Why People Are Irrational about Politics

Why is politics a subject matter about which there is widespread, strong, and persistent disagreement? In this paper, the philosopher Michael Huemer (following Bryan Caplan) argues that the phenomenon of rational irrationality is (a large part of) the answer to this question. In short, the idea behind rational irrationality is that people can rationally adopt irrational beliefs because acquiring rational beliefs involves a "cost" that exceeds its benefit. There are certain things that people want to believe "for reasons independent of the truth of those propositions or of how well-supported they are by the evidence". Given this there is a cost to thinking rationally, "namely, that one may not get to believe the things one wants to believe". The idea is that "most people will accept this cost only if they receive greater benefits from thinking rationally". And since there are almost no benefits to be received from thinking rationally about political issues, we can predict that many people will often be irrational about politics (and it is easy to find examples where this prediction holds true).

Elaborating on the theory of rational irrationality, Huemer appeals to the distinction between instrumental rationality and epistemic rationality. Roughly, while instrumental rationality consists in choosing the best available means to the ends one has, epistemic rationality consists in forming beliefs in a truth-conducive manner (accepting only things that are well-supported by evidence, revising beliefs in the light of new evidence, avoiding contradictions and logical fallacies, etc.). With this helpful distinction at hand, Huemer says that the theory of rational irrationality holds that it can be instrumentally rational to be epistemically irrational.   

In order to explain why some people adopt irrational beliefs, we need only assume that these people prefer to believe certain things to a higher degree than they prefer to be epistemically rational. Huemer points out that for some people, being epistemically rational may itself be preferred with sufficient strength to outweigh whatever preferences they might have with respect to their beliefs, but for many people this will not be the case. Huemer argues that the phenomenon of rational irrationality is particularly common when it comes to political beliefs.

As argued by Caplan, voters have systematically biased beliefs about economics. The policies that voters choose are, for example, systematically less free market and more anti-immigrant than what would serve the those voters own ends. But because of the miniscule chance that a single vote makes any difference to the outcome, it can be rational for the individual to indulge in irrationality in the political domain. Like Caplan, Huemer considers the competing explanations for political disagreement and concludes that neither of them (separately or jointly) can fully explain the salient features of political disagreement (without appealing to the phenomenon of rational irrationality). The commonly given explanations include that political issues are unusually difficult, that people are ignorant, and that people have different fundamental value systems. No doubt, these things are true as well (at least the second two), but they are not sufficient to explain disagreement. Commenting on the view that disagreement might be due to there not being any objectively true answers to value questions, Huemer boldly states that "value questions are objective, and moral anti-realism is entirely unjustified". I strongly disagree with him on that point (I think it is realism that is unjustified), but I agree that many political disagreements cannot be fully explained that way.

The irrationality hypothesis is superior to alternative explanations of political disagreement in its ability to account for several features of political beliefs and arguments: the fact that people hold their political beliefs with a high degree of confidence; the fact that discussion rarely changes political beliefs; the fact that political beliefs are correlated with race, sex, occupation, and other cognitively irrelevant traits; and the fact that numerous logically unrelated political beliefs—and even, in some cases, beliefs that rationally undermine each other—tend to go together. These features of political beliefs are not explained by the hypotheses that political issues are merely very difficult, that we just haven’t yet collected enough information regarding them, or that political disputes are primarily caused by people’s differing fundamental value systems.

Why do people have preferences over beliefs? Huemer's answer is that

The beliefs that people want to hold are often determined by their self-interest, the social group they want to fit into, the self-image they want to maintain, and the desire to remain coherent with their past beliefs. People can deploy various mechanisms to enable them to adopt and maintain their preferred beliefs, including giving a biased weighting of evidence; focusing their attention and energy on the arguments supporting their favored beliefs; collecting evidence only from sources they already agree with; and relying on subjective, speculative, and anecdotal claims as evidence for political theories.

Here I feel that this otherwise excellent paper tells only half the story. It is reasonable to ask why people are self-interested (and besides, it is in general not true that they are, especially not in the voting booth); why people want to fit into social groups; why we are more prone to be biased in certain directions (and not in others), etc. Our cognitive biases and preferences are not random and there is an evolutionary story to be told about how and why they came about (as Caplan noted). As Steven Pinker said in The Blank Slate,

Our minds keep us in touch with aspects of reality – such as objects, animals, and people – that our ancestors dealt with for millions of years. But as science and technology open up new and hidden worlds, our untutored intuitions may find themselves at sea.

For many domains of knowledge, the mind could not have developed dedicated machinery, the brain and genome show no hints of specialization, and people show no spontaneous intuitive understanding either in the crib or afterward. They include modern physics, cosmology, genetics, evolution, neuroscience, embryology, economics, and mathematics. It’s not just that we have to go to school or read books to learn these subjects. It’s that we have no mental tools to grasp them intuitively.

Therefore:

Understanding in these domains is likely to be uneven, shallow, and contaminated by primitive intuitions. And that can shape debates in the border disputes in which science and technology make contact with everyday life. […] with all the moral, empirical, and political factors that go into these debates, we should add the cognitive factors: the way our minds naturally frame issues. Our own cognitive makeup is a missing piece of many puzzles, including education, bioethics, food safety, economics, and human understanding itself.

Huemer does provide a nice list of things we can do to try to overcome our biases, but learning about the evolutionary origins of our cognitive biases should be added to his list as it may well be essential to overcoming bias. Still, Huemer's paper is very well worth reading in addition to Caplan's excellent book The Myth of the Rational Voter.   

Here is a short clip where Huemer talks about why people are irrational about politics:

The Believing Brain - From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

This book supposedly sums up 30 years of research. Michael Shermer argues that we form beliefs first (for non-rational reasons) and then we attempt to rationalize the beliefs we already hold. Our brains manifest a host of cognitive biases that continually confirm our beliefs as "true". We are, for example, prone to seek and find patterns everywhere, even where there are no patterns to be found (patternicity). And we are prone to infuse those patterns with meaning and intentional agency (agenticity). Why we do this has a simple evolutionary explanation. Ignoring genuinely meaningful patterns can be fatal, but reading meaning and agency into meaningless noise is often more or less harmless. Thus, those with a weaker tendency towards patternicity and agenticity were less likely to survive and leave offspring. Today, this can lead people to believe in all sorts of things (gods, aliens, conspiracy theories, etc. are considered). Science is argued to be our only hope of overcoming innate biases.

The Believing Brain is an easy read and some are bound to be familiar with many if not most of the results presented. It functions well as an introduction to common sense scepticism, but those hoping for a deeper analysis of the brain might perhaps be slightly disapointed. The book is somewhat similar to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan in that it mixes autobiography with argument in (primarily) epistemological issues.  

For me, the most interesting chapter is that on politics (despite that it largely overlaps with this article from which the quotes below are taken). Shermer refers to Thomas Sowell’s distinction between the unconstrained and the constrained vision of human nature, later discussed by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate under the alternative labels of the utopian and the tragic vision. Shermer states his reasons for rejecting the utopian vision:

An unconstrained utopian [which in its original Greek means “no place”] vision of human nature largely accepts the blank slate model and believes that custom, law, and traditional institutions are sources of inequality and injustice and should therefore be heavily regulated and constantly modified from the top down. It holds that society can be engineered through government programs to release the natural unselfishness and altruism within people. It deems physical and intellectual differences largely to be the result of unjust and unfair social systems that can be re-engineered through social planning, and therefore people can be shuffled across socioeconomic classes that were artificially created through unfair and unjust political, economic, and social systems inherited from history. I believe that this vision of human nature can be achieved in literally No Place.

Shermer then formulates a kind of middle-ground between these two views of human nature that he calls the realistic vision:

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this the Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of human nature.

He goes on to specify what he takes the realistic vision to involve. He says that

human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures. A Realistic Vision rejects the blank slate model that people are so malleable and responsive to social programs that governments can engineer their lives into a great society of its design.

Egalitarianism, Shermer points out, "only works (barely) among small bands of hunter-gatherers in resource-poor environments where there is next to no private property". One of the most telling modern-day examples of the consequences of basing political policies on the unconstrained or utopian vision is the failed communist and socialist experiments around the world throughout the previous century. These social experiments

revealed that top-down draconian controls over economic and political systems do not work.
The failed communes and utopian community experiments tried at various places throughout the world over the past 150 years demonstrated that people by nature do not adhere to the Marxian principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Humans are just not like that! We are not infinitely malleable blank slates waiting to be shaped by society. The realistic vision of human nature is well supported by the evidence from psychology, anthropology, economics, and especially evolutionary theory. Shermer lists many features of human nature that seemingly cannot be changed by environmental factors including the inherited differences among people in size, strength, speed, temperament, personality, cognitive ability, mathematical talent, spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, etc. that translate into some being more successful than others; the importance to us of family ties; the universal principle of reciprocal altruism and moralistic punishment; the almost universal propensity for aggression and dominance (within and between groups), and the almost universal desire of people to trade with one another.

Shermer believes that even if most moderates on both the left and the right (especially those educated in the biological and evolutionary sciences) can embrace a realistic vision, this vision of human nature is best represented by the libertarian political philosophy. Specifically he holds that attempts to equalize natural inequalities by governmental redistribution programs cannot and will not work given the facts about human nature. Several similar points (and many others) are made by Paul H. Rubin in his very good Darwinian Politics which offers a much more in-depth evolutionary study of politics.

In a follow-up piece to the article mentioned above, Ronald Bailey continues on the same trail and focuses on the evolutionary origins of the intuitions lying behind non-libertarian views.

Modern progressives are motivated by an old instinct to restore the primitive egalitarianism that characterized human social relations when people lived in intimate hunter-gatherer bands, corresponding to the Marxian notion of primitive pre-state communism. For their part, modern conservatives intuitively dislike the socially disruptive character of markets and free speech and want to protect their group from outside competition and cultural corruption. These atavistic longings are part of the bio-psychological heritage of humanity and must be constantly resisted if the ambit of liberty is to thrive and expand. Liberalism (libertarianism) rises above and rejects the primitive moralities embodied in the universalist collectivism of progressives and the tribalist collectivism of conservatives. In doing so, it made the rule of law, freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and modern prosperity possible. 

Shermer wrote a friendly response to Bailey making the Hobbesian point - not made in the book itself - that the natural state of humanity is abject violence and stressing the grave importance for liberty (and science) of coming to terms with violence. Shermer again cites Pinker who argued in his The Better Angels of Our Nature that we have already come a long way towards eradicating violence since our days as hunter-gatherers. Like Pinker, Shermer too follows Hobbes in assuming an essential role for government in the production of peace. But, again like Pinker, he is rightly worried about government power getting out of hand and stifling the very liberties it supposedly should defend.

Like so many other writers, Shermer too takes a naive view on liberal democracy (the oxymoron that gives this website its name). He says that it is "the best system yet devised" giving people "a voice to speak truth to power". If Shermer ascribed some of the large number of cognitive biases he describes in the book explicitly to voters (like Bryan Caplan did in his brilliant The Myth of the Rational Voter), he would no doubt be less optimistic about democracy. 

Darwinian Politics - The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom

The economist Paul H. Rubin has written an excellent study. Relying on an impressive amount of evidence from evolutionary psychology and economics, he shows us how the theory of evolution and the evolutionary history of humans are relevant for understanding contemporary political behaviour. Rubin is convinced that if we understand the ways in which our political preferences evolved, we will be in a better position to understand how we make political decisions and perhaps also how we should decide in these matters. This does not imply making the “naturalistic fallacy”. He is not drawing normative conclusions straight from empirical results. Rather, he calls attention to a large set of facts about human nature that no serious political theorist legitimately could ignore. 

Rubin follows Peter Singer’s work A Darwinian Left and argues, like Singer, “that there are evolved political preferences in humans and that political systems must consider, and perhaps adapt to, these preferences”. But, unlike Singer, Rubin does not start out with a specific political agenda but tries instead “to be somewhat more analytical and allow the agenda to come from the preferences”. He analyses which political institutions allow humans to fulfill their preferences, rather than imposing his own preferences on them. He admits to having started out writing the book as a libertarian, but that he has in the process come to question some of his previously held beliefs. It is refreshing that he for the most part avoids moralizing and takes a more scientific and objective stance to his subject matter. Only on a few well-chosen places does he step down from the meta-perspective to take a normative stand on important issues. The overall conclusion of the book is that modern western societies (particularly that of the United States, primarily because of its ethnical diversity) are the most effective societies for satisfying our evolved preferences. 

Adopting such a project obviously involves rejecting the blank slate myth – the idea that individual humans are almost infinitely malleable and can be fundamentally re-shaped by society. There are very strong evidence-based reasons against the blank slate (as meticulously gathered by Steven Pinker in his excellent book by the same name). Rubin writes that certain rules and behaviours are indeed "programmed" into us and that “we violate these rules only at great peril” which is powerfully exemplified by the disastrous social experiments of communism in Russia, China and elsewhere.  

The themes explored in the book include conflict (within and between groups), altruism and cooperation, envy, political power, and religion. There are so many good and important points made that I will not be able to mention them all here, but I will list some of them and then go on to raise a couple of critical points.

• Humans are highly individualistic and we differ from each other on numerous dimensions. There are reasons why evolution has not generated the same set of preferences in everyone. This explains why human individuality is important and why political ideologies that assume everyone to be the same are doomed to failure.

• We have a common desire for freedom which is an evolutionary very old characteristic of humans. But in addition to wanting to be free ourselves, we also have a desire to dominate others. Sometimes subordinates can resist this desire for power by dominants but at other times they cannot and we have dictatorship. Throughout most of human existence, most individuals (at least most males) have been quite free. It is only during the last 10.000 years or so that most humans have been living in an unnatural state of reduced freedom. Moving from this state to the relatively limited government powers of modern western democracies has caused a major improvement in human happiness by returning us to conditions that are more similar to the environment of our ancient ancestors. (Which is not to say that the current situation cannot be further improved.)

• There are good evolutionary explanations why some (primarily male) individuals seek political power. Those who sought and obtained such power generally left more descendants than those who did not. If those attracted to politics use it as a method of seeking status, then there would be relatively little demand for positions associated with the elimination of political power. Those seeking to reduce the power of government in all dimensions would tend to not seek political power in the first place. (This might explain why libertarian political parties do not do too well). “Given this, those of us not involved in government would do well to form our own reverse dominance hierarchy and attempt to limit the power of government.”

• Certain political behaviors may be counterproductive with respect to our evolved preferences in the novel environments in which we now live. We can learn that satisfying these preferences costs too much, and decide not to satisfy them.

• We evolved in a world with limited possibilities for exchange and other activities that increase wealth. Therefore, we are not well adapted to think intuitively in terms of gains from trade; our minds are built for understanding a zero-sum world in which we no longer live. The fact that all parties gain from trade, and that free international trade is welfare-maximizing is counterintuitive. Economic thinking must be studied and taught, it is not learned intuitively. The result is that humans in many cases now tend to base decisions on outdated zero-sum thinking. 

• One example of such zero-sum thinking concerns our preferences for (material) equality. In a zero-sum world, if some are wealthy, this must be at the expense of the poor. In today’s world, while increasing the incomes of the poor is a desirable policy, increasing equality is not. Policies aimed at increasing equality lead to lower economic growth and actually lead to more, not less, poverty.

• Another example concerns the envy that many people feel toward the relatively rich. This feeling is linked to a belief that the only way to accumulate wealth is to take it from others, perhaps through social cheating. It is easy to see how a basis for such attitudes of envy evolved in a zero-sum environment. But it is equally easy to see how misplaced they are today. In the market economies of modern western societies, the most efficient and the most common way to accumulate wealth is to provide some productive benefits for others. The wealthy have not in general accumulated their wealth through "exploitation". Thus, in most cases our envy towards the rich is misplaced. 

• In a zero-sum world where possibilities of increasing wealth by increasing productivity are not available, the only way to get additional resources is to take them from someone else. Those who were more successful at such predation would have been more likely to become our ancestors. If we evolved in such a world, we might have tendencies to believe that such aggression is a useful strategy. This might explain why we have war. However, since the world is no longer zero-sum this evolved intuition is now counterproductive and many are giving it up. This can explain why violence has declined. Rubin observes that warfare in primitive societies was a more significant source of death than in advanced societies, even when major wars are included.     

• Both ordinary people and professional students of human behavior and evolution have often confused dominance hierarchies and productive hierarchies. The same factors leading humans to (justifiably) dislike dominance hierarchies can lead them to (unjustifiably) dislike productive hierarchies as well, even though the latter may benefit all members. The result is that people may be overly hostile to productive hierarchies and as a result choose policies that actually make them worse off. Rubin takes Marxism to be the most powerful and tragic example of this phenomenon: “Marx opposition to capitalism and the acceptance of Marxism by many individuals (including many intellectuals) was based on confusion between productive and [dominance] hierarchies […] Marx did realize that capitalism was a highly productive system, but his analysis […] reads like a discussion of dominance hierarchies.” The appeal of Marxism (“which persists in some circles even today, when the dismal implications of a communist society should be clear”) “was based on the human opposition to dominance hierarchies, inappropriately applied to productive hierarchies.”       

• Another error made by Marx and accepted by many others may be based on evolved patterns of thinking. There was little capital in the environment in which we evolved and as a result we may not have reliable intuitions about the productivity of capital. This may explain the Marxian labor theory of value: "This theory is clearly incorrect, but it may be intuitively appealing for evolved reasons." It may also explain why many religions forbid interest: "Interest is a payment for the use of capital, and if one does not understand the productivity of capital, it is impossible then to understand the value of interest.”

• Voters exhibit many cognitive biases and illusions in the political process that are not so common in (private) economic decision making. (A point made more fully by Bryan Caplan in his The Myth of the Rational Voter). A rational citizen will pay much more attention to deciding what to buy in the marketplace than to which politicians he prefers. Indeed, given that it is extremely improbable that any one vote will have any impact on the outcome, there is no incentive to vote at all. Still, many people do vote. Rubin suggests that people greatly overestimate their individual contribution because we retain the thought patterns of our small-group evolutionary environment. “We are simply not suited to understand situations in which our decision has no influence.”  

• Humans have a flexible group identification mechanism but it is also powerful. If membership in an ethnic group becomes important for significant purposes, this membership can easily become the basis for strong group identification. Affirmative action (concerning race) is a very dangerous policy because it involves treating individuals as members of ethnic groups rather than as individuals. 

• Libertarianism as a strategy would not have been viable in the environments in which we evolved. Individuals with libertarian preferences would have been less successful than others and left fewer descendants. Such preferences would thus have been selected against, but not completely eliminated which can explain why there is a minority who desire a libertarian order. The conditions have now changed sufficiently so that a libertarian society would be more viable today when the benefits of interventionist preferences may have decreased and the costs of enforcing such preferences increased. Modern western society limits the power of dominants, and individuals in such societies have more freedom now than humans ever had in the past.

Rubin is evidently very well read in both economics and biology and the bibliography is indeed impressive, but (as he himself admits) his analysis is largely uninformed by contemporary moral and political philosophy. He is right to point out that philosophers in general have not paid adequate attention to biology. But in not paying adequate attention to philosophy Rubin himself commits the converse mistake (and citing other authors who also ignore philosophy (!) does not help). In the preface he states that this book is an effort in what E.O. Wilson has called consilience - the unification of knowledge across the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. This is an admirable and ambitious intention, and Darwinian Politics does go a long way toward achieving its goals, but it could have been even better if the philosophical literature had been given proper attention. I’m not just saying this because I care about philosophy, but because I really think that philosophical perspectives would have been useful in clarifying some of points made in the book. I now raise a couple of examples of that.

His rather quick and insufficiently motivated dismissal of using a hypothetical state of nature as a starting point in political theorizing and his equally quick and somewhat uncritical embrace of utilitarianism leaves something to be desired. He amusingly points out that the closest real-world approximation to a Hobbesian individual would be an orangutan, not a human. Orangutans live solitary lives with almost no social grouping beyond the mother and offspring. He says further that  

... rules governing social actions of individuals would have come into being along with humans themselves. Asking about the life of human beings in isolation with no social structure would not be meaningful. Moreover, since rules evolved along with humans, asking what rules humans in a totally ruleless state would choose is also meaningless. Such a world has never existed and, in principle, cannot exist.  

While this might demolish Hobbes' particular version of the state of nature (which is wildly implausible anyway!), it does no damage to the social contract idea as such. My point is not that Rubin is wrong, but that insofar as he wants us to stop thinking in terms of a state of nature altogether (which it is not clear if he really does) his argument needs to be a lot more subtle. David Hume's distinction between natural and artificial virtues might be very helpful here. We could agree that a totally ruleless state has never existed and, in principle, cannot exist and that social contract reasoning would indeed be meaningless when applied to the natural virtues, but maintain it with regard to the artificial virtues. John L. Mackie makes a big deal out of this distinction in his Hume's Moral Theory. Mackie stresses how insights from Hume can enhance and refine Hobbes' theory:

[Hobbes'] doctrine that men are completely selfish has been effectively criticized by many of his successors, and must be drastically modified. Nor have we found a need for an absolute political sovereign. Again, while Hobbes sees moral practices as being deliberately adopted through intelligent calculation as a means to individual well-being, this seems not to be their main explanation. These are radical corrections; yet after they have been made the main outlines of his theory still stand. He was right in denying objective moral qualities and relations. He was right in seeing morality as a solution to a social problem of partial conflict which is not solved, but rather made more acute, by human instincts and the ordinary
human situation. He was largely right in his view of the form of the problem, and partly right in his identification of the elements to be used in a solution. But his notion of sovereignty exaggerates the part that has to be played by government, and his notion of covenants overstresses explicit agreement whereas more weight should be placed on the notion of convention that we have extracted from Hume's discussion and the mechanism of reciprocal sanctions.

I agree with Mackie's attitude. We ought to make the state of nature more empirically accurate. In doing so we make the social contract view more, not less, plausible. Maybe, Rubin would agree? He says that "to understand the state of nature, we must replace the Hobbesian world of individuals in conflict with a world with groups in conflict" and that in such a world "behaviour within the group would have been governed by existing, evolved (not created) rules". Besides, the social contract idea is not (primarily, at least) about how rules come into being, but about the validity of rules - it is not about providing an explanation but a justification - a distinction that Rubin fails to make explicit. 

Rubin discusses utilitarianism, Rawls and Marx and thinks that, out of these three theoretical options, it is utilitarianism that goes best together with our evolved preferences. This is, I believe, highly questionable. All of these alternatives are patterned principles in Robert Nozick’s terminology. I think that our evolved preferences go better with historical principles which is shown by our deep and universal concern with reciprocity and moralistic punishment. Utilitarianism downplays reciprocity and gives it only a secondary importance which is not the kind of importance it enjoys in people’s minds. A common objection to utilitarianism (that Rubin does not mention at all) is that it demands too much of us. Utilitarianism demands not only trivial sacrifices for the benefits of others, but can demand significant ones for the benefits of utter strangers (in the name of total utility). Our strong evolutionary based propensity to give precedence to kin (and others close to us including ourselves) is, for example, not respected by utilitarianism (where overall utility is all that matters, not whose utility it is).

Only one objection to utilitarianism is actually mentioned by Rubin and his reply to it is puzzling to say the least. He notes that a common criticism proceeds by showing that the logical implications of utilitarianism are absurd if the theory is carried to its logical extreme. He then comments:

But the argument discussed here is that utilitarianism is essentially the result of fitness maximizing preferences. In this reading, any implications of utilitarianism that conflicts with fitness maximization for the relevant decision-making group are illegitimate extensions of the theory and should be ignored.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this somewhat cryptic passage, but it seems to be the case that Rubin is a utilitarian only with strong reservations. He also fails to explicitly make the standard distinctions between rule and act utilitarianism and between preference utilitarianism and hedonistic utilitarianism (his explicit embrace of Bentham might easily lead us to believe that Rubin is a hedonist, but his argument is concerned with preferences so the principle of charity forbids such an ascription). It remains unclear why his overall argument is supposed to fit better with utilitarianism than with theories in the social contract tradition (including that of Rawls).

As I said above, there is more to this book than I have been able to mention here. It should be said that Rubin’s style of writing is a bit on the formal side and the text could flow better than it does. But what it lacks in style it makes up for in content. Each chapter ends with a short summary and it is wise to start with these summaries together with the preface and chapters 1 and 8 on a first reading. Overall, this is a highly recommended read for economists, political scientists and philosophers alike. 

Before the Dawn - Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

In this book, Nicholas Wade seems to be doing precisely what Edward O. Wilson recommended in his Consilience. Namely, to try to unify knowledge in a way that bridges the gaps between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. Wade is doing a kind of consilient history of the human species by drawing on results from a wide range of scientific disciplines including paleoanthropology, archeology, population genetics, historical linguistics, primatology, social anthropology and evolutionary psychology. There is a special emphasis on the contributions of geneticists and how recent results from genetics can fill in many gaps in our history and adjudicate several important scientific disputes in other disciplines. Somewhat surprisingly, the human genome seems to contain an excellent record of the recent past that provides an interesting parallel to the written history.

Before the Dawn is a kind of scientific book of “Genesis” that traces our ancestors all the way back to the chromosomal “Adam” and the mitochondrial “Eve” who lived in the historical garden of “Eden”. It then follows our ancestors through our “Exodus” out of Africa and onwards to every corner of the planet. Along the way, Wade compiles answers to many questions regarding what the first humans were like, how they lived, what size of groups they lived in, what kind of language they might have spoken, their degree of sociality and aggressiveness, and many others.  

In some ways this book is similar to Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Both books start at a very early stage in human history and follow our species to the present day and beyond - both books end with some empirically based speculations about the future. Both also adopt an evolutionary or “Darwinian” approach. But the two books are also very different in that Wade’s book is more purely descriptive, while Ridley is more prone to advance normative theses. Wade clearly has an agenda, but it is scientific, not political, economical, or ethical.

One central insight, though, that Wade shares with Ridley is the importance of settlement in human history. Settlement was a significant event as it made possible the division of labor and specialization of roles which led to increased productivity. Wade observes that

Productivity creates surpluses, and surpluses of one commodity can be traded for another with a neighboring group. Settlement, specialization, property, surplus, trade – these are the sinews of economic activity, setting humans at long last on a separate path from living off nature’s bounty like all other species.

From chapter eight onwards, the chronological nature of the book is somewhat sidetracked and a more thematic approach is adopted. Sociality, race and language are given chapters of their own. The chapter on sociality was of particular interest for me. Here he talks about the evolutionary basis of social behavior and violence. Echoing Steven Pinker, Wade points out that archeologists and anthropologists often have downplayed the prevalence of warfare in the past and thereby obscured the important and surprising fact that “modern societies have succeeded in greatly reducing the frequency of warfare”. He says that

The savagery of wars between modern states has produced unparalleled carnage. Yet the common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent. As far as human nature is concerned, people of early societies seem to have been considerably more warlike than people are today. In fact, over the course of the last 50.000 years, the human propensity for warfare has probably been considerably attenuated.

He also stresses the importance of reciprocity in human emotions and behavior.

Many common emotions can be understood as being built around the expectation of reciprocity and the negative reaction when it is made to fail. If we like a person, we are willing to exchange favors with them. We are angry at those who fail to return favors. We seek punishment for those who take advantage of us. We feel guilty if we fail to return a favor, and shame if publicly exposed. If we believe someone is genuinely sorry about a failure to reciprocate, we trust them. But if we detect they are simulating contrition, we mistrust them.

The instinct for reciprocity, and the cheater-detection apparatus that accompanies it, seem to be the basis for a fundamental human practice, that of trade.

Trade is a foundation of economic activity because it gives the parties to a transaction a strong incentive to specialize in making items that the others find valuable. But trade depends on trust, on the decision to treat a total stranger as if he were a member of the family. Humans are the only species to have developed such a degree of social trust that they are willing to let vital tasks be performed by individuals who are not part of the family. This set of behaviors, built around reciprocity, fair exchange and the detection of cheaters, has provided the foundation for the most sophisticated urban civilizations, including those of the present day.

I would like to read this as implying that humans are natural contractarians. Wade, a science reporter, is not interested in arguing for any specific view in ethics. But insights such as these (not in any way original) seem to support the social contract view in moral theory, or at least to support the claim that any normative ethical theory that intends to guide human social behavior that does not give a central role to reciprocity is thereby flawed or incomplete. (The utilitarian view seems to suffer from this problem, for example, as it can at best give reciprocity a subordinate role.)   

As recognized by all social contract theorists, there is also a serious problem with trust. Wade observes that

Trust is an essential part of the social glue that binds people together in cooperative associations. But it increases the vulnerability to which all social groups are exposed, that of being taken advantage of by freeloaders. Freeloaders seize the benefits of social living without contributing to the costs. They are immensely threatening to a social group because they diminish the benefits of sociality for others and, if their behavior goes unpunished, they may bring about the society’s dissolution.

Wade then argues that

Human societies long ago devised an antidote to the freeloader problem. This freeloader defense system, a major organizing principle of every society, has assumed so many other duties that its original role has been lost sight of.

It is indeed very tempting to assume that he is talking about government here. Or maybe morality. But no! Wade claims it to be religion! He follows this claim by a whole section devoted to the social function of religion, but somewhat strangely he does not explicitly discuss government or morality. This, I think, constitutes a serious flaw in the book. I don’t doubt that religion has had a part to play in human social relations, but government and morality would have played their parts as well, and I am inclined to think that the latter two played much larger roles than did religion. Apparantly, Wade's latest book deals exclusively with the topic of religion and maybe he there develops this line of reasoning further? Richard Joyce’s highly engaging book The Evolution of Morality, is one example of a book that deals with the social function of morality.

Overall, Before the Dawn is an inspiring book with more to offer than I have mentioned in this brief review.  

The Rational Optimist - How Prosperity Evolves

A rational optimist is someone who has "arrived at optimism not through temperament or instinct, but by looking at the evidence". In this book, Matt Ridley does three things: (1) he argues that “human progress has, on balance, been a good thing, and that, despite the constant temptation to moan, the world is as good a place to live as it has ever been for the average human being" and that we are wealthier, healthier, happier, kinder, cleaner, more peaceful, and longer-lived than any previous generation, (2) he explains why and how it got that way and (3) he prognoses that it will most probably continue to get better in the future. To support his case, Ridley goes 200.000 years back into human history to seek the deep roots of our species’ success. Not surprisingly he identifies the division of labour, specialisation, and exchange (of goods, services, and ideas) as the essential keys to progress and prosperity, while self-sufficiency, central planning, and protectionism are identified as the enemies of progress. The optimism argued for here is not unconditional: it is only if the former forces prevail over the latter that the evolution of prosperity is highly likely to continue.

Ridley builds on the ideas of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin and interprets human society as a product of a long history of “evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order generated by an invisible hand of individual transactions, not the product of a top-down determinism.” He compares the free market with biological evolution. Like the latter, the former too “is a bottom-up world with nobody in charge”. He plausibly holds that “Human history is driven by a co-evolution of rules and tools. The increasing specialization of the human species, and the enlarging habit of exchange, are the root cause of innovation in both”. He sees rules and institutions as evolutionary phenomena too,

… emerging bottom-up in society rather than being imposed top-down by fortuitously Solomonic rulers. They come through the filter of cultural selection just as surely as do technologies. And if you look at the history of, for instance, merchant law, you find exactly this: merchants make it up as they go along, turning their innovations into customs, ostracizing those who break the informal rules and only later do monarchs subsume the rules within the law of the land.

He takes as his concrete historical example of this phenomena the lex mercatoria of the medieval period. (For an in depth study of medieval merchant law see "The Role of Institutions in the Revival of Trade: The Law Merchant, Private Judges, and the Champagne Fairs" in the anthology Anarchy and the Law). Ridley further gives many historical examples where government bureaucracy has impeded the evolution of prosperity and led to the destruction of wealth. “The inherent illiberalism of the bureaucracy, not to mention its tendency to corruption and extravagance” is pointed out and Ridley’s position is summed up in the slogan: “Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away”.

After having pointed out the “win-win” or positive-sum nature of trade and its essential role in generating human prosperity, Ridley goes on to note that “yet it takes only a few sidelong glances at your fellow human beings to realize that remarkably few people think this way. Zero-sum thinking dominates the popular discourse, whether in debates about trade or in complaints about service providers.” He continues:

… this is a shame, because the zero-sum mistake was what made so many -isms of past centuries so wrong. Mercantilism said that exports made you rich and imports made you poor, a fallacy mocked by Adam Smith […] Marxism said that capitalists got rich because workers got poor, another fallacy.

Why do so many people continue to commit such obvious economic fallacies? A large part of the reason is most probably that the human mind is not well adapted to grasp the enormous benefits of trade and other positive-sum interactions; Ridley says that “the notion of synergy, of both sides benefitting, just does not seem to come naturally to people.” This, in turn, is probably because most of the Stone Age transactions rarely benefitted both sides. Ridley quotes Michael Shermer saying that “during our evolutionary tenure, we lived in a zero-sum (win-lose) world, in which one person’s gain meant another person’s loss”. This point is argued at length in Paul H. Rubin’s excellent book Darwinian Politics – The Evolutionary Origins of Freedom.

Ridley goes on to argue that this might further explain why so many people see the free market as a necessary evil rather than an unmitigated good, and why so many mistakenly tend to think that “free exchange demands selfishness, whereas people were kinder and gentler before their lives were commercialized” (another version of the myth of the "noble savage" so forcefully demolished by Steven Pinker). As Ridley points out in response to this myth:

The notion that the market is a necessary evil, which allows people to be wealthy enough to offset its corrosive drawbacks, is wide off the mark. In market societies, if you get a reputation for unfairness, people will not deal with you. In places where traditional, honour-based feudal societies gave way to commercial, prudence-based economies […] the effect is civilizing, not coarsening.

This latter argument has also been made by Pinker in his The Better Angels of Our Nature (and there are indeed some similarities between that book and the present one).

Progress without planning, or “spontaneous order”, is another thing that people sadly find hard to grasp intuitively (for the same evolutionary reasons). Ridley quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury saying (probably having in mind Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”) that “Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves”. A funny thing to come from someone who believes in the existence of a divine being! Regardless, the invisible hand of the free market is (in sharp contrast to god) empirically well-based. The empirical evidence of the impotency and tragedy of a centrally planned economy is equally strong.

The comparative benefits of the free market over those of democracy are also pointed out by Ridley:

If you don’t like the outcome of an election you have to lump it; if you don’t like your hairdresser, you can find another. Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.

The book also argues that economic progress and social progress go hand in hand (and that the former often drives the latter). Commenting on contemporary politics, Ridley points toward the “bizarre paradox of a conservative movement that embraces economic change but hates its consequences and a liberal movement that loves the social consequences but hates the economic source from which they come”, he quotes Brink Lindsey saying that “one side denounced capitalism but gobbled up its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.” Bizarre indeed and it is a pattern that repeats in many western democracies. The classical liberalism that renounces government intervention in both the social and the economic spheres makes much more sense.  

This is the kind of book that I wish I could buy in large quantities and hand out to all my friends and relatives. It may not offer the deepest or the best analysis of all of the different topics that it touches upon (including climate change, overpopulation, genetically modified crops, and patents and copyrights, among others), but it is accessible and deals with some very important questions in a compelling and credible manner. Indeed, this is the kind of book that everyone ought to read!