Leviathan, Cooperation, and Social Trust

I promised I'd revisit this, though I wonder sometimes if I write about it too often? Feels like I do, in some shape or form... but the last time I covered this may have been years ago.

Imagine, if you will, a world where humans need 23 hours of sleep in a day. One tribe decides to stagger their sleep cycle, so that one person is always awake. The other... doesn't.

If something were to happen. An attack, or natural disaster, or somesuch, I think it's fairly obvious which tribe would be better off.

Cooperation makes us stronger. (Which is well known, of course, which is also why certain types of people find dissent so threatening. It's hard to accomplish much of anything if the group is unable to make a decision on what, or how. But that's a separate topic.)

A pack of wolves is more dangerous than the sum of each individual wolf's abilities. They can work together to attack blind spots, tire out their target, and so on and so forth.

But there are challenges to cooperating, especially for us. That's part of my fascination with social dilemmas and the like. How do we get people to agree to cooperate when there are so many incentives to be selfish? (This is also where trust comes into play... because maybe you do want the benefits of cooperating, but you don't trust everyone else to do their part. And if nobody is going to work together, then you might as well see about getting yours while you can.)

One of the best classes I ever took was called Analyzing Social Trust and Cooperation, and it covered quite a bit of this - social dilemmas, Bowling Alone, microlending, and more. It also discussed Elinor Ostrom's work on governing the commons, well before she won her Nobel prize.

And we discussed the Hobbesian notion of the Leviathan, and the problems and challenges with such a system.

Hobbes argued for a strong centralized government. As I mentioned earlier, he wrote during the English Civil War, and saw the horrors of disunity. I suppose you could also watch Game of Thrones to see a fictionalized account of that sort of thing. Can you think of a single character that didn't lose something they cared deeply about?

And, again, is it such a shock that some Iraqis now look fondly on Saddam Hussein, and prefer a 'strongman' to the chaos we unleashed?

But there are problems with Leviathan, and more than just the harm caused by being at the mercy of a tyrant. (I used to think the evil villains in fantasy were caricatures... a real world ruler would never be that awful, would they? I heard some stories about Saddam and his sons that made me rethink that.)

The thing is, centralized (and, more importantly, outside) forces generally make one of two mistakes - they either punish the innocent or fail to capture the guilty. It's sort of like the challenges the computer science industry has with intrusion detection systems, or biometric authentication... you get some false positives (thinking someone is hacking your system when they aren't, or in biometrics thinking someone isn't who they claim to be when they are) and some false negatives (thinking you're good when someone really is trying to hack your system, or with facial recognition recognizing someone when they really aren't the person they're supposed to be.)

Leviathan may try to, say, make marijuana illegal... but the cops may not catch everyone using it, and may falsely arrest someone who wasn't.

The thing is, these are the mistakes an outsider would make. I don't mean that they're a foreigner, per se, so much as that they just don't really know the local situation. You might know if your neighbor is doing something illegal, but the cops don't.

So one solution is to empower the people who actually know the situation, up close and personal. Elinor Ostrom's work looked at various ways local communities solved social dilemmas. Like water usage... if cities are drawing their water from underground lakes, and the lakes start filling up with salt water if the water level gets too low... destroying the resource for everyone... then the people who want to use that water benefit by working together.

Same thing with the fishing industry, and the problems with overfishing.

She wrote a whole book discussing this, and iirc it was rather dense and academic, though interesting. There's stuff like whether the boundaries of the resource are clearly defined (i.e. consider the difference between water rights to a lake, vs. the right to breathable air), whether there's an effective way of monitoring usage, and more. A lot of good stuff if you're into that sort of thing, but probably a bit much for a layperson.

The part I wanted to focus on, though, was her notion of allowing local communities to resolve it their own way (i.e. no attempt at a one-size-fits-all solution. One fishing community may agree to rotate access to prime fishing locations, and another fishing community may come up with an entirely different solution. That's okay.), and the notion that organizations should form multiple layers of nested enterprises (to go back to water usage... figuring out a solution depends, in part, on knowing exactly how much water it's safe to use before you destroy the resource entirely. That sort of research requires resources to collect the data and analyze it. You may also need the resources to create and enforce an agreement... perhaps through the judgment of a state or federal court, and the use of state or federal power.)

In other words, we have yet again discovered the joys of trying to keep decision-making at the lowest level possible, and empowering those lower levels to make decisions.

Nesting those governments in a larger organization gives you some of the benefits of that, without making the whole system cumbersome, slow, and prone to error.

Really, it doesn't seem all that different from the republic system of government we stumbled on... nor the ideal military structure. What's that term the military started using lately? Mission command?

Empower those closest to the issue to come up with their own solutions, and use any larger resources to help smooth away the problems in doing so.

As with all systems, there are strengths and weaknesses here, and things that have to be done in order to make it work. I also think there's a certain tension in... I dunno... humanity? I think of it like centrifugal and centripetal force - social pressure to consolidate and make everything (or everyone) the same, and a countervailing pressure to be individuals each doing their own thing.

Like, there's advantages to having everyone all speak the same language. Makes it a heckuva lot easier to order food, or go shopping. But there's also advantages to having different languages, where we're only just beginning to understand how language can shape the way we think, and different languages give us different ways of thinking... some of which may be useful at times. (It's like... how we frame issues can affect how we solve them, so having different frames of reference can be like having different tools in our toolbag. We can pull out the one that's most appropriate to the situation. Different cultures, different languages, different stories... they all can give us different ways of being human, and being aware of them give us more choices about that. Umm, not in a 'cultural appropriation' kind of way... It's more like, I dunno. I heard about high-context and low-context cultures, and realized the impact that has... and in some ways, I've reduced how explicitly I write in my blogs because of it. Err, not directly. I'm not trying to change up my cultural context or anything. It's just... if someone's interested enough in reading my babble they can probably, they can probably figure out some of this stuff without my explaining it in detail, and maybe it's even better if they do. Maybe I can let the reader figure it out for themselves, and even if it's not exactly what I was thinking, it probably sticks better that way, anyway.)

Anyways. There's advantages to having consistency... consistent rules, consistent standards. Like having screws, nuts, and bolts all standardized, so you don't have to custom make replacements.

And maybe it's better to use the USB-C, so you don't have to have twenty different cables for as many devices.

But there are downsides to that, too... from a business perspective, of course the makers of said devices prefer being able to sell you their own unique cable, even if we all benefit by being able to use just a few. But aside from that, one company might come up with something new or different (like allowing the cable to work regardless of which way you plug it in) that eventually becomes standard.

Though in that case I think it was specified by the IEC, so you don't exactly have to have private businesses competing in order to get improvements.

Anyways, this post has gone on long enough. I hope, dear reader, that my babble hasn't been too boring, or too much of a data dump.

Globalization - Opportunities.

I was trying to decide if I should start with the potential positives, or address the pretty hefty fears of globalization. I think the subject of this post makes it clear which one I decided to start with.

I've done a short little search online, trying to track down a reference that is unfortunately lost.  It was to the National Screw Thread Commission.  A commission created in the United States to help standardize screws.  The reference I recall mentioned it as one of the most successful commissions in our history.  It seems a little silly, to talk about the importance of a standardizing a screw.  Yet all it takes is a few moments of thought to realize just how critical it could be.  How much do we take for granted, that if we lose a screw - or ruin one by stripping it - that you can just go to a hardware store and find one that's the right size?  That the threading is the same, and will do exactly what you need?

Something similar happened with train tracks.  Imagine what a disruptive mess it would be if every train track was a different width.  Each train would have to figure out which tracks could support it's design, or you would have to create a one-size-fits-most design that could adjust to the different sized tracks.  Aren't we all better off by having a standardized system for building train tracks?

This does come at a loss, of course.  Nobody could build a monopoly by insisting on their own unique system (the way cell phone companies create phones with their own unique chargers).  There is less room for individuality, less of a chance to distinguish yourself with a unique screw design.

This is the strength and weakness of centralization, standardization, control.  In some situations (like screws and train track widths) it's fairly obvious which one has been better.  In others?  Not so much.

So to get back to globalization - right now each nation has their own way of doing things.  Almost as though they all have a unique train track width, and multi-national companies have to adjust their trains to each different system.  How much do we waste on this?  I see this where I work.  Somewhat.  Now that I'm at our returns center, I occasionally deal with returns from India and China...and sometimes find myself wishing I had a Chinese or Indian customs expert on speed dial.  And labels!  How do we put labels on our parts in all the local languages?  Covering the legal requirements of every nation?  We could wind up with labels larger than the parts themselves!

In addition to consistency, there's an opportunity to simplify, simplify, simplify.  I again did a quick search on a vague reference, and didn't quite find what I was looking for.  I remember hearing about the Code of Hammurabi, which apparently helped consolidate and simplify the laws of that region.  So much of our current system has grown haphazardly, over time, as the world has continued to change.  Sometimes the thought of cleaning it all up, codifying it, and simplifying it appeals.  (Almost too much...I try to remember the downsides, try to appreciate the little quirks, foibles and complexities that have developed over time.)

There are also some opportunities that have more to do with what I've been calling the endstate of globalization.  While going over this in my head, I realized that most of the perceived downsides have more to do with the start/stop process of globalization, than any real problem with the end result.  Fears of job loss, for instance...are more because of the tremendous imbalance in cost of living, currency, etc. between one region and another.  As I started to say in my response, once we're fully globalized a company is about as likely to move their business from the US to Vietnam as they would to move their headquarters from New York to North Judson, Indiana.  Not saying it couldn't be done, but it would depend on the market, the business, property taxes, etc.  The lower cost of living just isn't enough to justify moving when it takes you away from a key location.

Plus, a globalized endstate has the potential to determine what a truly appropriate cost of labor would be.  In a way, the disparities between industrialized world and developing world are suppressing wages in the industrialized one.  Hard to unionize when the company decides to close your factory and move to Mexico, hard to argue for a pay raise when workers in another country could live comfortably off a third of your income.

This isn't meant  as a 'rah, rah international labor movement'.  I believe the current situation skews what a rational business analysis of wages would be.  The companies that want to pay their workers more have to compete with companies that may not care, which means there's pressure on all of them to do more, cheaper.  Just to stay in business.  If the world economy were more balanced, that pressure would be gone and you could see the companies that invest in their people performing better.

Right now, we see a haphazard and inconsistent movement towards evening out the standard of living.  A company moves part of their business to China, for example.  Labor starts off cheap, but then costs go up.  The business then has to decide whether they're going to keep the investment of resources in China, or look to move to Vietnam. (Or some other country.  Countries are interchangable here, I'm not trying to pick on any particular ones.)  If you do that often enough, businesses on their own will even things out.  But not in any well thought out, planned process.  And it would all be affected by current events, political leadership, etc.

Some of that, btw, is not necessarily about cheaper labor.  I think most businesses want to get their toe in the door of the Chinese market.  In a fully globalized world, they probably would want some of their business over there.  Just as Toyota has factories over here in the US.  But those decisions have more to do with where your market is, etc.