Dear Prudence

I disagree. Look at what is happening in litagation for example. In the recent past (and still more so in Europe) there was a common understanding that you did not sue your neighbor at the drop of a hat.

Why not? For the same reason you tried to keep your dog from crapping in your neighbor’s front yard. Because there was a certain moral pressure to be bigger than to make a big issue out every problem. Isnt’ this what we tell our kids when they fight?

I remember living in Pittsburgh many years ago and reading in the paper about a local lawyer that had discovered a gold mine. He was suing everyone in sight for every petty greivance. Most people and businesses thought that it was reprehensible…

Nowadays this is common business practice and a giant amount of money is dissapated and quality of life lost due to the fear of litagation.

In your world of selfishness, everything would be like this but much worse. Forget about asking directions or getting change or help with anything. Forget about faithfulness from your spouse or your kids visiting when you are old.

You ought to take a good look around you. If you are anything like the rest of us, much that is good in your life comes from the kindness of strangers.

“Drivers would be less courteous, and strangers ruder to one another.”

I’m not sure that even that’s true. If you assume we all like it when other people are courteous to us, then the same tit-for-tat logic applies.

My only quibble with this post is that I think it’s better to say that the other virtues are all built upon prudence. Remember, the least costly way to appear good is to actually be good.

The problem is that “selfishness” is such a slippery concept. Is it selfish to follow your own preferences? If so, then arguably everyone is always selfish, by definition. But what if I’ve a preference for helping others or giving my money to charity? Caplan seems to think, following Hanson, that that too can be “selfish”, as it can be a way of “signalling wealth”. But if I were truly selfish, why would I want others to think I’m rich?

The point is that the concepts of selfishness & unselfishness, when looked at generally, are quite incoherent. Consider two saints playing the following game of prisoner’s dilemma: they’ve enough food to guarantee survival for only one, so each prefers that he himself starve while the other eats. The cooperative solution: they share what food there is. If both die of starvation (the non-cooperative solution) are they being selfish or unselfish? Most of us have met variations of this game in our personal relationships.

Drama theory (check out the Dilemmas Galore forum) offers a game-theoretic explanation of how and why our interactions with each other generate the preferences we have. Under this analysis, the distinction between selfish & unselfish motivations becomes irrelevant. What matters is the distinction between escalatory & conciliatory motivations, fuelled by negative & positive emotions.

I’m surprised you missed the obvious counterexample: nobody making rational economic decisions would ever have children. Children are amazingly expensive, especially for the wealthy (who are likely to spend for fancy schools), and are unlikely to provide a tangible benefit coming anywhere near the dollars and time invested.

Yet we continue to reproduce despite the cost, because of the immense and unquantified intangible benefits.

Ramon says:

I think we can base assumptions about exogenously given preferences on genetics. Under the selfish gene metaphor, we humans (or any other living thing) are robots with no goal in life other than propagate our genes as widely and as far into the future as possible. Signaling wealth and worring about others knowing how rich you are is, for biologist, just the standard peakcock tail display showing how good you are to attract mates and establishing your status.

I’m afraid this doesn’t quite work, though it gives a good start. People don’t inherit fixed preferences, given by their genes, such that all their other preferences are simply secondary, strategic ways of satisfying those given ones. They obviously start off with preferences you can model like that — eg, a baby’s preference for being suckled. But as they interact with others, their preferences develop, just like everything else about them. Some develop into patriotic Americans, others into torture-addicted Incas, etc. You need a model such as drama theory gives, whereby starting with certain preferences, interaction with others on the basis of given preferences leads to the development of new preferences — as well as new perceptions of opportunities. See http://www.dilemmasgalore.com

“Similarly, imagine a world where NO ONE would try to hurt another person out of envy or spite.”

But why is a desire to achieve revenge or satisfy envy or spite a priori different from a desire to live longer, have money, whatever?

I think the argument suffers from the standard definitional problems. Just like how one can reduce the problem to a nullity by saying, “ah, it’s selfish to give to charity, etc. because you value the pleasure you get out of doing so.”

I really like your choice and use of Beatles imagery, especially in choice of title.

I feel that unraveling could be an issue if you change the assuptions of other people’s behavior. Holding other people constant I agree with you. There are just too many questions I have about people’s behavior to think that prudence alone can explain how people act. Therefore I expect systematic change to have a large change in the system.

This is a bit of a semantic quagmire. But if you say that “prudence” is not always a good thing, aren’t you contending that imprudence sometimes is? Sounds like a contradiction in terms, if prudence is defined as doing that which brings about a positive state of affairs, or avoids a negative one. Even if you say that one should take a risk every now and then, and define that as imprudence, aren’t you saying that doing so is the only prudent thing to do? Perhaps one would get farther trying to define “happiness”.

Imagine a world where NO ONE was willing to die for a cause – country, religion, ethnicity, whatever. To make soldiers risk death, they’d have to start awfully poor and be richly rewarded. That sounds like a recipe for world peace to me.

This is not necessarily so. In dynamic games of imperfect information, a sequentially rational equilibrium in which soldiers fight until the end (dying or surviving)is not only possible but may even be cheap.

If, for instance, in the year 2000 someone takes a scholarship from the army and becomes available in case of war. The probability of having to go to way may be small enought so that the student ask for the schoolarship. Once war breaks out and the student is called, the loss of welfare due to a small probability (among other things) of dying may be below the loss of welfare from going to jail for deserting. So the student goes to war.

Once the student is in the battlefield, the obvious action is to fight as if you cared about The Cause just to increase the chances of survival. Add some other suporting institutions, some supervisors and a patriotic narrative and you are done.

You don’t need to make them rich.

George Stigler had a spoof “Conference Guide” from which you could select pre-digested comments. One of the most devasating was, “I do understand Mr. Smith’s point. Until recently I was thinking along the same lines.” I’d want to bring out that for Bryan’s Dear Prudence, commenting on my Buchanan Lecture (available I believe on line at the Public Choice Center of George Mason U). I know the arguments—consult The Applied Theory of Price, or my early work on English open fields. But consider that I’ve reconsidered. Hmm.

One knock-down argument has already been made by Shivering Timbers: children. I often reflect that if we knew how much child cost—mine have not spoken to me for ten years, for example—and could really, truly feel the cost on our pulses, so to speak, the race would die out in one generation. Something else is involved. Love, for instance. Identity, which I call Faith. Courage.

But beyond that one knock down case are deals in business, depending on a species of love, or working hard at your job, depending on a species of faith. I urge you all to rush to your amazon.com site and order your very own copy of The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism, shipping in June, cheap ($32.50 for a 600-page hardback), which gives hundreds of examples.

And beyond the evidence, consider the point I ended with in the lecture: if we members of the clerisy go on and on saying with a knowing smirk that “Frankly, your current behavior is probably pretty close to what Prudence alone recommends,” we will continue to erode the ethical reflection that makes a free society possible. I know it’s fun, I know it’s cute: I’ve felt the fun and cuteness. But if it’s not serious about the evidence, dead serious, respectful of the quantitative magnitudes, it’s bad for our ethical health. And anyway, since when is the selfish gene or a fun and boyish analysis of Prudence Only an ethical argument? Since when do we decide what to do by consulting the optimal spreading of seed or the largest bank balance on death? We’re humans, not grass.

Since when do we decide what to do by consulting the optimal spreading of seed or the largest bank balance on death? We’re humans, not grass.

Actually, humans never think in terms of optimizing the spreading of seeds, but we act as if we were. The difference between man and grass is probable the level of sofistication and complexity but our deep motivations are the same. I am not sure that we are very different from grass.

It seems to me that there are many “prudent” equilibria, and which one we would slide into is not obvious. To put it differently, I believe there are things we do today which are “prudent” now, but wouldn’t be unless mostly everyone else was prudent, too. Sure, there are mechanisms you libertarians have thought out, Tabarrok’s dominant assurance contracts and all that, and they seem genuinely valuable. I think they could help.

But before you can enter into any such complex social contracts you have to agree on some more basic things, like not killing each other arbitrarily etc. and it ain’t necessarily so that these things are “prudent” unless everyone else does them, too. A world of “prudent” people could probably risk going into a downward spiral of distrust and violence.

While there is rarely hard cash in revenge, there can be gain in it. Honour killings make sense in the cultures that have them, because it restores something that is of value there (“honour”). Given incomplete information, it seems to me that it’s perfectly possible for a war to be “prudent” for both sides, and a lynching mob to be “prudent” for all the participants. Doesn’t that happen even today?

As long as we make wishes, I wish for the opposite world, where everyone were willing to be imprudent and make sacrifices to further their higher beliefs and values, if they had any. Sell all they have and give the money to the poor, so to say. Then, the people who didn’t would be revealed for what they were, both to themselves, the nicer people and the other not-nice people. I’d expect we’d see some interesting change at that point.

And a pony, I wish for a pony.