Socio-Economic Puzzles. Last updated on November 15th, 2006.
Here are some of the puzzles that keep me interested in social science and for which I'm not aware that anyone has either addressed them or solved them satisfactorily. Probably someone has, but for those oblivious to the answer, the attractiveness of the puzzles remains. As always with such puzzles, it is perfectly arguable that they do not exist in reality but are due to my misinterpretation of events. Tentative answers are given to speculative questions. What follows below is hence speculation of the worst kind. View them as intellectual ping pong. If anyone has any nice arguments on any of these puzzles, I'll put them on the page (contact by email).
1. Why does the messenger of bad news get punished?
In most organisations I know of and from historical records of grave punishments that befell the messengers of bad news, it seems very probable that a messenger of bad news indeed often gets punished. Taking this as a fact, the question arises why?
A naive first-thought would be to see this as a so-called principle agent model where there is a possibility the messenger is to blame for the bad news (though not for certain). That is some unfair to the observation though because the whole notion of a 'messenger' is someone who doesn't create the news but simply reports it. Hence the kind of punishment I have in mind is a king who kills the messenger telling of a battle that has gone badly. Modern versions would be to attack the spokes person for a message he or she was ordered to give. Hence the question is why someone would blame the messenger in stead of the possible creator of bad news.
One possibility is that the punishment serves as a signal of the irrationality of the decision maker. Being irrational (such as having outbursts of temper at hearing bad news or refusing "unfair" situations) can improve pay-offs in bargaining situations in which take-it-or-leave-it offers arrive. Irrational individuals get better offers because the person making the offer anticipates being rejected if he does not offer enough, even if a small offer is in a strict sense better than no offer for the decision maker. A second possible explanation, somewhat in the vein of the naive thought is that the decision maker has imprecise information about the causes of the bad news and that his optimal response is to punish anyone associated with the bad news, including the messenger. This is then a signal to anyone associated who is capable of influencing events that they should make sure no bad news arrives by having no bad news to report. Obviously one can think of several ways to model this, but some informational imperfection between who is actually to blame for bad news coupled with the need for reputation on the side of the decision maker to be unassociated with any form of bad outcome seems plausible.
Dennis Botman (UvA) pointed out that there is a paper from 1998 on this issue which argues in the vein of imprecise information: Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper 98-061/2, Arnoud W.A. Boot, Todd T. Milbourn, Anjan V. Thakor, Killing the Bearer of Ill Tidings. Bas Jacobs (UvA) concurs with the imperfect information view and mentions that this practice seems to be very prevalent in politics.
A model in which individuals guard their reputation for being irrational has not yet been located.
2. Why do hunter gatherer groups make such bad slaves?
Although difficult to prove, it seems that both the North-American indians, the aborigines and the bush men of South Africans (all hunter-gatherers) made extraordinary bad slaves, even though some agricultural groups living in the same regions did manage to adapt to the slave system. Often this meant these hunter gatherer groups were virtually wiped out as they could serve no purpose for the invaders. Taking this as a fact, why can't the individuals in these groups perform as slaves, even when their lives depended upon it? For my best guess approach, see project x.
3. Why do there seem to be so few military coups in the history of some countries (Scandinavia, Germany, Benelux, France, Austria, Russia, India, the US, early Rome) and so many in other countries (Latin-America, Pakistan, late Rome, etc.)
Why in some countries the military always seem under political control (whilst in terms of firepower they could immediately crush all opposition) and in others the military can organise a coup at will, is puzzling. Given that the US army could easily crush all opposition and give its leaders immense wealth and power, it seems a puzzle why they haven't even attempted a coup yet (at least not one that succeeded in becoming widely known).
Again, one may naively point to the hundreds of studies that have fitted regressions of the occurrence of military coups with a whole range of socio-economic variables, such as the level of development, the level of inequality, ethnic diversity, etc. Such correlations don't really get to the heart of this puzzle though because the used variables can only ever be proxies for what's going on inside the military. The real puzzle is not what the characteristics of countries with many coups are, but why it is that they don't happen all the time in all countries. Surely from a wealth-maximising perspective military leaders everywhere have something to gain from taking over. Why don't they? It must have something to do with the ability of groups of officers to organise themselves within the army. It can't be institutional because often armies that arranged coups and their states were themselves formed in the spitting image of armies and states of countries where coups do not take place (i.e., the States or the armies of foreign colonisers). The armies of India and Pakistan for instance were I believe moulded similarly, but whereas one country has gone on from coup to coup, the other has not despite the fact that both did not do very well economically since their separation in 1948. Some Latin-American countries had both constitutions and armies formed in the spitting image of the US (I believe Colombia is a good example), yet experienced one coup after the other. Harsh economic conditions seem an obvious explanation but doesn't really seem enough because many of the mentioned stable countries have had terrible periods of economic downturns yet had no coups. It also can't really be associated with inequality of earnings, because the US or India with its immensely unequal income distribution would then have had to have a coup a year. It can't also be just the existence of a large middle class, because some mentioned stable countries didn't have a large middle class for the greater part of their history (I believe that in Russia a middle class is something only quite recent. If I'm not mistaken, Spain had a large middle class before the military coup of the 1930's that resisted the coup but failed. For discussions about Russia, see Wittfogel's account of hydraulic societies (1963)). Hence the existence of a civil society may help, but cannot suffice as an explanation. Perhaps a combination?
Other guess: could it have to do with the existence of an idealistic group spread out over all organisations (whose members are not a priori recognisable and hence isolatable), who will blow the whistle on planned coups even if that would cost them their own lives? Then coalition-formation within subgroups (such as the army) that are large enough to substantially challenge current ideals of democracy and the like is made much more difficult. But where does this group of idealistic true believers that is present in all organisations come from? See ahead for more speculation on the issue of idealism.
4. Why is there so much displayed pornography in the lower levels of male dominated organisations and is all the pornography hidden or even outlawed at the highest levels of organisations?
In transport companies, farm floors, building sites and other male dominated low-level professions there is a great amount of displayed female nudity on walls and vehicles. Yet in management offices and generally at the top of hierarchical organisations, which are at least equally male dominated, I've never seen pornography openly displayed. Some may have had some in their desks or on the pc but never out in the open. Given that in the animal world it seems that the dominant individuals get more sex and more overtly display this than the others this is puzzling: why do the dominant males in human hierarchical organisation have to be more cautious about sexual displays than the less dominant males (notice that this says nothing about who actually has more sex). Again, for my best guess approach, see project x.
Bas Jacobs (University of Amsterdam) argues that individuals who are more in control of their urges are more productive. The fact that managers and other individuals in the top of organisations then do not display pornography is then a signalling device for their higher productivity. What is crucial is that performance is hard to measure at that level of organisations. Where performance is easier to measure (at the bottom and in many male-dominated low paid professions), such a signalling serves no further purpose and hence pornography gets displayed there.
5. Where does the negative attitude towards some pleasurable drugs come from?
This is a great mystery, especially for the US situation: in terms of health dangers most drugs-takers run less risk of getting killed than those driving a car or those taking up dangerous sports. In terms of disruption to society the immense amount of money earned with drugs trafficking would seem to corrupt many societies (e.g. Columbia or the Surinam and even the US) and would seem a far worse problem. Outlawing drugs in this respect has proven to be very bad for many societies. It is even very questionable whether legalising drugs altogether (with some regulations for advertising and the like) would lead to more drug abuse: most people abusing drugs are people with a history of tremendous social and personal problems (low chances of jobs, desperate childhood experiences, etc.) and it seems quite likely that most of these would end up at the bottom of the societal scale, whatever their intake of substances. The fact that these people move from one drug to another, which is often used as an argument for the idea that the use of one type of drug leads to the use of another, hence says nothing about the causes of drug abuse. Dutch research for instance shows that despite a great reduction in the price of cannabis since the 70s intake has not increased consumption, neither do the Dutch have a greater than average problem with drug abuse (junkies). Given the increasing trade flows, effective control on flows of drugs is failing anyway and seems a hopeless task. Add to this the fact that US citizens seem to pride themselves on urging others to take responsibility of their own lives, it is immensely puzzling why they should want to interfere with the consumption of those who want to take drugs. Indeed, other addictive activities, such as drinking, seeking power, sex, and chocolate eating (which, believe it or not, is also addictive) are not outlawed at all but seen as natural. The actual reasons for outlawing some drugs can hence have nothing to do with either the health of the users or the health of the nation as a whole. Perhaps the underlying reason that some drug use is so much frowned upon is that many have an emotional reaction to seeing others "cop out" of society by using drugs instead of competing for jobs and partners which the rest is addicted to. If this would be the case, drug use associated with lessened work commitment would have to be most frowned upon, which seems reasonably apt though not entirely (arguments supporting this statement: the legal substance of caffeine (in coffee) does not impede work as it makes you more alert and work-prone, whereas the illegal substances cannabis, opium, nicotine and relaxing drugs in general do seem to go against a work ethos. On the other hand this reasoning should imply that something like speed or XTC which makes you more alert should be legal substances, which they are not. Speed is quite unhealthy though, but the health risks of XTC are reportedly minimal). The negative attitude against drugs and especially its intensity is hence still a mystery.
6. Why does idealism seem mostly concentrated amongst the middle class, with the upper class being without morals and the bottom class either blind followers of rules or crooks?
Again though hard empirical evidence for this "observation" is scant, as far as I can make out it is taken as the truth in most of political science. Most revolutionary leaders were middle class. Why they? One purely speculative possibility could occur if you assume that individuals need to feel superior to others. The upper class can feel superior because they hold more possessions and can take that as a reference point for feeling superior. Hence they needn't be idealistic to feel superior. The middle class is inferior in terms of possessions and has to find another yardstick to feel superior by. They can then try to feel superior by being more virtuous than the upper class and not doing too badly materially. They can then refer to their superior morals for their feeling of superiority. The bottom class, having given up hope of feeling superior because they are materially too far behind the upper class to be able to compensate with morals, does its best to get by, either by following the dominant set of rules laid down by the then powerful blindly (most coppers are lower class) or by ignoring them altogether (most criminals are lower class). The weak link in this story is the behaviour of the bottom class. Perhaps an intervening relative issue here is whether an individual uses a critical mind in his daily activities. For the lower class, most professions do not require any critical thinking and the two approaches (full subordination to domination or total indifference) seem optimal. For the middle classes, perhaps there are more professions where critical thinking is needed, which coupled with the dominance drive may lead to idealism. This could be empirically examined by looking at the professions of revolutionary leaders (or the professions they came into frequent contact with, such as the profession practiced in their family). Some subjective scoring of the extent to which critical thinking is necessary in different professions would have to underpin such an endeavour however. In current surveys one could however directly couple scores on idealism questions with scores on self-reported levels of criticality needed in the job of the respondent.
7. Why does economic development in Africa seem to be such a dismal failure everywhere, whereas in Asia many countries have managed to get onto a path of sustainable development.
This is one of the biggest economic questions, if not the greatest, of our time. At the start of the 1950's many african countries had higher GDP's per person than most of Latin America or Asia, had more natural resources, less internal unrest and had been occupied for much shorter periods by colonists (Ethiopia for instance had only been conquered by the Italians at the outbreak of WW2, whereas India had been occupied for over a century by the English). The almost universal lack of development in Africa is a big conundrum on which libraries have been written. I have no plausible answer, just a big question mark. Some blame the west or some other outside influence (such as the cold war, big business, agricultural lobbies), but given the great diversity in situations, affiliations, history and starting positions of the African countries, it is always possible to come up with one or more countries which do not fit the proposed "external" explanation. Internal factors, such as ethnic unrest and rampant corruption also fail as sufficient explanations: Japan has notoriously in-bred politicians yet thrived nevertheless. Thailand, India and Burma are as much an ethnic melee as any African country with its artificial boundaries. Some African countries were not artificially formed and had cultures far older than almost anywhere else. Egypt for instance had no artificial borders. As to corruption, there is always the cause-result problem: if you see corruption as just one way for an individual of obtaining money the reason for rampant corruption in many underdeveloped countries may be due to the lack of development. Then the question is why there weren't equally good opportunities in business to become rich.
The most interesting and also dangerous possibility seems the cultural explanation. There seems to be a lot of evidence suggesting that different ethnic groups fare completely differently as immigrant in both the US or the EU, even given a certain level of ex ante wealth or position. This is perhaps the strongest indication that something cultural (learned human characteristics transmitted by lineage) is involved in development. The cultural explanation is dangerous because wrong stories loom everywhere. As an example of how easily we can misjudge culture is illustrated by the Chinese: Weber (in his book "...the spirit of protestantism") argued that the Chinese culture of confucianism with its insistence on obedience and lack of independent thinking was very bad for development. Nowadays the same Confucianist culture, with its emphasis on savings and hard work, is seen by many as a positive influence. "Cultural" explanations and crap are hard to distinguish therefore. As cultures in Africa are also very divers, what we need are sound measures of culture which can be systematically compared. Hofstede (1980) reviewed the many tries before him and convincingly argued they were no good. His own attempt involved such dimensions as "masculinity" "power distance", etc.. These are really too vague to be of much use. Besides that, his empirical methods were inadequate (he basically labeled a set of answers to vague questions in an appealing way and could only focus on different reports of individuals in offices of one multinational in different countries. Hence he interviewed only those people in underdeveloped countries who did manage to fit into a complex organisation. This almost makes it impossible by design to find anything worthwhile).
A recent cultural explanation, made popular though not originally conceived by Fukuyama (1995), is "trust". In regions with low trust levels, business is hard because one need costly pre-commitment devices to trade and no-one has an incentive to become more trusting because the chance of having one's trust betrayed is very high and detection probabilities for being untrustworthy are very low. In regions with high-trust, business is easier (less transaction costs associated with pre-commitment devices) and no-one has an incentive to become less trusting as the few untrustworthy individuals have a high detection chance. Though appealing intuitively and supported by cross-sectional evidence from the World Value Survey (about 50000 respondents in 45 different countries in 1980 and 1990) this is not a very convincing explanation however because there is no reason why recent immigrants moving from a supposedly low trust region in Africa to a high trust region like the US could not immediately switch to a different level of trust once they have been in a different trust environment for a couple of years. Also, there is again a cause-result problem (do people resort to becoming untrustworthy if other options of obtaining money are depleted? + trust is not static but changing over periods). Again, for my best guess approach, see project x.
8. What are the long-term consequences of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction?
We are now and then told by arms experts that it is increasingly easy to build devastating weapons. What are the long-term consequences for our survival and economic activity if it is indeed the case that small groups could wreak immense havoc on anyone else (let's say, when 20 determined men could cause millions of deaths). See the attached word document , where I argue that the most likely scenario is that those with the power to do so will eventually eradicate all others perceived as potential threats when a really devastating threat materialises. I argue that the best approach the current stable nation states could take is probably to embark upon a second pacification wave. In any case, the complete dismantling of the notion of privacy seems likely. Ian McDonald of the University of Melbourne has kindly formalised many of these arguments in the attached document and has added to them the idea that small groups are more prone to allowing psychopaths to rise to the top than others, because small groups may have less checks and balances, less developed procedures for organising political activity, and, perhaps most important, less intelligent leaders. Thus the ability of small groups to get control of nuclear weapons increases the likelihood of catastrophe.
9. What makes its so difficult to overcome the political power of small interest groups, even if this power is at the expense of large fractions of the population?
In the Netherlands, as in many other countries, tremendous inefficiencies arise because of the vested interests of small groups. The best-known example of this is the agricultural lobby in Europe and the US, who represent no more than 5% of the population, yet via their combined market distorting efforts deprive large slices of the rest of the world's population from a fair income. Even domestically, the costs of maintaining agricultural subsidies means a disproportionate subsidy towards a small group. Other examples abound. It has for instance proven politically infeasible in the Netherlands to challenge laws allowing 15% of the working population to enjoy 70% of their last income indefinitely as 'disabled'. In reality, this benefit is abused by employers and unions to get rid of 'difficult' or unproductive individuals. A similar problem is created by the rule that many pensions (including for civil servants) are based on the incomes earned at the end of working lives. This creates a tremendous incentive for people to stop working just after the peak of their productive life because otherwise they will see their pensions fall to such a degree that total future earnings is simply higher when stopping work earlier. For such reasons, work participation between the age 55-65 is the lowest in the Netherlands of anywhere in the OECD (about 20%).
It has also proven politically infeasible to challenge the effective cartel of the medical specialists who themselves are allowed to determine how many new competitors they will educate. The predictable shortage of medical specialists leads to ever increasing prices for their services, political lobbying by specialists to keep out foreign trained competitors, power imbalances in hospitals, all with tremendous inefficiencies as a result. Similar problems hold for the cartel by actuaries, notaries, and accountants. Many other such examples of inefficiency creating vested interests abound in the Netherlands, as in any other country.
The interesting aspect of these problems is that these are widely known by top civil servants and intellectuals. Indeed, many economists warned of these problems at the time these laws were introduced. Debates within political parties often rage about this. It is hence not a lack of knowledge of the inefficiencies of these laws that keeps them where they are. The inefficiencies are also so large that they cause serious problems for all other functions of the state. Any extra money thrown at the Dutch health service is for instance directly gobbled up by the specialists using their market power. Nevertheless, no political party seems to have a hope in hell in overturning this 'coordinated mutual robbery'. Why not?
Machiavelli also notes that any politician who overtly proposes to go against a small vested interest will immediately feel the full wrath of such a group, whilst enjoying no support from the majority. Only after reforms will a ruler be credited, and then only if the reform is seen to have been done by someone whose power was unassailable (only the king is popular, never his servant). It seems a situation whereby the vested interests aggressively attack declared adversaries until no one challenges them and then credibly announce they will hit with full force on the first adversary to appear. This makes it very difficult to get organised resistance against the vested interest going (the first to try is literally often killed). Machiavelli gives as advise never to appear to be a reformist. Reforming should according to him be done in a big bang, i.e., all at once and unexpectedly, such that the vested interests are taken by surprise and are effectively powerlessly given new facts 'on the ground'. If Machiavelli is right, the only hope for structural improvement in the Netherlands (or indeed most other countries) would seem to lie in a crisis situation where a crisis manager would have to opportunity of improving things in such a big bang.
Modern economists have suggested several explanations. Game theorists note that coordination problems are more easily overcome if the individual gain from coordination rises above a threshold level. The argument is that a small group of people who loose a lot thus organise quicker and scream louder than the masses. This begs the question though why mayor political parties can't bunch a whole set of such issues into a reform platform supported by the vast majority. A more interesting explanation is that the persistence of interest groups allows them to, over time, generate a new set of beliefs amongst the populations that supports their interests. Irrational fears of medical errors supporting a ban against importing foreign medics would suit such an argument. Irrational fears against GM food supporting a ban against foreign imports in the case of French farm products also fit into this. A nice example is that of the French government, egged on by its farmers, which actively disseminates misleading science on GM that implicitly supports the interests of its farmers but destroys opportunities for foreign farmers or French consumers. The development, maintenance, and adoption of irrational fears however needs further explanation.
10. The need for guilt in some Western societies.
In many Western countries, feelings of guilt can be observed when it concern slavery, the holocaust, colonialism, and other tragedies. Guilt is usually appropriated by whites. The logic behind this is often strange to follow however. Take for instance the guilt of Western European whites who live in countries heavily involved in the slave trade. That slave trade stopped over 150 years ago. Hence anyone involved in it has long since died. Is it the case that those feeling guilty are the descendant of these slave traders? No! The vast majority of the population 150 years ago in Western Europe were farmers who were under the cultural and military cosh of the urban elites. Slave traders were invariably urban and often migrated with their slaves. The urban elites in those days also made sustained efforts to culturally change the rural community: via education programmes and armies, the rural dialects and traditions have been gradually destroyed. The movement of the rural population to the cities was mainly after the slave trade had already seized. Hence in terms of genetic lineage, those whites currently apologising for the slave trade are in all probability descendents of farmers culturally oppressed themselves by the same urban elite that benefited from the slave trade! Is it then the case that the slave trade is so objectionable that promoting feelings of guilt about it stops it happening nowadays? Also, clearly not. Not only are there various forms of modern slave trade still active and not particularly frowned upon, but 'the Arabs', who have been involved in the slave trade much longer than Westerners, are not overladen with the same guilt or reproach. Neither by themselves or by 'us whites'. Hence it is clearly not the slave trade per se that draws in accusations of guilt. Is it then the case that the slave trade represents just a series of wrong-doings by whites? Again, clearly not, because the advances in agriculture that Eurasia made in the course of 10000 years were also transferred to African countries when white colonists came, effectively allowing its population to increase far beyond historical population levels. Hence, if Africa were to go back to pre-slave trade technology, more than 90% of its population would perish. Life expectancy of the remaining 10% would reduce by over 20 years at least. Surely on aggregate thus, Africa's human population has gained from interacting with Eurasia. Why then this need for guilt and the insistence that a racially defined group (us whites) are somehow to blame? It seems like the worst form of racism possible to assume blame 'collectively' for no other apparent reason than skin colour.
Similar things can be said about all the other sources of guilt taken up by groups of predominantly white people: whilst nations with something to apologise for invariably don't, we're seeing a spate of calls to apologise for things like colonialism, crusades, and other things no well-minded person could possible apologise for without demanding that the whole world apologise for something some ancestor might have done. Where does this need for guilt come from?
A first-thought explanation would be that we are seeing the effect of small interest groups trying to wangle something out of a majority by appealing to a presumed guilt of a majority. Although small groups undoubtedly attempt this, the question is then why a majority allows itself to be lulled into guilt that is not theirs and why it is prone to adopt guilt anyway. This can hence be no more than a piece of the puzzle.
One possible 'ultimate' explanation is that we are merely seeing at the aggregate level a by-product of 'positive guilt' at the micro-level, by which is meant that in everyday life it is useful to let people feel guilty for mistakes. Avoiding guilt then becomes synonymous with avoiding mistakes that cost others. Because many of our actions are not observed by others a 'personal guilt' is effectively a pre-commitment device to care for others even if they are not looking. Teaching the next generation to have guilt or adopting such a personalised notion of guilt ourselves (if guilt is observable) can thus in some sense be productive. The need for historical guilt is then no more than 'guilt running away with itself'; an unintended by-product of something that does make sense. Such a theory would predict that guilt is more prevalent in places where production requires a lot of 'unseen actions' or where production is greatly increased if one can blindly trust others to 'do their bit'. There is something to be said for this in the sense that network economies, which most modern nations are becoming, are invariably about people filling the holes other people leave without this ever being apparent to any observer (i.e. constantly switching duties that depend on need rather than formal rules, which thus begets a lot of room for unseen actions).
Other 'ultimate' explanations would have to involve some causal story for the presence of individual guilt. That the guilt we see at the aggregate level is an unintended by-product of something that does make sense, seems very likely because of the glaring lack of sensible reasons for this aggregate guilt.
11. Why is there such a mass support amongst intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats, and social scientists (like economists) for a policy emphasis on growth of the national economy?
This 'growth fetish' seems the main stumbling block in effective climate change treaties and effective cooperation on scarce natural resources (ocean fish; pollution): whereas nearly all countries pay continual lip-service to the idea that humanity as a whole should unite to overcome these problems by limiting its growth (a nice example are the 'millennium goals of the UN'; pipe-dreams if ever there were any), national governments invariably back down when truly invasive measures are needed. Agreements on limiting greenhouse gasses have taken over 20 years to negotiate and the resulting protocols (Kyoto and other ones in the pipeline) are projected to have virtually no effect at all because they exclude the major growth economies and do not entail any effective big reduction of the current players whereas major reductions are needed to actually balance CO2 levels. Similarly, international agreements on reducing the fishing capacity of humanity have miserably failed, leading to the current collapse in fishing stocks. The most immediate puzzle is what is actually 'in it' for the elite of countries to keep insisting on national economic growth, thereby creating the free-riding problem we see in environmental matters?
A first naive thought is that economic growth increases the national pie and that it is easier for the elite to appropriate an increase in the pie than to appropriate a piece of the existing pie by dispossessing others. Psychologists indeed tell us that such a territorial instinct (a strong willingness to protect whatever we have now, termed status quo bias; loss-aversion; etc.) applies to the current division of the current pie. Yet, this does not explain why the scientists, politicians, and advisers are so in favour of economic growth for these are not particularly well-placed to syphon off an additional piece of the pie: its the powerful elite interest groups which have that privilege.
What is a scientist thus actually thinking of when they consider the benefits of economic growth? Do they really think individuals get much happier on aggregate when they all get much richer? Especially for rich countries, like the US, the UK, and Germany, this has been shown not to have held in the last few decades (happiness levels have remained fairly constant despite more than trebling economic wealth). Hence only misinformed scientists could think that. More importantly though, do scientists and advisers actually really care for everyone of their national population individually? Or would they, like anybody else, not really personally want to know the vast majority of their population and shun them whenever they meet them in person? Surely the latter appears likely. What is it then about the idea of economic growth that is so appealing? One thought is that such a scientist has an abstraction in their head of their country as a whole and wishes that abstraction to 'grow', 'compete', and preferably 'overtake' the alternative nationalities. They take pride in the aggregate power and standing of their country, not the happiness of the individual citizens, because its the former that corresponds to what they have in their heads. Note that such a theory has quite strong implications: it's not about happiness at all then, nor would this 'group impulse' go away with any environmental problem. One would truly need an involuntary uniting of all countries into a single command-and-control centre to get rid of this impulse. Scary thought.
12. For whom are social scientists writing their works?
In the game known as journal publishing, social scientists (economists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, etc.) report on the research they and their colleagues have been engaged in. In pieces judged to be good by peers who do roughly similar research, they tell us what their insights are into how and why humans behave in a certain way in a particular area. A large amount of these journal articles find deficiencies in earlier works and expand on earlier work in some dimension. As a result, almost every week you'll have a couple of thousands of research articles telling us of some 'new' insight that policy makers and fellow academics 'should' take into account. There are now for instance more than 5000 known correlates of happiness, several hundred factors important for labour supply, several thousands of factors impacting on inflation, dozens of 'irrationalities' important for decision making in the laboratory, etc. Each of these correlates, factors, and irrationalities differ by population, age, and research methodology. The list of such 'niceties' is virtually endless and continues to expand at an incredible rate. Given that no human could read more than the tiniest trickle of these papers and incorporate more than a smidgeon into their own work, most of these papers never get mentioned again and furthermore it would not be actually possible for a policy maker to take much notice of the 'findings'. For whom then are we social scientists writing this stuff? The first possibility is that we don't really write for anyone but ourselves, rather like a chess fanatic can write down the solution to a chess puzzle without being overly bothered who else reads it. If one can earn a job and a reputation by publishing some result, that's an added bonus to what is essentially a self-absorbing exercise. This is pretty much the argument of Ariel Rubinstein in his 2001 European Economic Review paper and also corresponds to Einstein's well-known saying that all we need to be happy in life is something to occupy our minds with. What is problematic about this explanation is that it fails to explain why we're keeping up the pretence of being useful. A second possibility is that we are in denial about the fact that it is not possible for our fellow academics or policy makers to take more than a trickle into account and thus nevertheless delude ourselves that we will be listened to by wide audiences (an imaginary anonymous horde of followers). A third and perhaps more intriguing possibility is that social science is turning into a sacrificial religion in the sense that we are no longer writing for other humans, but we are writing for a supposed superhuman who can bring all the threads together. Economists call such a superhuman a 'social planner', but others often just refer to the supposed synthesiser as 'the policy maker'. Since such a person must have mental qualities no human possesses this in effect means we are now appealing to a god-like entity and our papers are like offerings to this entity ('dear god, please take the following 5 millions facts into account when you make your next decision). If this third possibility were true, there should be some pointers one could look for. A necessary characteristic of a deity is that any human attempting to do the job the deity is supposed to do (i.e. bring all the millions of threads of research together into one explanatory construct) is deemed an arrogant heretic. This prediction rings true but is rather weak evidence. A fourth possibility is that we are really writing for no-one, i.e. neither ourselves nor anyone else, and that the current flood of niceties is just the outcome of individual researchers trying to make a living by finding more niceties within small sub-disciplines. This fourth explanation cannot stand alone though because it still needs something else to explain why it is that these individual researchers and the small sub-disciplines they work in feel obliged to pretend to write for a policy maker of for the advancement of social science in general rather than be honest and say 'for no-one but it pays the bills'. Hence the proposed answers to the question whom we are writing for are 'our own vanity', 'our willful ignorance' (which is also vanity of a sorts), 'god', or 'no-one'. One can argue that many social scientists realise all this and are unhappy with any of these answers but are stuck in a career path from which they cant escape and thus feel forced to continue down the path they unknowingly entered when younger (i.e. they realise too late what's going on by which time the game they've played is the only game they can play). That's not really a satisfactory answer though because it doesn't explain what lead to this situation.
13. Why do so few people trust their thinking and follow 'their gut'?
Many philosophers, poets and thinkers have remarked that people trust what they feel rather than what they think. The great Afghan poet Rumi warned his fellow courtiers about this and Machiavelli simply observed that only very few people deduce from ones choices what one really is and in stead judge by appearances, which he put down to mental weakness. Taking it as a truism that the vast majority of people follow their instincts rather than their mental faculties on important choices such as the person they marry, the job they seek, the education they pursue, the person they believe and vote for, the place they choose to live, etc., the question arises what this instinct roughly entails and why people don't put more faith in their reasoning. A first thought is that instinct and 'gut feeling' is nothing less than a rule of thumb one learned at an earlier date. Just like we don't consciously think much about how to walk once we've learned the trick but simply walk on instinct, we acquire a myriad of automated responses on a whole raft of issues, ranging from automated responses on preparing food to social situations. From this perspective, gut reactions will arise as fairly accurate heuristics saving us time. Where gut instinct fails is in the situation where appearances are either unintentionally or intentionally deceiving. This train of thought leads to four candidate explanations of the mystery: 1) Laziness: some people find it mentally too costly to re-compute a new situation even when the choice made in those situations are of profound consequence to their future lives. This is roughly what Machiavelli thought and would fit for those who sincerely dislike thinking; 2) Best-they-can-do: some people have found themselves so poor at computing things that they have found it is better to rely on a couple of instincts handed down to them by others (parents, teachers, etc.) rather than do any computing themselves on any major issue; 3) Insecurity: even when thinking costs little energy and someone is quite good at it, a very insecure person can still rationally choose not to think about a new situation other than in 'gut' terms simply to avoid the agony of discovering their gut can be wrong and to have to deal with the implications of that insecurity. They rather pretend to themselves that gut instincts are always right. This is not a stand-alone explanation though because it needs an ability of an initial self (Self 0) to realise that its future self (Self 1) will believe the lie Self 0 chooses to adopt, i.e. at some level we need to know something we wont again know in the future. Also this explanation needs a future self that would ignore facts that violate gut instinct. Both preconditions fit in with the psychological theories about cognitive dissonance though: having adopted a certain 'truth' we humans are prone to ignore any evidence to the contrary and will indeed reinvent a history as to how we got by that truth. The smarter we are the more elaborate our ex-post rationalisation for our previous choices become. To nail this theory down one would have to think of an experiment to satisfactorily prove that people realise at one point that they can fool themselves in the future and indeed choose to do so.
14. Why do so many of us want others to conform to a set of norms that have no productive rationale?
This is a mystery that comes in many guises. It arises when we ask of others not to harm their own health. It arises when we ask of others to follow the same religion as we do. It arises when we ask of others to appreciate the same art, food, rituals, mindset and sense of honour as we do, none of which have much to do with our own material wellbeing. What is it within ourselves that compels us to feel bad when the outside world and some people in it do not conform to our inner idea of how things should be? Why cant we shrug our shoulders but often feel the need to confront and reform this 'otherness', leading to many unpleasant possible forms of interaction? There are many possible explanations for this one. The first one is that there really is a productive rationale hiding behind this drive towards conformism, such as the notion that people with the same norms share the same incentives and find it easier to trust their leaders and institutions and thus find it easier to raise taxes and secure benefits for the individuals involved. Similar kinds of 'social contract' arguments can be generated at will which all boil down to the benefits of having the same material incentives. What is unpersuasive about this explanation is that the social norms extend to things which seem to have preciously little to do with group benefits. Where is the tax raising effect of joint eating doctrines or music tastes? Why would a population be more loyal to its leaders if it shared the same opinions about cleanliness? The first explanation hence cant stand alone. A second possibility is that we humans categorise things and take the outward manifestation of every aspect of human behaviour as a signal of adherence to a shared set of material norms. This is a more sophisticated version of the first argument but introduces the observation that we humans tend to put everything into categories to help sift through masses of information and are thus prone to use rules of thumb such as 'if he looks and behaves like one of us in ways that don't matter he probably is also one of us in things that do matter'. What then really matters can still be material. Intuitively one would think there is something to this but still doesn't quite fit the emotional vehemence with which we insist upon conformism in all matters. Another possibility is that when we ask others to conform we are actually trying to overshout our own doubts and thus wish to find confirmation of our norms in the behaviour of others. This line of reasoning would seem to be irrelevant for peoples and cultures that are very secure and would seem more relevant for peoples and cultures that feel themselves under threat. If we take an ancient culture like the Chinese one as a relatively secure one and the American one as a relatively new one under threat then we'd have to see that the former would be quite relaxed about social norms and the latter is not, which on casual reading doesn't quite seem to fit. A fourth possibility is that people more strongly adhere to a set of social norms and wish to see the subjugation of others to those norms if they are insecure about other things in their lives. Put succinctly, they're on a 'reflected power trip'. If this is true, we'd have to see that those with high expectations about their ability to influence the world but low outcomes would be especially prone to have a strong sense of social norms and to look for the outward confirmation of those. We'd have to see those with high outcomes or low expectations to be relatively unbothered by the adherence or non-adherence of others to social norms. This fits in with the observations on idealism above but how on earth would one go about empirically verifying such a thought given that it leans so heavily on early-life expectations of influence and the notion of sublimation (the desire for simple material domination transformed into the domination of other people's behaviour).
15. Why do Western countries spend such large amounts of resources and mental time on minute fears?
Again, this is a tricky mystery to nail down as an empirical stylised fact, but let me hide behind Tony Blair who told his civil service to stop making life difficult for everyone by continuing an avalanche of red tape designed against miniscule threats at the expense of more real threats and better ways to spend money. One could point to the hundreds of rules accompanying food preparation and building safety which only the most productive organisations can afford to learn, let alone implement. One could point to the absurd warning signs in buildings indicating that a building is 'not meant to be jumped off' which arose as a reaction to law suits by relatives of those who committed suicide by jumping off buildings. One could similarly point to the very expensive precautions many cities now have to take to prevent people believing that jumping into rivers might be safe (i.e. gates and warning signs). One could in this regard point to the immense amount of red tape surrounding food standards that has forced immense costs on producers at fairly minimal benefits. One could point to schools banning other children from taking peanut butter sandwiches to school because of the allergic reaction of some pupils (what are the odds of someone highly allergic truly eating someone else's sandwiches? Are they really higher than the other dangers in schools, such as roofs falling down, accidents in sports, faulty electric wiring, etc.? Surely not!). One could point to the large amount of interference accompanying teacher-pupil interaction to the point that simple human compassion is crowded out amongst highly unlikely suspicions. One can also point to examples that do not rely on a bureaucracy, such as the reduction of having children walk to school in many countries, purportedly because parent fear for the safety of their children. Its hard to believe that the increase in obesity and habits of inactivity that this reduction in exercise brings wouldn't far outweigh any supposed dangers avoided. Hence from a rational point of view, parents put their children in danger by riving them to school. Etc.: non of the above examples makes sense from a cost-benefit point of view and many commentators have made similar observations. Governments could probably investing their money better in developing vaccines against diseases and parents may well do better off with less mollycoddling. Yet strong pressures exist for each of the examples of waste related above to small fears. Why? There is a large literature on this. One answer is that our fear is not rational by nature but rather that it reacts to whatever image of dread is put in front of us often, i.e. we cant help but fear something if we're exposed to visual images often. What is unsatisfactory about this explanation is that it is not really an explanation in the sense that it is basically saying 'we fear because we fear propagated images'. This story would fit any observed pattern of fear. One must look for a pattern to explain why we propagate some images more than others. A second explanation is that many of these fears hide deeper, more rational, desires, such as the fear of loneliness, the wish to feel needed towards our children, the wish of bureaucrats to feel they are useful, the need to have a role in life by school boards, councils, lawyers, etc. Again, whilst it sounds quite plausible its a bit of a cop-out in that one can always come up with some story for any observed small fear as to what is really behind it: its not really a predictive theory. A third, perhaps more interesting argument, is that we are in essence looking at the effect of educating many lawyers who have an interest in finding something they can litigate against and thus to fan fears. Similarly, one can argue that identifying a fear for which to legislate against and to take action against is a kind of work-for-the-dole scheme amongst other professions. This would however mean that this fear-searching is the by-product of having run out of more productive things to do for individual workers. This is still somewhat unsatisfactory as an explanation though because we've have high levels of unemployment in many big countries without similar outbreaks of small-fear phobia A final possibility is that we've run out of immediate really big fears to worry about in combination with any of the stories above. The disappearance of big dangers (big wars, big epidemics, etc,) would explain why now more than before we've become sensitive to things we weren't sensitive about. More possibilities abound though and each seems almost impossible to really nail down empirically because it would require us to observe things we have trouble observing such as inner fears and desires, changing sensitivity to small things when big things disappears, etc.
16. Why has the level of religiosity in the US remained high in the last 50 years and gone down so much in Europe?
In the middle of the 20th century virtually everyone in the US and Europe was deeply religious in the sense of attending church often and leading their lives within religious rituals and doctrine. In the ensuing 50 years the level of church-going and adherence to religious beliefs dropped dramatically in Europe such that only a minority now regularly attends church and would count themselves as unquestioningly adhering to religious beliefs, whilst the levels are still very high in the US. Why this divergence when the initial stock was so similar? A naive explanation would be to say that those going to the US from Europe were somehow more religious than those staying behind. Not only is that particular observation doubtful (eg. many fled Europe because of the persecution they suffered implying someone back in Europe was sufficiently fanatic to bother persecuting) but it doesn't explain the divergence long after the big migration waves. One can think of two categories of explanation depending on whom you regard as the anomaly. If you take Europe as the anomaly then one can point to the changes Europe was involved in but the US was not. A thought would be the emergence of a welfare state administrated by secular governments in Europe which crowded out the role of religion in the sense of providing security and a means of making charity a-personal and a-religious. If this is true then other countries that are introducing welfare states (such as the ones emerging in Latin America and South East Asia) should see declining rates of religiosity fairly soon. What somewhat jars in that story is that the US government welfare system may not be of the same size as the West European one, but is not insubstantial either. A second thought would be to point to the different education system in Europe funded from the central government rather than from the local government as in the US, implying far more cross-subsidisation and presumably higher standards at the bottom in Europe. This of explanation hinges on the presumption though that a truly educated person is not religious which doesn't quite fit the fat that even most educated Europeans were religious before the 1950s. Hence both explanations fall a little short. If we take the US as an anomaly one can think of another set of explanations. One thought there is to link religiosity to the different role of religious organisations in the US compared to Europe and to wonder what drives those differences. One can argue that in the US religious organisations are often the focal point of community life and furthermore act as mobile communities in the sense that they are not based on a physical community but rather a mental one: when you move town you simply slot into the local branch of whatever religion you belong to. Hence these branches can be like small service stations for mobile households, providing services like child-care, a sense of belonging, charity, sports activities, and even matchmaking. In this story their ability to cater for mobile households sets them apart from the European type churches which cater more for an immobile population. Now, people who don't move around have the time to develop other organisations to provide the same services and hence indeed don't need the church any more, which would explain the reduced use for church in Europe relative to the US. This explanation ultimately rests on the supposed greater internal mobility of people in the US as the ultimate driver, which would have as a falsifiable prediction that the increasing level of mobility within Europe (due to reduced travel costs and decreased barriers to working in other parts of Europe) should be accompanied with increased levels of religiosity in Europe. Even that explanation still rests on the implicit presumption that the default situation is to become less religious in order to rationalise the demise of religion in Europe. A unifying thought one can turn to within all these explanations is to see high levels of religiosity in the US as a by-product of more job, emotional, and income insecurity in general. Thinking through what underlies this insecurity would link religiosity ultimately to costs of mobility, job protection laws, the prevalence of premature job dismissals, and things like rates of divorce. What is weak about this proposed explanation is that it lacks a firm grasp of how religions and their content arise in the first place. Any ideas anyone?
17. Why is the climate change debate in the media and in UN fora so dominated by the search for solutions that cant be implemented by individual countries?
This is a particularly important puzzle. The IPCC (International Panel for Climate Change) sponsored by the UN has managed to convince the scientific community that the earth's climate is changing and that we've seen an increase in temperature of about .6 degrees in the last 150 years, with expected further increases ranging from 2 to 10 degrees depending on which wild assumptions underlying the various models you care to follow. Concern about the potential consequences set a large environment movement into action advocating concerted world action to reduce CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gasses, leading a couple of countries to adopt a system of CO2 emission rights trading between countries in the Kyoto protocol. Given that even a world-wide adoption of that protocol would have only very marginal impacts on emissions and given the immense difficulty of getting so many countries to agree on minor reductions let alone substantive reductions, the question arises why there is isn't more attention on actions individual countries could take. The attached document by Edward Teller and others goes over various possibilities ranging from sending a lot of sunlight-reflecting balloons into the sky to setting up more dirty coal stations to pump more small sunlight-reflecting particles into the atmosphere (deliberate dimming). Whilst some of their theories sound a bit like science-fiction, at least the suggestions they launch can be taken up by individual countries and are thus politically speaking far more feasible than anything requiring the nod from 100 countries or more. The mystery is why we don't see an avalanche of the kind of solution a single country could engage in rather than the pleas for concerted world action? The first thing we could say is that we have no reason to suspect deliberate dimming would work whereas we would be sure that reduced greenhouse emissions would work, or to similarly belittle any proposed action an individual country could take. That's taking a liberty with the truth though for the uncertainties with respect to the various drivers of climate change and their relative effects are so enormous that no-one could claim a great degree of certainty as to how well reduced emission would work compared to other possibilities. Hence to say one solution is known to work and the other not is pretence and must be seen as a form of mental laziness that hides a deeper reason. Another thought would be that the types of policies countries could pursue alone have simply not yet entered the minds of many people who out of habit presumed that a world-wide problem needs a world-wide solution, but that we'll indeed get go hear more and more about more country-doable solutions in the future. Its an optimistic thought but one that seems hard to falsify. The worst one can say about it is that its taking a long time for our habits to be pushed by the wayside. Another speculative thought would be that many people in this debate secretly like the idea of having some kind of all-powerful world organisation that would police a world-wide solution, i.e. they yearn for a worldwide dictator-of-sorts. Variants of proposals leading to this include not only an the calls for an explicit world-wide government to implement environmental policies, but also ideas about creating a global environmental agency that would own all the world's natural resources and manage it for the benefit of man-kind, rather like a large ministry for the natural habitat. Whatever you'd call such an organisation, it would effectively own the world and thus be a world government. Even if such an entity is supposedly lead by scientists, it would still be an effective world autocracy to which the old adage 'power corrupts' would surely apply. The wish for such an organisation resembles a religious need for a deity to benevolently rule us. This theory could be easily verified in that proponents of such world-wide autocracies would still have this need even if climate change is solved by some other means, and hence we should observe them displaying this wish independent of new information on the problem at hand. What is weak about this story is that it depends on some kind of in-built human wish to be dominated which is indeed be something neuroscientists claim to have found (see eg Dean Hamer's book 'the God Gene' reviewed here in Time Magazine) but is still a hard swallow for many social scientists. A final thought is that the media finds it more lucrative to give exposure to those scientists and organisations calling for global action rather than country action. This simply begs the question though why the consumers of the media are more prone to respond to the former rather than the latter, which reverts back to one of the other explanations.
18. Why are we in many modern societies so ashamed of the human body?
In all Anglo-saxon countries, but also in most Eurasian rich countries, there are many customs and laws pertaining to the hiding of bodily elements. Not only are there sometimes quite strict clothing restrictions telling us what to hide, but even non-tittilating aspects of the human body are stowed away. Toilets lack glass doors; blood and excrements are deemed dirty and are usually disposed of as quickly and as unseen as possible; and there are whole industries getting rid of our bodies when we die in a manner than minimises the degree to which others have to see us as we are. None of this was possible or deemed desirable by our hunter gatherer ancestors, for whom all of these things were a natural part of everyday life. Hence the shame surrounding the human body is new and in need of an explanation based on something we didn't do as hunter gatherers. As a first stab, one could surmise that all this has to do with hygiene and the found necessity to get rid of anything that carries bacteria and viruses as fast as possible, which was much less of a concern for hunter gatherers whose low population density already guarded them from disease (too few people to have diseases go round and round). Whilst this may well be an historical reason for why shame connected to the human body would arise as a social norm with a productive rationale, that argument sounds rather hollow in today's world: sure we need toilets for reasons of hygiene, but why not glass ones? It doesn't explain having to cover up exposed parts of the body nor explains why we shun images of the body and its offshoots on television. It doesn't explain our indignance at seeing a corpse without clothes. A second stab is that its simply taking time for the productive social norm surrounding hygiene to fade. Where that stab runs foul is that our social taboos around the body don't seem to slacken at all. Indeed in many ways they seem to get worse with additional regulations about what can be shown on tv on the increase in many countries. A third stab is that we're looking at the unintended by-product of a work culture where for entirely productive reason we try to take our workers' mind off their own body so that they spend more energy on their work. If this is true, we'd have to see an increase in prudish norms when more and more people work for a powerful boss rather than are their own boss. We'd have to see more prudish culture in large hierarchical organisations over self-employed people or people in organisations with a high degree of autonomy. What happens outside the world of work is then no more than the by-product of this productive reason, i.e. when workers go home they and their bosses would simply elevate the norms they live under and expand at work as a general social rule for everyone to follow for either one of the reasons for such conformism mentioned above. A falsifiable prediction from this is that we should see more prudism when the average size of organisations increase and when work becomes more regimented, regulated, and less prone to power of workers. All this sounds true to me, but a weak point in this story is why one actually needs to have a taboo on the body to get people to turn their attention away from it.