TANSTAAFL?

One of the mild joys of life is learning new acronyms.  From PDQ to HOMES (a mnemonic for the Great Lakes) to LOL, we get a momentary flash of pleasure at meeting new strange groupings of apparently random letters.  In fact, beginning with their first exposure in Economics 101, economists seem actually to derive a lifetime of enjoyment from having learned TANSTAAFL, “There aint no such thing as a free lunch.”  Anyone who’s ever served as a volunteer at a soup kitchen knows better of course, though the economist will smile wisely and say that the lunch was “bought and paid for” by homelessness and the virtuous feeling of the volunteer.  But such disparate costs and values received seem to operate under some system of supply and demand other than that taught in economics class. 

That’s hard for economists to deal with.  In many ways they resemble a sort of intellectual accountant; benefits in one column must balance with costs in another, and anything not in accord with the system gets thrown out as irrelevant.  That’s the “determinism” part of “economic determinism.”

It turns out that evolutionary biologists are caught up in the same conundrum as the economists.  An interesting article by Jonah Lehrer in the March 5 issue of The New Yorker, "Kin and Kind" examines the current battle (there’s always at least one going on) among the biologists over the evolution and origins of altruism. Until recently, the biologists have been using a kind of mathematics that assumes altruism is a result of kinship; one ant or bee, or human, behaves altruistically towards another to the extent they are part of a “kinship group”, and the degree of altruism depends on the closeness of kin. Like the economists’ supply and demand econometrics, everything is neatly accounted for without the fuss and bother of explaining why someone would do something altruistic simply because they felt it was the right thing to do, in other words, altruistically. Charles Darwin had been unable to explain altruism, and regarded it as a fundamental paradox, but the biologists thought they had solved the problem with their mathematics.

The leader of the “sociobiology” revolution of the 1960’s that elevated kinship mathematics to a kind of biological theology was E. O. Wilson, who as a result became a sort of demigod in the trade.  Now, 40 years later, Wilson has seen the error of his previous views and seeks their downfall. He is aided in that effort by mathematicians, who see flaws in the basic workings of the kinship mathematics.  To shorten the tale, Wilson, based on his life-long studies and observations, now believes altruism is a part of human nature that is not the result of kinship groups, but instead produces them.  Human nature is balanced in a kind of dynamic tension between selfishness and altruism.  Moreover, Wilson proposes that altruism is an “emergent” trait (the wave of the future?) that aids “group selection”, a proposal that orthodox biologists find difficult to accept. In Wilson’s words, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups.  Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.”  And he provides a lot of evidence and reasoning to prove it.

Which should strike terror to the heart of orthodox economists or economic conservatives. For if Wilson is right, then the rational (read “selfish”) man assumption at the heart (or lack thereof) of economic theory is missing some terms in his equations, and is denying his own nature.  The “invisible hand” of the unregulated free market may someday result in its destruction. Society might be better off with the wealthy acting like Warren Buffett and welcoming a higher tax.  And the meek may indeed inherit the earth.