The Price of Altruism (16 page)

No one made this clearer than the Stanford entomologist Vernon Kellogg. Published earlier that year,
Headquarters Night
was an account of his war experiences as the chief liaison of the Commission for Relief of Belgium to the German high command in France. “The creed of the
Allmacht
of a natural selection based on violent and fatal competition is the gospel of the German intellectuals,” Kellogg wrote; “all else is illusion and anathema.” Former president Theodore Roosevelt agreed. In the preface to the book, he broadcast: “The man who reads Kellogg’s sketch and yet fails to see why we are at war, and why we must accept no peace save that of overwhelming victory, is neither a good American nor a true lover of mankind.” Formerly a pacifist, Kellogg had now changed his colors. Only a “war to end all wars” could save civilization.
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The delegates perked their ears in attention. If they could defeat German Darwinism on the scientific battlefield, they’d be lending their shoulders to the war effort. One by one, the big guns were paraded to make the cooperatist case: Did not Herbert Spencer argue that evolution led life from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous? Had he not explained how the ensuing specialization of function necessitates cooperation, the better to bring about an integrated whole? And wasn’t society just like an organism, comprised of individual parts each contributing to the community? Sure, he had later abandoned such ideals to paint a picture of a cutthroat struggle for survival, but he had been more insightful as a young man. And what about Kropotkin, that stellar exemplar of humanity: Had he not defeated Huxley’s “gladiator” in Nature’s glorious arena? Weren’t the fittest, after all, not the fiercest or the strongest but those who acquired the habit of mutual aid and cooperation for the benefit of all?
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Answering such questions in the affirmative, they suddenly felt like physicists. They left freezing Minneapolis immeasurably more important than when they’d arrived just two days before.

“How much is sixty million, five hundred and fifty-three thousand, eight hundred and ninety-one divided by twenty-seven?”

“Two million, five hundred and one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five point ninety-six.”

“Good boy!”

Johnny von Neumann could divide eight-digit numbers in his head by the time he was six. Visitors to the Budapest family home of the successful Jewish banker Max Neumann were as stunned by his son’s ability to memorize phone books as by the jokes he told in classical Greek. When he grew older he studied chemical engineering, physics, and mathematics at Europe’s finest universities: Berlin, Zurich, Budapest, Göttingen. Soon the word was out: Von Neumann was a genius. By 1930, at twenty-six, he was sitting in the room next to Albert Einstein’s at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. Einstein’s mind, they said, was “slow and contemplative. He would think about something for years. Johnny’s mind was just the opposite. It was lightning quick—stunningly fast. If you gave him a problem he either solved it right away or not at all.”
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Unsolvable problems were rare, though. Living with his wife, daughter, and an Irish setter, Inverse, at a Princeton mansion on 26 Westcott Road, von Neumann was famous for hosting lavish weekly alcohol-fuming parties, and even more for scribbling mathematical formulas with pencil and paper in the middle of it all—“the noisier,” his wife said, “the better.” He wore prim, vested suits with a white handkerchief in the pocket, “an outfit just enough out of place to inspire pleasantries.” Von Neumann was balding and porky; his diet consisted of yogurt and hard-boiled eggs for breakfast and anything he wanted for the rest of the day. He loved fast cars, hard liquor, classical music, and dirty jokes. He was a prankster. Once he offered to take Einstein to the Princeton train station and then put him on a train in the opposite direction. He was known for scribbling equations on the blackboard in a frenzy, erasing them before students could get to the end. Klara, his wife, claimed that he wouldn’t remember what he had for lunch, but could recall word for word books he had read twenty years before. He had produced groundbreaking papers in logic, set theory, group theory, ergodic theory, and operator theory. He had described the single-memory architecture of the modern computer, and performed the crucial calculation on the implosion design of the atom bomb. Along side these accomplishments, he loved toys and was observed unaffectedly scrapping with a five-year-old over a set of building blocks on a carpet. Though he was charming and witty in public, few felt that they really knew him well. People joked that John von Neumann was not human but a demigod who could imitate humans precisely.
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Above all he was fascinated by games, especially the kind, like poker, based on bluffing and deceit. “It takes a Hungarian to go into a revolving door behind you and come out first,” he used to say. In fact John von Neumann loved games so much that he had decided to study them, seriously, as a mathematician. What he discovered amazed him: In games where two opponents were in absolute conflict, where the loss of one is the gain of the other and only one side can ever win; in such “zero-sum” games there is always an optimal strategy for both players to pursue. Tic-tac-toe is the simplest example, but here is an illustration from life: Imagine two sweet-toothed kids being given a cake and told to share it. When a grown up carefully divides the cake down the middle, one side always feels slighted, even by a crumb. It is best for one of the kids to divide the cake, knowing that the other can choose which piece he wants. Since both kids know that the other wants as big a part of the cake as possible, cutting the cake precisely down the middle is the optimal solution.

It was mathematically airtight. It applied to games that involved perfect information (both kids know that the cake must be divided), complete self-interest (both kids want as big a piece of the cake as possible), and rational decision making based on a calculation of the other side’s agenda (the kid cutting the cake understands that the other kid wants as big a piece as possible, and vice versa, and both act accordingly). The issue was always how to maximize the minimum the other side strove to leave you with, or, in other words, to minimize maximal losses. The “minimax theorem” proved that there was always a best way to do this. With the relevant information, the right strategy could be known.
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The economists at Chicago had picked a hard time to wage their battle. In Europe the Great War was now over, but Adolf Hitler had risen to become führer of Germany, and Mussolini ruled with an iron fist in Italy. The Great Depression had taken hold. Reeling citizens looked to their governments for salvation.

Enter John Maynard Keynes. “I have called this book the
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
,” he wrote, Cambridge-style, in his magnum opus in 1936,

If government didn’t intervene in the economy it would be betraying its citizens. Since employment was not determined by the price of labor but by the spending of money (what is called “aggregate demand”), the assumption that competition will deliver full employment in the long run was patently false. On the contrary, underemployment and underinvestment were the likely natural state of competition; unless active measures were taken, that is. Lack of competition, Keynes was arguing, was not the fundamental problem; the reduction of unemployment by cutting wages, no promised panacea. What was needed instead was active government intervention: Public works, deficit spending, redistributive taxation, the lowering of long-term interest rates. In short, if society was to be stable over time, it would need to abandon the Invisible Hand in favor of the welfare state.
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“Nonsense!” Knight wrote in the margins of his copy of Keynes’s book, alongside more powerful expletives. Nonsense, Chicago colleague and expert on monopolies Aaron Director, a “mordant critic” of governmental and social institutions, concurred. Nonsense, agreed Henry Simons, down the hall, author of
A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire
. Most combative of all was Jacob Viner, “a strutting Talmudic Napoleon with facial expression alternating at express-train speed between joviality, challenge and utter contempt.”
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Challenging Keynes, Viner took welfare economics to the ring. Markets had to be left free, competition unencumbered. “Survival of the fittest” was the name of the game, intervention a curse of maudlin sensibilities. Man was selfish, but selfishness was not a curse. On the contrary, it was the true and only road to happiness.

It was said of Viner that his self-appointed task in life was destroying students’ confidence. When in the fall of 1932, a young four-foot-eleven-inch Brooklyn boy, son of immigrant parents from Carpatho-Ruthenia, shuffled into the classroom to attend Economics 301, like everyone else he was trembling. Unlike his fellow students, though, Milton Friedman would one day teach the very same course, becoming the leader of the intellectual movement that would challenge Keynes and the welfare state. Others would argue about precisely when it had all started, but the Chicago School of Economics was on its way.
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Darwin had pondered over the mystery of sterile insect castes, and so now did a new Chicago recruit. After a decade training at Cornell, teaching in Pittsburgh, and knee crawling in the jungles of British Guiana, Alfred Emerson arrived at the Chicago Biology Department in 1929 with termites on his mind.

He was
the
premier expert; when he retired his personal collection consisted of 91 percent of the known species in the world.
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His eyes were exceptionally dark, glistening like plums dipped in cold water. Easygoing and gregarious, he exuded the air of the confident son of a respected scholar of classical archaeology. Still, there was a problem that was killing him. Just like ants, termites were divided into castes, but how did such different castes arise? Were soldier and worker termites genetically determined before hatching, or did some environmental factor, like food, fashion individuals as they developed: for soldiers, ferocious fighting mandibles; for workers, special digestive systems for consuming cellulose. It was difficult to know. After all, at birth all termites are identical.

Good thing, then, that Sewall Wright was in the room next door. Recruited by Chicago in 1926 for his prodigious mathematical and statistical skills, he had yet to develop the evolutionary model that, alongside Fisher and Haldane, would soon make him famous. But he did have a theory about how genes worked: Particular chemical cues activated particular genes in particular ways; they could mutate them or turn them on or off. The genes would then activate particular physiological gradients, depending on the chemical cue they had gotten, directing genetically identical organisms to morph into entirely distinct creatures. That’s how development proceeded: The organism, Wright believed, was a “highly self-regulatory system of reaction” it was a mass of disparate parts each doing its thing to bring about an integrated whole.
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Emerson liked analogies. Just like organisms, colonies were integrated biological systems. Like genes and chemical cues and physiological gradients, termite warriors and toilers and queens and kings each sang their own particular aria. Whether a newborn termite would develop into a soldier or worker depended on the relative complex of castes in the colony—the analog to Wright’s chemical cues. It was one big coordinated opera. Far from a random aggregation of individuals, a termite colony was in fact a “superorganism,” a system so well integrated that it assumed a life of its own.
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This had been the idea of a scholar Emerson had met on his knees in the jungles of British Guiana. In fact the Harvard entomologist William Morton Wheeler was so convinced that the colonies of social insects were like a single individual that he saw no difference whatsoever between sterile workers toiling for the nest and a heart pumping for the good of the body. With the help of Wright’s fancy physiological genetics, Emerson could now apply Wheeler’s superorganism to explain termite evolution. Cooperation was a by-product of specialization of function. Ultimately it existed because individuals were subordinate to the whole.
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“Homeostasis” was the key. Coined in 1926 by the physiologist Walter B. Cannon, the term referred to the properties of self-control, regulation, and maintenance that ensured the stability of internal environments, like body temperature in mammals. Once again turning to analogy, Emerson replaced “internal environment” with “population,” fashioning homeostasis an ecological, not just a physiological, principle. “Just as the cell in the body functions for the benefit of the whole organism,” he wrote, “so does the individual organism become subordinate to the population.” Homeostasis was the solution to the conflict between part and whole; in the tug-of-war between the interest of the individual and the good of the group, the balance leading to stability was where the rope had to be fastened.
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