Nature of Human Altruism

Some thoughts I jotted down as I was reading a fascinating evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics article on human altruism: Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003. The nature of human altruism. Nature 425, 785–791.

In the abstract, the authors say that “current gene-based evolutionary theories cannot explain important patterns of human altruism,” and that gene-culture co-evolution will be invoked as an alternative explanation.

I am excited to see the explanation they deliver. I tend to be skeptical of this sort of thing because, well, evolution operates at the level of the gene. It is simply the nature of the process. In a given environment, a gene that has properties that lead to increased copies of itself will proliferate, and a gene that has properties that cause it to become less abundant in the gene pool will decline. That is the primary level on which evolution operates; anything else is secondary. That is not to say that other levels are ineffectual, simply that they are emergent from, and constrained by, that primary level of evolution.

An analogy: suppose that instead of looking to evolution to explain how altruism came to be, you wish to look at the movement of matter to explain how a bunch of sycamore branches and leaves got to be hundreds of feet up in the air. Gravity is the primary governor of how matter moves. Matter will always move toward other massive objects, so if you observe a case in which objects are not moving toward a massive object (like our sycamore leaves), you must search for a more powerful countering force that still operates within the confines of gravity. In this case, the explanation required for the phenomenon that appears to have bested gravity requires invoking the capillary action of xylem cells and water potential gradients from the soil to the leaves. Gravity is still operating on those leaves, but for the moment, the other forces are stronger, so the leaves remain in the air.

Cultural evolution is not impossible, and if we observe behavior that cannot be explained at the level of the gene (just as we couldn’t explain how the sycamore was up in the sky by looking to gravity alone), we should seek levels of evolution that emerge out of the gene level. However, we must always keep in mind that, just as gravity is always acting on matter, gene-based evolution is always acting on our bodies, behaviors, and societies.

Early-on, the authors say that there exists evidence for “strong reciprocity” among humans, which is the rewarding of “cooperative, norm-abiding behaviors” and punishing of norm-violating behavior, even when the rewarder/punisher gains no benefit whatsoever from rewarding/punishing. The problem with this is that rewarding/punishing must impose some cost on the rewarder/punisher, and if they truly gain nothing, then the genes that encode for that behavior decrease the fitness of any individual in whom they occur. Thus, if there is a group of people, all of whom have the rewarder/punisher genes, a mutation that inactivates those genes would produce an individual that is fitter than the rest of the group*, which would cause the inactive genes to increase in frequency, thus eliminating strong reciprocity. I don’t mean to state categorically that strong reciprocity is impossible, and indeed if it is observed, we ought to search for a mechanism for its evolutionary stability. However, I hope I have illustrated how difficult it is for such a trait to become evolutionarily stable and thus the challenge that any evolutionary biologist faces in trying to explain its occurrence.

* Upon rereading this, it occurs to me that this is not necessarily true. If punishments were also dolled out to those who don’t altruistically punish (or altruistic rewards to those who do), then an individual who received the non-rewarder/punisher gene would be punished by their group and could thus be made less fit.

** And lo-and-behold, this is precisely the conclusion the article reaches, nicely summarized the following figure. The red line is the possibility that only occurred to me upon rereading what I had originally written.

Evidence for altruistic punishing/rewarding

The ultimatum game provides a simple example of self-harming behavior to enforce a social norm. An offerer is given some amount of money, of which they offer some fraction to a responder. If the responder accepts the offer, they both keep their fractions; if the responder rejects the offer, they both keep nothing. Apparently, proposals offering less than 25% are very likely to be rejected across cultures and across monetary stakes. I wonder, though, how high those monetary stakes get. If I were the responder and were offered $2.50 of $10, I’d be very likely to forgo the $2.50 to teach the offerer a lesson. That teaching opportunity would be worth $2.50 to me. However, if the offer were $250 of an offerer’s $1,000, I would almost certainly accept the offer because $250, well, I suppose because I believe that $250 would significantly increase my fitness. So I suspect that the decision of whether to punish or not is the result of an analysis of the detriment to one’s own fitness imposed by punishment, the effectiveness of the punishment, and other factors.

The ultimatum game provides an opportunity for the person who is harmed (the responder) to punish the person who harmed them. However, in the real world, social norms are often enforced by a third-party, one who isn’t directly harmed. This sort of scenario has been simulated in a game with three players: an allocator, a recipient, and a third-party. The allocator is given 100 monetary units (MU) and is allowed to give any fraction of the 100 MU to the recipient. The third-party is given 50 MU, from which they can spend any number to punish the allocator. Every MU spent by the third-party as punishment results in a 3 MU penalty to the allocator. Since the third-party gains nothing by punishing, the economically-rational, purely self-interested punisher (i.e. Homo economicus) would never punish and would simply keep all 50 MU. However, the third-party often does punish allocators who offer less than half their MU.

Interestingly, while 55% of third-parties punish unfair offers, 70-80% of recipients expect unfair offers to be punished. So perhaps we expect more fairness than we are willing bring about.

In an altruistic rewarding game, a player can give money to another, then the players are shuffled and there is another round of giving, and the shuffling and giving are repeated. A recent experiment enacted such an experiment with half the players being able to develop a reputation (for giving or not) and the other half was anonymized so that they couldn’t develop a reputation. Those who were reputation-enabled helped on average in 74% of exchanges, while those who were reputation disabled helped in 37% of cases. This suggests that the possibility of developing and benefiting from a reputation of generosity may drive some altruistic behavior, but some baseline generosity (37%) exists beyond that.

Here’s an interesting tad-bit from a neurobiology study. Two groups played prisoners’ dilemma games, one group with another human; the other with a computer program. When the human-interacting group achieved a result of mutual cooperation, their neural reward circuitry was activated relative to the computer-interacting group achieving the same result.

Admirable & Despicable Behavioral Traits

Prompt: Before doing any of the readings, make up a list of 5 personality traits that define a good or admirable person, and 5 personality traits that define a bad or despicable person. Physical traits such as strength, intelligence, athletic ability, looks, and so on are irrelevant.

Traits defining a good, admirable person:

1. Concern for wellbeing of others, empathetic
2. Truth-seeking
3. Acting in accordance with principals
4. Steadfast
5. Humble in the face of uncertainty

Traits defining a bad, despicable person:

1. Opportunistic
2. Self-benefiting to the detriment of others
3. Lack of commitment to truth
4. Over-confident
5. Deceptive

Political power, social construction, and the Marcellus Shale

This exercise asks us to examine public perception and political power of parties involved in our problem (Marcellus Shale development). I have a pet interest in the psychology of social power, especially as it relates to political processes, so I was happy to see this exercise in the workbook. Thus far, the authors’ claim of ecological economics being transdisciplinary seems to hold true.

The two dimensions on which we are instructed to evaluate each group are:

· Social construction (SC): how they are perceived by society, and

· Political power (PP): the extent to which they can effect societal outcomes.

Setting the two orthogonally, we can group people into four categories, which the text labels:

· Advantaged: High SC and high PP, eg., newspaper editors

· Dependents: High SC and low PP, eg., teachers

· Contenders: Low SC and high PP, eg., corporate executives

· Deviants: Low SC and low PP, eg., urban poor people

While political power is relatively straight-forward to determine, social construction is trickier, because different sections of society view various groups differently. This becomes clear as soon as one tries to label any group as having low social construction – some people will always have higher opinions of that group. This is especially important with regard to our problem, as energy extraction in West Virginia is extremely contentious. It often feels that we live in a fissured society, where you’re either with the energy companies (cars with “friends of coal” bumper stickers abound) or against them (“I love mountains” bumper stickers are nearly as common, if more often stuck to things other than cars. The now-disgraced Massey Energy even produced a response bumper sticker to the I Love Mountains campaign.)

All that is to say that it will be tough to evaluate social construction of all the affected groups. I will try to take an “average," but I think it's important to acknowledge that my evaluation will be influenced by the cross-section of society I come into contact with via my work, personal life, and media consumption.

So, on a scale of 1 (very low) to 10 (very high), how do the following groups operate in society?

· Surface rights owners, often farmers. For clarification, for most of the land around here, the owner of the surface does not own the minerals that are under the land, the coal, gas, etc. Obviously, the surface owner is more likely to incur costs of gas development, while the mineral owner receives more benefit. See the excellent documentary Split Estate for more on this.

o PP – 3. Though they often cannot stop their land from being developed, my understanding is that they can have some influence on how wells are put in, and they may receive enough pay to relocate.

o SC – 7. Salt of the earth.

· Energy company executives

o PP – 10. Chesapeke Energy is one of the biggest players in the Marcellus Shale. Their CEO made $112 million in 2008, making him the best paid CEO in the country. In a political system where money is power, and in a state where politicians live and die by the support of energy industries, no one has more power.

o SC – 2. Maybe there are people who think more highly of these guys, but if there are, I don’t know them. I bump them one point from the bottom because I assume there are business students for whom these people are idols.

· Energy company labor

o PP – 5. West Virginia was the epicenter of the labor battles of the early 20^th century. The unions are alive and well, and coal and gas employees are paid more than twice the state average. However, their influence on political processes is dubious -- one need look no further than last year to see that the political system has failed to institute regulations to keep these workers safe: see the Upper Big Branch disaster or the Inidana Township gas well explosion.

o SC – 8. Among the pro-coal, pro-gas folks, these guys are heroes. Though there are some on the other side who malign them, I think there is a wide-spread differentiation of the executives and the labor. For example, the anti-mountaintop removal group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth followed up their “friends of the mountains” bumper sticker with on that read “friends of mountains and miners.” You might be against the war, but everyone respects the troops.

· Local residents

o PP – 2. What do you do if your neighbor sells her gas rights and the fracturing destroys your water well? You probably just take it. This is a poor area of the country, so folks’ legal options and prospects for relocation are limited. The residents of Morgantown recently put an exceeding amount of pressure on City Council that lead to a ban of hydraulic fracturing in and around town. However, that is the exception that demonstrates the rule, the outcome of the ordinance is in legal-limbo, and it does nothing to protect the air and water coming into town from further than the 1 mile buffer extends.

o SC – 4. I was going to say 5, since we are of all stripes, but the places where hydraulic fracturing is happening—rural Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Texas, western Colorado and Wyoming—are rural and poor. As Steven Colbert points out, “Most of the stream poisoning [from mountaintop removal] happens in Appalachia, and the only people it affects are the one remaining group that everybody still feels comfortable making fun of: hillbillies."

Attributes of resources associated with gas well development

This exercise asks us to take several of the major resources associated with our problem and label them with the characteristics defined in chapter 4 of the text: stock-flow vs. fund-service, rival vs. non-rival, etc., and the extent of human knowledge about their condition. Our tentative problem is high-volume hydraulic fracturing of shale for gas extraction.

Resource web for a hydrofracked gas well

Prompt: Sketch a resource web for your ecological-economic problem.

I’m not a huge fan of visual/artistic approaches to problems, but I sketched this out as far as I could, and then I addressed a bunch of the questions the workbook asked in text, below the diagram.

We are planning on addressing some aspect of the explosion in high-volume hydraulic fracturing gas wells in the Marcellus Shale for our problem. Here is my resource web for such a gas well pad. Please let me know via comments what I’ve overlooked.

Opportunity costs of material and energy use­ – The primary opportunity cost seems to be that of the water that is used in drilling. That water comes from rivers and streams where it is the medium of ecosystems. Obviously, it cannot be used by humans for drinking or recreation once it has been pulled from its source.

There are profound ecological impacts stemming from the extraction and processing of the materials used as inputs. Metals have to be mined, purified, reduced, and shaped into their usable forms, all of which have associated ecological costs, some of which are severe. The production of oil for use as fuel on site and in trucks and in the production of chemicals and plastic liners comes with serious ecological costs.

At this point, the workbook asks, for each of the resources that flow into your system, what other resources were required to acquire this resource and transform it into a desired good or service? I appreciate the point on which they want students to dwell—that production chains are long and complex and are associated with a wide variety of pollution and opportunity costs—but to make even a half-assed attempt at answering this question to any depth is far beyond the scope of this assignment.

Opportunity costs of waste production – Obviously, atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide and methane have tremendous consequences for ecosystems throughout the world vis-à-vis climate change. Locally, the input to ecosystems of wastewater is a serious problem. It is sometimes delivered directly to land surfaces, sometimes taken to treatment plants (that are not equipped to deal with the range of pollutants it contains), and sometimes injected underground, all of which have associated consequences. Furthermore, there have been numerous reports of illegal disposal of wastewater, into streams, on roads, on site, etc. The high total dissolved solids (TDS) of wastewater is a serious problem as the water makes its way into streams (which often already have high TDS from coal mining), the biological functioning of which can be severely impaired by high TDS.

Opportunity costs of the physical system – In Appalachia, well pads are often located on farms. There have been reports of farm land, beyond the physical boundaries of the well pad, becoming unusable due to pollution associated with drilling, fracturing, and emissions. The documentary Split Estate, which I recommend highly, shows homeowners in Colorado being forced to leave their homes due to air pollution from nearby wells.

Stock-Flow & Fund-Service Resources

Prompt: Think about a specific ecosystem (even an urban ecosystem if you like)-or better yet, go visit one, and take along a field notebook. Make a list of three stock-flow resources found in that ecosystem, and three fund-service resources.

Is the resource rival or non-rival? In general, can you think of any stock-flow resources that are non-rival? Can you think of any fund-service resources provided by nature that are rival?

Is the resource excludable or non-excludable? If it is non-excludable, can you think of an institution or technology that could make it excludable? Do you think it should be made excludable? Why or why not?

Is the resource a market good or a nonmarket good?

In general, can you think of any stock-flow resources that cannot be made excludable? Can you think of fund-service resources provided by nature that can be made excludable?

~~~

Ecosystem – WVU Core Arboretum (small, deciduous forest in urban environment)

Stock-flow resources

1. Paw-paws (fruit)

2. Timber

3. Deer (for food)

Fund-service resources

1. Temperature regulation

2. Carbon absorption

3. Water retention (rain, urban runoff)

All three stock-flow resources are rival; that is, the more of them I use, the less there is for you to use. They are also all excludable. Because the arboretum is owned by a university and open to the public without restriction, the resources that can be harvested (paw paws) are non-market. Regulations prevent the harvest of timber or deer from the forest, but if they were harvested, timber would very likely become a market good, and deer would almost certainly be a non-market good.

All of the fund-service resources are, for practical purposes, non-rival and non-excludable. All are, at present, non-market. However, temperature regulation could be made excludable and marketed by charge for entrance. I don’t think that should be done, as I believe that access to our evolutionary environment, not to mention shade, should be a birthright. Carbon absorption is absolutely non-excludable, and it is non-rival in that your carbon emissions can’t be differentiated from mine. However, it could be made marketable via, eg., a cap-and-trade system. There would be myriad challenges associated with developing and implementing such a system; however, it doesn’t seem like an all-together bad idea to me, especially if it could be developed in an international framework.

I cannot think of a stock-flow resource that is necessarily non-excludable. Fresh water is the closest thing I can think of, but, of course, efforts are in place to make it an excludable resource both via regulation, eg., the Colorado River Compact and technology, eg., dams.

Some fund-service resources can be made excludable. For example, a hot springs provides the service of warm bathing. At least within our conception of property rights, one could buy the land surrounding the springs and fence them off, thereby excluding anyone else from receiving the service of the springs.

Climate change and ecological economics paradigm

Prompt: Consider one of the serious problems that society faces today. Is there a relationship between this problem and conventional market economics? Does ecological economics offer useful insights into this problem? Would this problem have emerged if society had adopted an ecological economics perspective 100 years ago? Why didn’t we adopt ecological economics 100 years ago? Why have we still failed to adopt it today?

Global climate change is among the most serious problems our society must address. Conventional market economics has not only failed to address the problem of climate change, it has spurred it onward. Our economies are highly dependent on cheap fossil energy for growth, and conventional economics sees growth as the ultimate goal. Thus, the more energy used, the better. To this end, not only have costs associated with fossil fuel extraction, transport, preparation, use, and waste handling been externalized from the companies carrying out those activities, but the US government, among others, has actively subsidized energy industries and has repeatedly deployed the military to further those industries’ access to fossil fuels.

Ecological economics (EE) offers multiple insights into the problem of, and solutions to, global climate change. In contrast to conventional economics, EE recognizes that the economic system is a subsystem of the global ecosystem. Therefore, the waste from the economic system, including greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, end up in the ecological system. The blatant fallacy of conventional economics’ notion that the economic system is the whole is readily apparent when one considers what happens to waste from that system: where can it go?

Furthermore, ecological economics prioritizes an appropriate scale of the economy and a just distribution of its resources. By asking, what is an appropriate size for our economic system? EE suggests that we should consider how much fossil energy the economy should use before asking how we can most efficiently use it.

Concern for just distribution of resources in EE extends to intergenerational distribution. So, as we continue to burn fossil fuels at a rate that provides each of us in the rich world with the energy equivalent of hundreds of slaves, the ecological economist asks whether that is fair to a Bangladeshi whose home will be flooded as sea levels rise or to a child born in the Chihuahuan Desert in 2100 who will face warmer temperatures and less precipitation than they would have if we had lived more modestly.

Had ecological economics guided our actions through the twenthieth century, we would undoubtedly be in much less of a predicament. It seems to me that considerations of sustainability and justice would have prevented the much, if not all, of the extraction fossil fuels, obviating all concerns regarding climate change. For example, residents of Appalachia who live near mountaintop removal coal mining have higher rates of birth defects, die younger, and are poorer than other residents of Appalachia. If justice were a primary concern of economists for the last 100 years, it is hard to imagine that this type of mining would ever have been practiced.

Of course, we didn’t adopt an ecological economical paradigm 100 years ago, and we still haven’t today. That made more sense 100 years ago, when there were “only” a couple billion people on the planet and vast areas of land and sea were untapped and still fecund. Now, however, we have filled the world with humans, depleted non-renewable resources, hyper-exploited renewable resources, and filled waste sinks. It is clearly beyond time to adopt a full world paradigm. I suspect we haven’t for three primary reasons:

1. Inertia. We have been doing industrial capitalism under an empty world/conventional economical paradigm for a long time. Our systems are so large that they cannot change course rapidly.

2. Entitlement. We quite naturally enjoy having tomatoes in January, air conditioning in July, and jet travel whenever we want it. Unfortunately, as a society, we seem to have the maturity level of a toddler regarding getting what we want when we want it.

3. Power structures. Those who benefit most from the systems that are in place are those who have the most influence on those systems. Conversely, those who have the most to gain from adopting an ecological paradigm—the global poor, future human generations, and almost all non-human beings—have very little influence on our systems.

The situation is dire; we urgently need to adopt an ecological economical paradigm. I think we have begun to move in that direction, but we have already done a great deal of damage. It remains to be seen whether we will be able to get our act together before we hit powerful tipping points – points at which feedback loops strengthen to cross points of no return.

Desirable ends for hydraulic fracturing

What follows is a free-write for exercise 1.2 in the workbook associated with this class. At this point, I'm suppose to have chosen a tentative "problem" for which I will do a project that involves defining and working toward a solution. The nascent explosion of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale for methane is a pretty big problem around here, so I'm thinking that will be my project topic. What follows is a free-write.... it was written as a stream-of-consciousness and has not been edited for content or grammar.

The Problem – Hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale for methane

Sustainable Scale

sustainable scale of gas well drilling!? Ha, there couldn’t be. or could there? in theory there’s an amount of CO2 we could burn that the ecosystem could absorb. but the drilling could never be sustainable, the gas is finite and consumed. on an empty planet, the problem wouldn’t be one of sustainability, because there might be enough gas for everyone to burn some without making a dent in total reserves, but problems of pollution and environmental injustice would remain.

If the rate of throughput increases?! HA! The rate of throughput is exploding, with disasterous consequences. The benefits – a few jobs, slightly cheaper natural gas, and we will be able to keep the lights on for a few years longer, if we don’t melt the planet first. The consequences – we’re befowling our streams, tearing apart our mountains, toxifying the air. And it’s falling on people that have lived with the disasterous consequences of coal mining for generations. My heart sinks to think that now they’ll be burdened with this. I can and will leave; it’s not really my battle. I’ll fight it while I’m here, but I’ve never felt like it was my water being polluted. But I see how beaten down these people are by the mining, and I see how divided they are about the industry. It breaks my heart to see it reving up in a new arena.

Just Dirstribution

Who benefits? The mineral owners (if they don’t plan to stay living near the wells) and the energy companies. And the population as a whole in a very dilute way by the pennies they save on their gas bills. Though I’m not sure that’s true…… if we were to not drill into unconventional gas reserves, increased prices would force conservation, which might lead to a happier way of life, and could slow encroaching disasters associated with climate change.

Who created the costs? The beneficiaries, of course. Duh.

Who bears the burden? The people of Appalachia. The poor, health-impacted, community-divided people of Appalachia. For those few who can lease gas rights and make enough money to retire and perhaps move away, who can blame them? And even more so when their neighbors have already leased gas rights. In that way, it spreads like a contagious disease.

who created the values that are affected? nature, first and formost – the streams, the hills, the forests, all raped and pillaged. but also people who have built houses, developed farms, and developed relationships with their local landbase.

who determines what is just and unjust? in what court? in the court of public opinion, I suppose each of us individually, with (sometimes coercive) guidance from the media. in the court with material consequences, the courts, armed with police and appointed by corrupt political processes.

Efficient Allocation

the external costs are many – I hope someone will do an analysis for Marcellus wells like the ‘true cost of coal’ analysis that Epstein recently published. if they had to pay for the potential risks and eventual costs, I suspect they wouldn’t be able to drill. externalized costs include pollution of waterways that is guaranteed: sedimentation runoff and some amount of organics, and the product of the probality of a blowout or other disaster times the costs of such a disaster—from the emergency crews that come to put the fires out, to the downstream ecological effects. there’s also the air pollution, the people who have to move off their farm lands or from their homes because they’re getting sick from the air pollution. there’s the lost aquifers, which are becoming all the more valuable as (clean) water becomes scarcer.

perhaps prices could be used to internalize some of these costs, and I think they should be as long as drilling is happening. but ultimately, our knowledge is insufficient to estimate the costs associated with these damages. the technology is five years old – how could we possibly know how it’s going to impact future generations?

Neoclassical vs. Ecological Economics

Prompt: Create a chart comparing and contrasting ecological economics and neoclassical economics. On each respective side put the main points for each school of thought. For each major point also write down the reasoning behind the development of these practices and their goals, these may be either historical or current needs.

The wants of Homo economicus

Prompt: Read the “Economic Man” and “Wants” from the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. State whether you believe humans actually act in such a manner in their daily lives. How do these actions and beliefs differ from those held within ecological economics?

Homo economicus has perfect information, infinite computing power, and makes optimal, rational decisions. Demonstrations that H. sapiens ≠ H. economicus abound. One example is the variety of prices at which goods are purchased. Even on the internet, where the perfect-information premise is most-closely realized and the opportunity cost of selecting a different vender is near zero, goods are routinely sold at prices greater than their minimum.

It seems worth noting that corporate entities are more likely to make rational decisions than individuals. Corporate decisions are made by groups of individuals, often through formalized processes that are designed to maximize profits. Periodic review by managers and, at the ultimate level, shareholders, ensures that individuals or processes that produce sub-optimal (ie., irrational, ie., non-profit-maximizing) decision making are weeded out.

In contrast, individuals make decisions based on a complex psychological suite of rationality, morality, and emotion with little oversight or review. The decision to take $300 to a casino rather than to invest it is irrational*, but, as casino-loyalty-rewards programs demonstrate, there is seldom a mechanism to stop the individual from repeating the irrational act. In marked contrast, if the same person took $300 of a corporation’s money to a casino, they would be eliminated from the company and safeguards would be put in place to ensure that similar irrationality would not be repeated. This may be one of many reasons corporations have grown so dominant in our society.

On the subject of wants, it seems clear that neoclassical economics has inappropriately thought of individuals as surrogates for firms. Human wants aren’t rational; they are influenced, for instance, by social conditions (see, eg., cosmetic skin-whitening cream, which is presently very popular in East Asia). Furthermore, as the essay on economic man points out, the idea that individuals are preference-maximizing entities is entirely unfalsifiable, which makes it entirely unscientific. Preferences being invisible, the theory takes one’s actions as markers of preferences, and then says that those actions are evidence of the preferences they demonstrated. Circular reasoning, par exemplar.

Ecological economics acknowledges that human wants are complex and driven by a variety forces, among which rationality is but one. Being transdisciplinary, ecological economics' appreciation of human wants and decision making is informed by behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.

* The counter-argument would be that the individual derives pleasure from going to the casino in excess of the difference between the anticipated gains of investment and the anticipated loss of gambling. I would respond by suggesting that the counter-arguer go to a casino and look for such pleasure. It has been my experience that individuals are profoundly unhappy while they are in casinos, which returns us to the point that humans often make irrational decisions.

On premises

As I read the opening chapters of my new ecological economics texts, I’m occasionally frustrated by a feeling of patronization. When a text asks the student to reflect on whether ever-increasing working hours lead to ever-increasing happiness or whether infinite growth on a finite planet is possible, my initial response is, come on, can we get to the real issues already!?

But, of course, this is precisely the problem. Conventional economics takes as an axiom that increasing consumption is increasing happiness. Conventional economics recognizes no ecological bounds.

Last summer, I took a class called Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory. Before the class started, I was giddy to learn how nation-scale economic philosophy was developed and practiced. For the first two weeks of the class, I was shocked. I wiggled about in my chair, trying to limit my show of disbelief at ridiculous premise after ridiculous premise. I bit my tongue as often as possible, but I couldn’t let all those assumptions slide through unchallenged. To her credit, our teaching assistant, challenged on the fundamental pillars of the subject in which she was becoming an expert, patiently acknowledged that the assumptions were “imperfect.” And then we moved on to the next step, having incorporated yet another blatantly fallacious premise.

Then something unexpected happened. After those first, unbearable classes, I got quiet. Suddenly, there was nothing to question. Once the systems had been defined, it was just pushing variables around, and the math all seemed to check out.

That’s how economics has been able to drive us to this insane situation in which we’re destroying our life support system and growing none-the-happier for it—they have slid their premises in with hand waving and admissions of “imperfect assumptions” in the first chapter. Debate and contention is allowed about the subjects in chapter 24, but never about chapter one. Questioning the premises could mean rewriting everything that comes after them, and then what would all those old PhDs be worth?

It has been said that, “from insane premises to monstrous conclusions, Hitler was relentlessly logical.”¹

It’s become clear that we can say the same about neoclassical economics.

So, to return to the topic whence I’ve digressed, of course the opening pages of a subject meant to overthrow an established ideology start by examining the basic premises of the dominant ideology.

Once we’ve accepted the premises, we’ve been had.

If we’re going to define a new economics, we need to examine our premises very carefully.

So I’ll be patient as I read these opening pages and try to enjoy an economics that meshes with common sense and my system of morals and values.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Doctors-Medical-Psychology-Genocide/dp/0465049052

Visioning a better future

Prompt: Write a one page description of your vision of a sustainable and desirable future, i.e. what you believe are the desirable ends towards which society should allocate its resources. Use your imaginations without ignoring the laws of physics and ecology. Post your vision on the discussion board. Read and comment on the other students’ visions. You will be asked to return to this in the module on societal challenges and paradigm shifts.

I think the loss that we are most hurting from is the loss of connection to community and place. Many of us scarcely know our neighbors, let alone those who produce our food and clothing. For half of humanity, connection to the natural environment in which we evolved to exist has been replaced with suffocation by concrete and steel. It has been my experience (and to my limited knowledge, cutting edge research agrees) that contentedness arises from communion with human community and the natural environment. Therefore, since our goal is to increase human wellbeing, any changes we wish to make to the economic system should enhance connection to the places we live and the people with whom we share them.

Food, being our primary requirement, seems like a natural place to start visioning. The way we acquire and consume our food used to be the cornerstone of community interactions. For the vast majority of human history, that meant hunting and gathering in tribes, and, more recently, farming and raising animals in families and communities. Not coincidentally, as we have progressed from hunter-gatherers, to agriculturalists, to modern-microwavers, the quantity of calories we consume has increased while the quality of nutrition contained in those calories has decreased. In fact, human health deteriorates with the rise of agriculture¹.

Our modern system of food production and consumption damages human health (see, eg., obesity and diabetes, but also, likely, cardiovascular disease and many cancers²), destroys ecosystems (see, eg., soy production in the former Amazon rainforest or the 9,000mi² deadzone in the Gulf of Mexico), depletes limited stocks ranging from topsoil to rock phosphorus to oil, and has severed our primal link to the natural world. When a people live in constant contact with the systems that support them, they value those systems. It is only our dissociation from the natural world that has enabled the degradation of it. Conversely, by putting ourselves back in contact with the source of our sustenance, we will naturally become caretakers of those systems. As Derrick Jensen points out, “If your experience is that your water comes from the tap and that your food comes from the grocery store, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them; if your experience is that your water comes from a river and that your food comes from a land base then you will defend those to the death because your life depends on them.”

Current economic policies, such as subsidization of oil production and agriculture, along with powerful cultural forces, such as the drive for increasing consumption fueling longer working hours keep us chained to a system that dissociates us from our sources of happiness and vitality. The good news is that a return to one naturally means a return to the other.

1. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5927/588.1

2. http://www.amazon.com/Anticancer-New-Life-David-Servan-Schreiber/dp/0670020346

Intergenerational Pareto (In)Efficiency

Prompt: Why might excessive resource use have greater impacts on future generations than the current one? Consider the definition of Pareto efficient allocation. If the current generation is the de facto owner of all resources, could it be Pareto efficient for this generation to consume fewer resources so that future generations are better off?

There are many reasons resource use in the present could have a greater impact—positive or negative—on future generations than the present generation. For example, suppose there is a stockpile of grain sufficient to feed one person for one year. Someone, free from the burden of having to find food, could spend a year developing methods to produce food more efficiently, which could reduce food scarcity for future generations far more than the stock of food that was consumed to develop those methods.

More relevant to the topic at hand, present consumption can have powerful negative effects on future wellbeing. Many fisheries are presently severely depleted and dangerously close to collapse. The aggressive harvest of the remaining fish in a depleted fishery may increase present-day wellbeing a bit, but if it results in the collapse of a fishery, it would have dramatic negative effects on future wellbeing.

Pareto efficient allocation is the state of a system at which no alternative allocation of resources exists that would make anyone better off without making someone else someone worse off. If future beings are included in the system, it becomes clear that Pareto efficiency demands restraint on the current generation.

Considering the potential breach of feedback loop tipping points, such as desertification of forests and irreversible increases in atmospheric carbon, present consumption levels and methods are likely very, very far from Pareto efficient.