Self-recommending. I went to the event with high expectations, and I was not disappointed. I will post on the substance once I have watched a re-run. Each of the speakers had problems. Jonathan Haidt was flustered by technical difficulties which delayed the start of his talk. Leda Cosmides had a sore throat from a cold. And John Tooby reminded me of Paul Samuelson, in that it appeared that his mind was working much faster than he could talk, giving the listener the feeling of missing out on insights that were in the speaker’s head but never made it out of his mouth.
In general, I wish the event had been longer.
FREE MONEY! is always attractive, and seems to work out, until Other People’s Money runs out.
OPM addictions don’t end well, usually.
Tho Sweden and Denmark seem to have been successful at looking into the abyss and drawing back, on the socialism, anyway.
Most “Scandinavian Model” socialism enthusiasts seem to assume that the good results over the last 2 decades were due to 70s socialism, or more, rather than the reduction of socialism/ increase in market orientation and freedom in the 80s & 90s.
This should be far better documented.
Wannabee elite rulers almost always like the idea of socialism, with themselves among the “Leading Party” folk.
While it’s certainly a big piece to the puzzle, there are still a few big problems with building a case for the allure of Socialist ideas mostly out of the evolutionary psychology of primitive moral impulses adaptive in the ancestral forager environment.
Mostly, this doesn’t explain the various discrepancies we see in professed adherence to these ideas between classes, professions, etc. and changes in the mix over time. Nozick speculated about infamously prevalent anti-capitalist sentiments amongst intellectuals, for example. (To be fair, John Tooby also mentions the important incentives of power-seekers and the status-drives of intellectuals, and their tendency to engage in ‘Nirvana Fallacy’, romantic, utopian wishful thinking.)
Of course many poor laborers are easily seduced by the prospect of rationalized grabbing and socially-acceptable theft that can be framed as some kind of just exception to the typical moral principle with the minimum amount of hand-waving. But the motivation changes as one goes up to food chain, and one gets closer to the ‘political struggle between elites’ tier.
Also we have a bit of a mystery as to how and why these impulses were ever overcome in the eventual establishment of civilizations with state-protected institutions of private property and the eventual evolution of other, more more modern institutions (such as collective business organizations) and social patterns involving trade and wealth that we would now recognize as capitalistic.
Did the moral impulses diminish in certain sets of humans, or tolerance for inequalities increase, or did cultural techniques and social technologies evolve to effectively suppress these impulses, as per Henrich’s The Secret of our Success? And if so, then why did they weaken later on, and with apparently spread across the developed world in a viral manner at the dawn of industrialization?
After all, if we buy the idea that some forager moral impulses were largely based on the need for risk-pooling amongst hunters, then we might expect that to change once farming, shepherding, and stable settlements emerged, which provided the possibility of preservation of food and (potentially unequal) storage of wealth. Well, that happened to some populations at least 10,000 years ago, which is plenty of time for more human biological evolution above the neck to take place, even in regard to these moral impulses.
The speakers went through their lectures talking about all humanity as if psychological differences between population groups were nonexistent or negligible. But it is well-known and non-controversial that mixes of dominating personality traits and types differ a great deal between countries (e.g. introversion v. extroversion) and so do self-reported levels of happiness. How do we know that these moral impulses don’t vary too?
Think about trying to explain the demographic transition through evolutionary psychology. Obviously we are adapted to have sex drives that optimize reproductive fitness, and primitive or traditional cultures are characterized by plenty of pregnancies (if not necessarily plenty of children surviving to adulthood) and human population expansion up to the carrying capacity of local circumstances.
But the demographic transition began before modern chemical birth control and there have been disparate fertility rates between classes for a long time.
And while it tends to be a radioactive topic nowadays, there is the question of where non-normative sexual inclinations and behaviors come from and how the frequencies may vary over time, given the obvious intense pressures selecting for maximum heterosexual fecundity.
So even for the the most core and ancient of all evolutionary urges (sexually reproducing animals go back about half a billion years), in humans, cultural and ‘economic’ forces still seem to have enormous influence on whether and how these impulses manifest themselves.