselves and those they value at the expense of others (see: Kim Jong Un, Stalin, Ted Cruz...haha).
I'm glossing over some meat about whether moral abstractions can pre-exist a person's understanding of them and what the difference is between benefiting yourself and benefiting others if benefiting others provides you with serious self-benefit, but those are totally separate discussions =)
Keep in mind that at the time Gandhi and MLK were acting, the "right-thinking" dominant majority would have had the same reaction to them - sure, the British might not be perfect, but is it really necessary to cause all this awful fuss about it? Why not just work with them and try and be reasonable? Sure, blacks might not have everything the way they'd like it in the South, but let's not get too extreme here people!
Of course now we all know that negotiating with and beseeching the power agents in these cases was never going to work - the British were never interested in giving up their golden goose, and the whites in the South were never interested in treating blacks as equals. These systems had to be fought against and willfully resisted for people to see what happened when those in power asserted their entrenched position, to understand that it was an absurd, unjust, and exploitative power structure shielding itself with flimsy moral justifications. Change required swimming against the tide of social opinion. Of course now it's all very easy to say "well they were right and weren't they wonderful people" and forget the fact that at the time they were hated.
People in the future may well look back at companies like Uber and similarly appreciate the service they did to humanity by fighting incumbent, corrupted institutions, by fighting for the right for people to make their own decisions about the services they purchase, the contracts they enter into, and the risks they are willing to bear. They may well realise that at the time there was no point negotiating or pleading with the various feudal power brokers of the world - these city halls were never interested in giving up their rights to say who was allowed to sell what to whom under what conditions and at what price - they were too corrupted and no longer really existed to serve their putative original purpose.
You might feel like Uber rubs you the wrong way but at the very least you should realise that there is a significant possibility that people in the future will see you as naive and socialised as those who felt distaste and discomfort at Gandhi and MLK. That alone should give you cause to reconsider your position.
This all was more just a thought-experiment and an attempt to draw a connection I found interesting, but not something I necessarily believe at all - see my "Note on Uber" towards the end of the post:
"Note on Uber: I think Uber is a great business and has a significantly net-positive impact on society, and I reserve judgment w/r/t whether TK and the other Uber execs are good or bad people - I can't conclude they are good because they run a good business, and I can't conclude they are bad because they say stupid things in public."
But enough to control it.