Martin Daly: Evolutionary Psychology Pioneer

[Music] Yeah, sending this one out to my evolutionary psychology people. Yeah, David Buss, Cosmes and Tubi. Yeah, Jeffrey Miller. Yeah, we live in this till the day that we die. Survival of the fit. Only the strong survive.

There's a war going on outside, no man is safe from. You can run, but you can't hide forever. You come to my block, you see some territoriality. A place where a killer be killed is the mentality. But get it straight, it's just the necessary strategy. You got to play the hand you’re dealt. You can't magically escape from the habitat that you were born.

This morning, three homicides in my neighborhood. This morning, cops came and kicked the cockroach with no warning and started roughing up my young cousin. She's only 17 and got a bun in the oven plus a concussion. But she ain't done nothing, so keep your mouth shut and don't jump to judgment on the lives we're living. Just close your eyes and listen while I break down some homicide statistics.

So if you're thinking the criminal mind is just vacant, you're mistaken. This is calculated risk taken. We living in a situation with the low life expectancy and a major discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots. And you wonder why the padlock on every cash box is smashed off. Come on, you can't call it pathological. That's illogical. You can try to understand it, but you can't stop it though. Not unless you address the root causes. The conscious and unconscious decisions to discount future prospects.

Come on, it's obvious. The beat keeps bouncing, the homicide rate keeps mounting, which leads to steep discounting and a lot of violence. But it's not a virus. It's a rational response to high-risk environments, short-time horizons with high stakes and highly visible prizes. And you wonder why we're criminal-minded?

Hey, you can't say we'll get satisfaction and reap it with self-control and delayed gratification when the only job that pays is casket making. When death is the ultimate plan cancellation. Check the facts and recent data. It shows a pattern of increasing competition. A bunch of young guys, all struggling and status-seeking, causing the crimes that make the social fabric weaken.

And life expectancy also predicts teen pregnancy. To leave a legacy genetically will never be completely controlled. Contraceptives? Yeah, that's transparent. Imagine if your kids would never meet the grandparents unless they follow the Bristol pal and plan for Parenthood? And then they say, "Oh, these young girls are so damn careless to get pregnant before marriage. It's such a tragedy!" Apparently, it's also a reproductive strategy. Especially when you can see them adjusting actively when their circumstances change.

In both the cases of the young ladies with babies and the male risk-takers, we see people adapting to their situations. And it's the same in different places and with different races. This is not about ethical justifications, it's evolutionary psychology. And it's just the basics, and still, people call this behavior maladaptive because of our reaction when violence happens.

But if we really want to change the outcome then maybe we should just start questioning how it's adaptive. And the bottom line is that iniquity and life expectancy are the ultimate causes of crime and the results of crime. To me, that's true. The two combined together in a feedback loop.

But I got some moves to make now, so I'll be back soon. Just don't ask me what I'm about to do right, ‘cause I can't say. So it's left the untold fact. Until my death, my ghost will stay alive.

Survival of the fit. Only the strong survive. That's right, we live in this till the day that we die. Survival of the fit. Only the strong survive. Yeah, we live in this till the day that we die. Survival of the fit. Only the strong survive. That's right, we live in this till the day that we die. Survival of the fit. Only the strong survive. Yeah, we live in this till the day that we die. Survival of the fit. Only the strong survive. That's right, we live in this till the day that we die.

Survival of the fit. Only the strong. Only the strong. Only the strong. Only the strong. Yeah, sending this out to all my evolutionary psychologists. Da and Wilson, Steven Pinker, Robert Wright. Yeah, David Sloan Wilson. Yeah, that's right, gather the evidence, make it real. Make it real. Human mentality represent.

Yeah, this is human nature. Human nature to the core. I'mma get mine, and you get yours. Don't question my actions unless you're ready to make a little addition before I make a subtraction. End your up in traction. That's right, love scrapping.

[Music]

Peace.

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I'm here talking today with Dr. Martin Daly. Dr. Daly is a professor of psychology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and author of many influential papers on evolutionary psychology. His current research topics include an evolutionary perspective on risk-taking and interpersonal violence, especially male-male conflict. He and his wife, the late Margot Wilson, were the former editors-in-chief of the journal "Evolution and Human Behavior" and former presidents of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. He was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998. Dr. Daly is one of the main researchers of the Cinderella effect and has been interviewed many times in the Press about it.

So, I'm very pleased to be talking with Dr. Daly this morning. It seems to me that he's one of Canada's most outstanding psychologists and perhaps you could say that about psychologists in the world. He's done some incredibly interesting research on the relationship between inequality and male violence, and inequality and other topics too.

So welcome, Dr. Daly.

Thank you, Jordan. It's nice to be talking to you.

Well, I'm looking forward to our conversation a lot. So you just wrote a book, which I'm going to show people called "Killing the Competition." And I just read it; it was very interesting. So I thought maybe I could get you to start by talking a little bit about the book, and how you tell us the story. That would be a good thing to do.

Well, the general issue that is addressed in the book is the relationship between economic inequality, which is usually indexed as income inequality, and homicide rates. It's been known for a long time by sociologists that income inequality is the single best predictor they've got of homicide rates across countries, across states within the US, across cities within the US and some other kinds of jurisdictional comparisons. There's been controversy about why that is and whether inequality itself is truly the problem or whether it's just a correlate of something else.

And in this book, I try to make the case that no, inequality really is the problem. Some of the arguments that have been advanced for suggesting that it's a mere correlate of violence rather than in some way causal of violence are wrong.

So can you tell us a little bit about how you calculate inequality and what the measure is?

Yeah. Income inequality, there are a number of different measures that are used by economists, and I'm just borrowing the dominant ones from economists. The number one is something called the Gini index. I used to assume that that was some kind of acronym, but actually it was the name of an Italian economist.

It's a measure that ranges from 0 to 1. It would be 0 if everybody had exactly the same income or exactly the same wealth, if you're doing wealth inequality. And it would approach 1 as income or wealth was concentrated more and more in the hands of the few, and then a single individual, and then in principle, it would go to 1 in the extreme if all wealth were held by Bill Gates and none of the rest of us had anything.

Now you analyzed the Gini coefficient at different levels of jurisdiction. I know that in your work, you've looked at countries and states within countries, and I think that's particularly true in the US. So tell us a little bit about what you found.

Yeah, well, within the US, and again this has been known by sociologists for some time, the Gini coefficient is a very good predictor of homicide. The correlation tends to be on the order of .7 in many studies, which means that the variance in either measure 50% of it could be accounted for by the variability in the other measure, what I'm saying between homicide and income inequality.

And actually, it even works on a neighborhood level. My late wife Margot and I published some analyses in Chicago that showed that income inequality was a very strong predictor of homicide rates across neighborhoods within Chicago.

Tell us a little bit about what you did in Chicago because that research is extremely interesting. And also when you did it?

Let's see, we did our work in Chicago in the early 90s, and at that time, Chicago had a very high homicide rate. Not the worst in the United States, but one of the worst in the United States. In fact, it had more homicides every year than the whole of Canada, which makes it a substantial enough phenomenon that you can sort of look for causal factors or correlates without a lot of stochastic noise.

Chicago's divided up into some 77 neighborhoods, and there's a long-standing tradition of urban sociology in Chicago, and there's these sort of well-recognized 77 neighborhoods. Anyway, for these neighborhoods, we were able to amass a variety of neighborhood-specific information, including income distributions, homicides, and so forth, working with the Chicago Police who were collaborators in some of this work. Margot went to the Illinois Department of Health to try and get information on other death rates and birth rates and the demographic structure of each of the neighborhoods. She wanted to compute life expectancy because the idea that she had was that local life expectancy would affect the extent to which people were willing to sort of escalate dangerously in competitive situations.

In competitive violence, that was our concept of what most homicides in Chicago were about, were guys killing each other when dissed in bars—circumstances in which some sort of competition gets dangerous. Our basic idea there, and elsewhere, has been that a lot of the variability in homicide rates, the most volatile component of homicide rates, has to do with this male-male competition.

And where and when does it get dangerous and when does it sort of dampen down? And for Chicago anyway, the Illinois Department of Health had never, nobody had ever computed neighborhood-specific life expectancy, but the data were available to do it. Age-specific mortality and so on were available to do it.

We computed age-specific life expectancies, income inequality, and many other variables that criminologists have considered relevant in past studies: racial heterogeneity, and blah blah blah. Tried to see what were your best predictors of homicide and in that particular study. Everywhere else we've worked, we've mostly found income inequality to be number one. In that particular study, income inequality was a very good predictor, but the best predictor was male life expectancy at birth or at age 15.

And in order to compute, of course, you say, homicide rates. Homicide reduces male life expectancy, so you have to remove homicide statistically as a cause of death and say life expectancy net of the impact of homicide. That was our best predictor of homicide rate.

So life expectancy is very variable in the city of Chicago and assume in other US cities. I mean, in the worst neighborhoods, male life expectancy at birth was down in the 50s, as bad as in the worst countries in the world. In the best neighborhoods, male life expectancy was up in the I think it was over 80, or in the high 70s in any case, corresponding to what you might expect in Scandinavia or the places with the best life expectancy in the world.

So it's a huge range. That was our best predictor. Then if you try and do a multivariate analysis where you look for, well, what else predicts some of the residual variability? There wasn't much residual variability. The second best, indeed the only secondary predictor that seemed to be statistically significant was income inequality across the neighborhoods.

That was the thrust of our study in Chicago. And I'd love to see more work on life expectancy as a predictor of violence. University of Montreal criminologist Mark We tried to do the same thing in Montreal, but he found that in Montreal, the difference in life expectancy for men between the worst and the best neighborhoods was only six years, whereas in Chicago it was 24 years.

I think so. What do you think accounted for the vast difference in life expectancy between Chicago and Montreal? And was life expectancy itself associated with income inequality?

Oh, yes. I mean, that's part of the problem of course in all this kind of research. It's not experimental research; you don't control independent variables. Everything of potential interest is correlated with everything else.

So, you know, income inequality alone accounts for more than half the variance in homicide rates across Chicago neighborhoods. So does life expectancy alone. So does percent below the poverty line alone. But these things are all correlated with each other and so trying to tease apart what's most important is tricky.

So the low life expectancy in Chicago neighborhoods is not due to violence. It's due overwhelmingly to differential disease. You know, the privatization of medicine in the US was so extreme that by the time we were doing this research, emergency rooms in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago had closed down because they'd gone bankrupt. They didn't have enough money to remain open.

And therefore if you got stabbed or shot in a bad neighborhood in Chicago, you had to be transported somewhere else to try and keep you alive because there was, you know, the hospitals had shut their emergency rooms or had shut down completely. So there's all sorts of factors that contribute to differential death rates.

But you know, kids in the worst neighborhood are exposed to high levels of lead. There's some evidence that lead exposure in childhood is a big predictor of variability in life expectancy. All kinds of internal diseases; they were more susceptible to the effects of bad nutrition. They were more susceptible to...

So if you divide causes of death into so-called external causes—which basically means homicides, suicides, and accidents—and internal causes, which is more or less synonymous with what we ordinarily think of as disease, internal causes were still the biggest source of differential mortality across neighborhoods.

So you could make, by the sounds of it, you could make a reasonable case that the social safety net in Canada is flattening out the bottom of the income distribution. Especially the provision of health care. And you know, I also read—was informed a while back—that the rate of entrepreneurship in Canada is actually higher than in the US.

And part of the reason for that is that because health care is provided, people can take a risk of walking away from their jobs without putting their family completely at risk. And so one of the perverse effects of socialized medicine is that it elevates the rates of entrepreneurship.

So I also wanted to mention, you know, your work was absolutely striking to me because of the effect sizes. Now for people who don't know about how to compare effect sizes, I should point out that you never see a correlation of .7 between any two variables in the social sciences.

There's a guy named Hemp Hill who did an empirical analysis of effect size comparisons about four or five years ago. It might be longer than that now. He concluded that 95% of social science studies had an effect size of 0.5 or less. So to see a correlation of .7 is absolutely overwhelming when you also take into account that measurement error is decreasing.

The potency of the relationship to some degree, so that's the—and when you take into account that, those 0.5 represent studies that were published because they got something, yes, exactly. So point 7 is absolutely overwhelming. I've never seen effect sizes that big between two variables of interest in any other domain that I can recall.

Then the other thing that's worth pointing out, and we can talk about this a little bit too, is the other thing that's so radical about your research is that it—and this, this emerges out of the manner in which the Gini coefficient is calculated, because it's only a measure of relative poverty.

And it's the predictor; you also generated data indicating that places where everyone was relatively poor—or say relatively working-class like North Dakota and some of the Canadian provinces—had very low homicide rates, and also places where everyone was rich.

So to reiterate what you're seeing is that what's driving male homicide is the existence and for—you know, correct me if I'm wrong—the existence of a steep economic dominance hierarchy that makes it difficult for young men to obtain status through what you might describe as conventional and socially productive means, and so instead they turn to violence as a means of establishing status. And most of that's within race and between young men jockeying for position. Is that all correct?

Yeah, I think that's a pretty fair characterization. It's worth stressing that income inequality is in principle and in practice dissociable from just average income or percent below the poverty line or other measures of so-called absolute deprivation. They're often correlated. You know, income inequality across a certain set of jurisdictions may be fairly strongly correlated with the percent below the poverty line, for example. Would be surprising if it was not usually correlated.

But they're not necessarily, as you said.

So you demonstrated you were one of the first people to demonstrate—were you the first in fact?—maybe that it wasn't poverty that was causing this kind of crime; it was relative poverty. And that changes the interpretation of the situation absolutely dramatically.

So tell us a little bit about why you think the males are competing in this deadly manner; what's driving that behavior?

Well, it's very interesting. I think men are sensitive to, are interested in relative position, status, maintaining face in competitive milieus. And in a sense, all MERS are a bit competitive. And the willingness to use violence can be thought of as kind of a disdain for the future, or I want mine now.

I'm willing to do something that threatens my life, like escalating competition or not back down or not walk away from an insult because I'm thinking very short term. The rewards for being passive, you know, if you're a nice, prosperous university student of age 20, you have good life prospects.

Your chances for eventually becoming well-paid, maybe people will laugh at this—are still reasonably good. Your chances for eventually marrying are still reasonably good. If you're the same age kind of guy in an urban ghetto with a 48% unemployment rate or something like that, then you have very much more uncertainty about the stability of whatever income you do get, and with the future unknown, then you're more willing to take a risk now in the pursuit of status now and the pursuit of sexual opportunity now.

And also, the maintenance of face, like social reputation, is the one resource you've got. If you've got other resources, you can walk away from threats or disrespect and reap your rewards later. If social status is all you've got, then it becomes an important thing to defend.

So I read some research a while back that looked at the relationship between socioeconomic status among men and number of sexual partners, and also socioeconomic status among women and number of sexual partners.

And that's another domain where you see these kinds of whopping correlations. So the correlation between socioeconomic status for men and number of available sexual partners is about .6 or .7, whereas for women it's negative .12. And so do you think that it's reasonable to assume that either at the phylogenetic level or the autogenetic level, either evolutionarily speaking or even as a consequence of rational calculation, that part of the reason that men normed it, perhaps the main reason that men are engaging in these status competitions is because of female hypergamy? Is that a reasonable hypothesis?

Hypergamy, and as you say, simple access. I mean, the association that you mentioned is presumably a very longstanding one. That is to say that men with status and resources have had access to partners for sure, and probably multiple partners simultaneously or serially to a degree that men of lower status have not.

There's high variance in eventual reproduction among males in mammals generally, and although the situation is less extreme in people than in many other mammals, the same is true for people.

When you say they have high variance compared to what? Well, high variance compared to women, for example, the variability in eventual reproductive success is lower for women than for men.

Now you say access to women; I think that's exactly the right level to be looking at in contemporary societies. But the reason why that matters is because ancestrally that translated into differential reproduction. In a modern environment in which, you know, contraceptive technology is available especially to women, then that correlation may be broken down.

But the motives to seek sexual opportunity remain relevant. So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about too is, like, you made a comment in your book about Adrien Raine. Adrien Raine has written a book recently about the biological predictors of criminality, and you make a strong case that in some sense the turning to violence that's characteristic of men in uncertain situations is rational because it drives status increase and that produces a variety of positive effects.

So in some sense, it's a rational response to a radically uncertain environment where competition is high. Now, Raine would say the biological type of researchers, they look at the individual level and conclude that it's individuals who have various forms of prefrontal damage or characterological issues associated with antisocial personality disorder that are more likely to engage in violent acts.

And you can track that. I mean, Rashard Trombley has done some of this work in Quebec. You can track the emergence of aggression at an individual level all the way back to children at two years of age because it turns out that children who are two are the most violent children, particularly the boys, but mostly a subset of boys who kick, fight, hit, bite, and steal at two. Most of whom are socialized by the age of four, but a subset of whom are not socialized, and then they become—they're more likely to become the lifetime offenders.

And so what I'm wondering is maybe you can reconcile the difference between the two research streams. Imagine that as the economic gradient increases and the dominance hierarchy becomes steeper and steeper, the men who are prone to be violent, like, it's the disagreeable men that start to be violent first.

Maybe the ones that have an impulse control problem or that are characterologically like the violent two-year-olds. It seems to me that those would be the ones that, you know, as the pressure increases, those men who are more prone to violence for other reasons are going to be the people who react with violence first. Do you think that's a reasonable hypothesis?

Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable hypothesis. And I mean my objection to Adrien Raine's book was that I think he vast—he's there’s definitely evidence that many kinds of violent criminal offenders have got something wrong with their brains. Adrien Raine wants to extrapolate to the conclusion that violent criminals and indeed criminals in general have got something broken about their brains and it's like criminality is pathological.

Well, criminality is not pathological. People steal for cost-benefit-related reasons. The crime is a God-help-us social construction in the sense that certain behaviors are criminalized by a larger social group in order to deter them because self-interested individuals would otherwise pursue them.

You know how do you make people stop exploiting others, stealing from others? By criminalizing those activities and imposing penalties, and you know, there's a rational choice stream of theorizing within criminology that other people like Adrien Raine just dismiss out of hand. No, no, criminal offenses are pathological.

Yeah, and I think that's silly. Well, it seems unnecessary, you know, because it isn't that difficult to make a marriage between the two issues. Like one of the best predictors, you know I do research on individual differences in personality, and the best personality predictor of incarceration is low agreeableness. That's one of the dimensions on which men and women differ the most.

And so as you become more disagreeable, you become more self-oriented, I would say, and that can push past the point where you're so self-interested that you're willing to prey on others. And so those are the guys that, as well as the guys who lack impulse control, those are the guys—the first guys to turn to violence, let's say when the socioeconomic conditions become sufficiently unstable so that a conscientious approach is not tenable.

Yeah, and still, and the marriage between that kind of thinking and thinking about the relevance of inequality is that there's guys at the top who are like the violent people you described. There are people doing very well who are very happy to exploit others, but the costs of individual violent action are high enough, and the opportunities to exploit other people through financial means, through your lawyers, through whatever tactics are available to you, well-healed bullies, are safe enough that they opt to behave in those directions, right?

Because they've got a—their long-term future is relatively stable. And so that long-term planning and regulation of behavior actually play an important economic role. You know, and then in the case of somebody like Donald Trump, I mean he looks like somebody who's suffering a little bit from an impulse control problem, especially sort of during the night when he wakes up and his Twitter account is too close at hand.

But he's rich enough to bully people in other ways, that actually hedges on violence. Although come to think of it, the famous remark that he made during the campaign about women suggests perhaps that—you know, depends on your definition of hedging on violence I guess.

That qualifies.

Okay, so there's a very large body of research that indicates that alcohol is a major contributor to criminality too, especially with regards to men. About 50% of people who are murdered have a decent blood alcohol level, and about 50% of murderers.

And I think that's partly— that stat is equalized. I think it's because much violence among men is exactly the sort that you describe where it's a status dispute, and it's more or less a toss-up who's going to come out as a winner.

But then, I guess what's happening with alcohol perhaps is that because it's a disinhibitor, because it reduces anxiety, and anxiety is one of the suppressors of aggressive behavior, that men who are already on the edge, let's say because of the unstable environment and the steep dominance hierarchy, are also more likely to lose control when they're drinking. And maybe that's also fuel.

This is something too that I'm curious about. I mean, you can think about it as a rational calculation, but I'm also curious about the degree to which it's fueled by emergent negative emotions.

So it's easy for people who are in steep dominance hierarchies to regard the system as unfair and to become resentful and angry about it, as perhaps they should be. I'm not suggesting that that's necessarily an irrational response, but it seems that if the anger is simmering underneath the surface that it's waiting in some sense for an opportunity to break free, and alcohol in a bar or at home perhaps provides that route.

Yeah, what you say makes evident sense to me. I mean, it's probably worth injecting a bit of a caution about the word rationality generally when one talks about rationality in crime, and perhaps especially in confrontational violence.

The point is not that the person is making good and carefully weighed decisions. I mean, I think emotions are the handmaiden of what I would call ecological rationality. They help you know how you should feel about certain things and how you should react to them.

And the rationality claim is more a claim that this person gets riled up, resents X—and he should. There's good reason to get riled up and resent X—but the fact that alcohol perhaps disinhibits so that, you know, the truly rational balance between inhibitory and aggressive emotions is altered.

The idea that alcohol interferes with cognitive processes to the point that people are start making stupid decisions when they're drunk—decide to get behind the wheel or whatever. I think this plays very heavily into the reason why so many homicides tend to happen in contexts like two drunks insulting each other instead, or people who are somewhat under the influence of alcohol insulting each other, rather than, you know—

If you have more mental wherewithal at the moment, you probably have better capacities to defuse dangerous situations through, you know, ways that don't entail losing face by being articulate.

Great! Exactly, that's right. You have other tools at your disposal rather than immediate recourse to your fists.

Thank you! Yes! So if I remember correctly, too, in your Chicago studies, this is one of the things that I found particularly fascinating, was you track the consequences of killing someone in Chicago. And the consequences were something of the following sort:

Well, first of all, you were likely to be charged with something like second-degree murder. It would be difficult for the police to find people to testify against you, and if they did, generally what they would say is that it was a two-way altercation.

And so in many cases you could plead self-defense. Often it didn't go before a jury because the perpetrator plea-bargained it down to manslaughter. The sentence was something on the order of a couple of years, and people were generally out of prison in 18 months with a substantial boost in their social capital because now they were like dangerous sons of bitches not to be messed with.

And that was quite clear, and perhaps also improved, so to speak, by their sojourn in prison. Is that—if I got that right?

Except for one detail. Well, actually in our Chicago studies, we didn't have as good follow-up information as what you're talking about. This was earlier research in the city of Detroit that led to most of those findings.

But yeah, exactly. It's interesting. We had a single year sample of cases in Detroit, and there were I think 590 homicides in Detroit in that one year, 1972, at which time Detroit did have the highest homicide rate in the US.

A large majority of these are male-male disputes of some sort, status disputes usually, but sometimes robberies. Just as you said, witnesses are unlikely to come forward, and the prosecutors are stretched. They don't have the resources that they would need to pursue every case, and so many cases were dismissed.

I mean, not even prosecuted, never mind bargained down to something. Approximately half of all male-male macho dispute homicides in Detroit that were solved were not prosecuted on the expectation that there was a plausible self-defense argument that might win with a jury.

Then of the half that were prosecuted, almost all of them were plea-bargained down to manslaughter, and the majority of them got a conviction, which was about three years, 50% time off for good behavior. If you behaved nicely, you go to Jackson State Prison in Michigan.

Eighteen months later you're back out on the streets of Detroit. And Margot in particular was very interested in the question of whether killing in these contexts might even actually ultimately pay off for guys.

I tend to the view that actually killing is overstepping the bounds of utility. That that's reassuring that deadly threats are very self-interested and effectual, but that actually following through on them may be, you know, the nonfunctional tip of the iceberg.

But I honestly don't know that that's true in these kind of cases for the—for exactly this reason that guys get some social capital out of having done it.

Well hypothetically among the Yanomamo tribes in South America, I believe, or Central America, I think it's South America—yeah, yeah—the more warlike men have a much higher reproduction rate, the ones who've killed more.

Now I don't know—obviously, it isn't necessarily the case that that's directly translatable, but there is some utility in being a successful warrior. That's actually one of the reasons that I think that capitalism so to speak is underappreciated because in a very—I'm speaking in a very specific sense—that there are disagreeable and warlike men, and some of them are very powerful in many ways, not only physically but intellectually and characterologically, and with great ambition.

And the thing about capitalism is that it enables them to wage war in a manner that's not deadly and to become successful that way and to channel their intense competitive energy into something that, well, I think often is for some social good.

Now, it depends on how disagreeable the person is and how selfish they are, of course. But people like that also tend to get punished in their cooperative interactions with other people.

Yeah, I mean I partly agree, but I also feel that the often-toward the social good is a bit hopeful. I mean to the degree that people are successful in a fairly unrestrained capitalist competition, it's usually at the expense of large numbers of people at the bottom.

But it depends on how unrestrained that capitalist competition is. I was thinking of social good as in better than war.

Yeah, no, better than war for sure. Better than war, for sure. And sometimes the way you succeed is by producing goods that actually make people's lives better.

No quarrel with that. So now I also wanted to ask you, in the last couple of chapters of your book, you turned to what I would regard as more political issues and so I will—and I am very interested in inequality because we'll recapitulate for a minute.

So your work and the work of other people seems to indicate that as inequality increases and dominance hierarchies get steeper, not only do young men get more violent and so society becomes less stable, but there's also detrimental impacts on things like population health and that was documented quite nicely in "The Spirit Level."

And so I'm going to address a couple of criticisms of the research, and then I want to ask you, I want to have a discussion about your more prescriptive views, if that's okay.

So the first issue, someone just emailed me this a while back when I was talking about inequality, and they said, "Well, what about places like China where the rates of inequality are starting to skyrocket quite substantially and have been for several years, maybe several decades, yet the homicide rate doesn't seem to be budging much?"

And so I thought, well, that was interesting. Maybe there's something different about East Asian communities. They tend to have very low crime rates to begin with, like places like Japan, for example, have very low crime rates.

And so I'm wondering what you think about that. Is that a reasonable criticism, and how would you address it?

Fair enough. Well, I don't think we can characterize, you know, Orientals as less violent than accidentals or anything like that. I think, you know, history tells us otherwise. There's been a lot of severe and dangerous violence in Japan in history and in China in history.

I don't know how good data we have on Chinese murder rates, but what I've seen is that they have been going up a bit lately. But still, the point that inequality's been skyrocketing—I mean partly there's an interesting question about time lags and effects on people.

You know, how soon is an increased inequality effect going to play out as nasty interpersonal behavior? And you know, people respond to inequality as a result of their lifetime experiences.

You were talking about young kids, already very young children, being predictable in the extent to which they're willing to, you know, use violent tactics against other people. And that, you know, assessing three and four year-olds could give you some surprisingly good prediction of how they'll behave as adults.

It's not inconceivable that the effects of inequality are even influencing people's development prenatally, and so, you know, the guide environments that they experience as a function of inequitable environments, and the stresses and fraught social comparisons that happen in those environments could be influencing them at all life stages.

So I don't think we have any strong basis for expecting rapid change and inequality to be accompanied in the short term by rapid change of violence. That said, there, you know, it's certainly the case that there's other things that matter, and government controls are one.

I think strong governments that monopolize the legitimate use of violence can keep a lid on violence for a long time. I would question whether they could keep a lid on it indefinitely, but they could keep a lid on it for a long time.

If you execute all charged murderers, I presume that that would keep the incidence of murder down and not only because those people couldn't be recidivists.

Right. So there's an element potentially of authoritarian control.

Yeah, and then the other element that I think is particularly interesting is the time lag argument. I mean, we don't know over what period of time precisely inequality has its pernicious effects, and maybe it's not even the span of one lifetime.

I mean, do you have any data on that that would help answer the question?

Well, I did. I did make reference in my book, "Killing the Competition," to one sociological study that was looking at the effects of inequality on mortality generally. The notion that inequality affects mortality generally is mediated by what you were talking about, about health effects.

The idea that, you know, stresses and fraught social comparisons produce greater vulnerability to stress-related diseases, and in fact, many diseases, most diseases, maybe even are stress-related in their ultimate impacts on people.

So there's this one sociological study by a guy named Jang in Ohio State which sought effects of economic inequality and mortality in general, and came to the conclusion that there—the effects were lagged. That the maximum impact on current mortality was inequality seven years ago.

Which sounds kind of funny, but he had analyses that seemed to show—and I'm a bit wary about the legitimacy of these analyses, but they seem to me to show—they seemed to show that inequality a few years ago affects the chance that you'll die now.

And the effects of age and sex and other predictors of mortality, and that they're sort of—the cumulative consequences of many years of past inequality. So years ago was the worst, but six and eight also mattered additively. Five years ago and nine years ago also mattered additively. Ten years ago also mattered.

So that how bad the inequality was in your past seems to affect your likelihood of dying now. The effects of violence haven't been looked at. It's hard to figure out how you could get a decent enough data set to do that, right?

But I don't think it's impossible.

Okay, so with regards to health effects, so I'm going to lay out an account of them and you can tell me what you think about this.

Alright, so your brain is always trying to calculate how good things are going for you, and that's an extraordinarily difficult calculation because life is ultimately uncertain. It's difficult to predict the future, except perhaps by using the past as a marker.

And what seems to happen is that our nervous systems are always interested in how prepared we should be for emergency at any given moment. And as far as I can tell, there are a number of ways that we calibrate that.

One is baseline levels of trait neuroticism, so that's sensitivity to anxiety and uncertainty and emotional pain. And so you seem to be born roughly speaking at your average level of neuroticism, which can vary substantially between people.

It can also be adjusted at puberty, and then the environment can move you in one direction or another. So for example, if you have a highly anxious child and you encourage them to go out and explore, then you can move them towards the normal range.

Jerry Kagan has demonstrated that quite nicely.

Okay, so the first estimate of how worried you should be about the future is like a genetic roll of the dice. Some people will be born extraordinarily worried, roughly speaking, and some people will be born hardly worried at all.

And then that can be modified by the particulars of the social environment, right? So then the next thing that seems to me to be part of the calculation is comparison: how well are you doing compared to others.

And that seems to be adjusted by mechanisms that associate perceived social status with serotonergic activity such that, as you move up a dominance hierarchy, your serotonin levels rise so that your impulsivity, which would be partly sensitivity to immediate reward, declines, and so does your sensitivity to negative emotion.

Whereas if you plummet down to the bottom of a hierarchy, you start to become more reward-seeking and also more anxious, and the reason for that is that the bottom of the dominance hierarchy actually is a more dangerous place to be because you don't have reliable access to shelter or food or mating resources or health care.

And you even see this in birds, you know. If a flu sweeps through an avian population, it's the bedraggled bird at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy that dies first.

And so then one more thing—then I tell me what you think about this—is that the other thing that seems to happen is that as you plummet down the dominance hierarchy and your mind settles into a more depressed and anxious state, the levels of cortisol that you produce chronically rise.

And cortisol is a good hormone for activating you, but in high doses, continual doses, it starts to produce brain damage, particularly in the hippocampus, and it also suppresses immunological function, which makes you more susceptible to infectious diseases.

So that seems to be approximately the process, and so it's no wonder that people are trying to flee away from the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. Is that seem reasonable?

Yes. Give me a moment; I've got to cough and blow my nose. Okay, hay fever season in Southern Ontario.

Okay, yeah. I wish I were a better behavioral endocrinologist and knew a bit more, was more expert in some of the processes that you're talking about, but a lot of that makes sense to me.

The stress of social comparisons—I mean, the evidence certainly is that it's more stressful to be low-ranking than high-ranking. We've had a little myth that, oh, being a very high rank puts all this burden of decision-making on you and that's terribly stressful and makes you vulnerable to heart attack and blah, blah, blah, and the data say the opposite.

The data say that's not true. The more power and status—and if you like decision-making authority you have, the less vulnerable you seem to be to stress-related diseases.

So you know, a lot of what you're saying makes evident sense to me. The developmental story that you're telling—I mean, I think it's right that people, I don't know how important the throw of the genetic dice is.

I think it's an extremely interesting puzzle evolutionarily why there’s as much heritable genetic variability in seemingly important domains as there is, and I'm not convinced anybody has really understood what modulates how much variability there is. But in any case, that things are adjustable in response to what you encounter and in response to social status, perceived social status, in response to social comparisons, makes evident sense to me.

And again, I don't know enough about the putative damaging effects of excessively prolonged exposure to say high cortisol levels to be sure whether there is still some adaptation, some actual functionality to the response to long-term exposure lurking beneath the seeming breakdown of the system.

Because it just seems to me that sort of a Darwinian, non-evolutionary, social scientists, and psychiatrists and psychologists have been too quick to assume pathology when they see states of affairs that do indeed have damaging consequences but may in some, nevertheless, have some utility.

I wish I knew a little more.

Well, I think both the low serotonin and the high cortisol levels are interesting in that regard because what does happen is the combination of those two things makes you A) more impulsive, and B) more prepared for emergency action.

Both of those things are very useful in an uncertain environment. The detrimental consequences seem to occur as a consequence of prolonged overload. Is that because your body is utilizing—imagine that what your body is doing is utilizing more units of resource per moment of time because of the necessity for preparation for unexpected events.

And that can become physiologically exhausting in the long run. So I think it does—it seems to me that those biochemical effects do underlie the sort of adaptive responses that you describe, except that, you know, too much is too much.

And if it's hard to live at the bottom, what that means is you age faster, and you don't live as long, and you also have higher susceptibility to disease. And maybe in some sense, that's the price you pay for the adaptive impulsivity that's also necessary to give you a chance to shoot back up the hierarchy if that's the sort of thing that you're looking for.

Yeah, no, and I can't help thinking about the evolutionary theories of senescence and bodily repair that were pioneered by Sir Peter Medawar back in the 50s and developed more by George Williams.

The idea that many things involve some sort of tradeoff between expenditure for expenditure of energy, accumulated resources, and capacity in the pursuit of something now at the expense of reduced capacity to be successful later.

And so, you know, one reason why these chronic states may have long-term damaging effects is because selection against being in these chronic states has not been strong because those who were in them for a long time didn't historically tend to live very long anyway.

And they’re being, if you like, motivated or prepared to engage in high-risk activities that at least have some chance of short-term payoff, which is more or less what you said, actually.

Well, and you know you talked about this mis—let's call it a misbegotten idea that there's stress at the top of the dominance hierarchy just like there is stress at the bottom.

And that the stress at the top is responsibility and decision-making and all of that. And you know, I do believe that there's truth in that, but there's an important—another important biological element that needs to be considered.

And so there's plenty of work done in the domains of clinical psychology and some of this is psychophysiological and neurophysiological for that matter showing that stress of an equivalent magnitude has fewer negative effects if it's taken on voluntarily.

So because what happens is that if you voluntarily engage in the stressful activity, your approach systems are activated rather than your defense systems, and the approach systems are associated with positive emotion.

Whereas the negative emotions are associated with this defensive posturing that includes preparation for emergency, and that's much more physiologically damaging.

And so whether something—whether you pick up a load voluntarily or have it thrust upon you seems to make a big difference to how heavy it is. And that's a very, that's a very interesting piece of a set of research studies as far as I'm concerned; it's quite fascinating that that can be the case.

Yeah, okay, so let me ask you another question. Let's get down to, we might say, brass tacks here.

So we can make a case that inequality destabilizes societies and cranks up the male-on-male homicide rate, and the destabilization occurs because young men become more and more unpredictable and violent.

And so you could make a conservative case, as well as a liberal case for not having a society that takes inequality to an extreme because conservatives at least in principle should be concerned with the maintenance of social stability over the long run.

So, but, okay, and so then you might make a case for income redistribution, but that gets very, very troublesome because it's not that easy to redistribute income.

And one of the—I mean look, here's an example. You can tell me what you think about this. So I used to work—I used to live in northern Alberta when the oil sporadic oil booms were going on.

And my observation was that if you wanted to make money in Alberta when an oil boom was going on, you didn't go out and work in the rat, although if you did that you could make a tremendous amount of money.

Now it was all young men who did that pretty much, say between the ages of 16 and 25, something like that. And they were making fantastic amounts of money, but they virtually all of them came out of it with nothing to show for it because they would work for two weeks and then go into town and just have a blowout party for four days and spend everything they got and buy expensive cars and wreck them and so forth.

So it was reckless behavior that I think was akin in some sense to that steep dominance hierarchy violence and that sort of thing that for status seeking that you're describing.

The people who really made money were the bartenders, right? Because they absorbed all the excess profits and actually generally, comparatively speaking, were able to utilize the money properly.

Now the point I'm making is that an oil boom is a very effective way of distributing wealth down the economic ladder, but it didn't necessarily seem to me to be a very effective one because it didn't—because the money flowed back up to the top 1% damn near as fast as you could shovel it downwards.

And that's the thing about that damn Pareto distribution is that it's—it seems there are people—there's a scientific subfield called econophysicists, and they actually modeled the distribution of money in an economy using the same equations that model the distribution of a gas into a vacuum.

So there's something that's natural law-like about this. The economists call it the Matthew principle: right to those who have everything, more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.

And I don't think that we've done a good job of grappling with the actual complexity of this, and we tend to split up into politically opposed, what would you call, camps and argue about the solution to inequality.

And the left-wing solution is something like, you know, distribute the money, take it from the rich, especially the undeserving rich, if you can identify them, and give it to the poor.

And the conservatives say, well no, the poor should bootstrap themselves up and maybe be provided with more opportunity, and that might equalize things. But it isn't clear to me that we're actually grappling with the magnitude of the problem.

No, it isn't clear to me either. But what you say about equalizing opportunity, for example, is in effect a kind of distribution of resources because one way you equalize opportunity is by having universal high-quality health care that's paid for by some sort of government revenue, some taxes picked up somewhere.

Free education is certainly another, and it's you know it's another way that in effect you create a more egalitarian society.

So I mean, there are certain domains certainly and health care may be some others that are not springing to mind. Well, I suppose the improvement of various sorts of infrastructure that you know make it easier to get from point A to point B.

You know, yes, so that's publicly subsidized things like that can certainly be contributors as well. Now that's equalizing in its own right. You're not taking it from anybody and giving it specifically to anybody else.

Then there's things like a guaranteed minimum income, and at first it sounds like a crazy idea. The idea that, you know, we should take government accrued resources, which come from some sort of taxation, and we should just make sure everybody has $15,000 a year to start or something like that.

It sounds kind of wacky because the standard argument against it from the right has been that it will undermine incentives and nobody will produce—who wants to be welfare queens? Mostly, and where this stuff has been tried, my understanding is that it's been surprisingly successful.

That there was an experiment in Manitoba where a minimum income was tried for a while.

And—gosh, I remember that. I know Finland's about to try it. Finland's about to try it. Manitoba has tried it. It was an NDP government I think which then were replaced by conservative or nominally liberal government, then sort of canned the results.

But the results came to light later and showed that, for example, the number of people who chose not to work did not go up under this. And that it had various beneficial effects.

I think it remains to be seen, but I think even the idea of putting money in the hands of everybody from the great collective wealth that has accumulated could be socially beneficial, could be economically beneficial, could be environmentally beneficial.

See, I wonder—I wonder, and that certainly in domains like education and health care, that's in effect a kind of redistribution, right? That seems easy to effectuate.

I mean, easy if not easy to effectuate in terms of convincing people politically or overcoming the propaganda against it. But a whole bunch of—we obviously— a whole bunch of our wealth is embodied in the infrastructure.

I really noticed this for example when I lived in Montreal because Montreal is a great city, and one of the things that distinguishes Montreal from most cities that I've lived in, especially Western cities, is that people live in the city. They don’t live in their houses.

Yes. And the fact that the city is extraordinarily livable, you can walk everywhere, there's always something to do that's exciting, there's a tremendously active street life, means that there's access to infrastructure and social capital-related wealth just distributed everywhere, and that that's a lovely thing.

So, because I'm kind of looking for solutions to the Pareto distribution problem that conservatives and liberals alike could agree upon. And so some of those you outlined. Improve the infrastructure of our society because those are public goods that benefit everyone. That also improve productivity.

There seems to be no downside to that at all. Also raises employment. Improve the quality of education, right from day one, which is something that I think we do a very bad job of.

And then the issue with health care, it's my understanding that the Canadian healthcare system for it—and it has flaws. Because it's of course dealing with an impossible problem—still uses much less of its capital on maintaining itself.

And for example, having to maintain an infrastructure that collects money. I know that the hospitals in the US spend something—some substantial proportion of the revenue—I can't remember precisely, but it's between 17 and 30%, if I remember correctly, just gathering the money for their services.

Which seems to be a rather counterproductive use of the resources. And I wonder how much is spent on billboards advertising their hospitals too! If you drive the interstate highways of the US, it's astonishing how much information about, you know, come to such and such where we have the best cancer doctors.

And Americans pay a lot for their health care. They do a—they do A LOT. I spent three years there recently and we paid a lot for health care coverage that turned out not in fact to be all that thorough coverage.

Right. Well, and when I lived in the states too and I had decent coverage, I was teaching in Boston there; I had a pretty good program. But it wasn't, I wouldn't say it was manifestly different from my Canadian experience, which has been mixed.

But of course it is very important to note that—making people healthy is impossible because everybody gets sick and ages and dies, and so it's an impossible task. And it also indicates to me that that's perhaps one of the reasons why it doesn't fit so nicely into a free-market model.

Because the free market assumes that there's not infinite demand for something, and there is actually near infinite demand for health care, especially dying.

There's that, and there's also just, you know, it's an impossible problem because of an aging population. It's an impossible problem because, you know, governments have one of the determinants of the costs of the health care system is how many MDs you've got out there billing it.

And governments have a tendency to respond to this by restricting the number of new medics, in order to restrict the number of people billing. But this is not much of a solution when you have large numbers of people trying to find a family doctor unsuccessfully.

Okay, so there is some meritocratic structure to our society, in so far as IQ, conscientiousness, and openness predict long-term life success. And that's a good thing because that's an indicator of health in a society, I would say.

If your society is set up to allow people who are intelligent and conscientious to near the pinnacles of power structures, that's a good thing for everyone. Now, you could still have an argument about how steep that gradient should be.

But then with regards to the guaranteed annual income issue, I'm also concerned that the importance of individual differences there are not being considered.

So, for example, I don't know what people who are extremely low in conscientiousness would do with an annual income, because they're not inclined to work, and it isn't obvious to me that providing them with an easy way out is the answer.

Because providing unconscientious people with an easy way out seems to be actually quite counterproductive. And conscientiousness is a you know, it's a decent predictor of long-term success.

We also don't know to what degree necessity is a motivator, which is of course the conservative argument.

So, and we also don't know how homogeneous a society has to be before income redistribution programs will actually be successful. It seems easier to implement them in relatively homogeneous societies like the Scandinavian countries or Japan, which is where they tend to have been implemented with more success.

So that's a complicated phenomenon as well. And then the other thing that's really going to come up on us hard in the next 10 years, I would say this is how it looks to me, is that I think computational devices are a multiplier of intelligence and conscientiousness.

Because if you're smart and you know how to use a computer, and you're diligent, so as a conscientious person would be, then you're much more deadly than you would be without your computer, because it multiplies your, and there's a huge difference between someone who really knows how to use a computer—including knowing how to program it—and someone who's, you know, literate enough to use their iPad to do a Google search.

And so I think one of the things that's also driving inequality, particularly in societies like the United States, is that increasingly people who are smart and conscientious can do a tremendous amount of work without having to hire anyone.

So we have these tiny companies that employ almost no one that gather massive resources to themselves, and that's going to be a problem.

Well, here's a good example. Here's one thing that's coming. So, you know, the Tesla guys are working pretty hard on autonomous vehicles, and they're making a lot of progress. And they're not the only ones, obviously.

But you know, the biggest employer for males in North America is as drivers.

I didn't know that!

Yeah, yeah, it's the biggest single employment category. So, you know, we're increasingly eradicating the possibility for people who are on the lower end of the intelligence distribution and the lower end of the conscientiousness distribution to find a place in society.

And it's possible that providing them with minimal resources to survive might be sufficient to solve that problem, but I doubt it.

Because as they say, you know, man does not live on bread alone, and it seems to me that people need the quest—the degree to which people need to find a productive and credible place in a functional society is something that we haven't yet—we don't know the parameters of that.

No, no, I don't disagree. I mean, the loss of decently paid work—an entails the major computer revolution to some extent or at least the, you know, modern electronic device and your phone can do everything revolution.

And you know, I live in Hamilton, Ontario, where formerly a lunch bucket town with an enormous number of people working in decently paid working-class jobs, and those jobs have been evaporating.

And if drivers evaporate as I mean, work is going to change. Work opportunities are going to change. And I take your point that people need something that they could think of as useful work.

Useful work—you know, it's interesting, we're talking, we're two males talking about this, and we're probably thinking from a somewhat male perspective. There's a lot of useful work that is minimally or not at all compensated that have predominantly female domains—daycare kinds of things of various—so-called charitable activities and so on.

And you know, the idea that people need something to occupy their time with that feels worthwhile, that enters them into a social arena where they engage with other people, that they come home satisfied that they've done something useful—and they also, you know, have a chicken in every pot besides.

I mean, if work opportunities shrink and if the next Mark Zuckerberg can employ a hundred people to pull in tens of billions of dollars, then where's that going to come from?

It may come from various sorts of unpaid work with a guaranteed income that, you know, enables that work to be unpaid and still be fulfilling.

I don't know. I don't know.

Well, that's a good thing to think about. I mean, maybe people will learn how to go out into the community and spontaneously do useful things.

Although I can tell you that my experience trying to find gainful, let's call it volunteer, employment for people who are on the lower end of the ability distribution has been absolutely—it's difficult beyond imagination because it turns out that finding a volunteer position is actually no less difficult than finding a job.

For example, you have to go through a relatively complicated process of police screening for most jobs, and you have to produce a resume, and you have to be able to work in an office environment, and you know, you need to have all the abilities that you would have if you were actually having a real job.

And so that makes things complicated as well.

Yeah, no, I want to come back also to what you were saying about the predictive power of IQ and conscientiousness, which I don't dispute.

And I'm also not one of these people who suffers under the delusion that these things are totally socially determined. I mean, I understand and believe that they have high heritability and identifiable genetic sources in that variability and so on.

But you know, the standard old joke used to be—you can tell me because you know more about personality psychology than I do—the standard old joke used to be that everything's 50% heritable.

That pretty much anything that you can measure as a trait that has any stability within the lifetime also turns out to have a heritability somewhere near 50%. But there's the other 50% of, you know, some people have low IQs because they were exposed to too much lead.

Yeah, you know, severe malnutrition never provides zero information.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

So we've wiped out; in many ways we've wiped out the worst effects of privation, and that's increasingly true as well on a worldwide scale.

You know, there's about 150,000 people a day right now being lifted out of absolute poverty by UN standards—the fastest improvement in the history of the world by a huge margin.

And also about 300,000 people a day being hooked up to the electrical grid. So we are making some progress removing the absolute privation problem, which is a nontrivial problem.

The problem with most of the attempts to raise IQ is that they don't change the variance in IQ. They tend to raise the average IQ across the population, and that leaves the inequality—IQ inequality problem basically untouched.

So there have been studies trying to estimate how much socioeconomic pressure, let's say, you have to place on an individual to raise their IQ. Lowering it's easy, right? Because making something worse is always easier than making something better.

But if I remember correctly, if you take an identical twin who's adopted out at birth, in order to produce a 15-point increase in IQ compared to the other twin—which is a one standard deviation increase and about the same as the average difference between a university student in an average state college and an average high school student.

You have to move the one twin from the 5th percentile of socioeconomic status to the 95th percentile.

So you need about a three standard deviation improvement in socioeconomic conditions to produce a one standard deviation improvement in IQ.

So it looks like it can be done, but it's expensive, you know? And...

Yeah, I see what you're saying. I'm kind of surprised, actually. I mean, given, you know, we just mentioned malnutrition as one possible source of low IQ, one possible developmental source, I'm kind of surprised that to the degree that the Flynn effect might be due to things like a reduction of the number of people exposed to severe malnutrition—it wouldn't have also simultaneously truncated the variance a little bit.

That seems slightly—well, it has, let me restate that, it has truncated the variance, although the data on that isn't clear.

Isn't as clear. So, but I do believe that it's a reasonable inference to make that the variance has been truncated.

It's also hidden to some degree because the IQ tests are always normed to keep the variance out of the standard 15 points.

So it makes it difficult to look retrospectively and see what's happened to the variance.

So, but the other problem too is that, you know, you get these stories now and then about these companies that come out with claims that their brain exercises can improve IQ.

And the literature on that is damn dismal! I can tell you it's—the holy grail is to produce cognitive exercises that produce a legitimate impact on fluid intelligence.

And like there has been a lot of work done on that, and the answer so far is that it doesn't work.

So what about the G? What about the video gaming? I mean I know there has been this suggestion that playing video games actually improves at least some aspects of intelligence.

Yeah, well there are a couple of studies that indicated that video games might improve spatial intelligence. But here's the problem, and I think this is a critical problem and perhaps an insoluble one at least no one solved it, is that what you get is that if you exercise yourself substantially on a given game, you can radically accelerate your performance in the game.

So you can get much better at those specific skills. But you don't get generalization across cognitive sets, which is what you're really hoping for because—

Yeah, I thought that was the claim from some of these—

Yeah, well they have shown some increases in spatial IQ, but there's not very many studies.

And I would say they're far overbalanced by the other side of the research equation, which continually says—and I've looked at this because I'm really interested in the Improvement of IQ—I mean that's, that's the holy grail in some sense, and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence suggests that you don't get generalization outside the narrow domain.

Now why that is—and even this, it's even worse—because you might say, well imagine that you could take five different domains of intelligence still associated tightly with G, and you had people practice routines in all five dimensions, maybe you'd get generalization under those circumstances.

And the results of the research attempting that indicate that, no, as soon as you move away from those specific practice instances, you don't get generalization.

So I guess in some ways, some of this is to be expected from the consideration that everything is an allocation problem within the body and brain.

And that, you know, by and large, an improvement in one domain tends to be bought at the expense of something else.

You know, it's interesting, and conscientiousness, I can tell you, some research we've done—that's cool, although we haven't been able to demonstrate that it's actually improved conscientiousness.

The first thing to note about conscientiousness is that no one understands it at all, especially the industriousness element.

There's no plausible biological, psychological, neurophysiological, or animal models for conscientiousness. All we've got is self-reports.

We can't even find tasks that conscientious people do better. It's unbelievable.

But self-reports, really?

Well, you can get reports from teachers and parents and so forth, but it's all human report.

Okay.

It's the only way we can measure it. In my lab, we've probably tried 200 tasks trying to find something that conscientiousness people do better. No luck!

We can derive it from linguistic analysis of verbal output now to some degree, but that's still not a task, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So now we produced a series of programs called the self-authoring suite. And one of them, the future authoring program, is a writing program that helps people lay out their plans for the future in detail.

So they have to consider their intimate relationships, their career goals, their educational goals, their use of time outside work, their plans to maintain mental and physical health, their use of drugs and alcohol.

They have to write for 15 minutes about what kind of life they'd like to have if they were taking care of themselves three to five years in the future. And then write for the same amount of time about how terrible their life could be if all their bad habits took control.

Okay? And then they have to turn the positive vision into an implementable plan.

We've managed to improve their college grades by about 20% and dropped their dropout rate by about 25% over about 10,000 students now.

But you know, we tried to see if that was mediated by an improvement in conscientiousness, and there was no evidence for that.

What it was mediated by was the number of words written during the exercise.

So it turns out that thinking more about your future helps. The more you think about it, the more it helps.

And maybe that would translate into an improvement in conscientiousness across time, but there haven't been any credible studies that I know of indicating that there are exercises that can be done to improve conscientiousness.

So that's also, you know, troublesome and worrying because that would be a nice thing to be able to do.

Conscientiousness is having a strong element of attentiveness to social obligation and to the well-being of others as it is defined in the personality literature. Does it have any of that?

Well, I would say not so much attention to the well-being of others because that's more trait agreeableness—that's more the maternal dimension. But there's definitely a massive effect of social obligation, which is part of the reason why conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness than liberals.

But it's not the well-being of others; it's duty. And so the conscientious types may form and maintain social contracts.

Yes, they implement their plans.

Yeah, and they seem to feel shame and self-contempt when they fail to live up to their social obligations.

And so that's another thing that's interesting about the income redistribution idea because it's conceivable to me that conscientious people would hate that.

Because conscientious people do very badly, for example, if they're laid off from work; even if it's not their fault, they still take themselves apart for their failure.

So conscientious people in particular seem to find inactivity without productivity highly aversive, and aversive enough to really cause them, you know, major health problems.

So—

Well, yeah, that brings us back to what we were discussing a little while ago: the problem of ensuring that large numbers of people have access to meaningful work in an age in which it is more and more the case that big components of the economy are booming away with very few employees, and that's going to change.

That's probably going to escalate. We're back to that same topic to some extent.

Yes, well, again, I think iniquity of opportunity is sort of the bottom or bedrock of inequality having its impacts upon us. And it's certainly the bottom of bedrock of why we should care about it on moral and social justice grounds.

It's like, well, why should people who—why should one's birthright affect the opportunities available to one? And well, it's also a social catastrophe because hypothetically you want to set up a society so that whatever someone has to offer is maximally offered to the community because otherwise the community loses.

Yes, and that seems to be—I mean, I think one of the great examples of that, although I don't think this accounts for all of it, is that the relationship between the provision of women's rights by countries and their economic productivity is staggeringly high.

So I think that also has to do with openness in general to transformation and change, with the provision of women's rights being an index of that. But nonetheless, it's a great predictor of eventual economic success.

Well, partly an index and partly perhaps a more direct effect, that after all, slightly over half the population—maybe their talents are better utilized.

Right! Well, that's certainly what we would hope. And I think as you said, I think the evidence at least suggests that. So, okay, so let me recapitulate because we should probably fold this up.

It's—and so, so as far as I'm concerned, your work was revolutionary because it undermined the general proposition that the fundamental cause of crime, and violent crime in particular, was poverty. Instead, you flipped it.

You flipped it on edge so to speak and made the claim, well substantiated by the research, that it's relative poverty that drives violent crime because of status seeking primarily among young men.

And that although there are effects of absolute privation—and that would be the poverty effect—the effect of relative deprivation of status are much more, let's say, especially in our societies, much more socially significant.

Yes, and that the status competition itself is driven at least in part by the desire of men to attain status to obtain access to women, roughly speaking. And it's partly because women outsource the problem of mate selection to the male competition domain.

Right. So the males compete, and the women peel off the top—it's like a market solution in some sense.

And then, and then having pointed out that inequality not only drives male homicide, but also tends to destabilize societies, there is an impetus for people to consider how we can stop the winner from taking all without becoming unduly authoritarian about it or impeding individual productivity.

Given the fact that there is individual variation in, yes, in the elements that actually produce productivity, that's our set of social problems exacerbated by the fact that we're going to be wiping out employment for huge categories, particularly of men, over the next 15 years.

Yeah, let me in this context just make a point that I spent most of a chapter of my book on, and that is that the notion that inequality is somehow the engine of productivity has been pretty much rejected by economists themselves in recent years.

They've come to the conclusion that relatively equitable places actually have more economic productivity in the ensuing period of time than those that start out more inequitable.

And there's a lot of reasons for that. The one that I think is most striking and that I would commend people to look into is the concept of useless, if you like, or wasteful expenditure on guard labor in relatively unequal societies.

And guard labor is a term coined by economist Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev, and what they've shown is that the number of people who are employed in just jobs like being security guards goes up as inequality goes up.

It's no great surprise when you think about it, but you could define guard labor more broadly or more narrowly.

And the general result is that a large proportion of people are engaged in work that is in a sense nonproductive; it’s just trying to prevent people from usurping the property of other people.

And that this is a very wasteful consequence of extreme inequality. And a waste—an economic waste that's reduced in relatively equitable societies.

And there are others, so as the society becomes more unequal, it tilts toward authoritarianism at multiple levels of organization.

It’s also counter—

Sorry, I was just going to say, and towards—exactly. It's and it's counterproductive even from the point of view of simple, you know, economic criteria of GDP and so on that inequality gets in the way for a bunch of reasons.

Another really interesting one that Bowles has—has articulated in a recent book. Bowles, B-O-W-L-E-S, if people want to look him up. I think his book was called "The New Politics of Inequality and Redistribution," and I liked it a lot.

Anyway, what one thing that he's shown that I thought was very interesting and never entered my head before I read him was that the actual quality of goods in a society can be damaged by severe inequality.

When rich individuals and rich firms have the capacity to keep innovators and small companies from establishing themselves, you mentioned before about the differences in entrepreneurial undertakings and where large numbers of people with worthy small business plans can't capitalize them properly.

And you've actually got the phenomenon of people with lots of wealth and shoddy products can drive people with better quality products who are trying to get started at the bottom out of the market with negative results for just the consumers.

Right! That's a problem with having people stack up at zero! Zero turns out to be a very, very difficult place to get out of because you can't leverage yourself out of it!

You know, it's also—in those really unequal societies too, like say Central American societies, it also becomes increasingly unpleasant for the people who are wealthy because they're only wealthy in a very narrowly defined way, because they can't go outside.

They can't let children go out into the public because they'll get kidnapped. I mean, the societies get pretty ugly when the fences have to be really high.

Yes, and so, yeah, among the rich countries, among the rich countries in the world, those problems are not absent. I mean, they're certainly worse in the US than they are in Canada or most of Western Europe.

Yeah, well, all right, that was really good. I'm very happy that you agreed to do a podcast with me, and I mean I found your work—well, I definitely regard you as one of the people who's been highly influential on my thinking.

I mean, I think that work on relative poverty is just—and the effect sizes, the work you guys did in Chicago, your work on indicating the adaptive utility of uncertainty-related dominance challenges in unequal societies— all of that! Brilliant, I think! And nicely biologically predicated, and the science is done extremely sound