Meritocracy is not malevolent

Haven't done any posts on meritocracies for a while, but this Slow Boring piece is quite interesting.

For those unaware, I spent some considerable time investigating this in a series of simulations. I even got as far as writing a paper, but I just don't have the time to deal with the formal process of getting it into a publishable format, let alone handling the peer review experience. You can find a short summary here, or if anyone wants a copy of the full "paper", just ask.

Anyway, it seems to me that there are some very legitimate objections to the idea of a meritocracy :

• The flip side of awards based on merit is the implication of punishment based on failure (or at least the lack of rewards). Fear of punishment does work as an incentive in some cases, but by no means all, and there's a threshold : take too much from people and all you do is crush them. You can't pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you don't have any boots.
• Related : the mere notion of a meritocracy says nothing at all about the degree of inequality. It implies some, but that's all. If abilities follow a Gaussian distribution, then it follows that the most extreme talents are disproportionately rare and therefore command a highly non-linear premium, thus leading to potentially extreme inequality.
• Virtually all talents are in part natural. Is it fair to reward or punish people for things over which they have no control ? Nobody wants to be stupid or lazy, but some people are. The concept of meritocracy doesn't say much about how we should attempt to change people's characteristics.
• Material success requires material resources. Inherited wealth makes a mockery of the meritocratic ideal, since the child of a billionaire will find it far easier to start their own company than the child of a pauper no matter how gifted they are.
• A meritocracy in a free market leads to absurdities like kicking a ball around being valued manyfold times more than nursing skills, or marketing success being rewarded infinitely more than researching cleaner energy.

So a pure meritocracy is uncontestably a Bad Thing (see also Plato's Republic). Yet certain meritocratic ideals are equally uncontestably a Good Thing : if you have two otherwise equal candidates, you give the job to the more qualified. You give people a bonus when they go the extra mile. Unequal work demands unequal pay - it's just that this is far from the be-all and end-all of society. To have a truly just, fair system, you must give equal opportunities from the word go. You have to give people the best possible chance to improve themselves, not take so much that they're trapped in squalor. And you can't give people unequal pay for unequal work to an unlimited and unrestricted degree; giving people too much is as harmful as giving them too little.

Now, I agree with the Slow Boring author that very often that people do, in the real world, broadly tend to rise according to their qualifications. By and large, most professors of literature probably aren't bluffing their way through each day, most of the uber-wealthy technocrats are hardly stupid people who got a lucky break. You need some ability, except through lotteries and inheritance. And I agree that smart people are fully capable of making bad decisions... but I think on this point the author goes too far :

The people who work in private equity are very smart. Their job is to look for companies that, for whatever reason, are not being managed in a way that maximizes shareholder value. Then they take them over with borrowed money and rejigger operations so as to increase profits. In the case of nursing homes, it turns out that basically, if you give patients more drugs, you can get away with lower staffing levels, and then you can drain the resources that are freed up by that in various ways...  the point here is that things can go awry not despite, but because smart people are in charge.

Doctors are quite a bit smarter than the average American, which seems reasonable. Nobody wants a dumb doctor. But you also don’t really want a shrewd doctor who is putting his smarts to use figuring out how to take advantage of his asymmetrical information vis-a-vis his patients to buy unnecessary services. You want healers who, yes, earn a comfortable living, but also comport themselves according to a code of honour and offer legitimate medical advice. But this concept of honour and virtue is consistently at odds with the merit principle.

I think this points more towards an overly-crude definition of "merit", and an incomplete understanding of the nature of intelligence, than a fundamental flaw in the meritocratic ideal. Which is exemplified by the author's opinion on Trump :

Liberals who’ve had their brains poisoned by meritocracy often make out Trump to be some kind of dunce who only got anywhere because his dad was rich. But if you examine the record, it’s clearly not true. His recognition that he could get away with repeatedly stiffing contractors without becoming unable to do business going forward was genuinely insightful. The way he emerged from bankruptcy in Atlantic City by launching a publicly-traded company and then sticking his shareholders with his own personal debts was nothing short of brilliant. The problem with Trump is that he’s a bad person. He ran the federal government with the ethics of a private equity team taking over a nursing home.

No, Trump is thick as shit, of that there's no doubt. Rampant short-term, hyper-competitive, zero-sum-game, winner-takes-all behaviour is unbelievably stupid. That it's financially successful for the individual doesn't mean it doesn't have appalling wider consequences. This is much like the difference between critical and analytical thinking : people can be very adept at justifying insanely stupid things. This doesn't make them a special kind of genius - it literally makes them a special kind of stupid. It's like being a fantastic cavalry leader but a terrible tactician : leading a heroic charge into a volley of machine gun fire; or being a brilliant tactician but a lousy strategist - winning amazing battles you needn't have fought at all.

What you want to do is incorporate different aspects beyond raw analytic ability into your definition of "merit". You want it to include strategic, long-term, holistic thinking. You want it to include social responsibility and a consideration for the broader ramifications of the plan, not just short-term, analytic rationalisations for tactical decision-making. In short, you want to be good at planning a coal mine, not just good at hacking through rocks. This is not a fundamental weakness of meritocratic thinking, but a misunderstanding of it. Regardless of their medical skills, a doctor who defrauds their patients ought by definition to be a terrible doctor.

The facts are pretty clear that poor ethics can frequently be rewarded. To have a healthier society, we need more emphasis on fair play, “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” and creating an atmosphere in which people would be ashamed to tell their parents that their well-paid finance job involves identifying ways to make patient care worse.

Surely there's a large overlap in the Venn diagrams of ethics and intelligence. "I made a million dollars by this clever financial algorithm that deprives people of medical care" is an act of profound stupidity as well as an unequivocally immoral choice. I agree, though, that there are differences (being stupid doesn't invariably make you evil), and this too is a component inherently missing from a pure meritocracy. There just isn't any one single principle which can lead to the best society. You need a combination.

That’s not a simple switch we can flip. And while it obviously includes a regulatory component, it’s fundamentally not a regulatory issue. It’s a question of social values and getting away from celebrating tournament winners and being “the best,” and a shift to celebrating other kinds of virtues including humility, restraint, fairness, and a belief that some things just aren’t worth it.

But by far and away the biggest aspect of this will be that regulatory component; laws are a cause of societal values as much as a consequence of them. Merely proposing to change those social values by themselves is so vague as to be meaningless : unless you're prepared to suggest concrete legislative changes, then it amounts to saying little more than "we just need to be better people". Is there a special name for this particular fallacy ? Because this sort of "let's just make better choices" seems to be one of the worst and most common fallacies of all. No, you have to campaign for actual consequences, otherwise the fine ideals are only ever so hollow.

Meritocracy is bad

America is good at elevating "the best" people; the problem is that's a bad idea.

Proto-civilization

Humans are annoyingly social creatures. Not everyone enjoys living in big cities, but lots of people do. Yet the standard narrative is that living in large groups is a relatively recent development enabled only by the invention of farming, that prior to this we lived by necessity in very much smaller communities. After all, you can't support a large population by hunting mammoths and gathering berries.

This would seem to be broadly true as far as it goes, but it may not be the whole story. True, you probably can't sustain an unlimited population size by hunting and gathering : farming definitely helps. But the manageable population size might be considerably larger than that of a small village. There is probably also not a singular moment of agricultural revolution at which point suddenly everyone became farmers. In one of Francis Pryor's books (I forget which one), he makes reference to evidence of Neolithic settlements having deliberately sown desirable plants millennia before the Agricultural Revolution proper; not in anything like as sophisticated an approach as actual farming, but useful all the same.

So if farming doesn't suddenly spring into existence, perhaps neither does full-blooded civilisation. Couple of good recent BBC documentaries about this. First, The Lost Circle Revealed describes how part of Stonehenge was not only originally made of Welsh rocks, but actually assembled in Wales before being moved to England. Second, the slightly older Secrets of Orkney, which presents the case that the stone circle culture first developed in Orkney and then spread to the rest of Britain.

Now, at this point it's probably worth bearing this in mind :

Well fair enough. But if the physical achievements of Stonehenge and the cosy stone houses of prehistoric Orkney pale in comparison to their contemporary Egyptian counterparts, maybe the mental ones are not quite so sub-standard. After all, dragging a series one-tonne stones 140 miles (!) through the Welsh terrain is an achievement not to be sniffed at, but more than that, it requires mass co-operation over a huge geographic area. There surely wasn't a prehistoric British nation-state, but the collaborative effort must have taken place on a similar scale. If they didn't have the capabilities to construct the pyramids, then still had the mindset necessary to formulate, plan, and achieve national-scale projects. They were also (it would seem) considerably less hierarchical than the Egyptians, with the only real difference in the local chieftains being that they lived in - Pryor again - "a slightly larger roundhouse" than the common folk. And this seems to have lasted for many thousands of years.

There is nothing special about Britain. While we can't ever know what exactly the mindset was, whether this mass cooperation was some sort of emergent phenomena from local interests or a more deliberate, pseudo-nationalistic effort, it would still imply that our idea of small roving bands of hunter gathers is hardly the full picture. We are animals, and some animals are social to a degree far exceeding that of humans. So how are back does this large-scale thinking really go ? Maybe tens of millennia. Maybe all the way. Certainly, it would seem, far back beyond the earliest cities.

On to the Aeon piece, which is written in a somewhat tangential style that makes it hard to extract its main point, but I shall try.

This is more than just a theory of prehistory. It’s the modern, scientific origin myth. Yes, we live in mega-societies with property and slavery and inequality but, at heart, we are mobile, egalitarian hunter-gatherers, wired for small groups and sharing. According to the evolutionary social scientist Peter Turchin, this view is ‘so standard that it is rarely formulated in explicit terms’. It’s also probably wrong.

Both a kingdom and a state, the Calusa concentrated power in a hereditary sovereign who had life-and-death control over his subjects, a fact he demonstrated with regular human sacrifice. He ruled from the island of Mound Key – specifically, from a massive house perched atop a 32-foot-high mound and spacious enough to fit 2,000 people. He oversaw full-time military and priestly classes and funnelled surplus production into lavish celebrations... They ruled an area larger than Switzerland... How did the Calusa build such a large, stratified society? A reasonable guess would be through agriculture. Turns out, that’s not what happened. The Calusa built a state not through agriculture but through wild game – in particular, fish.

The more we dig through history, the more we encounter foragers who were sedentary and hierarchical. They covered Japan before agriculture. They dotted the South China coast before agriculture. They inhabited the Levant, tracts of the Nile, the beaches of southern Scandinavia, the central plains of Russia, the coasts of the Atacama Desert, and the grasslands of the high-altitude Andes – all before agricultural peoples dominated those regions. Even today, sedentary foragers live in riverine and coastal regions of New Guinea.

And then there are the Sunghir burials. Roughly 30,000 years old and situated 200 km east of modern-day Moscow, these are the zenith of Upper Palaeolithic funerary extravagance. Especially striking are two adolescent boys: buried head-to-head, coated with ochre, accompanied by 16 mammoth-ivory spears and showered with more than 10,000 mammoth-ivory beads.

Still, for Pettitt, the burials overturn any assumption of simple, hyper-egalitarian bands. They indicate societies of specialists. They indicate status-minded, conspicuous consumption. Even if people were chucking deer canines and mammoth-tusk lances into the graves of people who died strange deaths, they still had the time and motivation to craft such fancy knick-knacks. ‘It’s inconceivable that Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers were egalitarian,’ Pettitt said. ‘It just doesn’t work.’

I would suppose that if humans are hard-wired for anything at all, they are flexible enough that culture can override innate behaviour to almost any degree. The past would be to be a mixture of hierarchies and strictly egalitarian networks, from small-scale bands to enormous pan-national groups. Though specialisation doesn't necessarily equate to hierarchy, much less centralised control, still sometimes clear centralised hierarchies did emerge, with or without farming, and could be extraordinarily successful. Yet at the very least, stable egalitarian societies, if not bona fide egalitarian civilizations, were also equally a part of the story, also lasting for enormous periods. While we do have animal natures, perhaps how we arrange ourselves just isn't part of that. Maybe there is no "natural tendency" for human societies to be like anything in particular at all.

If, however, we evolved in both mobile bands and large hierarchical communities, then, by nature, we are much more psychologically flexible. We’re egalitarian, yes, but also predatory and hierarchical. We’re prepared to interact with familiar people, yes, but also ready to cooperate with strangers. The idea that human nature was forged in a chaos of sundry social environments might be more distressing than a narrative about small, egalitarian bands. But it explains the breadth of human behaviour and the ease with which we live in modern societies. The world today is unlike anything humans have experienced, yet in terms of their hierarchy, sedentism and political complexity, the societies we’ve built might still be deeply familiar.

Not all early human societies were small-scale egalitarian bands

Beyond the !Kung : A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale

People are weird and I don't like them

I wandered into an online debate the other day and it served as a potent reminder of how little I understand people.

Well, I didn't really wander. I was invited in by someone I respect who wanted my opinion, most likely because I've previously expressed skepticism for the idea of getting more scientists into politics. He is of the opinion that we should keep science and politics separate (I completely agree), so asked me for my thoughts as to why scientists shouldn't become politicians. As a summary of "what I think is wrong with politics", it got a bit more ranty and tangential than I intended, but I'm still pretty pleased with my response, so here it is for posterity.

***

I don’t think there is any harm in individual scientists going into politics. I would even encourage it. Where I draw the line is getting any sort of mass movement of scientists becoming politicians, or forming political parties, for a few reasons : 1) the distrust the media (often rightly) bestows on politicians will flow back towards scientists, meaning no-one will have any trust in the facts; 2) [Probably more importantly] scientists are not representative of the whole population any more than lawyers are, nor is science the only form of expertise; 3) any proficiency for scientists to be more impartial is in large part a result of the system they operate in, and not solely due to training. Put a scientist in the system of destructive criticism formed by the system of opposition [I mean in politics, where the opposition is duty-bound to oppose utterly everything] and relentless media attacks, and there’s no reason to suppose they’ll do any better or worse than anyone else. This last point might help explain why politics is so dominated by lawyers, who for all their faults are at least trained and expected to deal with this.

But… science does unquestionably work much better than politics. My take on this is that science has a system of well-moderated debate and peer review. In some venues, like conferences and blogs and whatnot, we can say whatever we like. But in formal publications, we’re forced to only set down what we can agree on, with an editor ensuring that the debate is handled according to clear rules (at least when it works well, which it often doesn’t). There is an inherent incentive to discover something new which is counterbalanced by the need to rigorously justify it. Thus, in the main, you get a sort of optimistic, progressive skepticism. No-one is ever really silenced, all ideas are up for discussion, but only the most solid findings are written, as it were, into law.

An additional key factor is that scientists are kept relatively isolated from the media. They don’t have to fact [sic; face] the shitstorm of questions from a wilfully ignorant rabble on a daily basis - by and large they get criticism from other experts instead. Unlike in politics, there’s far less of a public shaming of anyone who - woe betide! - dares to change their mind on an issue. And more importantly, science isn’t nearly so dominated by individuals as in politics. It’s much harder to point a finger at an emergent consensus.

What politics needs is not more scientists so much as it needs more diversity - people from all kinds of walks of life, of different professions, different levels of income and other backgrounds, as well as a better system for managing discussion and an end to the winner-takes-all strategy. Science has done pretty well at marrying competition with collaboration, but the political attempt has been more of a literal shotgun wedding.

***

The response I got from another participant, who as far as I can tell had been entirely civil until that point, was... less than enthusiastic. The words "inane" and "bullshit" were used. Lots of pointless, let's-take-everything-literally-and-to-a-pointless-extreme questions were asked which were WRITTEN IN ALL CAPITALS BECAUSE ANGER. I was called an entitled, arrogant, fascist.

Right...

So, a scientist says, "I don't want scientists dominating politics, I would prefer to have a more representative group of people running the country"... and that is fascism how, exactly ? Okay, I didn't say it explicitly (because I forgot), but my main point is that politics should be run a la the process of scientific discovery (this is mentioned in detail in the links, but my bad for not pointing this out more directly). But nothing here amounts even to populism, let alone fascism. Nothing here says "ignore the experts". Nothing here undermines scientific credibility (quite the reverse) or demands we respect the nobility of the peasants or something. And quite what in my response should provoke anger, especially from someone I've never before interacted with before, and who otherwise gives no indication of easily provoked... well, in this case "scientists baffled" is exactly correct.

Oh well. I'll preserve this as a record as the single weirdest response I've ever encountered, and move on.

Compassion fatigue and energy supply

Most people reading this are probably visiting from the Pluspora social media network, where I'm modestly active. It's an acceptable substitute for Google Plus, mainly thanks to the community more than the site itself (which is, frankly, crap). You can get some genuinely intelligent, protracted discussion going there about all kinds of topics, largely without having to deal with trolls or lunatics. Challenge someone's argument and most of the time it at least doesn't immediately descend into a shouting match. That alone is more than adequate compensation for the interface that looks like it wandered out of the mid 1990's having forgotten to put any clothes on.

Nevertheless, at times scrolling through the feed is highly unpleasant. Not because the content people post is wrong, and only in part because a lot of it is very bad, but mainly because so much of it is damn depressing.

When I say "bad", I do mean bad. There are opinion pieces masquerading as fact. There are random, unsourced factoid memes aplenty. There's activism championing a plethora of moderately interesting causes. And there's a tonne of stuff which does literally nothing at all except evoke an emotional response. 

What exactly am I supposed to do with this ?

I have absolutely no idea. There's a lot of stuff which seems to be intended just to make people angry, or blame some group for the follies of some other group. I don't doubt the sincere intentions of those posting it, nor do I even doubt the validity of most of the claims made, but much of it has simply no real function. It makes me momentarily angry, then I forget about it, and after a while I just feel depressed because of the horrible things going on in the world. Most of it is utterly irrelevant to my day-to-day life which is, to be blunt, really quite a pleasant experience, but much of social media seems to be hell-bent on convincing me that it isn't and/or isn't supposed to be.

Look, according to my feed for the last twelve hours, I should be worried about :

• Algorithms ruining privacy
• Overgrazing by cattle
• Drug-resistant microbes
• Amazon's efforts to suppress a book about capitalism
• Climate change
• Kids falling behind in school and how we should blame the parents
• Men not being in touch with their feminine side
• The difference between Republicans and Democrats both being ineffectual in office
• Men shaming slutty women too much
• Some weird shit about 8-inch sharks in goldfish bowls
• Republicans not caring about anyone except billionaires

And that's leaving aside all the totally random pieces of emotional drivel. Mind you, it's also leaving aside a lot of positive stuff and genuinely interesting articles, but you get the idea.

Again, it's not that I doubt the validity of the causes. It's just that it's stuck forever on the "raising awareness" stage, with no concrete plan forward, no concern for whether it's preaching to the choir or actually having a meaningful effect on people who might actually benefit from it, and most of it really boils down to a simple expression akin to saying, "I HAVE AN EMOTION RIGHT NOW". A great deal of it is so petty that it almost makes Harry and Megan sound interesting. Sometimes, it's all feckin' exhausting.

This leads me on to... energy supply ! Of course, what else ? 

Bear with me just a little longer. I promise this will all tie together soon.

We've learned two relevant but completely disparate things from the pandemic. First, that most people are in fact content to follow the rules. What they won't necessarily do is volunteer to do anything beyond them. And that's perfectly understandable : if the rules say it's safe to meet up with another household, a relatively small proportion won't take advantage of this. And second, we've seen that energy supply is by far and away the dominant factor (leaving aside agriculture and industry and other factors in climate change) that needs to tackled if we're to move to a greener future. Getting people to reduce their energy usage just isn't going to cut it - not even close.

What's the connection between all this ? Well, the article linked below finds that if you change people to green energy, most people won't voluntarily switch back, despite it being more expensive than fossil fuels. Like organ donation, it's far better to have an opt-out model than opt-in. The burden of switching, even if not particularly difficult, is enough to put people off. And people are willing to pay a bit more for cleaner energy. Of course, we shouldn't judge those who do switch back to fossil fuels - I would bet heavily that most of them simply can't afford the extra expense.

So why don't most people voluntarily switch to green energy in the first place ? The same reason they don't get organ donor cards : it takes time and effort that they don't have. It's not that they don't care. It's that they're overwhelmed with other things to do. This is why the burden should lie firmly and specifically with those who make the rules, not (only) on the general public. People are pretty good at following the rules, but they expect those rules to be sensible. That they don't voluntarily switch to cleaner energy doesn't mean they don't want to, or even that they're put off by the higher prices - it's just that they're overwhelmed with other things. They don't have the spare energy left to give it its due attention. They're busy satisfying their own needs, not because they're selfish, but out of raw necessity.

It isn't only social media, of course. It's everything. Not only are you supposed to work hard and long hours, but then you're expected to listen to the endlessly depressing news and then you're expected to care about a billion different causes of which pretty much none are either relevant, important, or anything you can do anything much about anyway. Modern society -at least in its virtual incarnations - is a bit like being trapped in an orphanage for depressed lepers who run an animal sanctuary but is now on fire. Pratchett said, "do the good that's in front of you", but bloody hell it's hard to know where to start.

In Utopia for Realists, the author makes the point that many impoverished people do not claim benefits they're perfectly entitled to : the burden of filing the claim is just too much, especially given the circumstances. And in The Happy Brain, the author notes that even being happy continuously is a tiring process. So I would suggest that a variant of compassion fatigue can affect everyone. If you're being asked to continuously care about everything, to have a passionately-held opinion on just about every possible topic from toxic masculinity to unjust labour laws in the cheese-making industry, you'll end up doing... nothing. It's like being pulled in a dozen different directions all at once. If you were asked instead to just do one simple thing, I suggest the results might be markedly different.

This is not the only possible interpretation, of course. It's also possible that this is just sheer human nature, that we tend towards inaction unless a specific threshold is reached - either that of a reward or a punishment. But I would suggest that compassion fatigue does at least play a role in shifting that threshold if nothing else.

And all this goes both ways. It's possible that most of those who don't switch back do so for the same reason, and if they were less overwhelmed with other things, they might actually prefer to have cheaper but more polluting energy. But here too the burden must fall on the politicians and energy companies. A vast reduction in personal energy use, or other lifestyle changes, is simply impossible. Leaving it up to individuals or corporations is as loopy as saying that people should follow their "common sense" during a pandemic. It just won't work. 

Thankfully there's a positive take-home message form all this : changing the rules does work. People are reluctant to change voluntarily but they will change if gently prodded. And there are very easy ways to prod them so gently that they don't even notice, like making green the default. So stop badgering people. Stop shaming them for not cutting back on energy use. Pressure instead governments and energy suppliers to default to green options, giving opt-out options for those who really need them. And surely this is where all activism must ultimately focus : not on changing the attitudes of a weary populace, but in the actions and policies of those with the capability to effect real change - part of which should be designed with the goal of making said populace considerably less weary.

Climate change: 'Default effect' sees massive green energy switch

When Swiss energy companies made green electricity the default choice, huge numbers of consumers were happy to stick with it - even though it cost them more.

Born Fair

Here's an interesting article about whether animals share a "human" sense of fairness. I say "human" because it's not clear if the people considered in the studies were from any particular culture or if this is really a universal. But it does make the point that you have to have a very careful experimental setup to determine in a monkey is really objecting to unfair treatment or not.

Imagine that there was no second monkey in the experiment, just one monkey and an experimenter with a bowl full of cucumbers and another full of grapes. If the monkey were given the cucumber as a reward in that case, she might also object to it — not because it was unfair, but just because the cucumber doesn’t seem very appealing once the monkey knows there are grapes to be had. The monkey who rejects cucumbers may be less like a political protester and more like a two-year-old swatting away a proffered apple slice when a well-stocked candy jar is in full view.

But hang on, surely giving a lesser reward when you could easily give a better one is every bit as unfair as giving different rewards to different monkeys. That monkey and the toddler are both equally justified in throwing a temper tantrum, because their handlers are both being jerks. From later in the article, what I think the author is driving at is that the monkeys who receive grapes also don't object, even though their treatment is just as unfair as the ones given cucumbers.

Plato all but equated justice with happiness. He thought that so long as everyone was treated fairly, happiness would surely follow. But I am not so sure. Fairness is important, but then again so are grapes. I do not think the majority of people would be unhappy to receive a grape if it meant someone else had to be given a cucumber (or even a kick in the teeth) instead*. The base desire is to receive the best reward possible, regardless of fairness. We are very much more concerned with "fairness" when we're being given cucumbers - it takes some real commitment to principle to object to one's own unfair receipt of a  grape.

* With the major caveat of visibility. If you can see someone else being treated worse for no reason, I think this is very different from the vague awareness that some anonymous schmuck got shafted with a cucumber** instead of rewarded with a tasty grape instead.
** Literally.

On the whole, evidence for fairness in other primates is much more limited than it is in adult humans. Monkeys and apes don’t reject an unequal distribution if the food is freely given rather than paid out in exchange for a task. In the lab, they generally act in their own interest when choosing how to dole out resources, while people are more likely to share equally with a partner. And they don’t turn down unequal offers in a task known as the “ultimatum game,” in which one partner decides how to divide up some resources and the other partner either accepts the offer or decides that neither partner will get anything. People often sacrifice resources in order to express contempt for an unequal offer, whereas chimps typically take what they can get, fair or not.

The general state of an animal is hunger, so it makes sense to accept any food on offer. I don't think I would snub an offer of a cucumber if I was really starving or unsure where the next meal was coming from even if someone else was being given grapes (I might still feel rather cross about it though). And I don't even like cucumber very much.

But studies show that it takes a surprisingly long time for children to incorporate fairness into their own actions. Three and four-year-olds do readily object to an unequal distribution of resources if they’ve received the short end of the stick. But, like non-human primates, they rarely protest when they’re on the winning end of an unequal distribution. This makes it hard to know whether it’s unfairness that they dislike, or simply getting less than others.

That last sentence is a bit confusing, but I suppose if you want to say it's really unfairness that someone dislikes, it has to be symmetrical. You can't say you value fairness if you don't also object when it works in your favour. So you can't measure it one direction. You have to measure both aspects of unfair treatment to know if there's really a moral principle at work here.

Interjection by Terry Pratchett :

“O’ course, I still hung up my stocking on Hogswatch Eve, and in the morning, you know, you know what ? Our dad had put in this little horse he’d carved his very own self...”
AH, said Death. AND THAT WAS WORTH MORE THAN ALL THE EXPENSIVE TOY HORSES IN THE WORLD, EH?
Albert gave him a beady look. “No!” he said. “It weren’t. All I could think of was it wasn’t the big horse in the window.”
Death looked shocked. BUT HOW MUCH BETTER TO HAVE A TOY CARVED WITH —
“No. Only grown-ups think like that,” said Albert. “You’re a selfish little bugger when you’re seven."

Which is apparently true (though whether it's cultural or not is another matter). First on kids being selfish little buggers :

In fact, in deciding how to distribute resources, preschoolers strongly favour divisions in which they come out ahead of others; not only are they likely to claim more than their own share, they even show a spiteful tendency to sacrifice resources if it means that they can have more than someone else. A recent study by Mark Sheskin and colleagues showed that when given a choice between allotting two prize tokens each to themselves and another child and claiming one for themselves while giving none to the other, 5 and 6-year-olds preferred the latter. 

And secondly on adults thinking differently, though not always in a better way :

As they approach adulthood, children show a steadily increasing tendency to distribute resources equally or even altruistically. But paradoxically, they may become less egalitarian in certain ways over the course of their development. Ernst Fehr and his colleagues found that children were more likely to deprive their peers of resources, even at a cost to themselves, if they were told that the other children came from a different school than if they were told that they belonged to the same school. This bias against members from a different group increased with age into the teen years, even though on the whole, teens were much less likely than younger kids to behave selfishly.

Is there a direct connection here ? Perhaps it mirrors some historical trends in ancient societies. It seems popular to shout down "individualism" as though it were necessarily an evil thing and invariably opposed to collectivism, which must therefore be a good thing. But as mentioned previously, thinking of oneself as an individual first and foremost may encourage thinking of others in the same way. When you identify yourself by your group membership, you may be predisposed to dealing with other groups more harshly, whereas if your group is less important to you, you may be less inclined to view other groups unfairly. Very crudely, individualism = selfish but fair, tribalism = cooperative but unfair. Maybe.

Presumably, it ought to be possible to treat each other as individuals but not put our own needs ahead of everyone else. What we want is for everyone to value each other as much as they do themselves, to adopt Epictetus' strategy of identifying their own self-interest with that of each other. This seems to be tremendously difficult in practise though.

Was the Golden Rule Born in the Mind of a Monkey?

As economic inequality increased in many wealthy nations in recent years, a debate has developed around the question of whether inequality is bad for national economies—and bad for their citizens. A captivating video clip of monkey behavior (see below), taken from a 2011 TED talk by primatologist Frans de Waal, has become a surprising piece of ammunition in this discussion.