“In the evenly
rotating economy consequently nothing is altered in the allocation of
goods for the satisfaction of wants nearer and in remoter periods of
the future. No one plans any change because – according to our
assumption – the prevailing allocation best serves him and because
he does not believe that any possible rearrangement could improve his
condition.”
-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
The evenly rotating economy is one of the most insightful foils as
to the working of actual human societies that our conceptual heritage
has to offer us. Within the evenly rotating economy, there are no
profits to be had. This in turn has the queer result of necessitating
that there is no longer uncertainty within the world. By the time
that society has reached such a state of perfect foresight, people
have made plans for every single changed taste, every single
technological improvement, and every single act of God until the
world finally dissolves into dust, and Homo sapiens has
finally reached the end of its phylogenetic line.
What is really
interesting about the evenly rotating economy (or at least really
interesting for me here) is not that the opportunities for profit
have all evaporated with not even a spurious mirage left behind to
lead a passerby astray. Nor is it even that, as would be implied by
the previous condition, that the world is now completely certain and
even human errors already provisioned for. What is really of interest
is instead the effect that such a world would have on human
interactions.
After all, human
interactions are not simply a mechanistic bumping together of n
people such as what happens when one person at a cashier's register
meets another with a basket of groceries in hand. For better and for
worse, human interactions are more often than not more complicated
than that. More often than not, they have a strategic dimension by
which the two have to play a complicated game of showing intentions,
perhaps hiding others, guessing what the other person's intentions
are, and deliberating on a strategy Edward O. Wilson notes this
aspect in all higher primate societies in his landmark book
Sociobiology (Harvard
University Presss 1975, pp 517):
In addition to
monitoring multiple signals, higher primates evaluate the behavior of
many individuals within the society simultaneously. The animal lives
in a social field in which it responds to multiple individuals
simultaneously, in ways that take differing relationships into
account and often entail compromise.
All of this is the
game of society, we all want something out of it, and in return we
have to provide other people with something they want. It applies to
bureaucracies, specialization in a free-market economy, friends, and
even to family. The strategic dance, kept alive by the self-regarding
maxim of do ut des,
is simply the normal mode of human interaction, inherited from
our mammalian heritage.
However, within the
evenly rotating economy, any room for strategic interaction within
the economy is assumed away along with uncertainty. After all, every
single person within the evenly rotating economy follows a plan of
action set by the necessities of profit-maximization. There is
nothing that someone will do that someone else cannot figure out.
Human interactions are now grammatical in their form, and all
interactions transformed into invisible-hand games (more on that
later) in which everyone plays the Pareto-efficient strategy (and in
those cases Homo behavioralis fails to do, someone else's
preordained plan will pick up the slack).
What's curious is
that this is a society that doesn't look mammalian, but instead has
much more similarities to the societies of the social insects. It is
a society based not on strategic interactions in which people have to
deliberate about their best tactic in approaching another human
being, but rather one in which everyone follows a preset plan with no
considerations needed. Everyone is but a worker drone happily, or not
so happily (the evenly rotating economy certainly doesn't care one
way or another), being provided a plan for its life upon birth.
Whether that drone has free will and can deliberate is outside of the
question. The outcome of Aristotle's sea battle has been determined
ahead of time, and along with it the profit-maximizing reaction to
the outcome; choice is emasculated, and fatalism reigns supreme.
What mammalian
society actually looks like is an outcome of the cooperation of
self-regarding units, each being potentially independent, seeking to
exploit the gains from the group in order to improve its own welfare,
even if that means succeeding at the expense of the group. The nature
of cooperation varies from species to species, but cooperation
between mammals is in general more often than not rudimentary and
difficult to sustain. After all, as long as each individual's can be
independent of his society, then each can gain from defecting from
the rules of cooperation that benefit the group, even if this
unravels cooperation. It is thus the endemic presence of the
prisoner's dilemma (or as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis refer to
it as in A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its
Evolution, the altruist's
dilemma) within mammalian societies that causes the difficulty of
sustaining cooperation within them.
It is only with the
evolution of intelligence, and hence the capability for strategic
interactions between unique individuals across time, that has made
the cooperation of such self-regarding animals possible. These types
of interactions are able to combat the corrupting influence of the
prisoner's dilemma that decays social cooperation within these
societies by allowing for repeated strategic encounters between
unique individuals within the society. After all, it takes an
intelligent animal to not only be able to tell individuals within her
society apart, but also to be able to process the information needed
to use strategy. Edward O. Wilson also noted this:
Intelligence is
the prerequisite for the most complex societies in the vertebrate
style. Individual relationships are personalized, finely graduated,
and rapidly changing. There is a premium on the precise expression of
mood. Higher primates have extended the basic mammalian tendency away
from the elementary sign stimuli and toward the perception of gesalt,
that is, toward the simultaneous summation of complex sets of
signals. (Sociobiology,
pp 516-517)
This evolution
culminates in the extremely complex and high strategic society of the
most intelligent animal, let alone mammal, to have walked the Earth:
H. sapiens, and similarly culminates in the most complicated
society ever seen upon the Earth.
Moving onto the
social insects, their societies, on the other hand, are based upon
the cooperation of a large population divided into specialized castes
that, are guided towards increasing the reproductive success of the
single mating female, the queen. The prisoner's dilemma does not
within within this social context because the constituents of the
society have been chosen by natural selection to be entirely
subservient to the queen. They are not potentially independent, but
rather phenotypical extensions of the queen herself. Because of this,
there are generally no conflicting interests between the members of
the colony, and they all act as but one superorganism striving for
its own holistic success within the world.
What is this
superorganism, you ask. The superorganism is a community striving
towards a single end of increasing the fitness of the whole. Within
the phylogeny of the social insects, the superorganism came about
with the mutation of a single queen insect and a host of neuter
workers around her. With this, a remarkable step was taken in insect
social behavior that allowed for cooperation to be exploited as it
had never been exploited in natural history since among the polyp
colonists of phylum Cnidaria. Now all selective pressures upon
the insect society could be isolated upon the queen alone, and so
forms of cooperation could be chosen for by natural selection that
maximized the queen's fitness alone.
With the queen now the sole member of the social-insect society a
player in the further evolution of those societies, cooperation among
the neuter castes that surround her could be perfected so as the
selective forces continue to choose for a greater cohesiveness within
the colony surrounding the queen.1
This is why the social insects like bees and insects are so
ferocious: Individual neuter insects simply have no instincts for
self-preservation. Instead, they are the embodiment of altruism in
the biological sense of the word, willing to choose self-destruction
for the benefits of their community. Thanks to the selective
pressures upon the colony being isolated upon the queen, the only
reproducing member of that society, an orderly system of cooperation
between the members of that colony, all chosen because the increase
the queen's own fitness, has emerged in which the prisoner's dilemma
plays no characteristic role.
This brings us to
the greatest similarity between the evenly rotating economy and the
insect superoganism: It does not pay to deviate from the set plan of
action. Within the superorganism, each constituent part is
functioning within a system highly calibrated by millions of years of
evolution, and its functioning ensures the Pareto-efficient outcome
of that system. Within the evenly rotating economy, every individual,
each a clone of that prudent fellow Max U, abides by a single plan,
and by virtue of that plan achieves the most satisfactory state of
affairs for himself possible.
Both societies are thus societies of cooperation in which everyone is
made better off by following the conduct of her caste (certainly the
distribution of plans within an evenly rotating economy would have a
sort of caste-like nature from the point of view of the impartial
spectator), and thus cooperation within both can be modeled as an
invisible-hand game:
|
A |
~A |
| A |
5,5 |
2,1 |
| ~A |
3,4 |
0,0 |
The Invisible-Hand Game
Within this
situation, each player is better off playing A, which we shall assume
is either their caste or the plan they follow, than from defecting,
and so this is a common-interest game in which the by playing their
own best option, each player also contributes to attaining the
Pareto-optimal outcome for their society at large. In the end, simply
by nature of how the interests are aligned within the two societies,
one aligned by natural selection, another by the selective force of
profit and loss, all members have the incentive to continue to
cooperate according to their roles in the society.
In the end, the
grand similarity between the society of the social insects and the
evenly rotating economy is that the interactions within each can be
described by the form of the invisible-hand game. This is of import
for the study of human society since it shows that by virtue of a
certain mode of cooperation, that mode being capitalism, and by
virtue of human beings being sufficiently intelligent to recognize
that his own self interest is advanced by following the rules of that
mode of cooperation, human society is able to overcome the endemic
problem of prisoner's-dilemma interactions within other mammalian
societies that promote the decay of social cooperation. Indeed, as
human society advances towards the state of the evenly rotating
economy, however imperfect those advances may be, it looks like
mammalian, and more insect-like.