Martin Daly： Evolutionary Psychology Pioneer (-asltUUvcGU)

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Music Yeah Sending this one out To my evolutionary psychology people Yeah David Buss Cosmetic and Tubi Yeah, Jeffrey Miller Yeah, we live in this till the day that we die Survival of the fit, only the strong survive There’s a war going on outside, no man is safe from You can run, but you can’t hide forever You come to my block, you see some territoriality A place where a killer be killed is the mentality But get it straight, it’s just a necessary strategy You gotta play the hand you dealt You can’t magically escape from the habitat That you was born in Three homicides in my neighborhood this morning Cops came and kicked the crooked door in With no warning, I started roughing up my young cousin She’s only seventeen and got a bun in the oven Plus a concussion But she ain’t done nothing So keep your mouth shut and don’t jump to judgment On the lives we’re living Just close your eyes and listen While I break down some homicide statistics So if you’re thinking the criminal mind is just vacant You’re mistaken This is calculated risk taken We’re living in a situation with a low life expectancy And a major discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots And you wonder why the padlock on every cash box is smashed off Come on, you can’t call it pathological Nah, that’s illogical You can try to understand it, but you can’t stop it though Not unless you address the root causes The conscious and unconscious Decisions to discount future prospects Come on, it’s obvious the beat keeps bouncing The homicide rate keeps mounting Which leads to steep discounting And a lot of violence, but it’s not a virus It’s a rational response to high-risk environments And short time horizons with high stakes and highly visible prizes And you wonder why we’re criminal minded? Hey, you can’t say we’ll get satisfaction if we’re patient With self-control and delayed gratification When the only job that pays is casket baking When death is the ultimate planned cancellation So check the facts on recent data releasing It shows a pattern of increasing competition A bunch of young guys all struggling and status-seeking We’re causing the crimes that make the social fabric weaken And life expectancy also predicts gene pregnancy The need to leave a legacy genetically will never be completely controlled contraceptively Yeah, that’s transparent Imagine if your kids would never meet their grandparents Unless they follow the Bristol-Palent plan for parenthood And then they say, Ooh, these young girls are so damn careless Getting pregnant before marriage is such a tragedy Apparently it’s also a reproductive strategy Especially when you can see them adjusting actively when their circumstances change In both the cases of the young ladies with babies and the male risk takers We see people adapting to their situations And it’s the same in different places and with different races This is not about ethical justifications It’s evolutionary psych and it’s just the basics And still people call this behavior maladaptive Because of our reaction when violence happens But if we really want to change the outcome Then maybe we should just start questioning how it’s adaptive And the bottom line is that iniquity and life expectancy are the ultimate causes of crime And the results of crime, to me that’s true The two combine together in a feedback loop But I got some moves to make now so I’ll be back soon Just don’t ask me what I’m about to do Right, cause I can’t say so it’s left an untold fact Until my death, my ghost will stay alive Survival of the fit, only the strong survive That’s right, we live in this till the day that we die Survival of the fit, only the strong survive Yeah, we live in this till the day that we die Survival of the fit, only the strong survive That’s right, we live in this till the day that we die Survival of the fit, only the strong survive Yeah, we live in this till the day that we die Survival of the fit, only the strong survive Yeah, sendin’ this out to all my evolutionary psychologists Daly and Wilson, Steven Pinker, Robert Wright, yeah David Sloan Wilson, yeah That’s right, gather the evidence Make it real, make it real Human mentality, represent Yeah, this is human nature, human nature to the core I’ma get mine and you get yours Don’t question my actions Unless you ready to make a little addition Before I make a subtraction End you up in traction That’s right, love scrappin’ Peace I’m here talking today with Dr. Martin Daly Dr. Daly is a professor of psychology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and author of many influential papers on evolutionary psychology His current research topics include an evolutionary perspective on risk-taking and interpersonal violence especially male-male conflict and fa- He and his wife, late Margot Wilson, were the former editors-in-chief of the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour and former presidents of the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998 Daly is one of the main researchers of the Cinderella Effect and has been interviewed many times in the press about it So I’m very pleased to be talking with Dr. Daly today I’m very pleased to be talking with Dr. Daly this morning It seems to me that he’s one of Canada’s most outstanding psychologists and perhaps you could say that about psychologists in the world and he’s done some incredibly interesting research on the relationship between inequality and male violence and inequality and other topics too, so welcome Dr. Daly Thank you, Jardon. It’s nice to be talking to you Well, I’m looking forward to our conversation a lot So you just wrote a book, which I’m going to show people, called Killing the Competition and I just read it, it was very interesting So I thought maybe I could get you to start by talking a little bit about the book and also how you- tell us the story, that would be a good thing to do Well, the general issue that is addressed in the book is the relationship between economic inequality, which is usually indexed as income inequality and homicide rates, and it’s been known for a long time by sociologists that income inequality is the single best predictor they’ve got of homicide rates across countries, across states within the US, across cities within the US, and some other kinds of jurisdictional comparisons And there’s been controversy about why that is, and whether inequality itself is truly the problem or whether it’s just a correlate of something else And in this book I try to make the case that no, inequality really is the problem and some of the arguments that have been advanced for suggesting that it’s a mere correlate of violence rather than in some way causal to violence are wrong So can you tell us a little bit about how you calculate inequality and what the measure is? Yeah, income inequality, there’s a number of different measures that are used by economists I’m just borrowing the dominant ones from economists The number one one is something called the Gini index, G-I-N-I I used to assume that that was some kind of acronym, but actually it was the name of an Italian economist And it’s a measure that ranges from zero to one It would be zero if everybody had exactly the same income or exactly the same wealth if you’re doing wealth inequality And it would approach one as income or wealth was concentrated more and more in the hands of few and then a single individual And in principle would go to one in the extreme if all wealth were held by Bill Gates and none of the rest of us had anything And now you analyzed the Gini coefficient at different levels of jurisdiction So I noted in your work that you’ve looked at countries and states within countries And I think that’s particularly true in the US So tell us a little bit about what you found Yeah, well, within the US, and again, this has been known by sociologists for some time Within the US and cross nationally The Gini coefficient is a very good predictor of homicide The correlation tends to be on the order of 0.7 in many studies which means that the variance in either measure, 50% of it could be accounted for by the variability in the other measure I’m saying between homicide and income inequality And actually it even works on the neighborhood level My late wife Margo and I published some analyses in Chicago that showed that income inequality was a very strong predictor of homicide rates across neighborhoods within Chicago Tell us a little bit about what you did in Chicago because that research is extremely interesting and also when you did it Let’s see, we did our work in Chicago in the early 90s And at that time, Chicago had very high homicide rate Not the worst in the United States, but one of the worst in the United States and in fact have more homicides every year than the whole of Canada which makes it a substantial enough phenomenon that you can sort of look for causal factors or correlates without a lot of stochastic noise In Chicago, Chicago is divided up into some 77, I believe, neighborhoods There’s a long-standing tradition of urban sociology in Chicago and there’s these sort of well-recognized 77 neighborhoods And anyway, for these neighborhoods, we were able to amass a variety of neighborhood specific information including on income distributions, on homicides and so forth working with the Chicago police who were collaborators in some of this work And Margo went to the Illinois Department of Health to try and get information on other death rates and birth rates and demographic structure of each of the neighborhoods And she wanted to compute the life expectancy because the idea that she had was that local life expectancy would affect the extent to which people were willing to sort of escalate dangerously in competitive situations In competitive situations, and that was our construal of what most homicides in Chicago were about where guys killing each other, when discs and bars, circumstances in which there’s some sort of competition and it gets dangerous And our basic idea there and elsewhere has been that a lot of the variability in homicide rates the most violent volatile component of homicide rates has to do with this male-male competition and where and when does it get dangerous and where and when does it sort of dampen down And for Chicago, anyway, the Illinois Department of Health had never nobody had ever computed neighborhood specific life expectancy but the data were available to do it, age specific mortality and so on was available to do it And so we computed age specific life expectancies, income inequality and many other variables that criminologists have considered relevant in past studies, racial heterogeneity and blah blah blah and tried to see what were your best predictors of homicide And in that particular study, everywhere else we’ve worked, we’ve mostly found income inequality to be number one In that particular study, income inequality was a very good predictor but the best predictor was male life expectancy at birth or at age 15 And in order to compute, of course you say homicide rates, homicide reduces male life expectancy So you have to remove homicide statistically as a cause of death and say life expectancy net of the impact of homicide That was our best predictor of homicide rates So life expectancy is very variable in the city of Chicago and I assume in other US cities I mean in the worst neighborhoods, male life expectancy at birth was down in the 50s as bad as in the worst countries in the world In the best neighborhoods, male life expectancy was up in the, I think was over 80 or in the high 70s in any case corresponding to what you might expect in Scandinavia the places with the best life expectancy in the world So it’s a huge range That was our best predictor Then if you try and do a multivariate analysis where you look for well what else predicts some residual variability and there wasn’t much residual variability That was the thrust of our study in Chicago and I’d love to see more work on life expectancy as a predictor of violence The Université de Montréal criminologist Marc Wiemann tried to do the same thing in Montreal but he found that in Montreal the difference in life expectancy for men between the worst and the best neighborhoods was only six years whereas in the worst neighborhoods, the best neighborhoods were only six years So that’s the thrust of our study in Chicago The worst and the best neighborhoods was only six years whereas in Chicago it was 24 years I think So what do you think accounted for the vast difference in life expectancy between Chicago and Montreal and was life expectancy itself associated with income inequality? Oh yes, I mean that’s part of the problem of course in all this kind of research here It’s not experimental research You don’t control independent variables and everything of potential interest is correlated with everything else So, you know, income inequality alone accounts for more than half the variance in homicide rates across Chicago neighborhoods So does life expectancy alone So does percent below the poverty line alone But these things are all correlated with each other and so trying to tease apart what’s most important is tricky The low life expectancy in Chicago neighborhoods is not due to violence It’s due overwhelmingly to differential disease Privatization of medicine in the U.S. was so extreme at the time we were doing this research Emergency rooms in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago had closed down because they got bankrupt They didn’t have enough money to remain open and therefore if you got stabbed or shot in a bad neighborhood in Chicago you had to be transported somewhere else to try and keep you alive because the hospitals had shut their emergency rooms or had shut down completely So there’s all sorts of factors that contribute to differential death rates But kids in the worst neighborhood are exposed to high levels of lead There’s some evidence that lead exposure in childhood is a big predictor of variability in life expectancy All kinds of internal diseases They were more susceptible to the effects of bad nutrition They were more susceptible to So if you divide causes of death into so-called external causes which basically means homicides, suicides, and accidents and internal causes, which is more or less synonymous with what we ordinarily think of as disease Internal causes were still the biggest source of differential mortality across neighborhoods So you could make, by the sounds of it, you could make a reasonable case I think it’s important to note that the social safety net in Canada is flattening out the bottom of the income distribution especially the provision of health care I also was informed a while back that the rate of entrepreneurship in Canada is actually higher than in the US and part of the reason for that is that because health care is provided people can take a risk of walking away from their jobs without putting their family completely at risk and so one of the perverse effects of socialized medicine is that it elevates the rates of entrepreneurship So I also wanted to mention, you know, your work was absolutely striking to me because of the effect sizes Now, for people who don’t know about how to compare effect sizes I should point out that you never see a correlation of 0.7 between any two variables in the social sciences There was a guy named Hemphill who did an empirical analysis of effect size comparisons about four or five years ago, it might be longer than that now and he concluded that 95% of social science studies had an effect size of 0.5 or less and so to see a correlation of 0.7 is absolutely overwhelming when you also take into account that measurement error is decreasing the potency of the relationship to some degree and when you take into account that that 0.5 represents studies that were published because they got something Yes, exactly, exactly So 0.7 is absolutely overwhelming I’ve never seen effect sizes that big between two variables of interest in any other domain that I can recall and then the other thing that’s worth pointing out and we can talk about this a little bit too is the other thing that’s so radical about your research is that it, and this is what emerges out of the out of the manner in which the Gini coefficient is calculated because it’s only a measure of relative poverty and it’s the predictor you also generated data indicating that places where everyone was relatively poor or say relatively working class like North Dakota and some of the Canadian provinces had very low homicide rates and also places where everyone was rich Right, so to reiterate what you’re seeing is that what’s driving male homicide is the existence, and correct me if I’m wrong the existence of a steep economic dominance hierarchy that makes it difficult for the young men to obtain status through what you might describe as conventional and socially productive means and so instead they turn to violence as a means of establishing status and most of that’s within race and so that’s the line between young men jockeying for position Is that all correct? Yeah, I think that’s a pretty fair characterization It’s worth stressing, yes, that income inequality is in principle and in practice dissociable from just average income or percent below the poverty line or other measures of so-called absolute deprivation They’re often correlated You know, income inequality across a certain set of jurisdictions may be fairly strongly correlated with the percent below the poverty line, for example It would be surprising if it was not usually correlated But they’re not necessarily, as you said Yeah, so you demonstrated or you were one of the first people to demonstrate were you the first, in fact, maybe that it wasn’t poverty that was causing this kind of crime it was relative poverty and that changes the interpretation of the situation absolutely dramatically So tell us a little bit about why you think the males are competing in this deadly manner What’s driving that behaviour? Well, it’s very interesting I think men are sensitive to are interested in relative position, status maintaining face in competitive milieus and in a sense all milieus are a bit competitive And the willingness to use violence Milieus violence can be thought of as kind of a disdain for the future or I want mine now I’m willing to do something that threatens my life like escalating competition or not back down or not walk away from an insult because I’m thinking very short-term the rewards for being passive If you’re a nice, prosperous university student of age 20 you have good life prospects your chances for eventually becoming well-paid maybe people will laugh at this are still reasonably good your chances for eventually marrying are still reasonably good If you’re the same age kind of guy in an urban ghetto with a 48% unemployment rate or something like that then you have very much more and with uncertainty about the stability of whatever income you do get with the future unknown then you’re more willing to take a risk now in the pursuit of status now in the pursuit of sexual opportunity now in the pursuit of monetary rewards legal or illicit now and also the maintenance of face like social reputation is the one resource you’ve got if you’ve got other resources you can walk away from threats or disrespect and reap your rewards later if social status is all you’ve got then it becomes an important thing to defend So I read some research a while back that looked at the relationship between socioeconomic status among men and number of sexual partners and also socioeconomic status among women and number of sexual partners and that’s another domain where you see these kinds of whopping correlations so the correlation between socioeconomic status for men and number of available sexual partners is about 0.6 or 0.7 whereas for women it’s negative 0.12 and so do you think that it’s reasonable to assume that either at the phylogenetic level or the ontogenetic level either evolutionarily speaking or even as a consequence of rational calculation that part of the reason that men or perhaps the main reason that men are engaging in these status competitions is because of female hypergamy is that a reasonable hypothesis? Hypergamy and as you say simple access I mean there is the association that you mentioned is presumably a very long standing one that is to say that men with status and resources have had access to partners for sure and probably multiple partners simultaneously or serially to a degree that men of lower status have not. There’s high variance in eventual reproduction among males in mammals generally and although the situation is less extreme in people that have many other mammals the same is true for people when you say they have high variance compared to what? Well high variance compared to women for example the variability in eventual reproductive success is lower for women than for men or husband now you say sexual access to women I think that’s exactly the right level to be looking at in contemporary societies but the reason why that matters is because ancestrally that translated into differential reproduction in a modern environment if you know, cod perceptive technology is available especially to women then that correlation may be broken down but the motives to seek sexual opportunity remain relevant So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about too is that you made a comment in your book about Adrian Rains and Adrian Rains has written a book recently about the biological predictors of criminality and you make a strong case that in some sense the turning to violence that’s characteristic of men in uncertain situations is rational because it actually legitimately drives status increase and that produces a variety of positive effects so in some sense it’s a rational response to a radically uncertain environment where competition is high now Rains would say the biological type researchers they look more at the individual level and conclude that it’s individuals who have various forms of prefrontal damage or characterological issues associated with antisocial personality disorder that are more likely to engage in violent acts and you can track that I mean Richard Trombley has done some of this work in Quebec you can track the emergence of aggression at an individual level all the way back to children at two years of age because it turns out that children at two are the most violent children particularly the boys but mostly a subset of boys who kick, fight, hit, and bite and steal at two most of whom are socialized by the age of four but a subset of whom are not socialized and then they become they’re more likely to become the lifetime offenders and so what I’m wondering is maybe you can reconcile the difference between the two research streams like this as the economic gradient increases and the dominance hierarchy becomes steeper and steeper the men who are prone to be violent it’s the disagreeable men that start to be violent first maybe the ones that have an impulse control problem or that are characterologically like the violent two year olds that are characterologically predisposed to be violent it seems to me that those would be the ones that as the pressure increases those men who are more prone to violence for other reasons are going to be the people who react with violence first. Do you think that’s a reasonable hypothesis? I think that’s a very reasonable hypothesis my objection to Adrian Rayne’s book was that I think he vast there’s definitely evidence that many kinds of violent criminal offenders have got something wrong with their brains Adrian Rayne wants to extrapolate to the conclusion that violent criminals criminals in general have got something broken about their brains and it’s like criminality is pathological well criminality is not pathological people steal for cost benefit related reasons that crime is a if you like, god help us, social construction in the sense that certain behaviours are criminalised by a larger social group in order to deter them because self-interested individuals would otherwise pursue them how do you make people stop exploiting others, stealing from others by criminalising those activities and imposing penalties there’s a rational choice stream of theorising within criminology that other people like Adrian Rayne just dismiss out of hand, no no, criminal offences are pathological and I think that’s silly well it seems unnecessary because it isn’t that difficult to make a marriage between the two issues one of the best predictors, you know I do research on individual differences in personality and the best personality predictor of incarceration is low agreeableness that’s one of the dimensions on which men and women differ the most as you become more disagreeable you become more self-oriented I would say, and that can push past the point where you’re so self-interested that you’re willing to prey on others and so those are the guys that as well as the guys who lack impulse control those are the first guys to turn to violence let’s say, when the socio-economic conditions become sufficiently unstable so that a conscientious approach is not tenable yeah, and the marriage between that kind of thinking and thinking about the relevance of inequality is that there’s guys at the top who are like the violent people you described there’s people doing very well who are very happy to exploit others but the costs of individual violent action are high enough and the opportunities to exploit other people through financial means through your lawyers through whatever tactics are available to you know, well-heeled bullies are safe enough that they opt to behave in those directions right, because they’ve got their long-term future is relatively stable and so that long-term planning and regulation of behaviour actually play an important economic role and, you know in the case of somebody like Donald Trump I mean, he looks like somebody who’s suffering a little bit of an impulse control problem especially sort of during the night when he wakes up and his Twitter account is too close ahead but he’s rich enough to bully people in other ways that actually hands on violence although, come to think of it the famous remark that he made during the campaign about women suggests perhaps that, you know, it depends on your definition of hands on violence, I guess that qualifies okay, so there’s a very large body of research that indicates that alcohol is a major contributor to criminality too especially with regards to men and so, about 50% of people who are murdered have a decent blood alcohol level and about 50% of murderers and I think that’s partly, that stat equalizes, I think, because much violence among men is exactly the sort that you describe where it’s a status dispute and it’s more or less a toss up who’s going to come out as a winner but then, I guess, what’s happening with alcohol, perhaps, is that because it’s a disinhibitor it reduces anxiety and anxiety is one of the suppressors of aggressive behaviour, that men who are already on the edge, let’s say, because of the unstable environment and the steep dominance hierarchy are also more likely to lose control when they’re drinking and maybe that’s also fueled, this is something too that I’m curious about, I mean, you can think about it as a rational calculation but I’m also curious about the degree to which it’s fueled by emergent negative emotions so, it’s easy for people who are in steep dominance hierarchies to regard the system as unfair and to become resentful and angry about it as perhaps they should be I’m not suggesting that that’s necessarily an irrational response, but it seems that if the anger is simmering underneath the surface that it’s waiting, in some sense, for an opportunity to break free and alcohol in a bar or at home perhaps provides that root what you say makes evident sense to me I mean, it’s probably worth injecting a bit of a caution about the word rationality generally when one talks about rationality in crime, but perhaps especially in confrontational violence the point is not that the person is making good and carefully weighed decisions I mean, I think, you know, emotions are the handmaiden of what I would call ecological rationality, they help you know how you should feel about certain things and how you should react to them the rationality claim is more a claim of this person gets riled up, resents X, and he should there’s good reason to get riled up and resent X, but the fact that alcohol perhaps disinhibits so that, you know, the truly rational balance between inhibitatory and aggressive emotions is altered, the idea that alcohol interferes with cognitive process, which is the point that people start making stupid decisions when they’re drunk, decide to get behind the wheel or whatever, I think this plays very heavily into the reason why so many homicides tend to happen in contexts like to drunks insulting each other, or, you know, people who are somewhat under the influence of alcohol insulting each other rather than you know, if you have more if you have more mental wherewithal at the moment, you probably have better capacities to confuse to defuse dangerous situations through you know ways that don’t entail losing face by being articulate great, exactly, that’s right, you have other tools at your disposal rather than immediate recourse to your fists thank you, yes so, if I remember correctly too in your Chicago studies, this is one of the things that I found particularly fascinating was, you track the consequences of killing someone in Chicago, and the consequences were something of the following sort, well, first of all, you were likely to be charged with something like second degree murder it would be difficult for the police to find people to testify against you, and if they did, generally what they would say is that it was a two-way altercation and so in many cases you could plead self-defense often it didn’t go before a jury because the perpetrator plea-bargained it down to manslaughter the sentence was something on the order of a couple of years, and people were generally out of prison in 18 months, with a substantial boost in their social capital, because now they were like dangerous sons of bitches and that was quite clear and also perhaps improved so to speak by the sojourn in prison have I got that right? except for one detail actually in our Chicago studies, we didn’t have as good follow-up information as what you’re talking about, this was an earlier piece of research in the city of Detroit that led to most of those findings, but yeah exactly hardly, it’s interesting we had a single year sample of cases in Detroit and there were I think 590 homicides in Detroit in that one year, 1972 at which time Detroit did have the highest homicide rate in the US a large majority of these are male-male disputes of some sort status disputes usually, but sometimes robberies and just as you said witnesses are unlikely to come forward, and the prosecutors are stretched, they don’t have the resources that they would need to pursue every case and so many cases were dismissed, I mean not even prosecuted never mind Plymark, and something like approximately half of all male-male macho dispute homicides in Detroit that were solved, were not prosecuted on the expectation that there was a plausible self-defense argument that might win with the jury, then of the half that were prosecuted, almost all of them yeah, were Plymarked down to manslaughter and the majority of them got a conviction it’s right, it’s 3 years, 50% time off for good behavior, if you behave nicely you go to Jackson State Prison in Michigan, 18 months later you’re back out on the streets of Detroit and Margot in particular was very interested in the question of whether killing in these contexts might even actually ultimately pay off for guys, I tend to the view that actually killing is overstepping the bounds of utility that deadly threats are very self-interested and effectual, but that actually following through on them is maybe the non-functional tip of the iceberg but I honestly don’t know that that’s true in these kind of cases for exactly this reason that guys get some social capital out of having done it well hypothetically among the Yanomamo tribes in South America I think it’s South America yeah, the more warlike men have a much higher reproduction rate the ones who’ve killed more, now I don’t know obviously it isn’t necessarily the case that that’s directly translatable but there is some utility in being a successful warrior, that’s actually one of the reasons that I think that capitalism, so to speak is underappreciated because, I’m speaking in a very specific sense, is that there are disagreeable and warlike men and some of them are very powerful in many ways, not only physically but intellectually and characterologically and with great ambition, and the thing about capitalism is that it enables them to wage war in a manner that’s not deadly and to become successful that way and to channel their intense competitive energy into something that well I think often is often for a social good now it depends on how disagreeable the person is and how selfish they are of course but people like that also tend to get punished in their cooperative interactions with other people yeah, I mean I partly agree but I also feel that the often toward the social good is a bit hopeful I mean to the degree that people are successful in a fairly unrestrained capitalist competition it’s usually at the expense of large numbers of people at the bottom but it depends how unrestrained that capitalist competition is I was thinking of social good as in better than war yeah, better than war for sure better than war for sure and sometimes the way you succeed is by producing goods that actually make people’s lives better no quarrel with that so now I also wanted to ask you, in the last couple of chapters of your book you turned to what I would regard as more political issues and so I and I am very interested in inequality because we’ll recapitulate for a minute so your work and the work of other people seems to indicate that as inequality increases and dominance hierarchies get steeper not only do young men get more violent and so society becomes less stable but there’s also detrimental impacts on things like population health and that was documented quite nicely in the spirit level so I’m going to address a couple of criticisms of the research and then I want to ask you I want to have a discussion about your more prescriptive views if that’s okay so the first issue someone just emailed me this a while back when I was talking about inequality and they said well what about places like China where the rates of inequality are starting to skyrocket quite substantially and have been for several years maybe several decades yet the the homicide rate doesn’t seem to be budging much and so I thought well that was interesting maybe there’s something different about East Asian communities they tend to have very low crime rates to begin with places like Japan for example have very low crime rates and so I’m wondering if what you think about that is that a reasonable criticism and how would you address it? Fair enough well I don’t think we can characterize orientals as less violent than occidentals or anything like that I think history tells us otherwise that there’s been a lot of severe and dangerous violence in Japan in history and in China in history I don’t know how good data we have on Chinese homicide rates but what I’ve seen is that they have been going up a bit lately but still the point that inequality has been skyrocketing partly there’s an interesting question about time lags effects on people how soon is an increased inequality effect going to play out as nasty interpersonal behavior and you know people respond to inequality as a result of their lifetime experiences you know you were talking about young kids very young children already being predictable in the extent to which they’re willing to you know use violent tactics against other people and that you know assaying 3 and 4 year olds can give you some surprisingly good prediction of how they’ll behave as adults it’s not inconceivable that the effects of inequality even are influencing people’s development prenatally and so you know the uterine environments that they experience as a function of inequitable environments and the stresses and fraught social comparisons and so on that happen in those environments could be influencing them at all life stages so I don’t think we have any strong basis for expecting rapid change in inequality to be accompanied in the short term by rapid change in violence that said there you know it’s certainly the case that there’s other things that matter and government controls are one I think strong governments that monopolize the legitimate use of violence can keep a lid on violence for a long time I you know I would question whether they can keep a lid on it indefinitely but they can keep a lid on it for a long time if you execute all charged murderers I presume that that would keep the incidents of murder down and not only because those people could be recidivists so there’s an element of potentially authoritarian control and then the other element that I think is particularly interesting is the time lag argument you don’t know over what period of time precisely inequality has its pernicious effect and maybe it’s not even the span of one lifetime do you have any data on that that would help answer the question I did make reference in my book Killing the Competition to one sociological study that was looking at effects of inequality on mortality generally the notion that inequality affects mortality generally is mediated by what you were talking about about health effects the idea that stresses and fraught social comparisons produce greater vulnerability to stress related diseases and in fact many diseases most diseases maybe even are stress related and their ultimate impacts on people so there’s this one sociological study by a guy named Sheng in Ohio State which sought effects of economic inequality on mortality and came to the conclusion that the effects were lagged that the maximum impact on current mortality was inequality seven years ago which sounds kind of funny but he had analyses which seemed to show and I’m a bit wary about the legitimacy of these analyses but they seemed to me to show to him that inequality of a few years ago affects the chance that you’ll die now net of the effects of age and sex and other predictors of mortality and that there’s sort of a cumulant of consequences of many years of past inequality so seven years ago was the worst but six and eight also mattered additively five years ago and nine years ago also mattered additively ten years ago also mattered so that how bad the inequality was in your past seems to you’re likely to die now the effects of violence have a look at it’s hard to figure out how you could get a decent enough data set to do that right but I don’t think it’s possible so with regards to health effects I’m going to lay out an account of them and you can tell me what you think about this alright so your brain is always trying to calculate to some degree how good things are going for you that’s an extraordinarily difficult calculation because life is uncertain and ultimately uncertain and it’s difficult to predict the future except perhaps by using the past as a marker and so what seems to happen is that our nervous and our nervous systems are always interested in how prepared we should be for emergency at any given moment and as far as I can tell there are a number of ways that we calibrate that one is baseline levels of trait neuroticism so that’s sensitivity to anxiety and uncertainty and emotional pain and so you seem to be born roughly speaking at your average level of neuroticism which can vary substantially between people it can be also adjusted at puberty and then the environment can move you in one direction or another so for example if you have a highly anxious child and you encourage them to go out and explore then you can move them towards the normal range Jerry Kagan has demonstrated that quite nicely ok so the first estimate of how worried you should be about the future is like genetic roll of the dice some people will be born extraordinarily worried roughly speaking and some people will be born hardly worried at all and then that can be modified by the particulars of the social environment so then the next thing that seems to me to be part of the calculation is comparison, how well are you doing compared to others and that seems to be adjusted by mechanisms that associate perceived social status with serotonin serotonergic activity such that as you move up a dominance hierarchy your serotonin levels rise so that your impulsivity which would be partly sensitivity to immediate reward declines and so does your sensitivity to negative emotion so if you plummet down to the bottom of a hierarchy you start to become more reward seeking and also more anxious and the reason for that more anxious is because the bottom of the dominance hierarchy actually is a more dangerous place to be because you don’t have access to you don’t have reliable access as reliable to shelter or food or mating resources or health care and you even see this in birds so if a flu sweeps through an avian population it’s the bedraggled birds at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy that die first and so then one more thing and then tell me what you think about this is that the other thing that seems to happen is that as you plummet down the dominance hierarchy and your mind settles into a more depressed and anxious state the levels of cortisol that you produce chronically rise and cortisol is a good hormone for activating you but in but in high doses, high continual doses it starts to produce brain damage particularly in the hippocampus and it also suppresses immunological function which makes you more susceptible to infectious diseases so that seems to be approximately the process and so it’s no wonder that people are trying to flee away from the bottom of the dominance hierarchy does that seem reasonable? yes, give me a moment, I’ve got a cough and blow my nose okay cough hay fever season in southern Ontario uh huh okay yeah, I wish I were a better behavioural endocrinologist and knew a bit more was more expert in some of the processes that you’re talking about but a lot of that makes sense to me this fraught social comparisons I mean, the evidence certainly is that it’s more stressful to be low ranking than high ranking, we’ve had a little myth that being a very high rank puts all this burden of decision making on you and that’s terribly stressful and makes you vulnerable to heart attack and blah blah blah and the data say the opposite, the data say that’s not true, the more power and status and if you like decision making authority you have the less vulnerable you seem to be to stress related diseases so, you know, a lot of what you’re saying makes evidence sense to me the developmental story that you’re telling I mean, I think it’s right that people I don’t know how important the throw of the genetic dice is I think it’s an extremely interesting puzzle evolutionarily why there’s as much heritable genetic variability in seemingly important domains as there is, and I’m not convinced anybody really understands what modulates how much variability there is, but in any case that things are adjustable in response to what you encounter and in response to social status perceived social status and response to social comparisons makes evidence sense to me and again, I I don’t know enough about the putative damaging effects of excessively prolonged exposure to say high cortisol levels to be sure whether there isn’t still some adaptation some actual functionality to the response to long term exposure lurking beneath the seeming breakdown of the system because it just seems to me that sort of a Darwinian non-evolutionary social scientists and psychiatrists and psychologists have been too quick to assume pathology when they see states of affairs that do indeed have damaging consequences but may in some nevertheless have some utility I wish I knew a little more about I think both the low serotonin and the high cortisol levels are interesting in that regard because what does happen is the combination of those two things makes you A, more impulsive and B, more prepared for emergency action both of those things are very useful in an uncertain environment the detrimental consequences seem to occur as a consequence of prolonged overload because your body is utilizing, imagine that what your body is doing is utilizing more units of resource per moment of time because of the necessity for preparation for unexpected events and that can become physiologically exhausting in the long run so I think it does it seems to me that those biochemical effects do underlie the sort of adaptive responses that you describe except that too much is too much and if it’s hard to live at the bottom what that means is you age faster and you don’t live as long and you also have higher susceptibility to disease and maybe in some sense that’s the price you pay for the adaptive impulsivity that’s also necessary to give you a chance to shoot back up the hierarchy if that’s the sort of thing that you’re looking for yeah, no, and I can’t help thinking about sort of the evolutionary theories of of senescence and bodily repair that were pioneered by Sir Peter Medawar back in the 50s and developed more by George Williams, the idea that many, many things involve some sort of trade-off between expenditure for expenditure of energy of accumulative resources of capacity in the pursuit of something now at the expense of reduced capacity to be successful later and so you know, one reason why these chronic states may have long term damaging effects is because selection against being in these chronic states has not been strong because those who are in them for a long time didn’t historically tend to live very long anyway and they’re being if you like motivated or prepared to engage in high risk activities that at least have some chance of short term payoff which is more or less what you said actually well, and you know you talked about this, let’s call it a misbegotten idea that there’s stress at the top of the dominance hierarchy just like there is stress at the bottom and the stress at the top is responsibility and decision making and all of that you know, I do believe that there’s truth in that, but there’s an important another important biological element that needs to be considered and so there’s plenty of work done in the domains of clinical psychology and some of this is psychophysiological and neurophysiological for that matter showing that a stress of an equivalent magnitude has fewer negative effects if it’s taken on voluntarily because what happens is that if you voluntarily engage in stressful activity your approach systems are activated rather than your defense systems and the approach systems are associated with positive emotion whereas the negative emotions are associated with this defensive posturing that includes preparation for emergency and that’s much more physiologically damaging and so whether something whether you pick up a load voluntarily or have it thrust upon you seems to make a big difference to how heavy it is and that’s a very interesting piece of set of research studies as far as I’m concerned, it’s quite fascinating that that can be the case yeah, okay, so let me ask you another question, let’s get down to, we might say brass tacks here, so we can make a case that inequality destabilizes societies and cranks up the male on male homicide rate and the destabilization occurs because young men become more and more unpredictable and violent and so you could make a conservative case as well as a liberal case for not having a society that takes inequality to an extreme because conservatives, at least in principle, should be concerned with the maintenance of social stability over the long run so, but okay, so then you might make a case for income redistribution, but that gets very, very troublesome because it’s not that easy to redistribute income and that’s what I want to talk to you about, so, you know we’re in a situation, of course where the top 1% of the population controls a substantial proportion of the economic resources and the top 1% of that top 1% controls the bulk of that now, I looked into that quite deeply and that distribution is it’s not a normal distribution of money it’s a Pareto distribution of money but the weird thing about Pareto distributions and so that’s a distribution where many, many people end up with zero and just a few people end up with a lot is that a Pareto distribution characterizes zero-sum games that are played out to their conclusion, so like monopoly everybody starts in the middle, but then random trading produces an eventual Pareto-shaped distribution where lots of people start to stack up on the loser side, one person accelerates towards victory until finally everyone’s at zero except one person so it’s the logical outcome of random trading game so that’s the first thing that’s interesting about the Pareto distribution, the second thing that’s interesting is that Pareto distributions they, Pareto distributions emerge in every domain of creative human production not just the distribution of money so for example, we did an analysis of creative achievement across the lifespan using an instrument called the creative achievement questionnaire, so what it did was assess people’s levels of competence across 13 potential domains of creative activity and so we were looking at production rather than creative thinking per se although those two things are related and quite tightly we wanted to know who actually accomplished things in the world and so for musical ability for example, the zero score would be I have no trading or talent in this area and the maximum score would be you know, my original compositions have been played for international audiences and so we’ve now administered that to hundreds of people and the median score is zero across all 13 domains it’s a very, very precise Pareto distribution with a few people who are the outliers producing the overwhelming majority of the goods and you also, and that, there’s also a law that DeSola Price came up with back in the 1960s governing the output of scientific papers and he found that the square root of the number of people operating within an academic domain produced half the papers that were published in that domain so that’s not so bad if there’s 10 researchers because then 3 of them are producing half the papers but if there’s a thousand researchers operating in a domain then 30 of them are producing half the papers and then one more complication and then I’m going to let you have at this now you can think that the Pareto distribution, which by the way characterizes the distribution of wealth in every known society although the degree to which the distribution is skewed differs. You can say that the Pareto distribution is a consequence of the of the final playing out of a random trading game, but then here’s the complication this is something that’s been you know, bothering me for years there are predictors of long term life success in relatively stable societies and the best predictors are in this order the first predictor is IQ the second predictor is trait conscientiousness and it’s about half as powerful as IQ and the third predictor is low neuroticism and it’s about half as powerful as conscientiousness. So if you get a good measure of IQ and a good measure of conscientiousness then you can predict about 25% of the variance in performance, especially across managerial, administrative and academic domains and then with regards to entrepreneurial performance, you can use IQ and trait openness which is the creativity measure so there are powerful individual differences that are driving differential performance and also driving this Pareto distribution and so it’s not merely a random game, although how these people manage to make it into not a random game is beyond me, but there is evidence that our society does hierarchically arrange itself at least to some degree by ability and competence and so then the question is how do you factor that into the equation when you’re thinking about practical let’s call them income I don’t think it’s so much income redistribution is that it’s an attempt by society to stop too many people from stacking up at zero and therefore logically turning to violence and that sort of thing as an alternative as well as an attempt to just improve the level of justice in society especially if there’s a strong element of randomness and who ends up where then there’s something unjust about large numbers being stuck down at the zero but you say how is it possible to redistribute, but countries vary in the extent to which they do this they vary in the extent to which they tax inheritance, they vary in the extent to which they tax large incomes they vary in the extent to which they provide education and health care try and provide it relatively universally, try and make opportunity relatively universally they vary in these things and you know some of the happiest countries in the world and I think the most productive countries in the world the Nordic countries, Japan have been relatively equitable because they rig this game more than some other countries if you like so you say that what stacks up at the top tend to be the most competent and creative people and to imply that to some degree we have a meritocracy, and to some degree we do have a meritocracy, but you know the four Walmart heirs have as much wealth as the 100 million poorest Americans put together and they did nothing to earn it you could say well they’re high quality people because they got half their genes from Sam Walton and he did something to earn it that seems like a pretty weak argument for why they should control that much wealth if inheritance were more severely taxed in order to provide public goods for everybody, would the society be worse off? Would flattening out that curve of accomplishment actually reduce productivity? I think there’s some evidence I wish I could pull it to the forefront of my mind about the utility of distributing grant money more or less equitably in certain sciences the amount of science you get for your buck is better when you give lots and lots of people relatively small grants than when you give a small number of people relatively large grants yeah well that’s interesting because I’ve worked in the grant system in the US and in Canada, the grant system in the US is more of the give a few people a huge amount of money variety and in Canada it’s distributed more equitably I must say that I vastly prefer the Canadian system I agree with you and I think the Canadian system has been moving regrettably in the direction of the American it partly depends on the field of science of course if you need a bloody hadron collider then you need millions and millions of dollars if you’re a psychologist like you or me things seem to work better in many ways when you fund a higher proportion of grants with a lower variance in the amount awarded when I first came to McMaster there was exactly although I shouldn’t say when I first came by say the late 80s and early 90s essentially everybody in the department had a research grant for me there at NSERC Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada or sure the social sciences and humanities research council of Canada usually the former in our particular department everybody in the department had an active research lab everybody created the opportunity for two or three students to do a bachelor’s thesis in their lab each year then would things get more variable people start people people who are being productive who are getting out a scientific paper to doing decent work making a contribution to knowledge when they start being denied these grants you refuse two or three times in the competition well the hell with it I’ve got tenure I’ve got a good pension lined up I think I’ll become a real estate speculator the opportunities for the dissemination of research opportunity to a larger number of students shrink I think it’s been a disaster in certain areas an area where I was raised animal behavior studies if you just look at either the number of papers and top ranked journals by country according to how they allocate their funds or how much money is allocated to it the money allocated to it is the less strong predictor you’d expect the equitability is a stronger predictor sweet in Canada used to last time I looked both rank far above the United States in numbers of papers per capita getting into top quality research journals in animal behavior it’s one little anecdote but I would be very surprised if there isn’t some generality to this well I wonder though to play devil’s advocate the thing about distributing research funds more equitably is that you are distributing them among a population that’s already been extraordinarily highly selected for capability so it seems counterproductive because it’s for all the flaws of the university system which are manifold it is still extraordinarily difficult to become a professor it’s a multi-tiered selection system and so the people who do become professors are on average very intelligent and on average very hardworking and we know that because we know what the predictors are of success in academia and it’s intelligence and conscientiousness unsurprisingly although creativity seems to play almost zero role well the thing that’s partly because science is an algorithmic game and just beatling away at it busily is a very powerful mechanism I’m not the least bit cynical about that the reason that science works is because in some sense it has the aspect of factory production it can be distributed anyone can learn to do it and you get a long ways by nibbling at the edges it’s continual slow progress when millions of people are doing it it’s progress that’s plenty rapid so okay so there are definitely situations in which denying people resources seems to be completely counterproductive and that would be one of them so now the other question note is I would say and also that’s the thing there’s also an effective means of funneling resources to let’s say a wide range of professors it actually works the problem one of the problems with general income redistribution as far as I can tell is that we don’t really know how to do it very well and one of the I mean look here’s an example you can tell me what you think about this so I used to work I used to live in northern Alberta when the oil, sporadic oil booms were going on and my observation was that if you wanted to make money in Alberta when an oil boom was going on you didn’t go out and work on the rigs although if you did that you could make a tremendous amount of money now it was all young men who did that pretty much say between the ages of 16 and 25 something like that and they were making fantastic amounts of money but they almost all of them came out of it with nothing to show for it because they would work for two weeks and then go into town and just have a blowout party for four days and spend everything they got and buy expensive cars and wreck them and so forth so it was reckless behavior that I think was akin in some sense to that to that to the steep dominance hierarchy violence and that sort of thing that for status seeking that you’re describing the people who really made money were the bartenders right because they absorbed all the excess profits and actually generally generally speaking or comparatively speaking were able to utilize the money properly the point I’m making is that an oil boom is a very effective way of distributing wealth down the economic ladder but it didn’t necessarily seem to me to be a very effective one because it didn’t because the money flowed back up to the top 1% damn near as fast as you can shovel it downwards and that’s the thing about that damn Pareto distribution is that it seems there are people there’s a group there’s a scientific subfield called econophysicists and they actually modeled the distribution of money in an economy using the same equations that modeled the distribution of a gas into a vacuum so there’s something that’s natural law like about this the economists call it the Matthew principle right to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken I don’t think that we’ve done a good job of grappling with the actual complexity of this and we tend to split up into politically opposed what would you call camps and argue about the solution to inequality and the left wing solution is something like you know distribute the money take it from the rich especially the undeserving rich if you can identify them and give it to the poor and the conservatives say well no the poor should bootstrap themselves up and maybe be provided with more opportunity and that might equalize things but it isn’t clear to me that we’re actually grappling with the magnitude of the problem no it isn’t clear to me either but what you say about equalizing opportunity for example is in a sense distributing the resources because one way you equalize opportunity is by having universal high quality health care that’s paid for by some sort of government revenue some taxes picked up somewhere free education universal access to education is certainly another and it’s it’s another way that in effect you create a more egalitarian society so I mean there are certain domains certainly education and health care maybe some others that are not springing to mind well I suppose the improvement of various sorts of infrastructure that you know make it easier to get from point A to point B publicly subsidized trends things like that can certainly be contributors as well now that’s equalizing it’s own right you’re not taking it giving it specifically to anybody else then there’s things like a guaranteed minimum income and at first it sounds like a crazy idea the idea that you know you should just we should take government accrued resources which come from some sort of taxation and we should just make sure everybody has 15,000 bucks a year to start or something like that it sounds kind of wacky because the standard argument against it from the right has been that it will undermine incentives and nobody will produce bugger all if we could all be welfare queens but we’ll want to be welfare queens mostly and where this stuff has been tried my understanding is that it’s been surprisingly successful that there was an experiment in Manitoba where a minimum income was tried for a while where gosh yeah I remember that I think Finland is about to try it Manitoba has tried it it was an NDP government I think which then was replaced by a conservative or nominally liberal government that sort of canned the results but the results came to light later and showed that for example the number of people who chose not to work did not go up under this and that it had various beneficial effects I think it remains to be seen but I think even the idea of putting money in the hands of everybody from the great collective wealth that has accumulated could be socially beneficial, could be economically beneficial, could be environmentally beneficial I wonder I wonder certainly in the domains like education and health care that’s in effect a kind of redistribution that seems easy to effectuate I mean easy, not easy to effectuate in terms of convincing people politically or overcoming the propaganda against it but a whole bunch of obviously a whole bunch of our wealth is embodied in the infrastructure I really noticed this for example when I lived in Montreal because Montreal is a great city and one of the things that distinguishes Montreal from most cities that I’ve lived in especially western cities is that people don’t live in the city, they don’t live in their houses and the fact that the city is extraordinarily livable so you can walk everywhere there’s always something to do that’s exciting there’s a tremendously active street life means that there’s access to infrastructure and social capital related wealth just distributed everywhere and that’s a lovely thing so I’m kind of looking for solutions to the Pareto distribution problem that conservatives and liberals alike could agree upon and so some of those you outlined improve the infrastructure of our society because those are public goods that benefit everyone that also improve productivity there seems to be no downside to that at all also raises employment improve the quality of education right from day one which is something that I think we do a very bad job of and then the issue with healthcare is that the Canadian healthcare system and it has flaws because it’s of course dealing with an impossible problem still uses much less of its capital on maintaining itself and for example having to maintain an infrastructure that collects money I know that the hospitals in the US spend some substantial proportion of the revenue, I can’t remember precisely but it’s between 17 and 30 if I remember correctly just gathering the money for their services which seems to be a rather counterproductive use of their resources and I wonder how much is spent on billboards advertising their hospitals too if you drive the interstate highways of the US it’s astonishing how much information about you know, come to such and such where we have the best cancer doctors etc and it isn’t, well and the they pay a lot for their healthcare they do indeed I spent 3 years there recently and we paid a lot for healthcare coverage that turned out not in fact to be all that thorough a coverage right, well and when I lived in the states too and I had decent coverage I was teaching in Boston there I had a pretty good program but I wouldn’t say it was manifestly different from my Canadian experience which has been mixed, but of course it is very important to note that that making people healthy is impossible because everybody gets sick and ages and dies so it’s an impossible task it also indicates to me that that’s perhaps one of the reasons why it doesn’t fit so nicely into a free market model because the free market assumes that there’s not infinite demand for something and there is actually near infinite demand for healthcare especially when you’re dying there’s that and there’s also just it’s an impossible problem because of an aging population, it’s an impossible problem because you know governments have one of the determinants of the cost of the healthcare system is how many MD’s you’ve got out there billing it and governments have a tendency to want to respond to this by restricting the number of new medics so as to restrict the number of people billing but this is not much of a solution you have large numbers of people trying to find a family doctor unsuccessfully okay so there is some meritocratic structure to our society in so far as IQ, conscientiousness and openness predict long-term life success and that’s a good thing because that’s an indicator of health in a society, I would say if your society is set up to allow people who are intelligent and conscientious nearer the pinnacles of power structures, that’s a good thing for everyone, now you can still have an argument about how steep that gradient should be, but then with regards to the guaranteed annual income issue I’m also concerned that the importance of individual differences there are not being considered so for example I don’t know what people who are extremely low in conscientiousness would do with an annual income because they’re not inclined to work and it isn’t obvious to me that providing them with an easy way out is the answer because providing unconscious people with an easy way out seems to be actually quite counterproductive and conscientiousness is a decent predictor of long-term success we also don’t know to what degree necessity is a motivator, which is of course the conservative argument and we also don’t know how homogenous and small a society has to be before income redistribution programs will actually be successful it seems easier to implement them in relatively homogenous societies like the Scandinavian countries or Japan which is where they tend to have been implemented with more success so that’s a complicated phenomena as well and then the other thing that’s really going to come up on us hard in the next 10 years I would say this is how it looks to me, is that I think computational devices are a multiplier of intelligence and conscientiousness because if you’re smart and you know how to use a computer and you’re diligent, as a conscientious person would be then you’re much more deadly than you would be without your computer because it multiplies your and there’s a huge difference between someone who really knows how to use a computer, including knowing how to program it and someone who’s literate enough to use their iPad to do a Google search and so I think one of the things that’s also driving inequality, particularly in societies like the United States is that increasingly people who are smart and conscientious can do a tremendous amount of work without having to hire anyone, so we have these tiny companies that employ almost no one that gather massive resources to themselves and that’s going to be a problem, well here’s a good example, here’s one thing that’s coming so you know the Tesla guys are working pretty hard on autonomous vehicles, and they’re making a lot of progress and they’re not the only ones obviously but you know the biggest employer for males in North America is as driver I didn’t know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah it’s the biggest single employment category so you know we’re increasingly eradicating the possibility for people who are on the lower end of the intelligence distribution and the lower end of the conscientiousness distribution to find a place in society and it’s possible that providing them with minimal resources to survive might be sufficient to solve that problem, but I doubt it because as they say, you know, man does not live on bread alone and it seems to me that people need the quest, the degree to which people need to find a productive and credible place in a functional society is something that we haven’t yet we don’t know the parameters of that No, no, I don’t disagree, I mean the of course the loss of decently paid work and to date the major computer revolution to some extent or at least the modern electronic device and your phone can do everything revolution and you know I live in Hamilton, Ontario where formerly a lunch bucket town with an enormous number of people working in decently paid working class jobs and those jobs have been evaporating and if drivers evaporate, I mean work is going to change, work opportunities are going to change and I take your point that people need something that they can think of as useful work useful work you know it’s interesting, we’re talking, we’re two males talking about this and we’re probably thinking from a somewhat male perspective there’s a lot of useful work that is minimally or not at all compensated that are predominantly female domains daycare kinds of things various so called charitable activities and so on you know the idea that people need something to occupy their time with that feels worthwhile that enters them into a social arena where they engage with other people that they come home satisfied that they’ve done something useful and they also have a chicken in every pot besides, I mean if work opportunities shrink and if the next Mark Zuckerberg can employ a hundred people to pull in tens of billions of dollars then where’s that going to come from? It may come from various sorts of unpaid work with a guaranteed income that you know enables that work to be unpaid and still be fulfilling I don’t know well that’s a good thing to think about maybe people will learn how to go out into the community and spontaneously do useful things although I can tell you that my experience trying to find gainful let’s call it volunteer employments for people who are on the lower end of the ability distribution has been absolutely it’s difficult beyond imagination because it turns out that finding a volunteer position is actually no less difficult than finding a job, for example you have to go through a relatively complicated process of police screening for most jobs and you have to produce a resume and you have to be able to work in an office environment and you know you need to have all the abilities that you would have if you were actually having a real job and so that makes things complicated as well I want to come back also to what you were saying about the predictive power of IQ and conscientiousness which I don’t dispute and I’m also not one of these people who suffers under the delusion that these things are totally socially determined I understand and believe that they have high heritability and identifiable genetic sources in that variability and so on, but you know the standard old joke used to be, you can tell me because you know more about personality psychology the standard old joke used to be that everything is 50% heritable that pretty much anything that you can measure as a trait that has any stability within the lifetime also turns out to have a heritability somewhere near .5 but there’s the other .5 some people have low IQs because they were exposed to too much land infancy you know I believe that conscientiousness can probably be I believe you suggested earlier that we know something about this already developmental determinants of shifts in conscientiousness so you know we have to caution ourselves against talking about these individual difference factors as if they are beautiful attributes of individuals that are going to undermine any sort of progressive improvement of circumstances for people are going to create bad by products of attempts to produce social justice it’s just going to, you know, you’re going to leave your dumb unconscious people out there being parasites or something well you know there is of course decent evidence that there are socio-cultural effects on IQ I mean the Flynn effect which is named after the man who described the the phenomena indicates that the average IQ has been increasing quite substantially over the last hundred years and the reason for that no one knows for sure but one of the putative reasons for that is that we’ve lifted the bottom out of catastrophe so there aren’t people whose IQs are stunted by exposure to zero information during critical developmental periods and who didn’t get enough to eat yeah I was going to say severe malnutrition never mind zero information yeah exactly, exactly so we’ve wiped out in many ways we’ve wiped out the worst effects of privation and that’s increasingly true as well on the worldwide scale, worldwide stage, you know there’s about 150,000 people a day right now being lifted out of absolute poverty by UN standards the fastest improvement in the history of the world and also about 300,000 people a day being hooked up to the electrical grid so we are making some progress removing the absolute privation problem which is a non-trivial problem the problem with most of the attempts to raise IQ is that they don’t change the variance in IQ they tend to raise the average IQ across the population and that leaves the inequality, IQ inequality problem basically untouched so there have been studies trying to estimate how much socio-economic pressure let’s say you have to place on an individual to raise their IQ lowering it’s easy because making something worse is always easier than making something better but if I remember correctly if you take an identical twin who’s adopted out at birth, in order to produce a 15 point increase in IQ compared to the other twin which is a one standard deviation increase and about the same as the average difference between a university student in an average state college and an average high school student you have to move the one twin from the fifth percentile of socio-economic status to the 95th percentile so you need about a three standard deviation improvement in socio-economic conditions to produce a one standard deviation improvement in IQ so it looks like it can be done but it’s expensive I see what you’re saying I’m kind of surprised actually given we just mentioned malnutrition is one possible source of low IQ, one possible developmental source, I’m kind of surprised that to the degree that the flit effect might be due to things like a reduction of the number of people exposed to severe malnutrition that it wouldn’t have also simultaneously truncated the variance a little bit that seems slightly surprising let me restate that it has truncated the variance although the data on that isn’t clear isn’t as clear but I do believe that it’s a reasonable inference to make that the variance has been truncated it’s also hidden to some degree because the IQ tests are always re-normed to keep the variance at a standard 15 points so it makes it difficult to look retrospectively and see what’s happened to the variance so, but the other problem too is that you know you get these stories now and then about these companies that come out with claims that their brain exercises can improve IQ and the literature on that is damn dismal I can tell you it’s that the holy grail is to produce cognitive exercises that produce a legitimate impact on fluid intelligence and like there has been a lot of work done on that and the answer so far is that it doesn’t work so what about the video gaming I mean I know there has been this suggestion that playing video games actually improves at least some aspects of intelligence yeah well there’s a couple of studies that indicated that video games might improve spatial intelligence but here’s the problem and I think this is a critical problem perhaps an insoluble one at least no one solved it is that what you get is that if you exercise yourself substantially on a given game you can radically accelerate your performance in the game so you can get much better at those specific skills you don’t get generalization across cognitive sets which is what you’re really hoping for yeah I thought that was the claim from some of these yeah well they have shown some increases in spatial IQ but there’s not very many studies and I would say they’re far over balanced by the other side of the research equation which continually says and I’ve looked at this because I’m really interested in the improvement of IQ I mean that’s the holy grail in some sense and that the overwhelming preponderance of evidence suggests that you don’t get generalization outside the narrow domain now why that is it’s even worse hey because you might say well imagine that you could take five different domains of intelligence still associated tightly with G and you have people practice routines in all five dimensions maybe you’d get generalization under those circumstances and the the results of the research attempting that indicate that as soon as you move away from those specific practice instances you don’t get generalization so I guess in some ways some of this is to be expected from the consideration that everything is an allocation problem within the body and brain that you know by a large an improvement in one domain tends to be bought at the expense of something else you know you just that and then conscientiousness I can tell you some research we’ve done that’s cool although we haven’t been able to demonstrate that it’s actually improved conscientiousness the first thing to note about conscientiousness is that no one understands it at all especially the industriousness element there’s no plausible biological, psychological neurophysiological or animal models for conscientiousness all we’ve got is self reports we can’t even find tasks that conscientious people do better it’s unbelievable whoo self reports really well you can get reports from teachers and parents and so forth but it’s all human report it’s the only way we can measure it in my lab we probably tried 200 tasks trying to find something that conscientious people do better no luck we can derive it from linguistic analysis we can derive it from verbal output now to some degree but that’s still that’s not a task so now we produced a series of programs called the self authoring suite and one of them the future authoring program it’s a writing program that helps people lay out their plans for the future in detail so they have to consider their their intimate relationships, their career goals their educational goals, their use of time outside their work, their plans to maintain mental and physical health their use of drugs and alcohol they have to write for 15 minutes about what kind of life they’d like to have if they were taking care of themselves 3-5 years in the future and then to write for the same amount of time about how terrible their life could be if all their bad habits took control and then they have to turn the positive vision into an implementable plan we’ve managed to improve their college grades by about 20% and drop out their drop drop their drop out rate about 25% over about 10,000 students now but you know we tried to see if that was mediated by an improvement in conscientiousness and there was no evidence for that what it was mediated by was number of words written during the exercise so it turns out that thinking more about your future helps, the more you think about it the more it helps and maybe that would translate into improvement in conscientiousness across time but there haven’t been any credible studies that I know of indicating that there are exercises that can be done to improve conscientiousness so that’s also, you know troublesome and worrisome because that would be a nice thing to be able to do yeah, I mean I haven’t thought much about and I don’t know much about the literature on conscientiousness as a trait but the word seems to come out to me as an ordinary English speaker has a strong social element to it as well so the conscientious person is somebody who doesn’t forget his obligations your index of conscientiousness in a university professor is, you know somebody has asked you to write them a reference letter for getting into graduate school or whatever do you actually prioritize and get the damn thing done on time or is there some risk that you’ll just forget about it and shove it to them somewhere else I imagine conscientiousness as having a strong element of attentiveness to social obligation and to the well-being of others as it is defined in the personality literature, does it have any of that? well I would say not so much attention to the well-being of others because that’s more trait agreeableness that’s more the maternal dimension but there’s definitely a massive effect of social obligation which is part of the reason why conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness than liberals but it’s not well-being of others, it’s duty and so the conscientious types form and maintain social contracts they implement their plans and they seem to feel shame and self-contempt when they fail to live up to their social obligations so that’s another thing that’s interesting about the income redistribution idea because it’s conceivable to me that conscientious people would hate that because conscientious people do very badly for example, if they’re laid off from work, even if it’s not their fault they still take themselves apart for their failure and so conscientious people in particular seem to find inactivity without productivity highly aversive and aversive enough to really cause them major health problems yeah, that brings us back to what we were discussing a little while ago the problem of ensuring that large numbers of people have access to meaningful work in an age in which it is more and more the case that big components of the economy are booming away with very few employees and that’s going to continue that’s probably going to escalate or back to that same topic to some extent yes, well I think inequality of opportunity is sort of the bottom or bedrock of inequality having its impacts upon us it’s certainly the bottom of bedrock of why we should care about it on moral and social justice grounds it’s like, well, why should people who why should one’s birthright affect the opportunities available to one well, it’s also a social catastrophe because hypothetically, you want to set up a society so that whatever someone has to offer is maximally offerable to the community because otherwise the community loses yes I think one of the great examples of that, although I don’t think this accounts for all of it, is that the relationship between the provision of women’s rights by countries and their economic productivity is staggeringly high so I think that also has to do with openness in general to transformation and change with the provision of women’s rights being an index of that but nonetheless, it’s a great predictor of eventual economic success well, partly an index and partly perhaps a more direct effect that after all, slightly over half the population maybe their talents are better utilized right, well that’s certainly what we would hope and I think as you said I think the evidence at least suggests that so, okay, so let me recapitulate because we should probably fold this up so as far as I’m concerned, your work was revolutionary because it undermined the general proposition that the fundamental cause of crime and violent crime in particular was poverty instead, you flipped it, you flipped it on edge so to speak, and made the claim, well substantiated by the research, that it’s relative poverty that drives violent crime because of status seeking, primarily among young men and although there are effects of absolute privation, and that would be the poverty effect the effects of relative deprivation of status are much more, let’s say especially in our societies, much more socially significant, and that the status competition itself is driven at least in part by the desire of men to attain status to obtain access to women, roughly speaking and it’s partly because women outsource the problem of mate selection to the male competition domain, right, so the males compete, the women peel off the top, it’s like a market solution in some sense and then, and then, having pointed out that inequality not only drives male homicide, but also tends to destabilize societies, there is an impetus for people to consider how we can stop the winner from taking all without becoming unduly authoritarian about it, or, or impeding individual productivity given the fact that there is individual variation in the elements that actually produce productivity, that’s our set of social problems, exacerbated by the fact that we’re going to be wiping out employment for huge categories particularly of men over the next 15 years yeah, let me, in this context just make a point that I spent most of a chapter of my book on, and that is that the notion that inequality is somehow the engine of productivity, it’s been pretty much rejected by economists themselves in recent years they’ve come to the conclusion that relatively equitable places actually have more economic productivity in the ensuing period of time than those that start out more inequitable, and there’s a lot of reasons for that the one that I think is most striking that I would commend people to look into is the concept of useless, if you like, or wasteful expenditure on guard labor and the concept of excessively unequal societies and guard labor is a term coined by economists Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev, and what they’ve shown is that the number of people who are employed in just jobs like being security guards goes up as inequality goes up it’s no great surprise when you think about it but you can define guard labor more broadly or more narrowly, and the general result is that a large proportion of people are engaged in people from usurping the property of other people and that this is a very wasteful consequence of extreme inequality and economic waste that’s reduced to relatively equitable societies, and there are others right, so as the society becomes more unequal it tilts towards authoritarianism at multiple levels of organization it’s also counter sorry, I was just going to say and towards, exactly, and it’s counterproductive even from the point of view of simple economic criteria of GDP and so on that inequality gets in the way of that for a bunch of reasons, another really interesting one that Bowles has articulated in a recent book Bowles, B-O-W-L-E-S, Sam Bowles if you want to look about I think his book was called The New Politics of Equality of Redistribution and I liked it a lot anyway, one thing that he’s shown that I thought was very interesting and it never entered my head before I read it was that the actual quality of goods in a society can be damaged by severe inequality when rich individuals and rich firms have the capacity to keep innovators and small companies from establishing themselves, you mentioned before about the differences in entrepreneurial undertakings and where large numbers of people with worthy small business plans can’t capitalize them properly and can’t get off the ground, you’ve actually got the phenomenon of people with lots of wealth and shoddy products can drive people with better quality products who are trying to get started at the bottom out of the market with negative results for just the consumers of the society Well that’s the problem with having people stack up at zero Zero turns out to be a very, very difficult place to get out of because you can’t leverage yourself out of it Now it’s also in those really unequal societies too, like say Central American societies, it also becomes increasingly unpleasant for the people who are wealthy because they’re only wealthy in a very narrowly defined way because they can’t go outside they can’t let their children go out into public because they’ll get kidnapped I mean, the societies get pretty ugly when the fences have to be really high Yes And among the rich countries among the rich countries of the world, those problems are not absent, I mean they’re certainly worse in the US than they are in Canada or most of Western Europe Well alright, that was really good I’m very happy that you agreed to do a podcast with me I mean, I found your work I definitely regard you as one of the people who’s been highly influential on my thinking, I mean I think that work on relative poverty is just and the effect size is the work you guys did in Chicago your work on indicating the adaptive utility of uncertainty related dominance challenges in unequal societies, all of that’s brilliant I think, and nicely biologically predicated and the science is done extremely soundly and it has remarkable policy implications and it changes the view around crime and wealth, and in a very important way to tilt it over towards the inequality side, I think it’s and it fits so nicely in with the dominance hierarchy literature and all of that, it’s really profound stuff as far as I’m concerned so I’m really glad you had a chance to share it with everyone Thank you very much, I appreciate those kind words, you can flattery will get you everywhere Yeah, well the thing is the best kind of flattery is truth so, and I would certainly recommend that people take a look at your book if they’re interested in what we’ve been discussing, again that’s killing the competition, which is very readable I would say, it provides a lovely argument with regards to inequality, addresses the major criticisms I think very effectively and starts to lay out what is going to be an increasingly necessary public discussion about how civilized societies can ensure that they don’t collapse into two extreme distribution into two extreme distributions of wealth or other resources it’s a real danger, it’s a conscious constant danger, needs to be thought through and addressed very intelligently so, thanks again hopefully, maybe we’ll get another chance to talk hopefully a couple hundred thousand people will watch this that would be good Thanks a lot Signing off? Signing off Okay, thank you Bye now