This post is a sort of note-taking for my benefit.
1. From Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (2006). Evolutionary psychology, moral heuristics, and the law In G. Gigerenzer & Christoph Engel (Eds.), Heuristics and the Law (Dahlem Workshop Report 94). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
p. 190-191:
When everyone reliably has access to the same goods, there is little benefit to sharing widely, but there are real potential costs. The smaller the role played by chance, the more differences between individuals in amount of food foraged will reflect differences in effort or skill. When this is true, band-wide food sharing would simply redistribute food from those who expend more effort or are more skilled to those who expend less effort or are less skilled. . .
For other resources, such as meat and honey, luck is a major contributor to variance in foraging success. ..Under these conditions, an individual is better off redistributing food from periods of feast to periods of famine. There are two ways of doing this: through food storage or through pooling resources with others. Decay and the energetic costs of transport for semi-nomadic people mean food storage is not an option for many hunter–gatherers, but pooling resources is: If two people average their returns, variance decreases—each buys fewer days of privation at the price of fewer periods of superabundance. By adding more individuals to the risk-pooling group, variance may continue to decrease. Through a system of band-limited generalized reciprocity, food can be stored in the form of social obligations.
2. From Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (2004). Knowing thyself: The evolutionary psychology of moral reasoning and moral sentiments. In R. E. Freeman and P. Werhane (Eds.), Business, Science, and Ethics. The Ruffin Series No. 4. (pp. 93-128). Charlottesville, VA: Society for Business Ethics.
p. 118:
Alliance tracking mechanisms should notice patterns of coordinated action, cooperation, and competition. This is the primary database from which alliances can be inferred. But acts of cooperation and competition—behaviors that reveal one’s coalitional allegiances—do not occur all the time. Like all behaviors, they are transitory. Alliance tracking machinery could form a better map of the political landscape if it were designed to use these rare revelatory behaviors to isolate additional cues that are correlated with coalitional behavior, but are more continuously present and perceptually easier to assay. This cue-mapping would allow one to use the behavior of some people to predict what others are likely to do.
Cues come in many forms. Some are intentional markers of one’s coalitional alliances: war paint, gang colors, political buttons, for example. Other cues are incidental markers. Ethnographically well-known examples include accent and dialect, manner, gait, customary dress, family resemblance, and ethnic badges.
p. 120:
Instead of trying to eradicate racism to get cooperation, companies might be able to use cooperation to eradicate racism. In making and marketing a product, companies create many small task-oriented teams: multi-individual cooperative coalitions. Creating teams where race does not predict team membership should decrease attention to race.
You might also be interested in Christopher Boehm’s work. I was reminded of Hierarchy in the Forest, but it’s a just old enough not to be searchable online. Here’s a similar excerpt from his newer book (which I’ve not read) called Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. Anyway, the issue is that unlike foraging, hunting success depends not only on luck and effort but also on strength and talent, and this may pose a risk to group harmony. Here’s a description of one way of handling that:
Or as a renowned healer named Tomazho says, “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” Thus, even though (he successful hunter’s chest may be quietly swelling with pride, he’ll shape his words very humbly, and his egalitarian peers, all too ready to put him down with ridicule, will approve his self-effacement and respect him both as a hunter and as a person of humility.
Cutting proud hunters down to size verbally isn’t the end of it, for usually Bushmen don’t even get to distribute the meat they’ve hunted. Once the carcass is hauled into camp, by custom someone else will probably preside over the meat and share it out to the main kin groups in the band—who’ll then share it further with their close kin and other associates. The effect is to remove the hunter from the meat he has killed as a possible ticket to power, and the Bushmen understand this situation all too well.
That’s the kind of incentive system that has made the Bushmen society the economic powerhouse it is today.
What we need is more harping on ‘inequality’ and more separating people from the fruits of their labor, and, more redistribution based on obtuse social cues, to attain the same superlative living standard.
I’m not suggesting it as a model to follow, only as a reflection of human nature to consider. And, indeed, the Bushman clans didn’t want to prevent the best hunters from continuing to bring in the most game or even prevent them from getting credit for it (everybody knows who did what) — they merely wanted to tamp down the displays of pride and feelings of envy. This is something, BTW, that modern society isn’t very good at (or we wouldn’t have so many people banging on about the ‘horrors’ of inequality despite absolute wealth that is several orders of magnitude above that of the Bushmen).
As for redistribution — if you live in a tropical hunter-gatherer society with no refrigeration, you pretty much have to redistribute meat or it will spoil. However, with improvements in methods of drying meat as well as the possibility of selling it for cash, apparently the communal sharing of meat has been dying out:
https://goo.gl/BElP6Z
That is such a cool book. Thanks for the link.