Failed States / A Bottomless Stomach of Want
"The essential idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it."
I was told a great story this week about a group of monkeys learning the idea of symbolic exchange and currency. Shiny things for fruit. It's true, because it was in the New York Times. And no, I didn't quite catch the Jayson Blair gag you just made, care to repeat?
Behavioural economics is a rather strange young science poking about in the kind of areas bloggers and pop science writers just love, somewhere on the fringes of economics and neuroscience. The scientists behind this study had previously attempted to discover if a monkey could learn to be altruistic by putting two tamarins in opposite cages and letting them figure out that they could only be fed if the other one pulled a lever.
So you get seven capuchins, monkeys with a particular drive towards food and sex and lacking much in the way of superego. They are, the scientists said, a bottomless stomach of want, permanently desirous of that which makes them happy. In this case, that's marshmallows, grapes and jelly. Over several months, the capuchins were taught to associate the exchange of otherwise meaningless tokens (small washers with a hole in the middle) with the reward of food:
It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.
Then Chen introduced price shocks and wealth shocks. If, for instance, the price of Jell-O fell (two cubes instead of one per token), would the capuchin buy more Jell-O and fewer grapes? The capuchins responded rationally to tests like this -- that is, they responded the way most readers of The Times would respond. In economist-speak, the capuchins adhered to the rules of utility maximization and price theory: when the price of something falls, people tend to buy more of it.
Soon after this, the monkeys were taught gambling in double-or-nothing coin flip challenges. I'll leave some of the rich nuances of the study to Dubner and Levitt's much more eloquent explanation in the NYT, including the bit about a bank heist gone wrong, but it does have to be mentioned that the experiment went much further than any of the scientists could have expected when one of the female monkeys was witnessed exchanging sex for a token, which she then immediately exchanged for a grape.
After the robberies, after the prostitution, where does that leave the monkeys? Economists can take the money away from them, but as with all of these studies, this story is a thinly veiled allegory about humankind, so what do we learn from it? Perhaps if ethicists had been watching over ancient greece, or wherever the idea of representative money was first forged, they may have withdrawn the experiment at the first signs of moral corruption. One of my favourite intellectual tricks at university was to explain to people the ever-increasing chain of signifiers that money refracted through, from credit to cash to silver, and how fiat money was really little more than a worthless indicator of a government hedging bets. We'd like to believe money still represents something like a stock of gold, but we haven't pegged our global currency to gold stocks for at least 30 years now. We're monkeys with washers, hurling them around the globe, killing, betraying, hoarding, saving up enough to be sure that our children's children can buy the sweetest candy.
This map has been sitting in my interesting things pile for a couple of weeks now, waiting for me to find something interesting to say about it, and so here I sit now thinking about the nature of humanity and am drawn back to it. Not just because of the monkeys, but, well, how inherent is corruption and failure?
What fascinates me about this map is its difference to how we might frame a similar geopolitical map in, oh, say, the Cold War. See how the once impenetrable iron curtain has now become a torn curtain, frayed and failing? How a great line of confusion, violence and fear streaks right across the middle of the world? It's almost the exact inverse of a map I posted on here some time ago of the outposts of the earth on which my feet had trodden. This one begins to look like how my games of Balance of Power began to look when I spent too much time destabilising tinpot dictatorships.
What defines a failed state? The article on ForeignPolicy.com suggests that failed and failing states are the greatest threat to world stability (or at least to America, and their trigger finger, and by extension to world stability). Governments that have lost control of their people, are under corrupt military or warlord rule, or rely on the black market for survival (hello to those of you in the 'stans). I would have to question the criteria under which North Korea could be termed a failed (as opposed to rogue) state, and that bright red beacon up there really problematises the whole damn map. Anyway, the wealth of info behind that infographic on the website is fascinating and a little scary, if potentially hawkish. Thanks to Bruce Sterling and Greg Burton, you can now get the t-shirt, mousemat and mug.
And, geez, Africa. You think Will Smith jumping up and down in Philly, beamed live via Satellite to Paul McCartney in London and Tina Arena in France is going to help with that big flourish of blood red danger? Let's talk about that one another time, eh?
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