TheGreatCompromise

In a dog-eat-dog world, people still 
cooperate, collaborate, and help each other out. Our species’ urge to work together has remained 
an evolutionary paradox, seemingly at odds with Darwinian theory—until now.


…The prisoner’s dilemma focuses on the choice between cooperation and selfishness. Superficially it seems quite simple: You and another person have been caught by the police on suspicion of criminal activity and are being held in separate cells. The prosecutor visits each of you separately and offers a deal. If you confess and incriminate your accomplice while he or she remains silent, you will be convicted of a lesser crime, serving just one year in prison while your accomplice serves four. In the parlance of the game, you have “defected” from your friendship.

If you and your accomplice both refuse the deal and stay true to each other—remaining “cooperators” in the game’s lingo—you will both be convicted of a lesser crime and serve two-year sentences, since the police do not have enough evidence to convict either one of you of the more serious crime. If you both testify against each other—that is, if you mutually defect—then the police will convict both of you for the serious crime but give you only three years, since you provided some evidence.

Clearly, the best choice for you as an individual is to defect. You get only one year in prison if you rat on your accomplice and he doesn’t rat on you. Even if you both rat on each other, the penalty is three years, not the maximum sentence. It is only the sucker who doesn’t defect while his accomplice does who spends four years in the slammer, the maximum sentence. On the other hand, both prisoners are worse off when they turn on each other than they would be if they both kept silent.

Nowak was fascinated by the prisoner’s dilemma because it provides a mathematical way to study human behavior and, more broadly, the evolutionary costs and benefits of cooperation. Each round of the game generates numbers (the number of years in prison can be considered points), there can be different results based upon different strategies, and all of this can be turned into calculations. With the prisoner’s dilemma, Sigmund said, one could use math to examine the thorniest conundrum of our social lives: how to weigh personal gain against the common good.

For the rest of the alpine weekend and all the way back to Vienna, Nowak talked to Sigmund about the game. He visited him the following day at his office at the Institute for Mathematics in Vienna, which shared a building with a seminary, the priests on the first floor and the mathematicians on the second. “It was total tranquility,” says Nowak, a Roman Catholic who holds fast to his faith. “In biochemistry, we were always breaking things, and there were bad smells. But here there were just empty corridors with someone occasionally walking by, deep in thought. I was amazed that someone could make a living just by thinking.”

In 1987 Nowak decided to do doctoral work with Sigmund on the mathematics of evolution. Their focus was the prisoner’s dilemma and its endless iterations, now parsed with computers and math.

Others had already studied cooperation using the prisoner’s dilemma, notably political scientist Robert Axelrod, who held virtual tournaments in the 1970s. Scientists around the world sent Axelrod strategies for the “prisoners”—instructions for when they would cooperate and when they would defect—to wield in round after computerized round. Each round, the strategies received points; the shorter the prison term, the higher the score.

Over the course of hundreds of computerized rounds, the winning strategy was one called Tit for Tat: Whatever you did in the last round of the game, I will do to you in this round. This strategy relies on direct reciprocity and abounds in the real world, especially in communities where creatures have a history with one another. For instance, Neighbor Jones is more likely to change a flat tire for Neighbor Newell if Newell helped fix Jones’s broken lawn mower last week. It holds true in the animal world as well: A vampire bat is more likely to share a blood meal with others in the cave if those others shared a blood meal with it the last time it failed to find prey…Read More

There is, however, another and contrasting type of interpersonal relation: the use of aggressive violence by one man against another. What such aggressive violence means is that one man invades the property of another without the victim’s consent. The invasion may be against a man’s property in his person (as in the case of bodily assault), or against his property in tangible goods (as in robbery or trespass). In either case, the aggressor imposes his will over the natural property of another—he deprives the other man of his freedom of action and of the full exercise of his natural self-ownership.

     Let us set aside for a moment the corollary but more complex case of tangible property, and concentrate on the question of a man’s ownership rights to his own body. Here there are two alternatives: either we may lay down a rule that each man should be permitted (i.e., have the right to) the full ownership of his own body, or we may rule that he may not have such complete ownership. If he does, then we have the libertarian natural law for a free society as treated above. But if he does not, if each man is not entitled to full and 100 percent self-ownership, then what does this imply? It implies either one of two conditions: (1) the “communist” one of Universal and Equal Other-ownership, or (2) Partial Ownership of One Group by Another—a system of rule by one class over another. These are the only logical alternatives to a state of 100 percent self-ownership for all.[1]

     Let us consider alternative (2); here, one person or group of persons, G, are entitled to own not only themselves but also the remainder of society, R. But, apart from many other problems and difficulties with this kind of system, we cannot here have a universal or natural-law ethic for the human race. We can only have a partial and arbitrary ethic, similar to the view that Hohenzollerns are by nature entitled to rule over non-Hohenzollerns. Indeed, the ethic which states that Class G is entitled to rule over Class R implies that the latter, R, are subhuman beings who do not have a right to participate as full humans in the rights of self-ownership enjoyed by G—but this of course violates the initial assumption that we are carving out an ethic for human beings as such.

     What then of alternative (I)? This is the view that, considering individuals A, B, C …, no man is entitled to 100percent ownership of his own person. Instead, an equal part of the ownership of A’s body should be vested in B, C …, and the same should hold true for each of the others. This view, at least, does have the merit of being a universal rule, applying to every person in the society, but it suffers from numerous other difficulties.

     In the first place, in practice, if there are more than a very few people in the society, this alternative must break down and reduce to Alternative (2), partial rule by some over others. For it is physically impossible for everyone to keep continual tabs on everyone else, and thereby to exercise his equal share of partial ownership over every other man. In practice, then, this concept of universal and equal other-ownership is Utopian and impossible, and supervision and therefore ownership of others necessarily becomes a specialized activity of a ruling class. Hence, no society which does not have full self-ownership for everyone can enjoy a universal ethic. For this reason alone, 100percent self-ownership for every man is the only viable political ethic for mankind.

     But suppose for the sake of argument that this Utopia could be sustained. What then? In the first place, it is surely absurd to hold that no man is entitled to own himself, and yet to hold that each of these very men is entitled to own a part of all other men! But more than that, would our Utopia be desirable? Can we picture a world in which no man is free to take any action whatsoever without prior approval by everyone else in society? Clearly no man would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly perish. But if a world of zero or near-zero self-ownership spells death for the human race, then any steps in that direction also contravene the law of what is best for man and his life on earth. And, as we saw above, any ethic where one group is given full ownership of another violates the most elemental rule for any ethic: that it apply to every man. No partial ethics are any better, though they may seem superficially more plausible, than the theory of all- power-to-the-Hohenzollerns.

c4ss:

… The minimum wage increases aggregate purchasing power among the working class at large, and helps secure employers a reliable pool of labor power on a sustainable basis. The welfare state keeps unemployment, hunger and homelessness from reaching politically destabilizing levels that — without the state cleaning up the capitalists’ mess at taxpayer expense — might result in capitalism being torn down from below. Universal healthcare, whether on the British or Canadian model, externalizes labor costs on the taxpayer which would otherwise be (and are, in countries like the U.S.) borne by employers who provide health insurance as a benefit.

Any time you hear soccer mom rhetoric about “our working families,” or self-congratulatory platitudes to the effect that “Democrats care,” look behind the voice and take a look at what the hands are actually doing. In a freed market — without the state to do the capitalists’ bidding — corporate capitalism would wither like a garden slug with salt on its back. The state works for the capitalists, not for you.

c4ss:

… If individuals were left free to compete and organize, there’s no telling how many would enter the field of banking, or how many different schematics they would develop for that end. As John Beverley Robinson observed, banking is, after all, a “simple and safe business.”

With the capitalist banking apparatus as it is, crises like that of 2008, will not abate at least not for very long intervals. Capital and credit concentration gives way to complacency in business, to waste, to destitution for the people whose work hours drive industry forward even in spite of its unstable footing on which the economic system stands. That system works for the capitalists—is their great swindle—but only to the extent that it remains at all and doesn’t end up completely in ruins. Why those who defend some version of “free banking” should defend the tax—because that’s really what it is—of interest is utterly beyond my comprehension, but what it means is that it’s all the more important for libertarians to continue in the tradition of William B. Greene and Benjamin R. Tucker.