desiderata

[quarrel]

In 1998, Sierra Studios released a game called Caesar III. The object of the game was to build a series of Roman cities from scratch. Citizens in your city automatically increased in social status as you furnished their neighborhoods with more and better goods, education, temples, and entertainment. If you taxed them too much, took too long to provide a service they demanded, or developed some neighborhoods significantly further than others, they’d riot and set buildings on fire. I never had rioters when I played because I avoided those situations. I built the socio-economic status of my cities evenly out of a naïve sense of fairness. In cases where I suddenly needed significant additional housing, I built it on the outskirts and separated it from the general populace with gates so the citizens couldn’t walk downtown and see how well everyone else lived. (This worked, by the way. Each citizen was only aware of the buildings that he wandered randomly past. If you didn’t allow poor people into the rich district, they’d never know there was one.)

The inherent shortcoming of any simulation game is that it’s only realistic if it’s based on an accurate model. Is this model accurate? Is knowing that others are more well-off than you a natural motivator for unrest?

In 2003, two scientists at a primate research center investigated whether seemingly instinctive aversions to unfairness existed in creatures other than humans. They trained pairs of same-sex capuchin monkeys — sometimes two males, sometimes two females — to exchange tokens for food. Sometimes both monkeys got cucumbers, which are edible but not fantastic. Other times, one monkey got a cucumber but the other got a grape, which they love. Both monkeys always saw what food the other got. Male monkey pairs happily ate whatever food they got, but with the females, when one got a grape, the one who only got cucumber sometimes refused to eat it or refused to exchange tokens in later trials.

The scientists then did more experiments with the female monkeys. First, they repeated the first two test cases, to check for reproducibility. Second, they tested having one monkey exchange a token for a cucumber while simply giving the other monkey a grape for not doing anything. Third, they tested having an unpaired monkey trade a token for a cucumber while they set a grape in the empty cage next to her.

The results?

When one monkey saw another get better food for performing the same task, she initially rebelled about a quarter of the time. That rose to more than half the time by the experiment’s end. Two-thirds of her rebellions were a refusal to eat what she got.

When one monkey saw another get better food for doing nothing, she rebelled 60% of the time at first and 80% of the time near the end, equally split between not eating her cucumber and not doing a future trade.

When one monkey saw that a better reward than hers existed (but that no one got it), she rebelled about 60% of the time at first, dropping to half the time by the conclusion. Again, rebellion was evenly split between not eating and not trading.

In the control case, where both monkeys have to do equal work for equal ho-hum cucumbers, they still rebel about 5% of the time because, well, they’re monkeys and they don’t always feel like playing silly experimental games — but when they do rebel, it’s almost never by refusing to trade later.

I’ve quoted Anatole France before: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

Something’s been bugging me about the last clause. The law doesn’t forbid stealing bread. It forbids stealing. The poor may be more likely than the rich to steal bread, but are they more likely to steal in general? Even if you discount mental disorders like kleptomania, theft occurs at all social levels. If poverty alone encouraged theft, that wouldn’t be the case.

So here’s what I think: people don’t steal when they don’t have enough. People steal when they have less than they think they deserve.

And that’s a big problem since so many times in life, you can do everything in the most likely successful way and still not succeed.

Case in point. Let’s say you’ve just been laid off. On your first week of unemployment, you apply to ten jobs. On your second week, you apply to two, then something serious and unexpected happens that occupies all your time — your car breaks down, your grandfather dies, something like that. The rules for unemployment benefits say you only deserve them if you apply to at least three jobs that week. Now, you could argue that the spirit of the rule is to deny benefits to people who aren’t earnestly trying to find work, and that you are not such a person. You could also argue that, had you known this was going to happen, you could have delayed one of the first week’s applications and made nine and three rather than ten and two, thus meeting the letter of the law with the same effort. And I would personally be inclined to side with you either way — sometimes, you think you deserve more because you do. Regardless, by the letter of the law, if you claim unemployment benefits for both weeks, you are guilty of fraud.