Post-Darwinian Societies Seminar

Santiago LOPEZ CANTOR (AMSE) 

The Impact of Morality on the Political Support for Public Policies: A Theoretical Analysis

Individual attitudes toward the environment are commonly motivated by moral imperatives, I study the implicit effect of such morality on the prevalence of public policies. This paper investigates the influence of morality on the political support of public policies, with a focus on redistributive policies, under the context of private provision of a public good, i.e. the environment. The theoretical framework employs a modeling approach where agents' behavior is characterized as a convex combination of the rational self-interest of a standard economic agent (homo oeconomicus) and the moral universalization of actions akin to the Kantian categorical imperative (homo kantiensis). By examining how the degree of morality among agents affects societal choices in policy-making, particularly regarding redistributive policies, key insights are revealed. As expected, a larger degree of morality among agents leads to an overall increase in the provision of the public good. However, this heightened morality also results in a reduction in the scale of redistributive policies within equilibrium. These findings shed light on the complex interplay between individual morality and public policy preferences, offering implications for understanding the dynamics of political support and the pursuit of collective welfare in modern societies.

Philippe Van Parijs (UCLouvain).

Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences

In my Oxford DPhil thesis, which became my first book (Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences. An emerging paradigm, Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), I wanted to explore the space of social-scientific explanations that did not rely on mechanism consisting of the aggregation of individual choices. This led me to focus on social-scientific evolutionary explanations that relied either (marginally) on natural selection or (mainly) on reinforcement as the underlying mechanism. Diachronic linguistics and historical materialism were used as the two main illustrations of the second case. The presentation will give a succinct account of the claims I made in this old book.

How Similar are Natural Selection and Market Competition?

By Brian McLoone (Auburn University)
Many believe that what Adam Smith said about the improving power of market competition is similar to what Darwin said about the improving power of natural selection. But how similar are Smith's and Darwin's ideas really? To answer this question, I'll compare two "fundamental" theorems—the fundamental theorem of natural selection and the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics. The theorems have more in common than their names; I have chosen to compare them because they are often taken to precisify (respectively) the way in which selection and market competition can lead to improvement. After characterizing the sense in which the theorems are indeed similar, I go on to show that the theorems' idealizations obscure some important points of contact between Smith's ideas and Darwin's, particularly concerning the benefits of division of labor.

Social norms evolving

By Jack Vromen, EIPE (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Following Lewis’ (1969) seminal account of conventions, several scholars have used game theory to shed light on how social norms evolve. In my talk I will show that the way in which this is done also has evolved. Initially, the focus was very much on providing “ultimate” functional explanations, for example how social norms could have evolved (as “high-welfare equilibria”) to solve coordination and cooperation problems. The focus has shifted to providing “proximate” explanations of what makes people comply with social norms, including social norms that are dysfunctional (as “low-welfare equilibria”; e.g., explaining why people with non-cooperative norms sometimes engage in antisocial punishment of cooperators). Several features of this shift in focus will be discussed with an emphasis on the utility functions that have been proposed to rationalize norm compliance.

Robin Philips (UCLouvain)

Multidimensional composite indicators of wellbeing: applications in economic history 

Although economists and social scientists have widely contributed to the so-called ‘Beyond GDP’ debate, the view that current measures of economic growth are inadequate to measure well-being and multidimensional indicators, economic history has not been prominent in these debates. Nonetheless, multidimensional indicators have captured the interest of economic historians, with both theoretical and empirical contributions. In this contribution, we examine the areas of consensus and debate in economic history. A comprehensive literature review shows a lack of consensus on how to use multidimensional indicators and that they face substantial critiques. We use two case-studies (a long-term series for the Netherlands and one on the basis of the CLIO-INFRA panel dataset) to illustrate how common findings emerge in the literature and empirical exercises despite methodological differences. We argue that debates on the relation between economic growth and well-being in the long-run using these indicators can not only contribute to many founding questions in economic history, though greater precision and transparency in our assumptions about well-being measurement are necessary, but also to better understand present-day challenges such as how to better pursue growth in well-being and not merely in GDP.

Estimating Social Preferences and Kantian Morality in Strategic Interactions
Boris van Leeuwen (Tilburg University)

Theoretical work suggests that a form of Kantian morality has evolutionary foundations. To investigate the relative importance of Kantian morality and social preferences, we run a laboratory experiment on strategic interaction in social dilemmas. We structurally estimate social preferences and Kantian morality at the individual and aggregate level. We observe considerable heterogeneity in preferences. A finite mixture analysis shows that the subject pool is well described as consisting of two types. One combines inequity aversion and Kantian morality, while the other combines spite and Kantian morality. The value of adding Kantian morality to well-established preference classes is also evaluated.

Epictetusian Rationality and Evolutionary Stability
Grégory Ponthière

An economic interpretation of Epictetus's precept of 'Taking away aversion from all things not in our power' consists of extending the domain of indifference beyond its boundaries under non-ethical preferences, so as to yield indifference between outcomes differing only on things outside one's control. This paper examines the evolutionary dynamics of a population composed of Nash agents and Epictetusian agents matched randomly and interacting in the prisoner's dilemma game. It is shown that, whether or not the type of players is common knowledge, neither the Nash type nor the Epictetusian type is an evolutionary stable strategy. However, if the matching process exhibits a sufficiently high degree of assortativity, the Epictetusian type is an evolutionary stable strategy, and drives the Nash type to extinction.

From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back. Parallels and Crossing between Economics and Evolution. 
Philippe Huneman (CNRS, Université Paris 1).

Linking Darwinism to Economics via Policy Engineering.
Hugh Desmond (University of Antwerp)

The economics that is considered “mainstream” receives epithets such as “Keynesian” or “Friedmanite” – but not “Darwinian”. Evolutionary thinking seems to have made remarkably few inroads in economics. Is this a fair assessment, and if so, how can we account for this in terms of the goals and types of explanation preferred respectively by economics and evolutionary science? 

In this talk I introduce a third variable: an engineering approach to social policy. I discuss the little-known but significant history of how economics was related to eugenics in the early 20th century. It seems that the prestige accorded to eugenics in the early 20th century gave confidence to economists to reject laissez-faire and to adopt an engineering approach to the economy. Evolutionary scientists later repudiated eugenics, but economists retained the engineering approach to economics policy. In the talk I discuss how this can help explain why economists favor certain (non-evolutionary) types of explanation, and why economists, by and large, do not view contemporary evolutionary theory as being useful to their goals.

Game theoretic analysis of childhood vaccination behavior: Nash versus Kant.
Philippe De Donder (TSE CNRS)

Whether or not to vaccinate one’s child is a decision that a parent may approach in several ways. The vaccination game, in which parents must choose whether to vaccinate a child against a disease, is one with positive externalities (herd immunity). In some societies, not vaccinating is an increasingly prevalent behavior, due to deleterious side effects that parents believe may accompany vaccination. The standard game-theoretic approach assumes that parents make decisions according to the Nash behavioral protocol, which is individualistic and non-cooperative. Because of the positive externality that each child’s vaccination generates for others, the Nash equilibrium suffers from a free-rider problem. However, in more solidaristic societies, parents may behave cooperatively –they may optimize according to the Kantian protocol, in which the equilibrium is efficient. We test, on a sample of six countries, whether childhood vaccination behavior conforms better to the individualistic or cooperative protocol. In order to do so, we conduct surveys of parents in these countries, to ascertain the distribution of beliefs concerning the subjective probability and severity of deleterious side effects of vaccination. We show that in all the countries of our sample the Kant model dominates the Nash model. We conjecture that, due to the free-rider problem inherent in the Nash equilibrium, a social norm has evolved, quite generally, inducing parents to vaccinate with higher probability than they would in the non-cooperative solution. Kantian equilibrium offers one precise version of such a social norm.