Keith,
Doesn't it bother you writing such stuff to
professional economists on the list? Maybe you mean to set a
context for what you are saying and if that is the case then I apologize but you
state things as if they are laws and they aren't. The
fundamental precepts of economics began being codified and examined in the West
in the Modern Era since Columbus and the pillage of this hemisphere but economic
information has been common sense in clever people for as long as there has been
trade.
Perhaps we are making new discoveries today but
somehow the reading of all of the fancy names still seems familiar and over
blown especially considering the rape of entire continents in its service and
the destruction of the very planet itself with no alternate site for
living. They still don't know how to deal with equality,
equality of opportunity, equal availability of resources, a beautiful
environment and the development of communities that work except in the culture
of the wealthy (and I can tell you that it DOES work and they are surrounded
with beauty and networks that protect even the Fetal Alcohol
damaged).
As for the Games? Game theorists set
the rules for the game biasing the outcome by the words they use for the
rules. Math serves to eleminate the ambiguity of
reality. The problem with ambiguity is that it is the root of
creativity and change. That is the flaw
IMHO.
On the other hand it is as if instead
of trying to hide bias which the rest of theoretical science hides as its
dirty little secret, the Game folks deliberately create the rules that will
bias the players and then judge how much the players differ from their
rules and then postulate theories about all of human behaviour as if it was
truly reality. In the arts we call that Aleatory writing
and it is much more interesting and harmless as Art than
Science. You have called it the end of Art but that is self-serving
since you are pushing old art in the public domain.
I published Free Rider Game studies on this
list from George Mason University four years ago that made the same points but
asked embarrasing economic questions. The answer was a deafening
silence. You can also find studies in the game of "shame" and other
types of explorations of common emotional states and their strategic purposes in
group manipulation. Its roots are in psychology and the work of such
writers as R.D. Laing. But I'll get out of that since Brad
will destroy me if I pretend more knowledge about that then I have.
Game theory seems to be useful in examining the structures of
such things but it also is severely limited in its Societal application thus
far. Remember Enron.
If someone knows the rules, for example the East
and the West in the Cold War, then they can play the game reasonably
successfully, like Chess. It was stupid and immoral and
brought us on many occasions up against a Fail Safe that could have destroyed us
all. You can see what one side playing and the other not has
done in Bosnia for example. Wouldn't you rather have harmless
Art where you could play without such destruction? Things like
drama, opera, even symphonies, or that wonderful hero who played his cello
everyday in Sarajevo in the middle of the worst killing
street? He stopped the game! To shoot him would
have been to kill the Mother culture itself. That would have put the
lie to the stories about superiority that each side believed. The
Bosnia Game player from Serbia is now sitting in a box in the Hague where such
monsters belong. If he had listened to Leonard Bernstein's
comments on cultural benefits rather than the testosterone laden games of the
Cold War then Sarajevo would still be beautiful. He should have gone to
that beautiful Festival in Dubrovnik instead of killing old men and little
boys.
What is even more interesting is the way that the
new economists love games but ignore such things as temporary cultural phenomena
like women cooperating well with women and men cooperating well with men but men
cooperating better than women in mixed groups. That result is
probably so time/space bound as make any generalization sexist. Sort
of like the 19th century racial arguments for white supremacy.
But the one area that is avoided at all costs by
the monetarists is the Free Rider phenomena in Public Goods.
All of the research that I've seen sounds like a machine running out of
gas. That is exactly what has happened in the Arts in
the US with "productivity lag" and the necessity of dependence on begging and
negotiation with the wealthy for ownership of the society's cultural
property. (Unless you believe that seven mansions in seven
countries is not a bit over the top.) If that's the case I
have nothing to say to you.
But if not then consider the phenomena of the
"Gatekeeper" as mentioned by Richard Caves in his book on the Creative Industry
Contracts where individuals maintain the level of competence for the whole by
competitive gamesmanship with one another. In voice teaching we call
it "Gatekeeping" while the Wealthy calls their version of such things
"Strategic Giving" and Harvard offers a course in it that I will never see since
it has a minimum wealth requirement before you can even take the
course. The voice teachers do it because only 2% of the labor force
works and they must keep out those who would muck up the work with family
connections. But Strategic Giving is something the wealthy love and
do well. Put very simply it is this: If I can get
you to pay for my share and then free ride on the product then I am a good
steward to my wealth and have "won" the game.
Is this truly
Judeo-Christianity? Where did such immoral ravings
originate? I don't know. Maybe it is a virus in
the Western mind. Or is it like the First World War when
everyone was just so bored and had so much that they had to have a fight to
release their hysterical tension. "But the old man would not
have it and slew half the seed of Europe one by one." W.
Owen. Our Elders say the great war is still
coming. New York will be the first to go and Bath will not be
far behind even for those living in caves.
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2002 10:40
AM
Subject: The Poppy Game
> discovered by the turn of the 20th century, the status of economics as a
> science has since been vitiated by two powerful developments. One is the
> considerable enlargement of the powers of nation-state governments well
> beyond the waging of war (their traditional function) and their intrusion
> into economic decision-making by means of vastly increased taxation and
> statutory regulation. The other important change is the greatly increased
> financial power of the broad mass of the population -- as taxpayer on the
> one hand and consumer on the other.
>
> As regards the role of governments in economics, the apparently
> all-encompassing orthodoxies of Keynes and Samuelson in the middle of the
> last century have been strongly challenged by successive schools of
> economists such as Monetarists, Public Choicists, Rational Expectationists,
> and no doubt there'll be several more 'ists' to come.
>
> The role of individual decision-making in the scheme of things is even more
> problematical because, quite often, people take unusual, even apparently
> irrational, decisions, particularly when under pressure. However, the more
> that conditions are specified, the more rational they turn out to be. These
> conditions are being increasingly investigated by Game Theorists.
>
> The important feature of games theory is that experimental games
> investigate the payoffs (or punishments) that accrue from individual
> decisions in strictly controlled, repeatable situations. And, very often,
> such games are tested across different cultures in order to get at the
> basic decision-making strategies of human beings.
>
> The first major games theorist was von Neumann, the brilliant polymath who
> wrote, "The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour", closely followed by
> John Forbes Nash (the subject of the recent film, "A Beautiful Mind) whose
> "Nash Equilibrium" brought him a Nobel prize in economics 40 years later in
> 1993.
>
> Another notable games theorist is Robert Axelrod whose researches into the
> Prisoner's Dilemma and Tit-for-Tat strategies are summarised in his book:
> "The Evolution of Co-operation". This book was first published in 1984 and,
> since then, the subject has blossomed enormously with researchers from a
> variety of disciplines (economics, psychology, political science, maths,
> etc) investigating different games.
>
> I described the Public Goods Game recently (FW, "The Science of Fairness",1
> February), taken from an article by Sigmund, Fehr and Novak in January's
> issue of Scientific American. Because this is of direct relevance to
> welfare benefits, I think this particular game will be of great
> significance in influencing government policy in future years.
>
> One economist I have a great deal of time for, Andrew Oswald, together with
> Daniel Zizzo have been investigating a game summarised in this week's
> Economist which might interest some FWers. It doesn't seem to have a name
> so far, so I'm calling it the Poppy Game for our purposes.
>
> Most games that I've read about tend to confirm the view that each
> individual is basically selfish but also has a 'reserve' of altruism which,
> if exercised in prescribed conditions, helps others, and ultimately
> himself. Altruism doesn't necessarily conflict with self-care. However, the
> Poppy Game gives a much more gloomy view of our nature -- though it has
> resonances with the findings of anthropology about the importance of rank
> in human society. This is something else that economics has yet to take on
> board.
>
> <<<<
> The economics of envy
> RICH BASHING
>
> Adam Smith famously argued that an invisible hand of self-interest guides
> markets to beneficial results. Today, rational and unemotional agents,
> rather than altruistic angels, lie at the centre of most equation-choked
> economic theories. But a new paper, "Are People Willing to Pay to reduce
> Others' Incomes?" in the February issue of "Annales d'Economie et de
> Statistique", suggests that Smith should have paid more heed to another
> hand: the one that cuts down tall poppies.
>
> Daniel Zizzo of Oxford University and andrew oswalkd of Warwick University
> crafted a series of experiemtns in which groups of four people were given
> nearly equal sums of money. The four had to gamble with their new wealth in
> random, computerised bets; two came out each time with more cash, and two
> with less.
>
> Richer or poorer, each was then given the chance to spend his money to
> reduce the take of his fellow subjects. There was no prospect that it would
> make him any richer. Indeed, it would cost him anything from 2 to 25 cents
> for every dollar destroyed that belonged to his fellow players.
>
> Economic man would surely never spend his money merely to hurt others,
> while leaving himself poorer? The professors were shocked to find that
> even at the price of 25 cents for every dollar burnt, 62% of the
> participants paid for the privilege of impoverishing their peers. What
> accounts for this?
>
> One answer could be the players' sense of fairness. another, of course,
> could be envy or Schadenfreude. The poor souls who lose some of their
> initial wealth like to burn the undeserving who receive a lot. No surprise
> to novelists. But the idea that man is a social animal, more concerned with
> relative rank and status than with absolute well-being, sits awkwardly with
> economics.
>
> Even the rich winners in the experiment like to see others taken down a
> peg; they destroy the wealth of the rich and poor alike. The authors
> speculate that the plutocrats expect the plebians, out of jealousy, to
> destroy their wealth. Pre-emptive retaliation preserves their rank. Nothing
> irrational about that.
> >>>>
> �The Economist 16 February 2002)
>
>
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>
> __________________________________________________________
> "Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in
> order to discover if they have something to say." John D. Barrow
> _________________________________________________
> Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> _________________________________________________
>
