Adam Smith Argued that people when allowed to work on a system of free (unadulterated, un-stymied,) trade and allowed to pursue their own self interests would inadvertently produce the best economic society for all by virtue of the "invisible hand." What I think he understood and therefore knew he could not control is that man is fickle and rarely seeks after his own self-interests. This is the Tragedy of the Commons.
What is most of mankind's major "top-priority" self-interest? Life... maybe chocolate... Followed by happiness, which means time and money enough to not complain too much... basically. Yet, we do all sorts of things that oppose that concept completely... Right now I'm eating raw cookie dough, though the package warns me not to (yes, I'm too lazy to make cookie dough from scratch...) I also wanted to soak my sore body in a warm tub so I stripped the wires to my computer bare and perilously climbed into the sweet bubbly warmth (I like to make bubble beards, okay?). Why not be more careful? Cause I don't want too... right now... But isn't that against my wanting to live?
The point is that we often will quickly forget what is truly most important to us... that is our self-interest. Selfishness doesn't have to be incontinent. Ayn Rand's characters discover this principle in this style: If I want a faithful wife who loves me and is devoted to me than I will love her and be devoted fully. If I want to have the best business I will have the perfect balance of hardness and easiness, the perfect customer service, and I'll help others who will help me to be the best and most innovative. And so on...
The tragedy of the commons is this... Lets place common land for everyone to use and graze their sheep on as they choose. Selfish people think, "I don't care if we all ruin the common land as long as I don't have to use my own land until the common land is gone - that's free food for my sheep." The problem is that's not the true self interest!!! The true self interest would be, how do we use this land so that we have the lowest amount of cost for feeding of our sheep for the entire length of my sheep business (theoretically - forever).
Personally, I fell in love with Atlas Shrugged and the concept of capitalism, because I saw it as a very flexible system (one that easily engulfs the new business models of the social networking and open software generation). I see that all life can be circumscribed into this model of "economic" behavior... If we all followed this principle we would find that we would give to others more because they would value our input and return it in kind. Now, skeptics would say that this can never happen, but they are wrong - its commin' baby. I'd start now if I were U.
"we often will quickly forget what is truly most important to us... that is our self-interest. Selfishness doesn't have to be incontinent. Ayn Rand's characters discover this principle in this style: If I want a faithful wife who loves me and is devoted to me than I will love her and be devoted fully."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure pure self-interest is the best response, though. In the spirit of economic and certain philosophical veins, let's call happiness "utility"—utility being what you get from eating cookie dough, soaking in a tub, marrying someone, and so on. There's this branch of applied mathematics called "game theory" which essentially mathematically mapped out the choices one ought to make given the goal of maximizing a certain aspect of one's utility (the word "game" was used to describe a way of achieving a given goal). What the people who developed this theory found out was that in some cases people actually *minimized* their utility by acting out of pure self-interest—e.g. by cheating in sports games and so on. Out of this sprang something called "metagame theory", a revision, which concluded that utility is a combination of personal *and* group factors. In other words, as theorist Christopher Langan put it, "A full definition of 'self' must include all of the external relations tying the self to other selves at all levels of organization relevant to all possible games." He affirms that "The Golden Rule leads to a stratification of self" and maximizes not just one person's utility, but *all* people's utility.
I think the lesson of metagame theory is that traditional capitalistic and economic models actually *don't* maximize individual utility. What we ought to do is instead act in both our own self-interest *and* in everyone else's interest. The only way to do this is to see everyone else as literally ourselves, and act accordingly.
I noticed that you have a blog post about this - I think you ought to add some links to your posts so that we can get more information on Game theory and Metagame Theory
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