The new book is called Ultrasociety. It has many interesting ideas. However, some of them I find quite unpersuasive.
One of his core ideas is that because groups need to cooperate, competition within groups is harmful. Meanwhile competition among groups is helpful, because it promotes cultural adaptation. So if players on a basketball team or soccer team are competing with one another, the team will do poorly because they are not cooperative. But competition between teams will lead to improvement, as good ideas from one team get copied by another.
Turchin equates inequality within a team to competition within a team. He claims that this has empirical support, in that teams with less unequal salaries tend to win more games. This makes me think of Lebron James getting paid a lot more than a teammate who spends most of the game on the bench. If you really believe Turchin’s analysis, the team would cooperate better and win more games if it did not have Lebron. I call baloney sandwich.
Outside of sports, I am not sure that the terms “group,” “cooperation,” and “competition” can be defined clearly enough. Is a professor of ecology at the University of Connecticut a member of the “UCon group,” cooperating with other members of that group while competing against the “Harvard group?” Or is he a member of the “ecology group,” cooperating with other ecologists while competing against the “economist group” or the “sociologist group?” To me, neither description seems appropriate.
Turchin is quite contemptuous of the “Rank and Yank” personnel policies practiced by Enron, in which employees were ranked and those who did not make the grade are let go. But what is academic tenure other than a “Rank and Yank” system? The top law firms and management consulting firms also tend to operate on a “Rank and Yank” basis. Wouldn’t Turchin’s framework predict the collapse of these institutions?
If and when I review the book, I will have to remark on the irony that it is filled with mood affiliation for progressive attitudes and yet he keeps stumbling on ideas that are part of bedrock conservatism. These include the importance of culture, the fragility of civilized society, the benefits of traditional marriage, and the value of keeping nations culturally homogenous.
I got the book for Christmas, but have yet to read it. On the other hand, I have followed Turchin for years on his blog and I really enjoyed his last book on patterns in history.
I agree with your comment on Turchin’s progressive mood affiliation. For example, he is one of those who believes that government intervention and union bargaining power were the primary drivers of better working conditions and higher wages, and seems to overlook that what is really happening is that marginal productivity is funding these things and that the state later steps in and formalizes what markets already pretty much solved.
I probably shouldn’t comment on the competition issue until I read his position, but will say that a common problem I see with progressives’ take on competition is that they often neglect to separate competition into its constructive and destructive elements. For example, competition can be structured so that you compete to solve problems (science) or even to compete to cooperate. A competition to cooperate better is effectively an arms race for cooperative gain, a positive sum process.
A related problem, is the progressive oversimplification of equality to a single naive dimension of equality of outcome. In reality, equality is substantially more complex and multidimensional. There is equality in proportion to effort, equality in proportion to contribution or value added, in proportion to need, or propertion to status. All these forms of equality are frequently in extreme conflict with one another. Succesful cooperative societies balance them in ways which optimize short term welfare and long term growth. Progressives also constantly ignore the value of growth.
I am sure it is possible to have too much of one type or another of inequality on a team. Pay every member the exact same with identical job security and I doubt you could win a single game in the NBA. But extremes in other versions of equality would also be harmful. You need balance.
equality is that they oversimplify equality into
Is that for sports with or without a salary cap? Because the optimal situation for the team is you have LeBron James, but he’s still on his rookie contract, making a couple million a year, which amounts to no more than 5% or so of the team’s total payroll.
On the other hand, you could look at LeBron’s time in Miami as kinda supporting Turchin’s position: Wade, James, and Bosch took home the majority of the team’s payroll, the rest of the roster was filled out with role players, and the result was a top heavy team that was ultimately a disappointment.
Of course, we don’t have salary caps in real world competition, although there are natural limits on the amount of resources an organization can muster for any particular purpose.
There are studies which contradict the position that teams with less inequality win more games: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/whats-the-best-way-to-build-a-major-league-baseball-team/
See Martin Nowak on evolutionary set theory. Layman’s discussion in his 2011 book Super Cooperators.
Basic story is right, though: widely reified competition is only virtuous to the extent that it promotes cooperation.
I also like Turchin’s work in general, but have serious doubts about his inequality/cooperation analysis, which I express here: http://lorenzo-thinkingoutaloud.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/so-you-want-to-reduce-inequality-some.html
You can hardly blame a tenured academic for filling his books with progressive mood affiliation. Imagine he followed his arguments to their logical conclusion and, say, come out for Trump.
He’d hardly be able to go on forming academic institutes and publish books, would he? Even Noble prize winners get ostracized in our day for even hinting at defecting from progressive orthodoxy.
All of the best functioning organizations are a dynamic and fluid mix of cooperation as well as internal competition that is channeled in a healthy and productive direction.
The military, for example, also has an ‘Up Or Out’ system which is hardly perfect but is probably the best way to keep the numbers at each shrinking level right, and provide constantly-operating motivating incentives in a work environment with a very level and compressed pay scale, and where it is hard to assess individual contributions. On average (with plenty of unavoidable injustice, alas), it tends to select for the best. If Turchin has offered a clearly superior motivation and selection method then I’d be eager to see it.
I could be wrong, but my rough impression is that this seems to be something of a nascent or emerging trend these days. Perhaps that’s the future of conservatism (or remnants of it) at this late stage in the game, “Traditionalism with a Progressive face”, refounded on the basis of a new ‘scientific’ understanding of social dynamics, and careful to avoid incompatibility with various normative imperatives. Building such a ‘Neoprogressivism’ would be a dream project.
If you really believe Turchin’s analysis, the team would cooperate better and win more games if it did not have Lebron. I call baloney sandwich.
Of course, Lebron James teams have lost more Championships than they have won. That said wasn’t Phil Jackson genius with Michael Jordan was convincing him that the Bulls would win more with more cooperation versus Jordan running the Bulls. So what if Michael Jordan passed the ball to an open Steve Kerr to win the 1993 Championship? (Of course it helps to have a Michael Jordan participating.)
I am not sold Peter Turchin thesis either, but successful firm need to a lot more cooperation to run smoothly. A firm can not afford to have everybody be the lead scorer either.