[FoRK] Math, law-breaking, taxes, fairness, efficiency, psychology

[Luis Villa]

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:59 AM, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
>
> This morning I came across this paper tying together a couple of recent
> threads --- the mathematics of law-breaking and taxes:
>
>  http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.0998

Fascinating; thanks for the link. Wish I had more time right now to
read more of the references.

> Also, apparently there's some evidence to suggest that humans are hard-wired
> to prefer fairness to efficiency:
>
>  http://www.livescience.com/healthday/615350.html
>
> ...which may explain Obama's / the populist "screw the rich" meme pretty
> well.  (Broken understanding of fairness a prereq...)

Lots of emotions like this are hardwired; there is fairly good
evidence that hating outsiders (especially under conditions of
stress/threat) is similarly hardwired, so this one shouldn't be
surprising. (Good bet that you're seeing the result of tribal-based
evolution; groups that shared amongst each other (so that they all
weakened but remained an effective group) but did not share with
outsiders when times were tough would possibly have been more
effective in the long run than those that shared under all conditions
or who were always 'greedy'.)

Luis