Games and moral superiority « The sound of my own voice

Games and moral superiority

06Apr08

Games are popular models for social behavior among economists, philosophers and social scientists. Recently Benedikt Herrman at the University of Nottingham has revealed that the so-called Public Goods Game is played differently in countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Belarus than in the West.

So what exactly is the game about? A fuller description is right here but the gist of it is this: All players can choose how much money they put in a collective kitty, and then all players get back a certain amount proportionate to how much they all invested. If everybody puts in the maximum to the kitty they all make a good profit. But if some freeloader puts in less or even nothing he still makes a profit at the expense of the others. Which tends to make others less inclined to invest their money. You can also punish other players (usually freeloaders). It costs a little money to punish someone, but it costs even more to be punished.

What Herrman found out was that cooperation worked better in the western nations. In the Middle East and Belarus so-called anti-social punishment, punishing someone who is not a freeloader, was a common problem. I find this result interesting but at the same time hard to interpret. In the blogpost (can’t access the original) it is suggested that it is democracy and market economy that makes westerners cooperate better. One commentator, Herbert Gintis of the Sante Fe Institute, says: “The success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of ‘naked self-interest’ is radically incorrect.”

I’m not so sure about that. It could equally well be religion, history, culture. But it seems to me that this game does tell us that equality (to a certain point) fosters cooperation. If it modeled a democratic market economy (or any other society for that matter) a little better, the players would not start with the same amount of money, rules wouldn’t apply equally. For some the punishing fee would be insignificant and for others it would be half their assets. Most likely they would not cooperate as well and their collective wealth would plummet. This conclusion is certainly in line with the fact that wealthy countries tend to be more economically equal than others (with the USA as the one big exception).

But rather than seeing the obvious Gintis comes up with a murky hypothesis of democratic markets moral superiority. Which begs the question: Why do morally superior countries emit more CO2 per capita than others?