December 25, 2005
Monogamy as public good.
In Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Taleb differentiates between low-risk/high-quality strategies that result in surivival over the long term and high-risk/low quality strategies that look successful only because the losers are difficult to count. e.g. playing lotteries look like a good idea when you see how happy the winners are, but then you are not accounting for all the people who don't win. It may be obvious that lottery tickets are actually not good investments, but he shows that the same phenomena happens in all sorts of more professional investment contexts and even professionals don't notice.
He characterizes many trading strategies as equivalent to repeated plays of Russian Roulette with some payoff for survival. Over enough plays you will have a small number of rich survivors and a large number of ex-players who you will never meet. It will therefore appear like Russian Roulette is a good career as oppposed to, say, Dentistry.
A point to note here, is that the survivors of this game of Russian Roulette will be much more attractive than Dentists. They will have worked less hard, and earned more money. They will appear to have both good genes/memes to have succeeded in such a game (sic) and the wealth to give potential mates a high expectation of comfort for them and their kids.
In societies that allow polygamy (and perhaps adultry), these Russian Roullete players will crowd out Dentists for breeding opportunities. The result is that the next generation will be substantially LESS FIT than the prior one. One way out of this bind is for females to become highly efficient at differentiating between random success and expected success. One of the points of Fooled By Randomness is that such differentiation is exceptionally hard to do generally and particularly without specialized knowledge of the game.
An alternative strategy is for a society to adopt monogamy as a rule. Under monogamy, the Roullete survivor is more likely to get his pick of the female population, but less likely to crowd out the other lower risk strategies that acually have higher levels of expected success.
A third strategy is that women pursue all the highest expected value (or worst-case optimized) strategies and for men to specialize in risky behavior. In this model, large numbers of men are thrown into various forms of Russian Roulette games in order to procure random inordinate wealth to be distributed to the remaining population. This sucks for the random male but from a societal perspective is actually a good strategy. Male hunting and female gathering follow this model.
This third model requires polygamy in the case where gambling kills off the least successful mates (otherwise it is not breeding at capacity). However, absent war, success has become much more financial. In those realms some combination of monogamy and male-disposability makes the most sense.
The public goods problem is that individual women should prefer polygamy to monomany because if the inequalities between Roulette success and expected success are sufficiently large, a share of the Roulette's wealth may be subtantially larger than the expected marginal value of mating with the Dentist. So even as she would prefer to sleep with Roulette, the public-good is that she mate with the Dentist.
The male-disposability problem is further that men need some compensation to justify their engaging in more risky behavior.
The upshot is that the most successful people in a healthy society are highly likely to be male and further than these societies probably oppress women in various ways both to compensate for male risk and to breed fitter men.
Note: This post is just a thought. Not fully worked out. My gut is that this argument also plays into cultural hotpoint discussions of gay marriage and abortion, but I have not worked out the details.
Posted by Alex at 05:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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