There’s a sense in which everybody is a competitor because everybody is doing the same thing

From WSU researchers see violent era in ancient Southwest by Eric Sorensen.

I was just out in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado and visited both Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. These were epicenters of quite sophisticated urban communities circa 900-1200 AD before they were abandoned. As we walked around the ruins we would often pose a question "I wonder why . . ." and then read in the pamphlet "We don't really know why . . . ". It became our standing joke "We don't know . . .".

I commented at the time that there seemed to be a deliberate effort to deemphasize the role of violence in the downfall of these communities. I was able to recall enough history to know that it was material. I read Constant Battles by Steven Le Blanc a number of years ago. His archaeological work was originally in this area though the book was about the larger issue of the destructive nature of low level warfare in ancient communities. The casualties in any encounter are, in part because of the primitiveness of their technology, very low in absolute terms compared to modern warfare. However, given that such low level warfare was both common and constant, the cumulative death rates were far higher than in modern history.

The work Sorensen is reporting is entirely consistent with both Le Blanc's work as well as that of Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature. But there is an intriguing insight thrown in.

Both the central Mesa Verde and northern Rio Grande experienced population booms, said Kohler, but surprisingly, the central Mesa Verde got more violent while the northern Rio Grande grew less so.

Kohler offers a few explanations.

Social structures among people in the northern Rio Grande changed so that they identified less with their kin and more with the larger pueblo and specific organizations that span many pueblos, such as medicine societies. The Rio Grande also had more commercial exchanges where craft specialists provided people both in the pueblo and outsiders with specific things they needed, such as obsidian arrow points.

But in the central Mesa Verde, there was less specialization.

“When you don’t have specialization in societies, there’s a sense in which everybody is a competitor because everybody is doing the same thing,” said Kohler. But with specialization, people are more dependent on each other and more reluctant to do harm.

Kohler and his colleagues also cite Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s thinking in his book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.”

“Pinker thought that what he called ‘gentle commerce’ was very important in the pacification of the world over the last 5,000 years,” said Kohler. “That seems to work pretty well in our record as well.”

So there are three factors hypothesized to make a material difference in the level of community violence in otherwise culturally common communities - 1) Broad community identification versus narrow community identification; 2) Community institutions that facilitate that broader identification; and 3) Complex, specialized economic systems which foster trade (and therefore interdependencies).

I suspect all three are both pertinent and material. Factors One and Two are partly why I am so concerned by the proliferation of victimhood groups and advocates of race and gender identity. If we are all Americans, we have common problems to solve. If I define my community only based on race and/or gender and/or religion then instead of a synthesized solution that optimizes everyone's needs, we are indulging in zero-sum competition in which there is a winner and a loser.

It is the third root cause that I find especially intriguing, greater and lesser specialization.

Comparative advantage, as first formulated by David Ricardo, takes some of the sting out of two individuals/groups/countries producing identical goods. As long as they each have other economic activities, there will be some advantage to trade between them which increases the cost of warfare. In other words, independent of the cost of the war, the loss of economic advantage from trade fueled by comparative advantage also reduces the putative benefits of war.

But there is more to specialization than just comparative advantage. Adam Smith of course was exploring this more than two hundred years ago in both The Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments.

With specialization, the disappearance of others who produce that upon which I depend, harms me very directly and very immediately. I may not particularly interested or concerned about their well-being, but I am concerned about anything that impacts them in such a way as to impact me. Just a reformulation of Smith's "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

But beyond this retreading of established philosophy and economics, I wonder if there is more that can be eked out from this insight.

It is well documented that the level of violence among the upper class is dramatically lower than that in the lowest class (whether by socioeconomic class or in economic terms such as income). In the popular narrative, this is cast as a product of economic deprivation though there is very little evidence to support that argument and the evidence there is tends to be both muddied and equivocal.

There are numerous other theories, most culture-based. Violence is a product of bad behaviors and bad behaviors are a function of bad culture. There is more empirical evidence for these types of theories but it still seems somewhat lacking.

I wonder if Kohler's observation isn't part of the explanation. I live in an upper middle class neighborhood characterized by lots of professionals. You can probably go fifty houses in any direction and not hit another management consultant (or any other specific profession). Everyone has spent years in education and experience becoming increasingly specialized. Even among an umbrella group such as Attorney, there are patent lawyers, real estate lawyers, intellectual property lawyers, defence lawyers, etc. All specialized and none in zero-sum competition with one another. Because no one, or virtually no-one, is in direct competition for their livelihood, it permits much more cooperation for communal activities that benefit everyone.

If you go to a poor neighborhood, I wonder if it isn't a very different profile. Store clerk, cashier, day-laborer, etc. I am guessing that you have both a smaller range of jobs and that the overlap (non-specialization) is much greater. These are all lower skilled jobs. Lower skills, lower barriers to entry, less specialization and differentiation, greater personal competition with one another. In that environment, you do approach a zero-sum game. If you get the McDonalds job, I don't. This breeds much more personal and intimate competition and potentially conflict.

Not that bitter rivalry is confined to those whose skill sets are generic and unspecialized. In recently discussing the narcissism of small differences, I mentioned that that was a variation on Kissinger's observation that, "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

Lack of differentiation and low return to effort. Put them together and you have, perhaps, an explanation for the violence and abandonment of Mesa Verde as well as the pathologies of inner cities.

What that suggests is that policy ought to focus on enabling people to improve their skill set differentiation as well as improving their return to effort (non-cognitive skills and decision-making).