My review of Pascal Boyer

I write,

Boyer writes,

… the economy or society as a whole is construed as a gigantic collective action, to which everyone contributes in one way or other, and from which they may receive rewards.
… humans do not generally believe that any individual’s contribution could possibly be hundreds or thousands of times greater than anyone else’s.

This reinforces the instinct that economic inequality must be derived from power rather than from merit.

I found Minds Make Societies to be highly valuable, and I am disappointed that it seems to have been mostly overlooked. Don’t overlook my review.

13 thoughts on “My review of Pascal Boyer

  1. Maybe I am wrong about this, but I have gotten the impression that the public is okay with inequality that comes from entrepreneurs building companies that produce real things or services. They are much less supportive of inequality resulting from differential wage rates coming from established companies and professions. But maybe I am projecting my own views onto the public?

    • The public comfort level with wealth seems a lot more closely related to how cool (famous, prestigious, powerful, high-status, “on the right team”, etc.) the particular rich people in question are. Consider modern celebrities: people are fine with Kylie Jenner making a billion dollars, and, well, what exactly has she built? Call it “the fanboy test”.

      A lot of rich people and companies have noticed this, and have adopted similar reputation management / PR strategies to try to stay cool and famous and conspicuously on the right team, which in practice means they get a pass from the usual resentment, vilification, and demonization game in which wealth is presumed to be ill-gotten unless proven otherwise.

      Having fanboys is so important and valuable in this and other regards that the benefit makes it worth saying and doing conspicuously outrageous things as part of the calculated public performance that make you look like a cool hero or champion to them, even if it has other major costs.

      • Yes.

        Political polarization is undermining a 99%-style disdain for the rich in general. People are lining up behind their favorite rich folk, defending them from being dragged through the mud by rival political teams. Complain about the Koch brothers and it’s a red flag for someone who identifies with Republicans for reasons unrelated to $; the reverse for Soros.

        The new – as opposed to old – gilded age is going to progress unobstructed because people on the ground are directing more rage at others on the ground than they do those flying high above in private jets.

  2. I think the left values intention more than outcome, so while it might be possible for an individual to contribute 1,000 more productivity than the average, it is not possible for them to contribute 1,000 more effort.

  3. I’m wondering what the point is to an endless series of posts on the various ways underlying human social instincts distort rational thinking. At some point, doesn’t this just make things worse? Is there any benefit to society to continue to propagate these ideas?

    While there has always been people in the world that have had these insights on how to manipulate others, we are now seeing an explosion of these discussions, and the inevitable widespread normalization of manipulation over utility. Every larger company behaves this way. Most politicians behave this way, not just occasionally, but almost full time.

    The result seems to be that we now live in a world where too many people know these tricks. My only hope is that we may eventually exhaust the marginal utility of such stuff, and find that the only worthwhile utility is in pursuit of rational principles.

  4. Morse, Edison, Nyquist, Hartley, Shannon, Franklin, Gibbs, Henry, Coulomb, Maxwell and so one, they were not adding by the thousands, they were, amongst themselves, competing to hammer to hammer out the small margins, but fairly obvious science routes.

    Remove Samuel Morse, he would have been replaced by Baudot, if not Maxwell, the Henry; and so on. We look at one single statistic since Morse, data rates have gone up exponentially, mostly without fail. Long term growth is a stymied theory because once the electron was a manageable, then everything was in industry standard, a sort of Moore’s Law for digital systems since 1820. Something fore ordained once a species discovered the electron.

  5. Arnold,

    In your essay at the embedded link, you write:

    “I found the chapter on economics and our ideas of social justice to be particularly convincing. It turns out that, although his name does not appear in the index, research over the past 50 years or so has confirmed Friedrich Hayek’s belief that human intuition was formed to deal with a more primitive environment.”

    Are evolutionary-psychology explanations of attitudes about social justice well supported by empirical research (including novel, testable predictions)? Or are such explanations mainly speculative?

    The examples you adduce are plausible; i.e., they cohere with our general knowledge (our prior beliefs). They don’t depend on ad-hoc assumptions. They don’t seem like just-so stories.

    But ‘plausible’ is less than ‘convincing.’ If the reduction of ideology to evolutionary psychology is to be convincing, it must meet the empirical standards of science.

    I will have to read Pascal Boyer’s book!

  6. “In the formative era we were faced with imminent threats, particularly from predatory animals. This gave a survival advantage to people who could recognize and communicate about threats.”

    This formulation is a bit too Lamarckian for me. I’d turn it around. Evolution favored those people for who for whom threats were placed at the top of their mental in-boxes. Messages that take advantage of this mental hard-wiring are more likely to get attention.

  7. While this note adds some more to the discussion, I think a key issue is the difference between intentions and results. Most anti-PC folk attack the PC-despots because of their results, not their intentions.
    This doesn’t convince them; in fact, it seems to make them feel more strongly that their good intentions are even more important. So this adds some description to this problem, but not much on the solution.

    The “Camping Trip vs Woolen Coat” economics was excellent; funny I missed it a few years ago when it was fresh. Camping Trimp economics (Trip, I know, but slipped up twice, too close to Trump?) seems an excellent explanation for the support of socialism, as well as why socialism fails “when one runs out of Other People’s Money” — when the rich endowment is used up. Like in Venezuela.
    http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2015/Klingcamping.html

    We more rational folk who have questions about how to improve Economics must also struggle with branding, and phrases.
    Economic activity involves complex patterns of specialization, production methods, trade, and innovation. Economists study the evolution of economic activity.
    This is a bit long.
    My suggestion:
    Economics studies specialization, production, and trade, plus innovation over time.

    Sub-titles or secondary notes can expand on complexity & patterns, perhaps also the difference between economists, what they study, and economic activity itself.
    ‘Patterns of economic activity are so complex, economists simplify in varying ways in order to suggest policy, yet because the patterns are always changing, all models are a bit off.’

    Boyer: “economic inequality must be derived from power rather than from merit.” This “you don’t deserve it” is important, but only half of the critique, there is also a huge amount of not-fully deserved luck. The key point is that riches from power and luck are not as deserved as from merit, and thus less acceptable.

    Merit also includes “moral” merit — and AOC’s claims about being “morally right” are crucial to the evaluation of deserved or undeserved wealth; tho less so about poverty. Her socialistic “morality” is directly coming from Camp-Trip econ, as well as Boyer’s point about judging “people by their apparent concern for our relationship:”

    So the PR scam is making the select rich appear to have concern about the relationship.

    [Arnold — you would have much better relationships with us, your reader/ commenters, if you would more often add your own conversational thoughts to these comments on your posts.]

  8. I read your review again, and ordered Pascal Boyer’s book.

    In the meanwhile, it occurs to me that there is a trade-off between explanatory scope and explanatory power in evolutionary psychology. Any cause that shapes a wide array of social phenomena (explanatory scope) can’t specifically determine any phenomenon (explanatory power). For example, an instinct to focus on threats might help to explain the Salem Witch Trials (1692-93), The Great Fear (France 1789), and Fake News (2017); but it won’t begin to explain why any of the events occurred as they did (who, what, when, where, how).

    Moreover, evolutionary psychology’s explanatory scope isn’t as wide as advertised. If I have understood correctly, the theory of evolutionary psychology predicts that people, everywhere and always, tend to believe that inequality springs from power rather than merit. But people, in different times and places, have deemed inequality meritorious in vast areas of social life; for example, patriarchy (sociology), hereditary monarchy in feudal societies (politics), slavery from Ancient Athens to the Antebellum South (the economy), Papal Infallibility (religion), cult of the leader (totalitarian societies), élite universities (high culture), agonistic sports (popular culture), and so on.

    Thus my priors are: evolutionary psychology is onto something, but tries to explain too much, and hardly explains historical specifics.

    And I wonder how best to square evolutionary psychology and methodological individualism. Are human cognitive instincts soft constraints on individual decision-making in complex societies? Or do they shape salience in social cognition? Or do they defy the distinction between cognition and motivation (i.e., between beliefs and preferences) at the core of modern choice theory?

  9. I am tempted to say nothing explains historical specifics. Why did WW I begin in August, 1914? Why not September, or May 1915, or never? The more I read about WW I, the less clear the answers become.

    • Indeed, causal explanation of historical events is difficult and elusive.
      Nonetheless, historians fare better than evolutionary psychologists at the task.

      A causal explanation of an historical event identifies antecedents that increased the probability that the event would occur.

      How might an evolutionary psychologist explain WWI? Perhaps she would point to the mismatch between cognitive instincts, which evolved when humans were organized in bands of hunters gatherers, and which persist, on the one hand; and the scale and complexity of nation-states, empires, and industrial economies, on the other. In a word, she might point to what Arnold Kling calls behavioral meta-economics. It does seem plausible that such cognitive instincts increase the chance of major wars. But evolutionary psychology sheds little light on why there was mostly peace among the Great Powers for a century after Napoleon, then a world war.

      By contrast, historians identify various antecedents, each of which plausibly increased the probability of WWI; for example, formation of rival alliances (The Triple Alliance and The Entente), exhaustion of non-rivalrous colonization, new technologies, growth in State capacity, unraveling of the Ottoman empire, emergence of secessionist nationalism (unlike previous aggregative nationalism of Italy and Germany), and assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo.

      Reasonable people may differ about the degree of explanatory power of historians’ accounts of the causes of WWI. Cognitive humility might be in short supply among historians. But historians’ accounts, however incomplete and imperfect, have much more explanatory power than does evolutionary psychology.

      BTW, one trick is to eschew the so-called ‘benefit of hindsight’ in historical explanation. The benefit of hindsight is a curse for historians, who must strive to put themselves in the shoes of myriad individuals who made history without knowing where their actions would lead (even though many historical protagonists believed that they would master events). ‘History is the result of human action, not of any human design.’

  10. An example of an excellent historical explanation that also incorporates cognitive psychology is Arnold Kling’s account of the 2008 financial crisis: https://www.econlib.org/cee/2008FinancialCrisis/

    Dr. Kling identifies antecedents, psychological propensities, institutions, and social mechanisms, each of which increased the probability of the 2008 financial crisis (when, where, how, and why it occurred).

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