“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.
1 Note that I avoid using the mechanisms of kin selection, and I do so purposefully. Although the theory that insects have evolved eusocial behavior because of their genetic similarities is a appealing theory that can be beautifully mathematically modeled, it hasn't stood up to empirical testing. When W.D. Hamilton first published his piece of kin selection, he was trying to explain the statistically significant presence of eusocial behavior among the genus Hymenoptera though the Haplodiploid hypothesis, but since then the inclusive-fitness theory has had meager empirical success with even the presence of eusocial behavior in Hymenoptera falling beneath statistically significant levels.