Social analysis consilient with biology

Building analysis of social dynamics from a biological basis—plus noticing how many folk are nowadays paid to fail.

A living organism uses information and resources to keep itself functioning.¹ Information is:

Whatever is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.

Things that improve an organism’s functioning are gains. Things that impair its functioning are losses.

If it loses too much, it dies. To keep itself functioning, it must keep itself above the threshold of death. The closer a potential loss gets to causing death, the more threatening it is. In economic terms, losses have increasing marginal cost: each increment of loss is more threatening than the previous increment.

(One can think of bankruptcy as financial death. The existence of such thresholds generates non-linear patterns.)

Since natural selection works through which organisms successfully reproduce, it operates via lineages—descent from individual organisms. Sexually-reproducing species add in sexual selection—selection for successfully mating with an organism with the other-but-compatible gametes. By complicating the reproduction process, sexual selection provides a filter that makes investment in increased organism complexity sustainable. Such increased complexity enables wider range of responses to circumstances. Greater genetic variability facilitates selection to reinforce successful strategies.

Wikimedia commons.

Sexual selection can extend to death being a cost of reproduction—as in a male mantis offering his body for the consumption of the female mantis in order to reproduce. Nevertheless, there are still thresholds below which the organism cannot afford to go in order to keep functioning and to reproduce.

About gains

Gains function differently from losses. As gains increase, their marginal gain decreases: each increment of gain is typically less beneficial than the previous increment.

Living organisms are structured: their basic building blocks are cells organised to keep the organism functioning. Cancer cells defect from such cooperation.

The structure of living organisms constrains how much gain is possible. The more gain, the more it pushes against the constraints of structure. This then generates internal signals. Thus, for instance, the more you eat, the more satiation you are likely to feel for a given level of food bulk and nutrition. Hence, each increments of gain provides less benefit—both experientially and structurally—than the previous increment.

The implication of this is that losses (threats) loom larger in decision-making than gains (benefits).

Moreover, satiation mechanisms are important for the survival of organisms even beyond not straining internal structures. Living organisms have to manage a range of threats and opportunities. Success in one dimension raises the salience of another. Satiation is also a signal to move onto the next thing—such as sleep. (A serious problem with modern industrialised food is that our taste buds can be “gamed” in ways not conducive to metabolic health.)

What is selected for in natural and sexual selection is lineage resilience—ability to continue to function across the range of circumstances that the members of the lineage have to deal with so as to successfully reproduce and so keep the lineage going through time. The ability to “take the win” from some gain, and then move on, is a survival mechanism.

Thus, even if the reality of the constraints of structure did not create declining marginal benefit, it is a selection advantage to have satiation mechanisms. Indeed, to have satiation mechanisms that kick in before the structures of the organism become stressed, so that the organism is able to deal with whatever comes next.

Efficiency and efficacy

Efficiency is how much output can be generated for given inputs (or vice versa). Efficacy is how useful is that output.

The problems of shifting salience in what matters, and limitations of structure, for achieving resilient efficacy affect patterns of efficiency. Investing in the efficiency of one system competes with, even inhibits, investing in the efficiency of another. We can see this clearly in perceptual systems. Species invest in balances of perceptual efficacy that vary between species.

An aquatic species living in darkness will cease investing in eyes. Raptors will invest strongly in eyes, but not so much in smell. Efficiency in various systems is invested in to varying degrees to produce the balance of efficacy that proves resilient for a lineage. Biological organisms invest in “good enough” efficiency for “good enough” efficacy: we might even call it satisficing efficiency and satisficing efficacy.

So, all organisms exist in multidimensional action-spaces with shifting salience of threats and opportunities. Hence, due to limited capacity to absorb and use gains, and the existence of failure thresholds, gains will show decreasing marginal benefit, losses increasing marginal cost.

Consciousness

Organisms also have limited cognitive—i.e. information processing—and attention capacities. They will also have limited perceptual capacity and attention.

Consciousness is a mechanism for directing perceptual and cognitive attention. This is obviously necessary for organisms that need to scan their environment for threats and opportunities so that they can direct their actions to respond to the same. Hence, (mobile) animals need consciousness, (immobile) plants do not.

Self-consciousness is required to assess packages of information. Organisms that internally process and package information to a sufficient level of complexity need to be self-conscious. The more important communication becomes to subsistence and reproduction strategies, the more self-consciousness is required.

The cognitive capacity of the genus Homo increased over time. First, the returns from technology—stone and wooden tools, fire—increased. The more learning and cognitive capacity came to be relied upon, the more biologically expensive children became, as it took longer and longer for offspring to reach subsistence adulthood. Subsistence adulthood is being able to regularly forage at least as many calories as one consumes.

All this drove more and more cooperative reproduction and subsistence strategies. As offspring became more and more biologically expensive, more and more risks were transferred away from child-rearing and resources to child-rearing. Such capacities expanded cognitive capacities—notably normative capacities—that then enabled the development of various social technologies: aka the extended phenotype.

Homo sapiens developed expanded status strategies to facilitate cooperation. Dominance behaviour was actively suppressed and instead prestige—deference to demonstrated skill and effort, including undertaking risks—and propriety—deference to norm adherence—developed. This has enable cooperative status strategies promoting networking and in-group/out-group differentiation. Stigma developed as a mechanism of social coherence.²

Bounded rationality

Given limited attention and information-processing capacities, even a being with unusually high cognitive capacity is going to be boundedly-rational. That is, they will not maximally calculate every action but use heuristics, framings, habits, etc to economise on cognitive effort and attention. They will satisfice—do well enough to be able to move onto the next thing—rather than maximise—get the absolutely best response to all available information.

Social technologies may, however, enable agents to more closely approximate maximising rationality. For instance, by processing distributed information into prices.

Optimal behaviour for boundedly-rational beings with limited cognitive and attention capacity is to adopt different strategies according to capacities—including learnt capacities—and circumstances. Cultures are, in effect, assemblies of life strategies. They generate, transmit and reinforce particular framings/patterns of belief (schemas) and patterns of action (scripts). Such reinforcement comes from what registers as success in those cultures, the various normative social technologies—customs, conventions, social norms—the importance and types of various social connections, and so on.

Patterns of risk

The main concern in risk management is to not fall below some terminating threshold, such as death or bankruptcy. A classic differentiation in social strategies to deal with risk is distribution of risk across time—such as by borrowing and storage—or across space: such as by dispersal, whether of hunting grounds, social connections, fields, supply sources or whatever.

So, peasants who confront higher levels of risk across time—e.g. risks in storage, high interest rates for borrowing—will tend to disperse their fields to cope with variations in soil quality and local rainfall. That is, they accept lower average returns—due to foregoing economies of scale—to decrease the risk of falling below the starvation threshold. They accept a lower average level of production in order to have less variance in production.

As a society becomes safer, and interest rates fall, there will be a shift from distributing risk across space—via field dispersal—to distributing risk across time—i.e., by borrowing and increased use of storage. There will then be consolidation into larger fields and shift of commons—previously operating as a shared dispersal mechanism³ —into more productive private ownership.

The lower interest rates are—so lower the cost of transmitting resources through time—and the higher the level of world trade—i.e., cheaper and safer are resource-connections across space—the longer and thinner (i.e., efficiency-maximising) supply chains can be expected to be. There can be expected to be more use of long-distance contractural arrangements and of trade financing.

The higher the interest rates are—so the higher the cost of transmitting resources through time—and the lower the level of trade—i.e., the riskier and more expensive are resource-connections across space—the shorter and “fatter” (resilience-focused) supply chains can be expected to be. In particular, there will be much greater emphasis on direct control of key inputs.

A high cost of time means assets are more scarce, so there will be more investment in persistent benefits from those assets that are built. They will therefore be built to last—i.e., be robust—and to be beautiful.

A low cost of time means assets are more plentiful, so there will be less investment in making assets robust and beautiful. On the other hand, that lack of scarcity comes from more investment in creating and acquiring assets. The cheaper the cost of time, the cheaper/safer it is to transmit resources through time, so the higher the expected future value of an asset.

This is why time-discount rates—how to value future benefits—are an inverse of interest rates. The lower the interest rate, the greater the expected benefit, due to greater expected reliability in enjoying those benefits.

The question of the value of time, of the cost of moving resources through time—so delaying the benefit received from them—is mainly a matter of risk. The higher the expected return, the more risks can be managed. Nevertheless, such risks operate as a filter. It filters who is willing to take such risks, because it affects the rate at which agents and effort survive said risks.

Black markets notoriously have risks. They sort for who is willing to undertake such risks, as well as which agents, and which goods or services, survive such risks. (There may also be sorting for normative constraints, or the lack thereof.)

These filtering processes increase the value of what ends up getting through the filter and so be provided. This can generate large returns to such activity—see the drug cartels of Latin America. Most of those involved in supplying the markets for illegal narcotics don’t do all that well—even fatally badly—but some enjoy very large returns indeed.

Strategies

Agents who have limited cognitive and attention capacity—so limited capacity to acquire and use information—will generate a range of strategies. Over time there will be selection between those strategies.

The more able folk are to switch strategies, the more the selection will be on the strategies themselves. The less able folk are to switch strategies, the more selection will also be on the agents using particular strategies.

Homo sapiens are a self-conscious species with a much higher ability to develop and switch strategies than other species. Hence our ability to create an ever-expanding range of social niches, and to switch between them.

A key question is how agents—whether individuals, groups or organisations—experience the consequences of their strategies. If the operative feedbacks are limited to how they affect the agent, group or organisation regardless of costs to others, it is possible for strategies that prove ultimately disastrous for them and/or the wider society to be pursued—and pursued at scale—until some crucial threshold is breached, and collapse occurs. What feedbacks are operating on agents thus become crucial.

A key problem that organisations have to deal with is that the larger the scale on which they operate, the harder it is to judge the efficiency/efficacy profile within the organisation. Peacetime militaries can suffer this problem quite severely.

Bureaucracy

The great advantage of bureaucracy is that it regularises administration, enabling action at scale. It does so by breaking up actions into processes. These can become highly compartmentalised, and separated from outcomes. There is thus even greater difficulty in identifying efficiency/efficacy profiles within bureaucratised organisations.

What makes this difficulty worse, is that decision-making by bureaucrats within a bureaucracy naturally tends to select for strategies that generate benefits for bureaucrats, rather than benefits for the bureaucracy’s ostensible purposes. Bureaucracy also tend to select for personalities that are able to more effectively operate within the bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is not some machine that you set up and it just then runs as set up. Bureaucracies are social mechanism full of biological beings, so bureaucracies evolve over time. Unfortunately, their natural tendency is to evolve to be increasingly dysfunctional.

Bureaucracy tends to select for inefficiency, for more resources to go to the bureaucrats. It tends to select for controlling and suppressing information, to increase the authority of the bureaucrats. It tends to select against accountability, to make the position of bureaucrats safer and more comfortable. It tends to select for more manipulative personalities, as they are more able to play bureaucratic games to their own advantage.

Moreover, it can be hard to accurately transmit knowledge, especially implicit or tacit knowledge, when, for instance, procedures are more salient than the original reason for them or formal training replaces mentorship. Such problems in transmitting knowledge is part of what futurist Samo Burja calls the succession problem. Historian of philosophy Etienne Gilson (1884-1978) was gesturing to this when he said that the conclusions of the master are the premises of the disciple: there can be a loss of nuance, of the complexities, that the master was aware of but the disciples are likely not.

The natural tendency, therefore, is for bureaucratically delivered goods or services to deteriorate over time. The main reason that corporations fail over time is that their internal bureaucracy becomes increasingly less functional, until one of those terminal thresholds is breached, and the corporation folds, goes bankrupt or is taken over.

It is not that corporate bureaucracies are inherently more functional—more efficient and efficacious—than those of non-profits or states. (The classic “bean-counter” mistake is to confuse efficiency with efficacy and cost with both.) Rather, the selection pressures against inefficiency and lack of efficacy are relatively stronger on private firms.

There used to be quite strong selection pressures on European states, due to the high level of military competition between them. Hence Europe had hundreds of polities in 1300 and less than 30 in 1914. States operating in more peaceful environments have weaker selection pressures.

As for the selection pressures on non-profits, they can easily be (socially) perverse. A solved problem puts them out of business, unless they can find another problem. Hence, gay and lesbian non-profits have pivoted to Trans issues. Hence also the “homelessness industrial complex” on the US West Coast, where non-profits and their personnel are very well paid—provided the problem of homelessness persists.

Similarly, it is in the interest of activists who purport to advocate on behalf of Jews to have Jews be as worried as possible—hence the nonsense about “the Holocaust can happen anywhere”, “the Holocaust starts with words”, “the Holocaust was a unique evil”, none of which is true. Instead, the feral, censorious activism of such lobbyists—who pioneered modern cancel culture—has alienated more and more people, leaving Jews increasingly friendless.

The welfare state also includes perverse incentives. Thus, public health gets more resources, and greater authority, the sicker the general population gets.⁴ Economist Anthony de Jasay (1925-2019) was onto something when he argued for a Gresham’s Law of Institutions—i.e., social selection for self-serving institutions.

It is frightening to contemplate how many people and organisations in contemporary welfare states are, in effect, paid to fail. Managers that profit from increasing the expense and reach of management; non-profits that profit from problems being as large and permanent as possible; welfare state organisations that profit from entrenched, or expanding, social pathologies.

A fundamental social technology to enable greater cooperation that Homo sapiens developed was normative capacity—extending to the willingness to punish, to shame and shun, even drive away or kill, norm violators. But biological and social evolution does not stop. We also developed the capacity to game norms, to rationalise and moralise our self-interest, and the capacity for self-deception to do so more effectively. The last being greatly aided by only a fraction of our cognition being self-conscious—which is why ideas can “pop into one’s head”.

Self-deceptive rationalising moralisers

Our ability to generate technologies—both social and material—to operate at scale can readily outpace our capacity to police behaviour in pro-social directions. Hence the grim history of predatory government and how much we are currently paying people and organisations to fail: to maintain, or even create, social dysfunction.

The paradox of polities

References

Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Christopher Boehm, “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy”, Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No.3. (Jun., 1993), pp. 227-254 (with Comments by Harold B. Barclay; Robert Knox Dentan; Marie-Claude Dupre; Jonathan D. Hill; Susan Kent; Bruce M. Knauft; Keith F. Otterbein; Steve Rayner and Reply by Christopher Boehm).

Eugene F. Fama and Michael C. Jensen, ‘Separation of Ownership and Control,’ Journal of Law and Economics, Vol.26, No.2, Corporations and Private Property: A Conference Sponsored by the Hoover Institution (Jun., 1983), 301-325.

Eugene F. Fama and Michael C. Jensen, ‘Agency Problems and Residual Claims,’ Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 26, No. 2, Corporations and Private Property: A Conference Sponsored by the Hoover Institution (Jun., 1983), 327-349.

J. Doyne Farmer, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World, Allen Lane, 2024.

Chris D. Frith, ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2012, 367, 2213–2223.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

F.A. Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society,’ The American Economic Review, 1945, 35, 519-530.

Anthony de Jasay, Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public Goods Problem, Liberty Fund, [1989] 2012.

D.N. McCloskey, ‘The Open Fields of England: Rent, Risk and the Rate of Interest, 1300-1815,’ in Galenson, D.W., (ed.) Markets in History: Economic Studies of the Past, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 5-51.

Raymond Noble, Denis Noble, Understanding Living Systems, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Martin A. Nowak, ‘Five rules for the evolution of cooperation,’ Science, 2006 December 8; 314(5805): 1560–1563.

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action, Cambridge University Press, [1990] 2011.

M. Sauder, F. Lynn, & J. M.  Podolny, ‘Status: Insights from organizational sociology,’ Annual Review of Sociology, (2012), 38, 267–283.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 36, March 2021, 100-136.

Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Two types of aggression in human evolution,’ PNAS January 9, 2018, Vol.115, No.2, 245–253.

1. In biologists Raymond and Denis Noble’s words, “Life is an integrative self-conserving entity.”

2. Stigma has not disappeared from contemporary Western society, it has merely shifted. Racism has become an enormous stigma, for example.

3. Such common fields—being common goods: that is non-excludable but rivalrous—often had well-established local rules for their management, as the work of Elinor Ostrom and her collaborators elucidated.

4. There were a lot of bureaucratic dysfunctions on display in public policy responses to the Covid pandemic: the threatening of clinicians to enforce conformity to bureaucratic messaging; the failure to focus on risk factors such as obesity; the denial of natural immunity through mandatory vaccination; the over-statement of risks to children and the metabolically healthy—all of which served one-size-fits-all policies that maximised bureaucratic authority while minimised dealing with awkward complexities. Hence, in Australia, approaching half of the excess death in 2021 were from non-Covid causes, while around a third were in 2022 and 2023. Victoria was the mainland State with the most severe lockdowns and suffered the highest rate of excess death, with non-Covid deaths being higher proportion of excess deaths than the national averages—half in 2021, 40 per cent in 2022 and 56 per cent in 2023. Moreover, that Covid deaths were “from or with Covid” means that some of them were due to public policy responses as well.