Progress Daily

In the late 1990s, under the supervision of Samuel Bowles, twelve field researchers — including eleven anthropologists and one economist — went into fifteen “small-scale” societies (essentially small tribes that were, to varying degrees, self-contained) and got people to play the kinds of games in which experimental economics specialize. The societies included three that depended on foraging for survival, six that used slash-and-burn techniques, four nomadic herding groups, and two small agricultural societies. The three games the people were asked to play were the three standards of behavioral economics: (1) the ultimatum game, (2) the public goods game (in which if everyone contributes, everyone goes away significantly better off, while if only a few people contribute, then the others can free ride on their effort), and (3) the dictator game, which is similar to the ultimatum game except that the responder can’t say no to the proposer’s offer. The idea behind all these games is that they can be played in a purely rational manner, in which case the player protects himself against loss but forgoes the possibility of mutual gain. Or they can be played in a prosocial manner, which is what most people do.

In any case, what the researchers found was that in every single society there was a significant deviation from the purely rational strategy. But the deviations were not all in the same direction, so there were significant differences between the cultures. What was remarkable about the study, though, was this: the higher the degree to which a culture was integrated with the market, the greater the level of prosociality. People from more market-oriented societies made higher offers in the dictator game and the ultimatum game, cooperated in the public-goods game, and exhibited strong reciprocity when they had the chance.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, by James Surowiecki

Research done at the University of Alberta found a connection between the length of the male index finger relative to the ring finger and the tendency to be aggressive. No such connection was found in women.

Scientists have known for more than a century that the finger-length ratio differs between men and women.

In women, the two fingers are usually almost equal in length, as measured from the crease nearest the palm to the fingertip. In men, the ring finger tends to be much longer than the index.

Recently, scientists found a connection between finger lengths and the amount of testosterone that a fetus was exposed to in the womb: the shorter the index finger relative to the ring finger, the higher the amount of prenatal testosterone. The new study found such a fetus is more likely to be a physically aggressive adult, according to Peter Hurd and his graduate student Allison Bailey. The connection was found only with physically aggressive behavior, not with verbal aggression or other forms of hostility.

Other studies looking at finger length ratio have suggested that, in men, a long ring finger and symmetrical hands are an indication of fertility, and that women are more likely to be fertile if they have a longer index finger.

One study found boys with shorter ring fingers tended to be at greatest risk of a heart attack in early adulthood, which was linked to testosterone levels.

Another recent study had found women exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the womb, and hence a more ‘male’ pattern of finger length, displayed more frustrated behaviour when answering challenging telephone calls than other women.

A 2003 report in Chemical & Engineering News, a weekly newsmagazine published by the American Chemical Society, said “flawed brain chemistry, brain damage, genetic defects, an unhealthy psychological environment” all contribute to violent behavior.

Another study by Hurd, to be published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, find that men with more feminine finger ratios are more prone to depression.

Finger lengths explain only about 5 percent of the variation in these personality measures.

“Finger Length Predicts Aggression in Men”

“Finger Length ‘Key to Aggression’“

In the prisoner’s dilemma, two partners in crime are being interrogated separately. The state lacks the evidence to convict them of the crime they committed but does have enough evidence to convict both on a lesser charge bringing, say, a one-year prison term for each. The prosecutor wants conviction on the more serious charge, and pressures each man individually to confess and implicate the other. She says: “If you confess but your partner doesn’t, I’ll let you off free and use your testimony to lock him up for ten years. And if you don’t confess, yet your partner does, you go to prison for ten years. If you confess and your partner does too, I’ll put you both away, but only for three years.” The question is: Will the two prisoners cooperate with each other, both refusing to confess? Or will one or both of them “defect” (”cheat”)?

If the two prisoners can’t communicate with each other, and both behave logically, they will almost certainly both suffer as a result. To see this, just pretend you’re one of the prisoners and run through your options one by one. Suppose, first of all, that your partner cheats on you by copping a plea. Then you’re better off cheating on him and confessing: you get three years in jail, as opposed to the ten you’d get by staying silent. Now suppose your partner doesn’t cheat — doesn’t confess. You’re still better off cheating, because then you get out of jail, whereas if you stayed mum like your partner, you’d each get a one-year jail term. So the logic seems irresistible: don’t cooperate with your partner; cheat on him.

But if both of you follow this logic, and both cheat, then you’ll both get three years in jail. And if both of you hadn’t cheated — if both had stayed mum — you would have just gotten one year in jail. So mutual mumness is, relatively speaking, the win-win outcome. But it makes no sense for either of you to stay mum unless you’ve both been assured by the other that he will stay mum, too.

Robert Axelrod organized a tournament that amounted to a simulation of biological evolution. Several dozen people submitted computer programs that embodied particular strategies for playing the prisoner’s dilemma. The programs were then allowed to interact with each other — as if they constituted a kind of society. Upon each interaction, the two programs involved would “decide” — on the basis of their algorithms — whether to cheat or cooperate. Depending on what each had decided, both would receive a score representing the outcome of that encounter.

Then each would move on to the next encounter, with another program. In each round, there would be enough encounters so that every program interacted with every other program 200 times. At the end of each round, the scores for each program, each “player,” were added up. Programs were then allowed to “replicate” in proportion to their score. So the better your program did in one round — one “generation” — the more copies of it there would be in the next generation.

The winning program was called “Tit for Tat.” Tit for Tat’s strategy was very simple. On its first encounter with any given program, it would cooperate. On subsequent encounters, it would do whatever that program had done on the previous occasion. In short, Tit for Tat would reward past cooperation with present cooperation and would punish past cheating with present cheating. Generation by generation, Tit for Tat came to dominate the population, so that, more and more, Tit for Tats spent their time interacting with other Tit for Tats. Such interactions invariably blossomed into stable, cooperative relationships. As the game wore on, the “society” of players in Axelrod’s computer exhibited more and more amity and order.

By showing how cooperation could evolve without formal communication, Axelrod had shown how reciprocal altruism could evolve in animals that don’t do much talking — including chimpanzees and vampire bats. He had also shown how stable, cooperative relationships could form in a very small society of humans without much explicit discussion; so long as the same players encounter each other day after day — as in a small hunter-gatherer society — trust could develop even with little explicit commitment.

A key feature of cultural evolution has been to make it possible for such non-zero-sum games to get played over great distances, among a large number of players. And in these kinds of situations, typically, there does need to be explicit communication (however circuitous), and there do need to be explicit means of sustaining trust. Hence the importance of evolving information technology in expanding the scope and complexity of social organization.

From Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright

In a new University of Chicago study of men and women 50 to 68 years old, those who scored highest on measures of loneliness also had higher blood pressure. And high blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease, the number one killer in many industrialized nations and number two the United States.

Lonely people have blood pressure readings as much as 30 points higher than non-lonely people. Blood pressure differences between lonely and non-lonely people were smallest at age 50 and greatest among the oldest people tested.

The researchers separated loneliness out from depression, age, race, gender, weight, alcohol consumption, smoking, blood pressure medications, hostility, stress, social support and other factors. Loneliness was worse for blood pressure than any other psychological or social factor the researchers studied, and the morbid health effect of loneliness accumulates gradually and faster as you get older.

Weight loss and physical exercise reduce blood pressure by the same amount that loneliness increases it.

About one in five Americans is lonely, a gnawing emotional state that is a patchwork of feeling unhappy, stressed out, friendless and hostile.

The main psychological difference between lonely and non-lonely people is that the former perceive stressful circumstances as threatening rather than challenging and cope passively and withdraw from stress rather than trying to solve the problem.

Lonely people who are middle-aged and older tend to also have problems with alcoholism, depression, weak immune system responses to illness, impaired sleep and suicide.

“Loneliness Kills, Study Shows,” by Robin Lloyd

Of the 16 million Americans who were in uniform at some time during World War II, fully 10 million were conscripted. (For more on this, see Robert Higgs, “Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s.”) The only way economists have to figure out whether someone is better off having a job than being unemployed is to know that the person chose the job. But conscription is the antithesis of choice. To put this in numerical perspective, the civilian labor force during World War II was only 54 to 56 million. It’s not hard to reduce unemployment by almost 7 million people if you use conscription to raise the size of the armed forces by almost 11 million people.

Gross national product increased during World War II, but GNP became a meaningless measure because of price controls and war production. When the US entered the war, it imposed price controls on virtually all goods used in the war effort and put itself at the front of the line for those goods. So when we look at the incomes of consumers and consider what they were able to buy with those incomes, we get an overstatement. Many goods were actually unavailable.

War spending made up nearly half of GNP by the end of the war. All of those expenditures that went for guns, trucks, airplanes, tanks, gasoline, ships, uniforms, and labor were expenditures that were destroyed. Not just the goods, but even the millions of labor hours, were used up without creating value to consumers. It’s not prosperity to produce things that government quickly destroys. If we factor out war spending, we’re left with virtually no increase in real gross national product per capita between 1940 and the last fiscal year of the war.

It’s actually worse than that. The economy was coming out of the Depression in the prewar years. The unemployment rate, which had reached 24.9 percent in 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression, had fallen to 17.2 percent in 1939, 14.6 percent in 1940, and 9.9 percent in 1941. The unemployment rate would probably have continued to fall, absent U.S. participation in World War II, possibly reaching as low as 6 or 7 percent by 1944. This means that GNP per person, properly measured to reflect consumers’ values, would have been well above its actual level in 1944.

“The Myth of US Prosperity During World War II,” by David R. Henderson

A woman enters a room alone and seats herself before a table covered with seven small boxes. She picks up each box, sniffs it carefully, and jots something on a pad of paper. This is the lab of Claus Wedekind, a zoologist at Bern University in Switzerland. Wedekind is testing women’s responses to men’s sweaty T-shirts. He has found that women are attracted to the scent of men who are most unlike them in the array of immune system genes known as MHC, for major histocompatibility complex.

MHC genes are the most diverse of all genes. They differ so widely from person to person that they constitute a molecular signature, one that helps an organism recognize its own healthy cells, identify pathogens, and reject foreign tissue.

Wedekind recruited a group of 49 women and 44 men who harbored a wide range of MHC genes. Wedekind gave each man a clean T-shirt on a Sunday morning and asked him to wear it for two nights. To ensure a strong body odor, he gave the men supplies of odor-free soap and aftershave and asked them to remain as “odor neutral” as possible.

Each woman was scheduled for the experiment at the midpoint of her menstrual cycle, when women’s noses are reputedly the keenest, and each was presented with a different set of seven boxes. Three of the seven boxes contained T-shirts from men harboring MHC similar to the woman’s own; three contained T-shirts from MHC-dissimilar men; and one contained an unworn T-shirt as a control. The women were asked to rate each of the seven T-shirts as pleasant or unpleasant.

The women Wedekind tested were more likely to prefer the scent of men with dissimilar MHC. In fact, that scent tended to remind them of their boyfriends, both past and present.

When mice are pregnant, their preferences revert, and they prefer the familiar odor of MHC-similar males. By nesting with relatives, the mothers get help nursing the young pups as well as protection from strange and murderous males. The women in Wedekind’s study who were on the pill — which raises estrogen levels in the body, as in pregnancy — also preferred the odor of MHC-similar males.

Preferring MHC-dissimilar mates may reduce the risk of inbreeding and thus of producing children with genetic diseases. MHC-based mating serves that function among mice, who live in small, genetically homogeneous communities. It may also help ensure offspring with more effective immune systems. The main function of MHC genes is to encode cell-surface proteins that offer a window display of the proteins being made inside a cell. That helps the immune system identify cells that have been invaded by a virus or some other pathogen. It’s likely that the more genetically dissimilar a child’s parents are the more diverse his complement of MHC genes will be, and the more capable his cell-surface proteins will be of presenting for immune attack any pathogen that happens to beset him.

MHC-similar couples, according to several recent studies, are less fertile. Carole Ober of the University of Chicago studied a South Dakota community of Hutterites, a religious group who do not believe in contraception and tend to marry within the community — and are thus more likely to marry partners with similar MHC. She found that Hutterite couples with similar MHC tended to have longer periods between pregnancies and higher rates of miscarriage than other Hutterite couples.

Choosing MHC-dissimilar mates may, therefore, serve three ends: increasing fertility, producing hardier offspring, and reducing the risk of genetic disease.

“Scent of a Man,” by Sarah Richardson

We should expect the average beliefs of laymen and experts to be identical. If they are not, we can infer that rational expectations fail to hold for at least one of the groups. A reasonable presumption, moreover, is that when laymen and experts conflict, the experts are correct. The Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy study, produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Washington Post, and Harvard, asked 1,510 randomly sampled Americans and 250 Ph.D. economists the same wide-ranging battery of questions about the economy. Compared with economists, the public suffers from a strong anti-foreign bias, a tendency to underrate the economic benefits and overrate the dangers of dealing with people from other countries. It sees employment as a good in itself rather than a means to the end of production. Non-economists also display a powerful anti-market bias. They resist supply-and-demand explanations of price determination in favor of monopolistic conspiracy theories. The public naively sees profits, executive compensation, and business taxes as mere transfers between rich and poor, and rarely considers their effect on incentives.

The reason why economists and the public disagree is not that economists are materially well-off. Rich non-economists generally think like poor non-economists, not rich economists. Controlling for “ideological bias” with party identification and left-right ideological placement actually slightly increases belief gaps’ absolute magnitude. The reason why economists and the public disagree is not that economists are conservative ideologues. In fact, the typical economist surveyed is a moderate Democrat.

“Mises and Bastiat on How Democracy Goes Wrong” by Bryan Caplan