Taking Back Oakland
But the most important point, I think, is this: when we left the Oakland Public Library, the last speaker’s last words (after making as clear as possible to the crowd that we were marching to liberate Oscar Grant plaza from massed riot cops, and telling people who couldn’t be down for that to stay at the library) were something along the lines of “No matter what happens, this is only the beginning of a long struggle.” At the time, I was worried. He said that after this march, we should meet at 14th and Broadway every day at six p.m., from now on, and take “whatever space we can.” But before the police tear gassed a non-violent protest, I was not confident that this thing would continue, was worried that today would be not the beginning but the ending. It didn’t seem like much of a strategy, and without the camp to give the movement a center, well, I was worried. “Whatever space we can” is not likely to be much. But now, who knows? I’m ready to occupy some space. So I’ll see you at 14th and Broadway, today at six.
CBO gets it: inequality is the issue!
This morning, news consumers woke up to news that the Congressional Budget Office has found that the "top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation's income over the last three decades," while incomes have stagnated for the working classes. Much of this, the CBO found, is the result of conservative government policies that are deliberately less redistributive than the policies of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when the class gap was far less extreme.
At the same time, news consumers also got a look this morning at the latest public attitudes on economic policy. As it turns out, the American mainstream strongly supports economic populism, including higher taxes on the wealthy, more public investment in job creation, and in general, policies that would ensure that American wealth is "more evenly distributed among more people."
Cooperation, evolution, and reproduction
Why did evolution give us sexual reproduction? Why does evolution give us cooperation? These questions bug me today because the standard explanations don't make sense, don't cover the whole ground in my mind.
Cooperation first. It seems strange that we would, as highly evolved beings etc., be absolutely unable to act with rational self-interest in even the most basic of controlled settings. As a rule, we fail to take the lion's share when it s ripe for grabbing, we act out of spite even it means destroying our own gains in the process, and just generally fail to observe even the mot basic of the behavioral prescriptions from economic textbooks.
We, in short, cooperate. By spite we reinforce ideas that others ought to be sharing well with us, and by sharing we avoid the guilt that comes from sacrificing these ideas on the altar of self-interest.
Nature knows something we don't: it knows that self-interest is inefficient. It knew that economics was wrong long before we did. It knows that we have got to work together, even when it means sacrifice without recompense, and it seems to have taken upon itself the task of enforcing that cooperation even she we ourselves are unable to.
Take sexual reproduction. It's a process that requires a hell of a lot of cooperation, but not for the obvious reasons. Nature has, for its part, made pretty sure that in order to be liked well enough to be thought of as mating material, one has to be, to name just a few: generous, amiable, compassionate, available... You know the drill. These are self-sacrificing attributes. You're expected to put your partner equal to or ahead of yourself.
If nature thought that economics was right, it would let us love a little easier. But we have a sexual reproduction mechanism, and now there is a real, biological-evolutionary requirement that people be generally cooperative. Sexual evolution - and this is crucial - is biased towards cooperation. Evolution, in just about every functioning organism in this planet, wants - needs - us to cooperate, in irrational, sacrificial, and after all collectively (although not always mutually) beneficial ways.
Quote & commentary: ‘Blindness’
By Jose Saramago:
The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and always has existed, it was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quaternary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of blood and the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror that turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally tying to deny.
This commentary caught my eye as a perfect illustration of an idea that I've been pondering since I attended a talk by Dan Ariely on human irrationality and one by Paul Zak on human trust. Zak claims a genetic basis for 'moral sentiments'; his research has demonstrated that the presence of a particular hormone causes humans to engage in more trusting behavior. Ariely has studied the various conditions under which humans lie, cheat, and steal, when they think they can get away with it, and what changes their behavior even when the real consequences remain unchanged. We have an enormous set of functions that are outside our conscious control; some make important strategic decisions for us, some communicate information that we wish to hide.
We are not by any stretch perfectly rational; but I argue that we have an emergent collective rationality. So many of our challenges require us to be vulnerable to the whims of others; they require us to trust each other above and beyond what strategic assessment would permit. So our individual irrationalities are designed to enable collective rationality. In this passage, our eyes automatically communicate our intentions. A rational agent might like to lie before committing a crime; but one who is forced to wear his intention on his face is presumably much less likely to even contemplate theft, as he knows the look of larceny will be plainly visible.
Our cooperative biology needs to be complemented by a cooperative economy. A pure free market system would prevent maximum prosperity for the same reason a purely rational physiology would. Socially-motivated regulatory mechanisms can and should make our world greater the same way socially-motivated biological restrictions do.