| | Ed, the coin has two sides. The forced taxation and warfare - looting your neighbors at home and abroad - is the consequence of following a policy of altruism. To me, that is the reverse or tails side. The heads side (the obverse) is that the largesse is bad investing. The booty is given to people who do not use it well. For one thing, it typically comes in the form of consumables, not capital goods. In that primitive tribe, the freebies are food and maybe ornament, but not big chunks of chert for knapping axes and points.
In our society, the largesse that causes taxes and wars takes the form of low interest rates, laws restricting your competitors, leasing public lands, and city bond issues to build stadiums. I watched an OWS-themed video and one of the protest signs read "My taxes are not venture capital." That is more cogent than he knew on several levels.
Also, you do acknowledge that controlled altruism could take 100 generations to ruin a society. That is 3000 years. We have survived a lot of altruism since recovering from the Bronze Age Collapse. I do point out that the researcher assumed that altruism is inherited in a single allele and that reproduction is asexual. Aside from the fact that you read into this "study" something you already believe, I am not sure what it actually proves.
The study also seems more to demonstrate under what conditions altruism is an effective group strategy. That is the purpose of course, survival of the group at the expense of (sacrificed) individuals.
[The study assumes that] "Groups are sufficiently large that the increased probability of group success in conflict that is associated with an additional altruistic member does not compensate the individual for the cost of the behavior in question. Thus, adopting the altruistic behavior decreases the expected fitness of an individual (by comparison to an individual eschewing the behavior) while increasing the expected fitness of other group members. ... This paradoxical role of war arises because, in the absence of within-group positive assortment, altruism will suffer adverse within-group selection. But it might be sustained by the between-group selection pressures that warfare introduces if altruists willingly fight on behalf of others in their group so that otherwise comparable groups with many altruists tend to prevail in intergroup contests.In game theoretic terms, defense or predation is a public good (participating is an n-person prisoner’s dilemma) in which those who participate confer benefits on their fellow group members at a cost to themselves.
"But taking all of the evidence into account, it seems likely that, for many groups and for substantial periods of human prehistory, lethal group conflict may have been frequent enough to support the proliferation of quite costly forms of altruism. This might help explain why altruism often does not extend across group boundaries, and how this kind of “parochial altruism” may have evolved in humans (13) and perhaps even other animals."
Science 324, 1293 (2009); Samuel Bowles. "Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?"
Another fundamental problem is assuming that the "primitive" people of our time are "like" the hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene/Holocene. The author, Samuel Bowles, does acknowledge that limitation. No society is truly static. And, perhaps more to the point, as in the case of the Australians, hunter-gatherers are marginalized to the least desirable environments. The world of 10,000 YA was quite a bit different for hunter-gatherers, a vertiable Eden perhaps, hence our myths of that Garden.
In the opening post you wrote: "If we were a nation in constant war, then an aggregate tax rate of 20.7% might be justified somehow. If we were a peaceful nation, even an aggregate tax rate of 5% would be potentially unjustifiable."
Again, to me, this speaks to the direction of the causal arrow. Once you malinvest over 5% your only alternative is to take the difference from someone else. That said, though, I agree that the drumbeating and flagwaving of warfare goes to justify the necessary looting required by the 21% altruism rate. After looting the gold here, after eight years of the New Deal, President Roosevelt then had no choice but to loot the UK, Germany, and Japan, though admittedly, they were slim pickings.
Finally, in the opening you also noted: "This is based on empirics rather than on an a priori moral argument. I prefer the moral argument, but the scientific argument against altruism is mounting."
We all have our modes of thought and reality is seamless, so it might not matter ultimately how you approach a problem. I trust that you agree that the moral argument and the empirical facts must support each other by establishing the same truth. Personally, a red flag went up for me when I read that. I might agree on an emotional level that I like "theory" more than "facts" because theory explains facts. Absent the facts, though, you have nothing.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 8/14, 6:57am)
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