Posts Tagged ‘cooperation’
“Individuals may form communities, but only institutions can create a nation”*…
Good institutions are social technologies that scale trust from personal relations to entire nations. Game theorist and social scientist Julien Lie-Panis unpacks the extraordinary phenomenon of human cooperation to explain how– and why– institutions work…
Every human society, from the smallest village to the largest nation, faces the same fundamental challenge: how to get people to act in the interests of the collective rather than their own. Fishermen must limit their catch so fish stocks don’t collapse. People must respect others’ property and safety. Citizens must pay taxes to fund roads, schools and hospitals. Left to pure self-interest, no community could endure; the bonds of collective life would quickly unravel.
The solutions we’ve devised are remarkably similar across cultures and centuries. We create rules. Then we appoint guardians to enforce them. Those who break the rules are punished. But there’s a problem with this approach, one that the Roman poet Juvenal identified nearly 2,000 years ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves?
Fisheries appoint monitors to prevent overfishing – but what if the monitors accept bribes to look the other way? Police officers exist to protect everyone’s property and safety – but who ensures that they don’t abuse their power? Governments collect taxes for public services – but how do we stop officials from diverting the funds to their own accounts?
Every institution faces the same fundamental paradox. Institutions foster cooperation by rewarding good behaviour and punishing rule-breakers. Yet they themselves depend on cooperative members to function. We haven’t solved the cooperation problem – we’ve simply moved it back one step. So why do institutions work at all? To understand this puzzle, we need to first ask what makes human cooperation so extraordinary in the natural world…
[Lie-Panis explores human cooperation, and examines the ways in which, while it follows the same evolutionary rules as cooperation among other species, humans have expanded the ambit of their coordination. He explains the ways in which institutions depend on “a present-future trade-off,” on its constituents’ patience as it works through problems. And he illustrates the ways in which constituents’ concerns with material security and social capital can generate that patience. He concludes…]
… Institutions can thus be understood as social technologies. We engineer them constantly, often without realising it. When neighbours organise to maintain a shared garden or playground, they appoint a small committee to manage funds and decisions. The arrangement works because it transforms the hard problem of coordinating dozens of contributors into the easier problem of trusting a few visible people who can be praised for diligence or blamed for misuse.
Like any tool, institutions cannot create what isn’t already there; they can only amplify existing cooperative capacity. Institutions rest on the conditions that make cooperation rational: material security and social capital. Where those conditions hold, reputation can work at scale. One layer of accountability supports the next, until cooperation extends far beyond the limits of familiarity. From the same force that binds vampire bats and coral reef fish, we have built cities, markets, and nations. Institutions are how trust is scaled to millions of strangers.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Guarding the Guardians,” from @jliep.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
Apposite (albeit a bit orthogonal): “Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings,” from @marco-giancotti.bsky.social.
* Benjamin Disraeli
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As we get along, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that a film poking fun at a plethora of institutions, Howard Hawks’ comedy Bringing Up Baby, premiered at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. Featuring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and a leopard, the film earned good reviews but suffered at the box office. Indeed, Hepburn’s career fell into a slump– she was one of a group of actors labeled as “box office poison” by the Independent Theatre Owners of America– that she broke with The Philadelphia Story (again with Grant) in 1940.
As for Bringing Up Baby, the film did well when re-released in the 1940s, and grew further in popularity when it began to be shown on television in the 1950s. Today it is recognized as the authentic screwball classic that it is; it sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and ranks among “Top 100” on lists from the American Film Institute and the National Society of Film Critics.
“We all live in each other’s shadow”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post, Nathan Gardels, editor of Noema Magazine, on a new book by Children of a Modest Star, “A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences” by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman…
Globalization was about markets, information flows and technology crossing borders. The planetary is about borders crossing us, embedding and entangling human civilization in its habitat. That, in a nutshell, is the core thesis of a new paradigm-shifting book by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman titled “Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for the Age of Crises.”
The concept of planetarity describes a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above and apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.
“If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering, then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things,” Blake and Gilman write.
As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, “the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of perception – a rapidly maturing technosphere of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that collectively are rendering the planetary system increasingly visible, comprehensible and foreseeable. This recently-evolved smart exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer — is fostering an unprecedented form of planetary sapience.”
The open question is how, and if, human governance in the late-stage Anthropocene can align with the knowledge we are now attaining.
Paradoxically, planetary-scale connectivity is also what divides us. Convergence entails divergence because the universalizing and rationalizing logic of technology and economics that ties the world together operates in a wholly different dimension than the ethos of politics and culture, rooted in emotion and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind.
While the emergent world-spanning cognitive apparatus may be sprouting the synapses of a synchronized planetary intelligence, it clashes with the tribal ingathering of nations and civilizations that remain anchored in their historical and spatial identity.
Consequently, this new domain of encompassing awareness is — so far — as much the terrain of contestation as of common ground…
[ Gardel unpacks Blake’s and Gilman’s proposition, which would devolve some decision-making on some issues, even as it globalized others. By way of addressing the Herculean challenge of creating the equitable, workable global system for addressing global challenges they [propose– a task made the more difficult by the divergence in values discussed yesterday— he invokes an episode from American history…]
… At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, America was morphing from an agricultural, largely rural society into an urban and industrial one. Cultural norms and familiar ways of living were in upheaval. Political institutions that had become dysfunctional were challenged — not so unlike the disruptive transition to digital society and planetarity we are experiencing at present.
The turmoil of transition in those days gave birth to what became known as the Progressive Era. Its progenitors sought to address the new social concerns of a more complex society — working hours and safety conditions in newfangled factories, women’s suffrage, public health exposure from mass food processing, poor urban infrastructure from housing to water and electricity, the concentration of power in the railroad and banking trusts as well as exploitative private utility companies.
The Progressive Era response in the American states was to move in two directions at once. The movement promoted direct democracy whereby citizens could make laws and enforce accountability directly, skirting the corrupt and bought-off legislators of the patronage machines, through the citizens’ ballot initiative, the referendum and the recall of elected officials. At the same time, elected Progressive governors delegated authority to nonpartisan experts for commissions that regulated commerce, banking, railroads and electric utilities on behalf of the public interest. Professional city managers, unelected but accountable to direct democracy and the elected officials who appointed them, came into being for the first time to competently administer ever more complex urban environments.
In time, the reforms that resulted from this pairing of citizen engagement and technocracy percolated up to the national level into institutions such as the Interstate Commerce Commission or the Food and Drug Administration and led to the abolition of child labor, the eight-hour working day and women’s right to vote.
The point of this brief detour into American history is not to suggest the unworkable proposition of direct democracy at a planetary scale, but simply to say that it is well within the capacity of the political imagination to marry modes of consent with delegated authority in a way that confers legitimacy.
The paradigm shift and governing innovations Blake and Gilman propose in “Children of a Modest Star” are no less realizable over time than what has come before because, now just as then, changing circumstances demand it…
A paradigm shift from globalization to planetary governance? “The Third Great Decentering,” @NoemaMag @JonathanSBlake @nils_gilman.
* Irish proverb (in Gaelic, “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine”), quoted by Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin
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As we think systemically, we might recall that on this date in 1998 The Price Is Right aired its milestone 5,000th episode (the longest-running game show in history, it’s over 10,000 episodes to date, and still chugging along). Every prize given away on that episode was a car.
“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation”*…
… and happily that prospect may be more likely than we’d been led to believe in works like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone…
Despite widespread worries that the social fabric is disintegrating, data from the American Psychological Association shows that since the 1950s, cooperation between strangers has steadily increased in the United States.
“We were surprised by our findings that Americans became more cooperative over the last six decades because many people believe U.S. society is becoming less socially connected, less trusting, and less committed to the common good,” said lead researcher Yu Kou, Ph.D., a professor of social psychology at Beijing Normal University. “Greater cooperation within and between societies may help us tackle global challenges, such as responses to pandemics, climate change, and immigrant crises.”
Over 63,000 people participated in 511 studies that were carried out in the US between 1956 and 2017 that were analyzed by the researchers. These studies included lab tests that evaluated strangers’ cooperation. The study was recently published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
The study discovered a slight, gradual rise in collaboration over the period of 61 years…
“Good News: Cooperation Among Strangers Has Increased for the Past 60 Years.” The full study is here.
* Bertrand Russell
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As we bowl together, we might recall that any improvement on cooperation is on a base that’s not too high: it was on this date in 1957 that nine Black students, having been denied entrance to Little Rock, Arkansas’ Central High School (in defiance of a 1954 Supreme Court ruling), were escorted to school by soldiers of the Airborne Battle Group of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Two days earlier the Black students had faced an angry mob of over 1,000 Whites in front of Central High School who were protesting the integration project; as the students were escorted inside by the Little Rock police (supporting national Guard troops), violence escalated, and they were removed from the school. President Eisenhower responded by calling in the regular Army.
“What is missing from the policy analyst’s tool kit – and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization – is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts”*…
Further to yesterday’s post on privacy as a public good, a revisit of an apposite topic, the destructively-problematic concept of “The Tragedy of the Commons“…
In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest,’ he wrote. ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.’ Hardin’s argument made intuitive sense, and provided a temptingly simple explanation for catastrophes of all kinds – traffic jams, dirty public toilets, species extinction. His essay, widely read and accepted, would become one of the most-cited scientific papers of all time.
Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.
The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.
When it came to humans and their appetites, Hardin assumed that all was predestined. Ostrom showed that all was possible, but nothing was guaranteed. ‘We are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies nor free of moral responsibility,’ she told an audience of fellow political scientists in 1997…
Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight. Michelle Nijhuis (@nijhuism) explains: “The miracle of the commons.”
* Elinor Ostrom (who received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work)
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As we come together, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that a Conference of Governors, convened by President Theodore Roosevelt and focused on the issue of conservation, opened in Washington. The brainchild of Gifford Pinchot, Chief Forester of the U.S., it was attended by the governors of the states and territories, the members of the Supreme Court and the Cabinet, scientists, and other national leaders. Seven days later, the governors adopted a declaration supporting conservation. One result was The National Conservation Commission, appointed by Roosevelt later that year, which prepared the first inventory of the natural resources of the United States with chairmen for water, forests, lands, and minerals. The conference also led to annual governors’ conferences, and the appointment of 38 state conservation commissions.
“We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.”*…
The World Clock in Alexanderplatz, Berlin
The set of ideas now called ‘Ergodicity Economics’ is overturning a fundamental concept at the heart of economics, with radical implications for the way we approach uncertainty and cooperation…. starting with the axiom that individuals optimise what happens to them over time, not what happens to them on average in a collection of parallel worlds.
Much of this view rests on a careful critique of a model of human decisionmaking known as expected utility theory. Everyone faces uncertainties all the time, in choosing to take one job rather than another, or deciding how to invest money – in education, travel or a house. The view of expected utility theory is that people should handle it by calculating the expected benefit to come from any possible choice, and choosing the largest. Mathematically, the expected ‘return’ from some choices can be calculated by summing up the possible outcomes, and weighting the benefits they give by the probability of their occurrence.
But there is one odd feature in this framework of expectations – it essentially eliminates time. Yet anyone who faces risky situations over time needs to handle those risks well, on average, over time, with one thing happening after the next. The seductive genius of the concept of probability is that it removes this historical aspect by imagining the world splitting with specific probabilities into parallel universes, one thing happening in each. The expected value doesn’t come from an average calculated over time, but from one calculated over the different possible outcomes considered outside of time. In doing so, it simplifies the problem – but actually solves a problem that is fundamentally different from the real problem of acting wisely through time in an uncertain world.
Expected utility theory has become so familiar to experts in economics, finance and risk-management in general that most see it as the obvious method of reasoning. Many see no alternatives. But that’s a mistake. This inspired [the Ergodicity Theory creators’] efforts to rewrite the foundations of economic theory, avoiding the lure of averaging over possible outcomes, and instead averaging over outcomes in time, with one thing happening after another, as in the real world. Many people – including most economists – naively believe that these two ways of thinking should give identical results, but they don’t. And the differences have big consequences, not only for people trying to do their best when facing uncertainty, but for the basic orientation of all of economic theory, and its prescriptions for how economic life might best be organised.
Of particular importance, the approach brings a new perspective to our understanding of cooperation and competition, and the conditions under which beneficial cooperative activity is possible…
Economists and mathematicians at the London Mathematical Laboratory, together with collaborators including two Nobel laureates from the Santa Fe Institute, propose something altogether different: “How ergodicity re-imagines economics for the benefit of us all.”
* Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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As we consider alternative accounts, we might recall that it was on this date in 2007 that Dodger infielder Chin-Lung Hu, recently acquired by the team, singled in a home game… allowing legendary Dodger announcer Vin Scully remark on-air, “shades of Abbott and Costello, I can finally say, ‘Hu is on first base.'”
Hu, on first
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