70. War and Peace

Note: This post is the seventieth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Many years ago, I read 'Century Of War' by Gabriel Kolko. It's not actually about war itself, but rather about the impact of the war on the society that wages it. I don't remember any of the details of the book (it was many years ago), but I do remember coming away completely convinced of his argument that the wars led to a shift to more progressive policies. And I also remember not being nearly as clear about why war had that effect.

This post will look into that question, in a roundabout fashion, first returning to a story I related way back near the start of this series, "One of my childhood friends happened to have his birthday on the same day as Halloween. Naturally, a group trick or treat outing was incorporated as part of his birthday celebration. Afterwards, the group of us would pile into his bedroom and dump out our accumulated loot into a pile on the floor (one pile for each person - not one big pile). Note that at this point, the distribution of loot has been determined by the random allocations at each front door, and does not take into consideration each trick or treaters particular tastes. This raises the possibility of making trades that benefit all parties involved. For example, I always liked the Rockets and Mint Laura Secord bars the best, whereas others preferred items such as the Coffee Crisp that I had little interest in.

So the initial distribution was Pareto-inefficient in that changes could be made that would benefit people without making anyone else worse off.

So, naturally, we set about trying to achieve a Pareto optimal distribution of candy in a free wheeling round of candy exchange that would last until everyone was satisfied enough with their adjusted haul such that no further exchanges could be made that were agreeable to both parties."

Now, imagine if you were one of the trick or treaters, and you were about to embark on the candy exchange when your friend suggested that the two of you team up in order to trade more effectively. The immediate question that comes to my mind is, how would teaming up help? In fact, teaming up might well be harmful since if the two of us had to agree to trades together, that might mean that I have to compromise and trade for things we both like. If I love malted milk but my friend hates malted milk, then teaming up makes me less likely rather than more likely to get what I want. The more correlated our tastes are to one another, the less compromise and less sacrifice comes from teaming up, but why make any sacrifices at all, why not just have everyone remain as sole traders. And of course, that is what we did as kids.

Now, let's imagine that a couple of your friends haven't learned proper manners and they begin to violate commercial (trading) ethics by stealing candy and a fight breaks out, with everybody trying to grab candy from everybody else's pile. And further suppose that your best friend turns to you and offers to team up. In this situation, the benefits of teaming up are obvious. A two person force would be much more effective in a physical battle than two people fighting alone, especially if you and your friend are able to place your piles beside one another in order to form a more geographically contiguous territory to defend.

OK, another scenario. This time, you and your friends (let's say there are 5 of you in total) are getting along, but a couple of kids who are up to no good, start making trouble in your neighbourhood and come over and demand that you give them all your candy or they will beat you up. You figure that if all 5 of you stand together and fight, you can fight these older kids off, but if anyone gets scared and bails, you might well lose all your candy. In this situation, you need everyone to team together in an all or nothing battle.

So, let's say that you and your friends stick together and the older bullies are scared to attack you. So one of the bullies has an idea and makes the following offer, "The first one of you little punks to come over to our side gets an equal share of the candy after we beat up the rest of your friends." Now there is an extra incentive for one of your friends (or you) to betray the rest and side with the bullies. Strong bonds of loyalty will be required to keep the group together. A moral viewpoint that says this kind of trading, or selling out, is shameful behaviour wouldn't hurt either.

OK, final scenario, same as the last one, but this time, instead of the candy being divided relatively equally between you and your friends (as you might expect after a night of trick or treating together), let's say the candy is divided the same way that wealth is in the United States. So if you collected 100 candies in total, then one friend has 84 candies, another friend has 11, one friend has 4, the second last friend has 0.2 (one fifth of a pack of rockets, perhaps), and you have 0.1 candies (one measly rocket). Do you think the chances of someone selling out their friends to the bullies goes up in this scenario? I do. How much loyalty can the person with 0.1 candies really feel towards the 'friend' sitting across from them with 84?

In a situation where you need cooperation from everyone to succeed, then everyone has equal worth, since the withdrawal of any one person dooms the enterprise. And in a situation where people are tempted to defect, the more unequal the distribution of benefits, the greater the temptation to defect. The World Wars were just this sort of situation, and it's no surprise, looking at it this way, that they led to policies which tried to take care of everyone in society (more so than what came before, at any rate).

And now, 65 years since World War 2 ended and since any collective effort or sacrifice was needed in our society, we have settled into the mindset of candy traders, preferring private schools and health care to paying taxes for public services, driving our car exactly where we want to go, rather than compromising by riding transit, staying at home watching exactly what we want to watch rather than compromising by watching what others are watching as well, and bowling alone, rather than compromising by organizing our schedule around a time everyone can come.

60. Signalling

"Buying bread from a man in Brussels
He was six foot four and full of muscles
I said, 'Do you speak-a my language?'
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich"


In a world where everyone behaves the same way (e.g. the world of most economic models), being able to tell one person from another isn't all that useful. But as we saw a few posts back, and as common sense also indicates, people vary, with some people being more prone to cooperative behaviour than others.

If we imagine ourselves wandering around a world filled with a mix of those who are willing to cooperate with us, and those who will pretend to cooperate just to take advantage of us, then the importance of knowing who you can trust becomes obvious.

One way is to learn by experience. If you can remember who you've dealt with in the past, then you can shun those who've defected against you and only deal with people you've had successful dealings with before. But this still leaves a problem of what to do with people you are meeting for the first time, or people who you are dealing with in a new situation, or even people who defected on you before, but claim to have turned over a new leaf.

In these cases, we tend to look for signs that indicate we can trust someone. Maybe a common language or culture, or skin colour or alma mater, or a certain manner of dress or hairstyle, or a certain level of courteousness, or a certain credit score, or even a certain food choice (e.g. vegemite sandwich).

Thinking more generally, even someone's past behaviour could just be considered another type of signal to take into consideration.

Ideally, the signs that we look for will be hard to fake, since otherwise defectors might just try to pass themselves off as cooperators. Barring the use of memory altering technology, past experience with a person can be very hard to fake, which makes past experience with someone one of the best signals of their potential willingness to cooperate in the future.

Given a perfect ability to differentiate cooperators from defectors, even a group of cooperators as small as just 2 people could outperform a society full of defectors. But given a complete inability to differentiate cooperators from defectors, and lacking a way of keeping track of the results of prior dealings with people, then cooperators would become helpless against defectors - and the defectors will likely take advantage of the cooperators until eventually there are no cooperators left.

As we covered a while back, this distinction is what led David Gauthier to assume, in Morals By Agreement that people pursuing cooperation would be able to perfectly differentiate cooperators from defectors.

This is all pretty straightforward common sense, but as this series goes along and I talk more about how cooperative behaviour can evolve (or go extinct) in various circumstances, it will be useful to keep some basic points in mind, such as the importance of signalling cooperative intentions and remembering past interactions with people in sustaining cooperation.

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A few other notes on the topic of signalling:

It's worth mentioning that signalling is only necessary when one party to a transaction has information that another party lacks (the information that will be signalled) so, from an economic perspective, situations requiring signalling are an example of one of the effects of asymmetric information , a topic which we discussed here a while back.

Of course, barring an ability to read minds or predict the future, you never really know for sure what the other person is going to do, so in that sense every transaction involves asymmetric information, which is a bit hard on economic theories which rely on the absence of asymmetric information as a key assumption.

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Signalling problems can also be tied back to game theory via various 'signalling games' which investigate what messages might be sent and received between players under varying circumstances.

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Some concepts related to the idea of signalling:

Cheap Talk - Signs that can be made with little effort and thus don't signify much. For example, if I ask you, 'Are you going to screw me over?' And you say, 'No', your answer would qualify as cheap talk, since it doesn't cost you much to make that statement. Or if cooperators tried to identify one another by wearing a yellow shirt, than anyone could wear a yellow shirt and pretend to be a cooperator. This notion is generally captured in the expression, 'actions speak louder than words' - since actions typically have a higher cost than words do.


Common Knowledge - Something that everybody knows, and everybody knows that everybody knows, and everybody knows that everybody knows and everybody knows, and so on. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an example:

"A proposition A is mutual knowledge among a set of agents if each agent knows that A. Mutual knowledge by itself implies nothing about what, if any, knowledge anyone attributes to anyone else. Suppose each student arrives for a class meeting knowing that the instructor will be late. That the instructor will be late is mutual knowledge, but each student might think only she knows the instructor will be late. However, if one of the students says openly 'Peter told me he will be late again,' then each student knows that each student knows that the instructor will be late, each student knows that each student knows that each student knows that the instructor will be late, and so on, ad infinitum. The announcement made the mutually known fact common knowledge among the students."

39. Clint Eastwood and the Guardian Syndrome

The next few posts in the series are going to focus on the Guardian Syndrome, as outlined in Jane Jacobs' 'Systems of Survival'.

As a reminder, here is the list of ethics in the Guardian syndrome:

Guardian Moral Syndrome:

Shun trading
Exert Prowess
Be Obedient and Disciplined
Adhere to Tradition
Respect Hierarchy
Be Loyal
Take Vengeance
Deceive for the sake of the task
Make rich use of leisure
Be Ostentatious
Dispense Largesse
Be exclusive
Show Fortitude
Be Fatalistic
Treasure Honour

The Guardian syndrome is based on taking (as opposed to trading) as a way of life, and is used in organizations that are territorial in nature (governments, militaries, religions).

A few points to note while I'm on the topic:

1) While maximization is a logical goal of the trading based commercial syndrome, maximizing taking (whether from nature or from other people) is not a sustainable approach.

2) While the commercial syndrome treats everyone equally as people/orgnaizations who have something to trade, the guardian syndrome makes a distinction between us and them (be exclusive, deceive (them) for the sake of the task) and also between superior and subordinate (respect hierarchy, be obedient, dispense largesse).

3) While the commercial syndrome never calls for somebody to make themselves worse off (only to refrain from bettering their condition at somebody else's expense) the guardian syndrome (treasure honour, be loyal, show fortitude, etc.) is all about sacrifice in the name of duty or some greater good.

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Unlike the boring, rational, commercial syndrome, the guardian syndrome is full of excitement and lends itself well to television and movies. The best example of the Guardian Syndrome in action that I can recall recently was the Clint Eastwood movie 'Gran Turino'. So I thought that showing the connection between the movie and the syndrome might help to give a flavour of the guardian syndrome. (Warning: lots and lots of spoilers for the movie in what follows)...

Walt Kowalski (played by Eastwood) is a military veteran (the archetypal guardian career) who is now retired and still living in and carefully maintaining his old house in Detroit (complete with American flag out front), even though the neighbourhood has been abandoned by almost all white people and has become a slum.

The plot follows three main threads.

The first main thread follows Walt adjusting the boundaries of his us vs. them group. At the start of the movie it is Walt against the world, defending the territory of his small patch of lawn in the slums of Detroit against all comers. By the end, he has overcome his racism to include the local Hmong community as part of his 'us' group that he is loyal to, choosing them over his own family who he sees as materialistic, shallow, commercial, self-interested and lacking in respect, discipline and honour. As Walt enters the Hmong community we even see the Hmong helping Walt make rich use of his retired leisure instead of just sitting on his porch all day. Walt's final act of largesse is to will his beloved Gran Turino to his neighbour Thao instead of to his family members who were coveting it.

The second thread is the escalating cycle of violence and vengeance with Walt and his Hmong neighbours on one side and local gangs, in particular the local Hmong gang, on the other. The movie ends with Walt making the ultimate sacrifice, restoring his own honour, employing deceit for the sake of task, exerting prowess, showing his loyalty, and taking vengeance all in one final action.

The third thread is Walt taking on a guardian type role with respect to his adolescent neighbour Thao, doing his best to help Thao 'become a man' while maintaining a hierarchical (paternal) relationship in which Thao is expected to obey what Walt tells him, and Walt feels justified in deceiving Thao as necessary to protect him.

Looking at it again, every scene in the movie seems to reinforce the guardian characteristics of Walt's character. The movie opens with the funeral for his wife. At the funeral, we get a sense of Walt's character as he stands erect in formal suit and snorts in disgust at the lack of respect (for tradition, for their elders, for the church) shown by his grandchildren at the funeral. Where a commercially minded person might embrace the 'openness to novelty' of wearing a midriff and bellybutton ring exposing shirt to your grandmother's funeral, obviously Walt isn't buying it.

Next we see Walt's disdain for the self-interested materialism of his granddaughter who tries to convince him he should give her his car (the Gran Turino).

Next we see Walt's exclusiveness, as opposed to his willingness to collaborate with strangers, as he is extremely rude to the teenage boy next door (who is of Hmong descent) referring to him as 'zipperhead'.

Then he corrects the local priest who calls him Walt, saying his name is Mr. Kowalski, again demanding the respect for tradition, and hierarchy.

That's just the first few minutes, I could go on like this describing every scene, but hopefully you get the point - point being that Clint Eastwood's character in this movie is one of the purer depictions of the Guardian syndrome you're likely to see - both the good side and the bad side.

More discussion of the guardian syndrome next week...