In fairness to chimps...

In yesterday's post, I said some unflattering things about our cousins the chimpanzees (not that I don't say worse things about humans most days). Here's the other side of the coin. If we inherited our capacity for intra-species violence from our chimplike common ancestor, it looks like we also got a sense of fairness from them too. It's always a mixed bag.

SCISSORBILL was a term used by the Industrial Workers of the World back in the day to describe workers who just didn't get it. The term refers to the bill of a duck, as in cutting off your nose to spite your face. As in low income workers who finally get health care from the Affordable Care Act but support politicians who want to repeal it. Earlier this week, I linked a NY Times article about that. Here's another take on the subject.

CHILD POVERTY. Despite some progress, it got worse in WV in 2013, according to the latest Census data..

Must see TV

I have to give props again to Stephen Colbert for this hilarious "report" on an Appalachian small town in eastern Kentucky which is, so far, the smallest to adopt a Fairness ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Vicco has a population of around 334...and an openly gay mayor.

Props to the people of Vicco, too!

WHERE YOU LIVE may affect how long you live. And WV doesn't come off too good from this look.

PATRIOT COAL. Union miners are voting today on a proposed agreement with Patriot Coal (search Patriot Coal in upper left corner for more information). I'm not sure how the vote will go but if I was a gambling man I'd say it will pass. The big news is that the UMWA leadership got a better deal for its members than a federal bankruptcy judge after the judge's ruling.

MEDICAID, PRISONS, DRUG ABUSE. An audit from Oregon suggests that the former will help reduce problems with the other two. And save millions.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Don't bee a stranger

When I was a small child, our family lived next to the kind of people who probably don't exist anymore. They were an elderly couple, the Richmonds, and they were what I can only describe as bedrock Appalachians, real mountain people. They knew all the old ways and skills of survival.

The man, Hinton, knew where to find fish in the river. He hunted for ginseng in the hills. And he claimed--and I believed--that he could follow honeybees to their hives. Hinton attempted to educate me about the benefits of honeybees. I was a hard sell since these creatures seemed to have been designed specifically to sting my feet when I played barefoot outside.

It took me a while to get the memo, but eventually I became a bee fan. I was sad to learn of the recent unprecedented decline in the bee population due to a mysterious syndrome known as colony collapse disorder. This was bad news not just for bee-keepers but for the many plants and crops that the bees pollinate.

Eventually, this hit home. For the past two summers, I don't recall seeing a single honey bee at Goat Rope Farm. I am pleased to announce that they are back and were as welcome to me as the return of a long lost friend. I hope they stick around.

TALKING SENSE. Here is Paul Krugman doing battle with bad economic ideas.

FAUX NEWS. Here's a look at 14 propaganda techniques used by a certain "fair and balanced" news network.

FROM EVIL TO HEROISM. Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist of prison experiment fame, is trying to see whether heroism can be taught. (Search Goat Rope archives in upper left hand corner for several posts on Zimbardo's work.)

A SENSE OF FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE may be innate in humans. Too bad some people apparently didn't get the memo.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A la carte

El Cabrero is about to hit the road for a few days but here are some items that caught my eye:

ROCK ON, ROCKEFELLER. West Virginia's senior senator Jay Rockefeller takes on plans to arbitrarily cut the federal budget at the expense of working and low income people.

NO LOVE FEAST. Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) found his plan to torpedo Medicare was a tough sell on a tour of his home state.

THE BACK DOOR PLAN. Here's more on the splendidly bad idea of global caps on federal spending.

AFTER OSAMA. Will scaling back military engagements and spending be on the agenda?

FAIRNESS ON THE BRAIN. A sense of justice (however apparently dormant at times) seems to be innate. Scientists may even have found its location in the brain.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The ultimatum game--don't monkey around with it

Don't offer this guy a bum deal.

A classic experiment in behavior economics challenges the image of people as rational agents who always act in their own material self interest. It's called the ultimatum game and it works like this:

there are two players, one with say $10 and the other with nothing. Player A decides how to split the money and makes a take it or leave it offer to Player B. Player B can either accept what is offered or veto the whole deal.

While it would technically be in Player B's rational interest to accept whatever is offered, even if it's only $1, most people in that position insist on a fairer division, even if it means walking away from a bad deal with nothing at all.

In most games, the average amount offered was $4.71. When people in Player B's position were asked what the lowest amount they would take would be, the average answer was $2.59. As Michael Marmot put in in The Status Syndrome,

"Players were prepared to tolerate a degree of inequality if the absolute reward to them was great enough. But if the inequality increased sufficiently, or the absolute rewarded went down enough, the game wasn't worth it, and they opted for both getting nothing."

That's also the way some monkeys play it. James Surowiecki in an old New Yorker column relates the following:

...the primatologists Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal released a study showing that female brown capuchin monkeys seem to have a sense of fairness, too. Pairs of capuchins had been trained to give Brosnan pebbles in exchange for slices of cucumber. This idyllic monkey market economy was disrupted, though, when the scientists changed the pay scale, rewarding one monkey with a delicious grape and the other with the same measly old cucumber. Exposed to this injustice, the capuchins who were given cucumbers often refused to eat; forty per cent of the time, they stopped trading entirely. Things got worse when one monkey in each pair was given a grape for doing nothing at all. The other monkeys often responded by tossing away their pebbles; eighty per cent of the time, they stopped trading. The capuchins were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to express their displeasure at their partners’ unearned riches.

The point was not—as some of the news coverage suggested—that capuchins are innate sharers. (The capuchin who got the grape showed no inclination to give it up.) The monkeys want to distribute things fairly, not equally. They seem to believe that there should be a clear connection between work and pay. One variation of the ultimatum game shows that humans feel this way, too: instead of randomly assigning the proposer role, the researchers had the participants take a trivia quiz beforehand, and the ones who did best became proposers. Not one of their offers was rejected; apparently, people believed that a proposer who might be worthy of his status deserved to keep more of the money.

Our sense of fairness, in other words, demands that there be at least some relationship (however tenuous) between accomplishment and reward...

It looks like a sense of justice is a primate thing.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, justice lost a round yesterday in the US Senate finance committee. WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's public option amendment to the Baucus health care reform bill was voted down. It's not over yet as there is still a chance to amend the bill on the floor or when the House and Senate meet to reconcile their bills.
Here's a big Goat Rope "Thank You!" to Rockefeller for fighting the good fight.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s might have had a silver lining, according to this scientific study. Thanks to a certain hermit for passing this along.

IN THE HOLE. Economist Dean Baker takes on the deficit here.

ADVICE FOR PARENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN: talk early, talk often.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Where will it end?

Athena, courtesy of wikipedia.

We're almost done with a long series on the Odyssey of Homer. You'll also find links and comments about current events. When I started writing about what this timeless classic had to say to us today, I never thought it would last this long. What can I say? Homer is the man (or maybe, as some have speculated, the woman).

For many readers, the least satisfying part of the book is the ending. Odysseus, Telemachus and some faithful servants finally wreak terrible vengeance on the 108 suitors and the unfaithful maids and servants. In a contest, Odysseus strings a bow as only he can do and a massacre ensues.

(The goat herder Melanthius comes to a particularly nasty end. El Cabrero's one complaint about the bard is that he was a little rough on a fellow goat herder. I'm not sure you can really blame the guy for being such a jerk: this is an occupational hazard of hanging out with goats. But I digress...)

The people of Ithaca are not happy about this slaughter. Nor are they particularly pleased with a commander who loses every single one of his 600 men after the war was over.

A fresh conflict is about to ensue between Odysseus, son Telemachus, father Laertes, and servants and a mob of Ithacans when the gods intervened. Athena cries out

"in a piercing voice that stopped all fighters cold,
"Hold back, you men of Ithaca, back from brutal war!
Break off--shed no more blood--make peace at once!"

With that,

...Terror blanched their faces,
they went limp with fear, weapons slipped from their hands
and strewed the ground at the goddess' ringing voice...

At her command, they made a pact of peace.

It is kind of hard to believe (even in an epic with all kinds of gods and monsters and wonders). But it does raise this point: how does the spiral of violence come to an end, with one provocation being answered by yet another with no end in sight and with all sides feeling justified in doing what they do?

Homer seems to suggest that we do need some kind of divine intervention for that to happen. If it's on the menu, I'll take it. Another reading is to say that our only hope is in what the goddess Athena embodies: wisdom, craft and strategy.

Or maybe they're the same thing.

THE END OF AFFLUENZA? Maybe.

PAYBACK. Here's an interesting item on our innate sense sense of justice, the desire to punish cheaters, and capacity for forgiveness.

THE RECESSION AND YOUR HEALTH. Economic downturns can have some interesting effects.

GET THE PICTURE on climate change? If not, click here.

WARM BLOODED. Half of all mammal species are in decline and one fourth are headed for extinction, according to this report. Here's more on the topic.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED