Written by Martin Štěpán.
My interest as of late has been in the dubious assumptions of mainstream economics. As far as I can tell, the entire job of economists is to figure out ways to maximise some measure that is supposedly good in itself, while ignoring more fundamental human needs. It’s not that I see nothing valid in the field; it’s that practically all economists carry some ideological premises with them—almost invariably liberal, universalist and utilitarian. Even Marxism is basically just a liberal heresy that never disagreed with those premises. Here I want to address specifically how economics runs afoul of evolutionary biology.
The first issue is: what is the economy actually for? Most economists believe it’s ultimately for satisfying people’s preferences. But they often treat preferences in a naïve or frankly bizarre way. Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy devised a theory of “rational addiction” to dangerous drugs.
An evolutionary biologist doesn’t just declare that man prefers certain things; he asks why man prefers those things. What purpose did a given preference serve in our evolutionary history? And once we ask that question, we can start looking at whether the same purpose is still being served today—in a modern, industrialised economy.
Some examples. When food is made tastier or outright addictive without a corresponding improvement in nutrition, is our preference for such food still serving its original purpose? When people watch entertainment in their homes without going out and socialising, when they play video games but don’t learn any skills with real-world value, when they watch porn without producing babies or enjoying intimacy, when they do drugs and feel good without having accomplished anything—we are clearly dealing with a mismatch.
We are optimising for the measure, a preference, while ignoring the original target, the biological reason the preference exists. Now, maybe you don’t see a problem with this. I am concerned about the long-term consequences of allowing people to profit from reducing the population’s fitness.
Of course, there’s no surefire way to test whether an exchange is raising or at least not lowering fitness. Nor am I saying people should never have any vices or hobbies comprising surrogate activities. That’s not realistic. It’s more a case of “I know the problem when I see it.”
Which brings me to the next point. The reason why there’s a field of economics in the first place is that we divide labour and then exchange the fruits of our labour. And we do this because we are a tribal animal who evolved to cooperate with our fellow group members. But the implications of that fact don’t end at “cooperation good”.
We are wired for being part of a tribe or community. Our psychology is tuned to regularly interact with roughly Dunbar’s number of people, who give us feedback, reward us, punish us, train us, help us, defend us—and who likewise rely on us for all these things. We participate in shared experiences and shared rituals. We have a sense of shared fate. This is in fact the primary source of meaning for most people. Our tribe is also where we’d find mates under historical conditions.
The state and the market1 have provided cheaper and, in many ways, more efficient alternatives for pretty much everything we previously obtained from the community or the family. In Western countries, the state has drastically curtailed organic communities by banning exclusivity and making defection easy. And the nuclear family is not far behind. Thanks to the upending of status hierarchies and new technologies like the smartphone, marriage and fertility rates are at historic lows.
As for solving the fertility collapse, a typical coin-brained analysis can’t come up with anything better than financially rewarding people for having children. However, studying what has changed in the environment since the last time fertility rates were high (when we were much poorer) would reveal very different causes and, as such, suggest very different solutions.
Important considerations include how people relate to extended family, whether they know and trust others around them, when and where the sexes interact, and whether there are functioning mating rituals in place. Some people suggest artificial wombs as a solution, not even considering that directly competing with women’s reproductive role might have some negative consequences.
Family and community are also the scale at which hedonism, addiction and other maladaptive behaviours would get corrected, as nobody wants to see their loved ones destroy their lives, and a family wouldn’t want to be left without descendants. While people have always partaken in vices and hobbies comprising surrogate activities, they were generally kept within limits.
At a large scale and among strangers, making profit takes precedence, which means there are no scruples about selling people things they shouldn’t be buying, or about pushing them to work as hard as possible without any regard for how it affects their family life.
I believe the reason why mental health is deteriorating is exactly this: our main source of meaning and healthy social feedback has been lost. Large numbers of people are atomised and lonely, and our social instincts have been hijacked by the state, corporations and academia for political and commercial gain. Economists rarely account for this; their graphs show a standard of living that keeps rising because people get to consume more.
All this tells me that standard methodological individualism is the wrong framing for thinking about humans. As an alternative, consider how we’d think about any other animal if we wished to ensure its survival and flourishing.
We wouldn’t be talking about a standard of living or, for that matter, about freedom or equality. We’d be talking about its ecology and whether the animal can get around, feed itself and attain its reproductive goals. We’d consider whether enough demands are being placed on it in terms of movement and effort, as letting the animal get everything it needs lying down isn’t good either. We’d consider whether it is being stressed in ways that let it grow more resilient or experiencing the kind of chronic stress to which it can’t respond.2
For social animals, we’d try to keep their established groups together and not interfere with their internal relationships and hierarchies. And if we observed that they have trouble forming relationships, we’d consider what has been introduced into their environment that could have caused such disruption. In the case of humans, that might mean removing some technology that should have never been allowed in the first place without extensive testing, or it could mean removing available choices and opportunities that make the opportunity cost of an evolutionarily correct choice too high.
It’s clear, for example, that most women will marry a man only if they perceive that it would raise their status relative to staying single, and only so long as their opportunities outside of marriage don’t appear more attractive. Meanwhile, men mostly just need some ability to exercise authority and some assurances of fidelity from their wife.
Of course, all this will need to be balanced against the incentives for sufficient production and innovation required for maintaining sovereignty. I am merely saying we can’t keep ignoring our evolved instincts, as we have been doing.
Insofar as the interests of elites diverge from those of the majority, we also need to ensure that the majority has a strong enough negotiating position. Luckily, ensuring that it does aligns with ecological concerns, since thriving communities have a much better negotiating position—as well as much better political incentives—than atomised individuals.
An ecological perspective suggests a different way of thinking about technological progress too. Such progress improves the efficiency with which humans can perform everything within their niche at the cost of needing fewer people to do it. We seem to be approaching an endpoint where no humans are necessary at all, and hence most of the value one human used to provide to another will be eliminated.
AI makes this problem more apparent than any other technology. Economists celebrate AI because “line go up”, and those that see the issue can’t come up with anything better than UBI, i.e. paying people to be useless. Ecologists would consider “protectionist” measures to preserve our niche and our ability to provide value to each other—ranging from taxing the artificial competitors to potentially removing them entirely, if necessary.
Modern economics and liberalism ignore what man is, grounding their analyses in a universalist and utilitarian model of perfectly rational and sovereign individuals, rather than the science of evolutionary biology. Relying on this erroneous model is causing atomisation, loneliness, low fertility, demographic change and political radicalisation. States that refuse to take an ecological perspective will not survive in the long run.
This essay was adapted from two longer articles published here.
Martin Štěpán is a fellow of the Natural Law Institute. He blogs at The Autistocrat.
Become a free or paid subscriber:
Like and comment below.
This, by the way, is not the dichotomy libertarians present it as. There would not be any common market at scale if the state didn’t create conditions for it.
In other words, instead of thinking about what supposedly hurts the consumer, think about what reduces the population’s fitness.
I have a tendency to agree with whatever the last thing I read was, but I think this was a very good article. Ten years ago, when I would have arguments about Brexit with my friends, it was always astonishing to me how often they turned the conversation immediately to the economy, as though that were the only thing that mattered. I suspect this was why they thought all Brexiteers were a bit thick, since leaving the EU was almost certainly going to make us poorer, at least in the short term. But some of us were less bothered about the economy than about how our communities had disintegrated. I think we hoped that by getting our sovereignty back we might also get back some of those local 'platoons' that had given our lives meaning.
That aside, I think the author is right in thinking that to understand what humans really want you need to ask a series of 'but why?' questions. This way, I think, you end up with a more accurate and complete understanding than economics ever can of what motivates us, what gives our lives meaning and what fulfills us.
Great article.
Our society has gone from tribal influence to large-scale national manipulation.