CNR Post, January 23, 2008. Big Business Biology

Big Business Biology

Economic Injustice

An often discussed issue among social thinkers these days is the vast disparity in wealth between the highest and lowest economic classes. It is common knowledge that this disparity is increasing, despite all technological and political achievements. In fact, many people who lived thousands of years ago in scientifically unenlightened times had better standards of living than the many today that live in abject poverty.

The first impulse is to blame the population increase that we have seen over the last century, for the continued existence of poverty. On closer scrutiny however, it becomes obvious that this is not the case. Population growth, while being a major cause for concern for various reasons, is not responsible in itself for the great disparity in wealth. Something is going on in our social evolution that negates the ability of knowledge and innovation towards uplifting everyone. Is it possible that as our human population exploded and our knowledge grew, we preserved certain evolved behaviors that today tend to maintain the disparity between classes? To what extent does the system itself direct this polarization of people?

Natural Economics

In looking for biological factors that could be influencing socio-economic wealth distribution, it is useful to adopt an evolutionary approach. I will discuss two factors here, group size and inter-group communication, and describe how innate human tendencies may be driving this economic polarization.

Humans, for a large part of our evolutionary development, lived in small groups. These tribal groups, usually consisting of a few individuals/families, had social lives that involved some basic social rules. In these circumstances, everyone in the group would have been part of the team, contributing to the common effort towards survival. For hundreds of thousands of years as humans and for millions of years before that, our ancestors were being wired for interacting within (and between) small groups.

Take the little Gaulish village portrayed in the comic book series Asterix. For all the major trades there were one or two people who were in charge. There was Obelix, the quarryman who carried his menhir with him everywhere he went. Then there was Unhygenix, the fish monger who stank to the high heavens. There was Cacophonix, the tone-deaf bard who whipped out his harp at the suggestion of a gathering. In general, there was little remembering to do if you wanted to be a consumer in Asterix’s village. Say you wanted fish; you knew everyone went to Unhygenix to buy his putrid offerings. It was a no-brainer.

Global Societies

Since the origin of large post-agricultural societies many systemic changes have taken place, creating infinite new kinds of groups and social divisions, resulting in a heterogeneous cacophony of cultural identities. We now form super-groups with hundreds of millions of members. However, in many aspects humans still function socially by utilizing behaviors that evolved while living in small groups. In essence, practically the entire human population is one large fish market for the modern day Unhygenix.

The increase in human group size goes hand in hand with the explosion in communication technology. It is possible today to communicate ideas across cultures like never before. This is the age of brand image and product identity, where an entire infrastructure exists to support the constant barraging of people’s minds with names and catch phrases. Unhygenix, as long as his name is culturally identified with fish, can, with the help of modern communication technology, sell his fish to the entire Roman Empire and become the richest man in all of Gaul. In the process he will destroy all the small fish mongers.

Now, Unhygenix may indeed have the best fish delivery system in the state, but what really matters is how many people THINK he does. Say there are two or three fish mongers in Gaul. The people may then compare the products and choose based on the quality of service. Suppose there were 500 fish mongers; the one who advertises the most, wins. Why? Well, because people have better things to do than sit around and compare fish, so they go with what they perceive to be the most popular brand. Unhygenix didn’t create a new market; he stole the markets of every other fish monger in the Empire by playing on the human tendency towards homogenization. This is how behaviors that evolved in a very different social setting are adversely influencing modern society.

Fair World Order

I have briefed upon how evolutionary traits functioning in a modified social environment are leading to the wealth spread that we see in the industrialized world. It is obvious that there have been tremendous achievements in technology that would have only been possible with such wealth consolidation as we have witnessed. Modern corporations set high standards on efficiency, although how much overall efficiency can be measured across the economic spectrum may be debatable. However, it is also clear that such a society is highly unfair because of the innate value that capital and brand name popularity can possess. In modern society, fame is its own virtue.

Laissez-faire economists would profess (usually not blatently) that the biased spread in wealth is essential for economic growth. Can this assertion be challenged by an alternate economic system? Is it possible to create a post-industrialist society where wealth distribution is not as skewed as in modern capitalist societies? How would such a society attend to and tap into the social traits that we humans evolved when living in much smaller groups? That is something worth thinking about……….