I think he's for the most part wrong. The strongest evolutionary development that fed (or was selected for) progress was cooperation, people working together based on the recognition that that they could live safer and produce more if they worked together. At different points in different contexts, there does become a we and a them, and zero-sum creeps in.
Doesn't seem right to me. Often our environment for hunter-gatherers was deeply dynamic; the distribution of plants and animals -- and often the weather -- was changing all the time. And there is very little chance that we experienced the world as a zero-sum environment, since we never really knew -- in any detail -- what was happening to and with the peoples around us.
Maybe Rubin's mistake is that he takes a collectivist starting point. If we think of humans as individuals, then even in a primitive setting, cooperation was key to survival. There had to be a division of labor within the family, presumably, extending to the entire "clan." Viewed from the point of view of an individual, this is not a "zero-sum" environment. In Rubin's favor, it does seem there is a pretty big cognitive leap from clan to tribe to nation, i.e., to an extensive society where division-of-production leads to wealth, which leads to rapid technological progress. So, the big question on my mind is, where or when did mankind make the cognitive leap that allowed it to conceive cooperation on a massive scale? I am speaking, of course, of reaching some level of understanding of what we now call "the market" and its benefits. Was this a physical change in the brain? Why did it take tens of thousands of years for humans to reach the level of cooperation that makes the science of economics necessary? Anyway, kudos to Rubin for taking on this problem.
A static world and a zero-sum world are completely different things. But the deeper problem is in the setup: in the idea of enlightened economists and the benighted hoi polloi. A better question would be why economists are so sure that they're smarter than tens of thousands of years of collective human wisdom.
I think evolutionary psychology is a very powerful tool. But it's very easy to make just-so stories with it. I'm skeptical of any evolutionary psychology explanation that isn't accompanied by examples and exceptions that can prove the rule found in other species.
The ability for foreign workers to produce at less cost comes from their ability to live in an environment which costs a whole lot less. That does indeed seem unfair. But even if the ability to work hard for less money is due to a talent or not needing the nice things of life that too seems unfair. There is also an inborn skill that allows hard work to be more productive due to strength or stamina or something else that we are not all equally provided with. That last source of unfairness, the productivity of labor , is what the US had over Chinese up until recently. But in trading with us during that time they were better off than not trading with us. So it follows that very soon now their higher productivity of labor, would be to our advantage by our trading with them.
Rubin is making a SERIOUS upper-middle class category error here....
He is confusing a supposed net benefit to society with the VERY REAL zero-sum game experienced especially by lesser educated males in the USA who have seen their incomes go backwards in real terms compared to everyone else.
Those with Bachelors degrees or higher simply dont notice because it does not affect them.
P.S. The "things get cheaper" argument does not work: What compensation in having a cheaper color TV for the working class when housing, education and health have risen so much?
P.P.S.. Rubin's argument that things will somehow resolve in the mid to long run. Well - 40 years or most of a career is a hell of a long time to wait !!
I'm not sure we know that much about how people lived and what they thought before they invented writing. In The Rational Optimist, Ridley pointed out that trade was common among humans for as long back as we can find archeological evidence. Given the amount of items we find in areas outside their natural environment - for instance, sea shells inland, or amber in areas with no trees that produce it - inter-tribe trade must have been happening to some extent.
I don't have a great alternative answer myself, but I suspect part of it is just that something like the market is extremely unintuitive to most humans. I notice that the average human often struggle with even fairly basic questions in areas like probability or combinatorics, and often favor binary over stochastic thinking, even though understanding the natural world requires those kinds of ways of thinking about it. The Pragmatists might have been wrong about many things, but they were right that our brains did not evolve to model the world and thus most of us are just not good at it.
Saddened to hear that Paul died. You spelled the date of death wrong, by the way.
I suppose one possible challenge to Rubin's evolutionary explanation of zero-sum beliefs could be the following. Why invoke evolutionary explanation when zero-sum logic is present from our early childhood? For example, if one child takes a toy from another child, the first child gained by the loss of the second child.
While the country as a whole likely benefits economically from immigration, there are usually tradeoffs. New immigrants tend to skew low-skilled, which increases the supply of low-skilled labor and can put downward pressure on wages in that segment of the workforce.
Okay, but playing a positive sum game doesn’t guarantee everyone comes out better off, just that they could. A zero sum game just redistributes wealth, a positive sum game creates it, a negative sum game destroys it. I suppose I am quibbling, but there is a difference between playing a zero sum game and playing a losing strategy in a positive sum game.
It hasn't helped that several generations of the bourgeoisie, who got rich making things, have aped the manners and habits of the aristocracy, who got rich taking things.
This wouldn't explain the emotional intensity of tribalism. We could be educated out of a false belief, and then stop acting on it. We might occasionally forget, but we wouldn't need to hate others the way humans typically easily hate foreigners. The way most humans think of one another, especially when they are afraid or threatened, clearly isn't grounded in isolated self-interest of individuals.
Humans are very weak primates. We had little ability to defend ourselves on our own, and we lived in an environment with lots of predators. We absolutely needed to be included in a group in order to survive. On the other hand, we couldn't be pure pack animals both because our diet required some rather limited resources and because we didn't evolve from pack animals in our recent evolutionary history. Survival required a tribe of an appropriate size. Because we are weaker than other apes, and we also couldn't have vast numbers, we couldn't rely on scaring others with relatively peaceful behavior due to our size or numbers. We needed a tribe where the members would fight fiercely and irrationally for one another in order to make it dangerous to attack us.
Like chimps, early humans almost certainly also had a form of warfare, and likely faced serious dangers from other humans in addition to predators. The intense antagonism towards other tribes and the intense need for tribal inclusion fosters the ability to be so tightly bonded even to those members of the group you personally hate that you would risk safety for them, and be willing to kill for them. Self-interested rationality is a clear obstacle to this. We needed feelings intense enough to shut down reason. We were once animals that couldn't have survived without the capacity for blind hatred and an intense desire to fight outsiders and protect insiders.
People still easily fall back into this mindset. Irrationality accompanies any sense of group identity, and intensifies greatly in the presence of a perceived threat. Because this behavioral response shuts down reason, it won't respond to rational considerations once it's activated. Otherwise smart, decent people are currently feeling good about people being subjected to horrific conditions of imprisonment with no due process, and with deporting four-year-olds with cancer. Breaking relatively minor laws related to immigration seems to people like adequate justification for brutality and evil. It's insane. Quite literally. It's insane in exactly the way we evolved to be insane. The conditions that shaped this sort of response has changed so drastically that they are maybe the greatest obstacle not just to human decency and to morality, but also to the continuation of human progress that capitalism has afforded us. People rise up who know how to take advantage of these ingrained failings of human nature, and once fear takes over and a target is identified, there's really little hope of decency until that fear gets quieted down. Keep everything crazy and scary, and it can last forever. A deeply ingrained part of us was built for a world we're no longer in, and is being used to ruin the amazing one we have.
Perhaps half-true. Both parties typically gain from voluntary trade therefore advantaging cooperation. But DNA prefers altruism toward nearer genetic kin. And then we have the unusual fact that a major factor in human survival is competition with other humans. So perhaps trading the knowledge to make a spear-point or fish-net with kin has advantage, but trading this knowledge with a 'foreigner' with an unknown quantity of kin may become a major disadvantage.
In the recent context, I see economists snicker at Trumps tariffs, but a tariff is a tax on outside production thus advantaging local production. This how Canada got auto mfgr in the 1960s and how Asian nations have developed their industrialization policies. Slightly higher tariffs encourage local production. So PLEASE explain to me how , for example, Japan, with no iron ore and no coal yet a major steel producer has Ricardian comparative advantage ? It doesn't - Japan produces steel by central planning & support and anti-competitive behavior. (and ship-building. appliances, autos, electronics ... ). Would Taiwan be the major semiconductor producer without central planning and anti-competitive behavior ?
The economic model is Eloy vs Morlock, not free trade.
I have my own evolutionary-psychological take on evolved economic thinking (https://sites.psu.edu/drj5j/files/2023/07/2011NEEPS.pdf). My account follows the thinking of Alan Fiske and Steven Pinker, and I think that Paul Rubin's account falls a little short of the more sophisticated analyses by Fiske and Pinker. Their account supposes (correctly, I think), that sharing was ubiquitous for most of human history when we hunted, fished, and gathered in small groups. Ancient thinking was not zero-sum during that stage, as cooperation among everyone in the group was essential to survival and it was necessary that everyone had enough resources to survive. If there was too much disparity, the group would literally lose members and the group as a whole would be at greater risk. Things changed after the advent of agriculture, when it was possible to accumulate more resources than an individual could consume. Indeed, our evolved psychology wasn't well-suited for understanding transactions in this new economy, but the problems are more complex than Rubin's account.
I think he's for the most part wrong. The strongest evolutionary development that fed (or was selected for) progress was cooperation, people working together based on the recognition that that they could live safer and produce more if they worked together. At different points in different contexts, there does become a we and a them, and zero-sum creeps in.
It was cooperation within the in-group and zero-sum with the out-group.
Doesn't seem right to me. Often our environment for hunter-gatherers was deeply dynamic; the distribution of plants and animals -- and often the weather -- was changing all the time. And there is very little chance that we experienced the world as a zero-sum environment, since we never really knew -- in any detail -- what was happening to and with the peoples around us.
Maybe Rubin's mistake is that he takes a collectivist starting point. If we think of humans as individuals, then even in a primitive setting, cooperation was key to survival. There had to be a division of labor within the family, presumably, extending to the entire "clan." Viewed from the point of view of an individual, this is not a "zero-sum" environment. In Rubin's favor, it does seem there is a pretty big cognitive leap from clan to tribe to nation, i.e., to an extensive society where division-of-production leads to wealth, which leads to rapid technological progress. So, the big question on my mind is, where or when did mankind make the cognitive leap that allowed it to conceive cooperation on a massive scale? I am speaking, of course, of reaching some level of understanding of what we now call "the market" and its benefits. Was this a physical change in the brain? Why did it take tens of thousands of years for humans to reach the level of cooperation that makes the science of economics necessary? Anyway, kudos to Rubin for taking on this problem.
A static world and a zero-sum world are completely different things. But the deeper problem is in the setup: in the idea of enlightened economists and the benighted hoi polloi. A better question would be why economists are so sure that they're smarter than tens of thousands of years of collective human wisdom.
I think evolutionary psychology is a very powerful tool. But it's very easy to make just-so stories with it. I'm skeptical of any evolutionary psychology explanation that isn't accompanied by examples and exceptions that can prove the rule found in other species.
The ability for foreign workers to produce at less cost comes from their ability to live in an environment which costs a whole lot less. That does indeed seem unfair. But even if the ability to work hard for less money is due to a talent or not needing the nice things of life that too seems unfair. There is also an inborn skill that allows hard work to be more productive due to strength or stamina or something else that we are not all equally provided with. That last source of unfairness, the productivity of labor , is what the US had over Chinese up until recently. But in trading with us during that time they were better off than not trading with us. So it follows that very soon now their higher productivity of labor, would be to our advantage by our trading with them.
Rubin is making a SERIOUS upper-middle class category error here....
He is confusing a supposed net benefit to society with the VERY REAL zero-sum game experienced especially by lesser educated males in the USA who have seen their incomes go backwards in real terms compared to everyone else.
See table 4 in the attached.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-earnings/2020/
Those with Bachelors degrees or higher simply dont notice because it does not affect them.
P.S. The "things get cheaper" argument does not work: What compensation in having a cheaper color TV for the working class when housing, education and health have risen so much?
P.P.S.. Rubin's argument that things will somehow resolve in the mid to long run. Well - 40 years or most of a career is a hell of a long time to wait !!
I'm not sure we know that much about how people lived and what they thought before they invented writing. In The Rational Optimist, Ridley pointed out that trade was common among humans for as long back as we can find archeological evidence. Given the amount of items we find in areas outside their natural environment - for instance, sea shells inland, or amber in areas with no trees that produce it - inter-tribe trade must have been happening to some extent.
I don't have a great alternative answer myself, but I suspect part of it is just that something like the market is extremely unintuitive to most humans. I notice that the average human often struggle with even fairly basic questions in areas like probability or combinatorics, and often favor binary over stochastic thinking, even though understanding the natural world requires those kinds of ways of thinking about it. The Pragmatists might have been wrong about many things, but they were right that our brains did not evolve to model the world and thus most of us are just not good at it.
Saddened to hear that Paul died. You spelled the date of death wrong, by the way.
I suppose one possible challenge to Rubin's evolutionary explanation of zero-sum beliefs could be the following. Why invoke evolutionary explanation when zero-sum logic is present from our early childhood? For example, if one child takes a toy from another child, the first child gained by the loss of the second child.
Indeed. What WERE the dates?
I think zero-sum thinking might be somewhat reasonable within the specific group of workers in low-wage, low-skill occupations.
That is your conclusion. Can you give a hint about the reasoning that brought you to it?
While the country as a whole likely benefits economically from immigration, there are usually tradeoffs. New immigrants tend to skew low-skilled, which increases the supply of low-skilled labor and can put downward pressure on wages in that segment of the workforce.
Okay, but playing a positive sum game doesn’t guarantee everyone comes out better off, just that they could. A zero sum game just redistributes wealth, a positive sum game creates it, a negative sum game destroys it. I suppose I am quibbling, but there is a difference between playing a zero sum game and playing a losing strategy in a positive sum game.
It hasn't helped that several generations of the bourgeoisie, who got rich making things, have aped the manners and habits of the aristocracy, who got rich taking things.
This wouldn't explain the emotional intensity of tribalism. We could be educated out of a false belief, and then stop acting on it. We might occasionally forget, but we wouldn't need to hate others the way humans typically easily hate foreigners. The way most humans think of one another, especially when they are afraid or threatened, clearly isn't grounded in isolated self-interest of individuals.
Humans are very weak primates. We had little ability to defend ourselves on our own, and we lived in an environment with lots of predators. We absolutely needed to be included in a group in order to survive. On the other hand, we couldn't be pure pack animals both because our diet required some rather limited resources and because we didn't evolve from pack animals in our recent evolutionary history. Survival required a tribe of an appropriate size. Because we are weaker than other apes, and we also couldn't have vast numbers, we couldn't rely on scaring others with relatively peaceful behavior due to our size or numbers. We needed a tribe where the members would fight fiercely and irrationally for one another in order to make it dangerous to attack us.
Like chimps, early humans almost certainly also had a form of warfare, and likely faced serious dangers from other humans in addition to predators. The intense antagonism towards other tribes and the intense need for tribal inclusion fosters the ability to be so tightly bonded even to those members of the group you personally hate that you would risk safety for them, and be willing to kill for them. Self-interested rationality is a clear obstacle to this. We needed feelings intense enough to shut down reason. We were once animals that couldn't have survived without the capacity for blind hatred and an intense desire to fight outsiders and protect insiders.
People still easily fall back into this mindset. Irrationality accompanies any sense of group identity, and intensifies greatly in the presence of a perceived threat. Because this behavioral response shuts down reason, it won't respond to rational considerations once it's activated. Otherwise smart, decent people are currently feeling good about people being subjected to horrific conditions of imprisonment with no due process, and with deporting four-year-olds with cancer. Breaking relatively minor laws related to immigration seems to people like adequate justification for brutality and evil. It's insane. Quite literally. It's insane in exactly the way we evolved to be insane. The conditions that shaped this sort of response has changed so drastically that they are maybe the greatest obstacle not just to human decency and to morality, but also to the continuation of human progress that capitalism has afforded us. People rise up who know how to take advantage of these ingrained failings of human nature, and once fear takes over and a target is identified, there's really little hope of decency until that fear gets quieted down. Keep everything crazy and scary, and it can last forever. A deeply ingrained part of us was built for a world we're no longer in, and is being used to ruin the amazing one we have.
Perhaps half-true. Both parties typically gain from voluntary trade therefore advantaging cooperation. But DNA prefers altruism toward nearer genetic kin. And then we have the unusual fact that a major factor in human survival is competition with other humans. So perhaps trading the knowledge to make a spear-point or fish-net with kin has advantage, but trading this knowledge with a 'foreigner' with an unknown quantity of kin may become a major disadvantage.
In the recent context, I see economists snicker at Trumps tariffs, but a tariff is a tax on outside production thus advantaging local production. This how Canada got auto mfgr in the 1960s and how Asian nations have developed their industrialization policies. Slightly higher tariffs encourage local production. So PLEASE explain to me how , for example, Japan, with no iron ore and no coal yet a major steel producer has Ricardian comparative advantage ? It doesn't - Japan produces steel by central planning & support and anti-competitive behavior. (and ship-building. appliances, autos, electronics ... ). Would Taiwan be the major semiconductor producer without central planning and anti-competitive behavior ?
The economic model is Eloy vs Morlock, not free trade.
I think this paper offers a better model of economic bias, with more testable implications, than the Rubin model: http://pascalboyer.net/articles/2018BoyerPetersenFolk-Econ.pdf
I have my own evolutionary-psychological take on evolved economic thinking (https://sites.psu.edu/drj5j/files/2023/07/2011NEEPS.pdf). My account follows the thinking of Alan Fiske and Steven Pinker, and I think that Paul Rubin's account falls a little short of the more sophisticated analyses by Fiske and Pinker. Their account supposes (correctly, I think), that sharing was ubiquitous for most of human history when we hunted, fished, and gathered in small groups. Ancient thinking was not zero-sum during that stage, as cooperation among everyone in the group was essential to survival and it was necessary that everyone had enough resources to survive. If there was too much disparity, the group would literally lose members and the group as a whole would be at greater risk. Things changed after the advent of agriculture, when it was possible to accumulate more resources than an individual could consume. Indeed, our evolved psychology wasn't well-suited for understanding transactions in this new economy, but the problems are more complex than Rubin's account.