In this episode, Dr. Martin Daly talks with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson about his new book, "Killing the Competition." Dr. Daly is a psychologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and author of many influential papers on evolutionary psychology. His current research topics include an evolutionary perspective on risk taking and interpersonal violence, especially male-male conflict. He and his wife, the late Margaret Wilson, were the former editors-in-chief of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, and former presidents of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998, and is one of the main researchers of the Cinderella Effect, and has been interviewed many times in the press about it. In this book, he tries to make the case that, no, inequality really is the problem, and that some of the arguments that have been advanced for suggesting that it is a mere correlate of violence are wrong. To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson s PODCAST on his website, which can be found here. To support Daily Wire Plus: Donations are tax-deductible, and can be made in the form of a dollar or dollar amount, and you can get a free copy of the book, Killing the Competition, which is available for purchase here. If you like what you hear, please consider pledging a small monthly fee of $1 or $5 or $10 or $15 or $20 or $50, and we'll send you an autographed copy of Killing The Competition and you'll be entered into the drawing drawing for a chance to win a chance at a place at the Big Dawgs drawing a drawing contest, and receive a prize, too! You can also support the drawing a prize and receive an additional $5,000 in the drawing, plus a free book or two, and a lifetime of listening to the next episode of Daily Wire plus! You'll get a signed copy of his book, which will be delivered to you in the podcast, plus all other prizes throughout the course of the show, plus you'll get an ad-free version of the podcast and access to the show. that's all that's coming in the future, plus shipping and shipping, plus some other goodies, plus an additional shipping and goodies, too. You won't have to pay for the book and an ad on the book is available on the day of the final day, plus I'll be notified when it's available.
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00:00:51.060Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
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00:01:14.100I'm here talking today with Dr. Martin Daly.
00:01:19.360Dr. Daly is a professor of psychology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and author of many influential papers on evolutionary psychology.
00:01:28.140His current research topics include an evolutionary perspective on risk-taking and interpersonal violence, especially male-male conflict.
00:01:36.660He and his wife, the late Margo Wilson, were the former editors-in-chief of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, and former presidents of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
00:01:50.460He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998.
00:01:55.660Daly is one of the main researchers of the Cinderella effect, and has been interviewed many times in the press about it.
00:02:01.880So, I'm very pleased to be talking with Dr. Daly this morning.
00:02:06.120It seems to me that he's one of Canada's most outstanding psychologists, and perhaps you could say that about psychologists in the world.
00:02:14.360And he's done some incredibly interesting research on the relationship between inequality and male violence, and inequality and other topics, too.
00:02:26.940Thank you, Jordan. It's nice to be talking to you.
00:02:29.760Well, I'm looking forward to our conversation a lot.
00:02:32.460So, you just wrote a book, which I'm going to show people, called Killing the Competition.
00:02:39.420And I just read it. It was very interesting.
00:02:42.880So, I thought maybe I could get you to start by talking a little bit about the book, and also how you...
00:02:48.760Tell us the story. That would be a good thing to do.
00:02:51.980Well, the general issue that is addressed in the book is the relationship between economic inequality, which is usually indexed as income inequality, and homicide rates.
00:03:06.280And it's been known for a long time by sociologists that income inequality is the single best predictor they've got of homicide rates across countries, across states within the U.S., across cities within the U.S., and some other kinds of jurisdictional comparisons.
00:03:23.100And there's been controversy about why that is, and whether inequality itself is truly the problem, or whether it's just a correlate of something else.
00:03:34.660And in this book, I try to make the case that, no, inequality really is the problem, and some of the arguments that have been advanced for suggesting that it's a mere correlate of violence, rather than in some way causal to violence, are wrong.
00:03:46.300So, can you tell us a little bit about how you calculate inequality, and what the measure is?
00:03:53.080Yeah. Income inequality, there's a number of different measures that are used by economists, and I'm just borrowing the dominant ones from economists.
00:04:01.640The number one one is something called the GINI Index, G-I-N-I.
00:04:05.360I used to assume that that was some kind of acronym, but actually it was the name of an Italian economist.
00:04:11.020And it's a measure that is, ranges from zero to one.
00:04:16.520It would be zero if everybody had exactly the same income, or exactly the same wealth, if you're doing wealth inequality.
00:04:23.980And it would approach one as income or wealth was concentrated more and more in the hands of few and then a single individual.
00:04:32.600And in principle, it would go to one in the extreme if all wealth were held by Bill Gates and none of the rest of us had anything.
00:04:41.020And now you analyze the GINI coefficient at different levels of jurisdiction.
00:04:47.760So, I noted in your work that you've looked at countries and states within countries, and I think that's particularly true in the U.S.
00:04:56.740So, tell us a little bit about what you found.
00:04:59.200Yeah, well, within the U.S., and again, this has been known by sociologists for some time, within the U.S. and cross-nationally, the GINI coefficient is a very good predictor of homicide.
00:05:12.680The correlation tends to be on the order of 0.7 in many studies, which means that the variance in either measure, 50% of it could be accounted for by the variability in the other measure, what I'm saying, between homicide and income inequality.
00:05:28.840And actually, it even works on the neighborhood level.
00:05:32.180Well, my late wife, Margo, and I published some analyses in Chicago that showed that income inequality was a very strong predictor of homicide rates across neighborhoods within Chicago.
00:05:41.520Tell us a little bit about what you did in Chicago, because that research is extremely interesting, and also when you did it.
00:05:47.320Let's see, we did our work in Chicago in the early 90s, and at that time, Chicago had a very high homicide rate, not the worst in the United States, but one of the worst in the United States, and in fact had more homicides every year than the whole of Canada, which makes it a substantial enough phenomenon that you can sort of look for causal factors or correlates without a lot of stochastic noise.
00:06:14.020In Chicago, Chicago's divided up into some 77, I believe, neighborhoods by, there's a longstanding tradition of urban sociology in Chicago, and there's these sort of well-recognized 77 neighborhoods.
00:06:28.600And anyway, for these neighborhoods, we were able to amass a variety of neighborhood-specific information, including on income distributions, on homicides, and so forth, working with the Chicago police, who were collaborators in some of this work.
00:06:44.060And Margot went to the Illinois Department of Health to try and get information on other death rates and birth rates and demographic structure of each of the neighborhoods.
00:06:58.820And she wanted to compute the local life expectancy, because the idea that she had was that local life expectancy would affect the extent to which people were willing to sort of escalate dangerously in competitive situations.
00:07:13.620And that was our construal of what most homicides in Chicago were about, were guys killing each other when dissed in bars, circumstances in which there's some sort of competition and it gets dangerous.
00:07:27.440And our basic idea there and elsewhere has been that a lot of the variability in homicide rates, the most volatile component of homicide rates, has to do with this male-male competition of where and when does it get dangerous and where and when does it sort of dampen down.
00:07:45.160And for Chicago, anyway, the Illinois Department of Health had never, nobody had ever computed neighborhood-specific life expectancy, but the data were available to do it, age-specific mortality and so on was available to do it.
00:08:01.080And so we computed age-specific life expectancy, income inequality, and many other variables that criminologists have considered relevant in past studies, racial heterogeneity and blah, blah, blah, and tried to see what were your best predictors of homicide.
00:08:18.340And in that particular study, everywhere else we've worked, we've mostly found income inequality to be number one.
00:08:25.360In that particular study, income inequality was a very good predictor, but the best predictor was male life expectancy at birth or at age 15.
00:08:36.320And in order to compute, of course, you say homicide rates, homicide reduces male life expectancy.
00:08:41.480So you have to remove homicide statistically as a cause of death and say life expectancy, net of the impact of homicide, that was our best predictor of homicide rates.
00:08:51.180So life expectancy is very variable in the city of Chicago, and I assume in other U.S. cities.
00:08:56.900I mean, in the worst neighborhoods, male life expectancy at birth was down in the 50s, as bad as in the worst countries in the world.
00:09:03.540So in the best neighborhoods, male life expectancy was up in the, I think it was over 80, or in the high 70s in any case, corresponding to what you might expect in Scandinavia, or the places with the best life expectancy in the world.
00:09:20.080Then if you try and do a multivariate analysis where you look for, well, what else predicts some residual variability?
00:09:26.600And there wasn't much residual variability.
00:09:28.580The second best, indeed the only secondary predictor that seemed to be statistically significant, was income inequality across the neighborhoods.
00:09:36.360That was the thrust of our study in Chicago.
00:09:40.140And I'd love to see more work on life expectancy as a predictor of violence.
00:09:50.920But he found that in Montreal, the difference in life expectancy for men between the worst and the best neighborhoods was only six years, whereas in Chicago it was 24 years, I think.
00:10:02.340So what do you think accounted for the vast difference in life expectancy between Chicago and Montreal?
00:10:07.520And was life expectancy itself associated with income inequality?
00:10:33.640So does percent below the poverty line alone.
00:10:38.020You know, but these things are all correlated with each other.
00:10:40.520And so trying to tease apart what's most important is tricky.
00:10:44.100Well, so the low life expectancy in Chicago neighborhoods is not due to violence.
00:10:49.580It's due to it's it's due overwhelmingly to differential disease in Chicago.
00:10:56.320You know, privatization of medicine in the U.S. was so extreme.
00:11:00.060At the time we were doing this research, emergency rooms in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago had closed down because they got bankrupt.
00:11:07.260They didn't have enough money to remain open.
00:11:09.940And therefore, if you got stabbed or shot in a bad neighborhood in Chicago, you had to be transported somewhere else to try and keep you alive because there was, you know, the hospitals had shut their emergency rooms or had shut down completely.
00:11:23.400So there's all sorts of factors that contribute to to to differential death rates.
00:11:29.060But, you know, kids in the worst neighborhood are exposed to high levels of lead.
00:11:33.200There's some evidence that lead exposure in childhood is a big predictor of variability of life expectancy.
00:11:47.480So if you if you divide causes of death into so-called external causes, which basically means homicide, suicides and accidents and internal causes, which is more or less synonymous with what we ordinarily think of as disease, internal causes were still the biggest source of differential mortality across neighborhoods.
00:12:07.720So you could make by the sounds of it, you could make a reasonable case that the social safety net in Canada is flattening out the bottom of the of the income distribution, especially the provision of health care.
00:12:19.880And, you know, I also was informed a while back that the rate of entrepreneurship in Canada is actually higher than than in the U.S.
00:12:29.860And part of the reason for that is that because health care is provided, people can take a risk of walking away from their jobs without putting their family completely at risk.
00:12:38.380And so one of the perverse effects of socialized medicine is that it elevates the rates of entrepreneurship.
00:12:44.240So I also wanted to mention, you know, your your work was absolutely striking to me because of the effect sizes.
00:12:50.260Now, for people who don't know about how to compare effect sizes, I should point out that you never see a correlation of 0.7 between any two variables in the social sciences.
00:13:03.100So this guy named Hemphill, who did an empirical analysis of effect size comparisons about four or five years ago, might be longer than that now.
00:13:11.540And he concluded that 95 percent of social science studies had effect size of 0.5 or less.
00:13:18.380And so to see a correlation of 0.7 is absolutely overwhelming when you also take into account that measurement error is decreasing the potency of the relationship to some degree.
00:13:28.880And when you take into account that that 0.5 represents studies that were published because they got something.
00:13:37.680Yes, exactly. Exactly. So 0.7 is absolutely overwhelming.
00:13:41.880I've never seen effect sizes that big between two variables of interest in any other domain that I can recall.
00:13:47.740And then the other thing that that's worth pointing out, and we can talk about this a little bit, too, is the other thing that's so radical about your research is that it and this this what emerges out of the out of the manner in which the Gini coefficient is is calculated.
00:14:02.920Because it's only a measure of relative poverty and it's the predictor, you also generated data indicating that places where everyone was relatively poor or, say, relatively working class, like North Dakota and some of the Canadian provinces, had very low homicide rates and also places where everyone was rich.
00:14:24.120Right. So to reiterate, what you're seeing is that what's driving male homicide is the existence and correct me if I'm wrong, the existence of a steep economic dominance hierarchy that makes it difficult for the young men to obtain status through what you might describe as conventional and socially productive means.
00:14:45.020And so instead they turn to violence as a means of establishing status and most of that's within race and between young men jockeying for position. Is that all correct?
00:14:55.520Yeah, I think that's a pretty fair characterization. It's worth stressing, yes, that income inequality is in principle and in practice dissociable from just average income or percent below the poverty line or other measures of so-called absolute deprivation.
00:15:13.660They're often correlated. You know, income inequality across a certain set of jurisdictions may be fairly strongly correlated with the percent below the poverty line, for example. It'd be surprising if it was not usually correlated. But they're not necessarily, as you said.
00:15:30.760Yeah, so you demonstrated, or you were one of the first people to demonstrate, were you the first, in fact, maybe, that it wasn't poverty that was causing this kind of crime. It was relative poverty. And that changes the interpretation of the situation absolutely dramatically. So tell us a little bit about why you think the males are competing in this deadly manner. What's driving that behavior?
00:15:52.280Well, it's very interesting. I think men are sensitive to, are interested in relative position, status, maintaining face in competitive milieus. And in a sense, all milieus are a bit competitive. And the willingness to use violets partly can be thought of as kind of a disdain for the future, or I want my now.
00:16:21.560I'm willing to do something that threatens my life, like escalate in competition or not back down or not walk away from an insult. Because I'm thinking very short term, the rewards for being passive.
00:16:40.600You know, if you're a nice, prosperous university student of age 20, you have good life prospects, your chances for eventually becoming well paid, maybe people will laugh at this are still reasonably good, your chances for eventually marrying are still reasonably good.
00:16:59.880But if you're the same age kind of guy in an urban ghetto with a 48% unemployment rate or something like that, then you have very much more.
00:17:11.080And with uncertainty about the stability of whatever income you do get with the future unknown, then you're more willing to take a risk now, in the pursuit of status now, in the pursuit of sexual opportunity now, in the pursuit of monetary rewards, legal or illicit now.
00:17:31.480So, and also the maintenance of face, like social reputation is the one resource you've got.
00:17:39.200If you've got other resources, you can walk away from threats or disrespect and reap your rewards later.
00:17:50.320If social status is all you've got, then it becomes an important thing to defend.
00:17:56.100So, I read some research a while back that looked at the relationship between socioeconomic status among men and number of sexual partners and also socioeconomic status among women and number of sexual partners.
00:18:09.540And that's another domain where you see these kinds of whopping correlations.
00:18:13.300So, the correlation between socioeconomic status for men and number of available sexual partners is about 0.6 or 0.7, whereas for women, it's negative 0.12.
00:18:23.920And so, do you think that it's reasonable to assume that either at the phylogenetic level or the ontogenetic level, either evolutionarily speaking or even as a consequence of rational calculation, that part of the reason that men, or perhaps the main reason that men are engaging in these status competitions is because of female hypergamy?
00:18:49.020Hypergamy, and as you say, simple access, I mean, there is, the association that you mentioned is presumably a very longstanding one.
00:19:00.840That is to say that men with status and resources have had access to partners for sure and probably multiple partners simultaneously or serially to a degree that men of lower status have not.
00:19:15.540There's high variance in eventual reproduction among males in mammals generally, and although the situation is less extreme in people than in many other mammals, the same is true for people.
00:19:28.360I mean, when you say they have high variance, compared to what?
00:19:32.040Well, high variance compared to women, for example.
00:19:34.900The variability in eventual reproductive success is lower for women than for men or has been.
00:19:39.720Now, you say sexual access to women, and I think that's exactly the right level to be looking at in contemporary societies, but the reason why that matters is because ancestrally that translated into differential reproduction.
00:19:52.920In a modern environment in which, you know, contraceptive technology is available, especially to women, that correlation may be broken down, but the motives to seek sexual opportunity remain relevant.
00:20:08.980So, one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, too, is that you made a comment in your book about Adrian Rains, and Adrian Rains has written a book recently about the biological predictors of criminality.
00:20:22.540And you make a strong case that, in some sense, the turning to violence that's characteristic of men in uncertain situations is rational, because it drives, it actually legitimately drives status increase, and that produces a variety of positive effects.
00:20:42.180So, in some sense, it's a rational response to a radically uncertain environment where competition is high.
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00:24:19.260He and his wife, the late Margo Wilson, were the former editors-in-chief of the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour,
00:24:28.940and former presidents of the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society.
00:24:33.060He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998.
00:24:37.240Daly is one of the main researchers of the Cinderella Effect, and has been interviewed many times in the press about it.
00:24:45.040So, I'm very pleased to be talking with Dr. Daly this morning.
00:24:48.620It seems to me that he's one of Canada's most outstanding psychologists,
00:24:52.840and perhaps you could say that about psychologists in the world.
00:24:56.300And he's done some incredibly interesting research on the relationship between inequality and male violence and inequality and other topics, too.
00:25:35.600Well, the general issue that is addressed in the book is the relationship between economic inequality,
00:25:43.380which is usually indexed as income inequality, and homicide rates.
00:25:49.500And it's been known for a long time by sociologists that income inequality is the single best predictor they've got of homicide rates across countries,
00:25:59.440across states within the U.S., across cities within the U.S., and some other kinds of jurisdictional comparisons.
00:26:05.700And there's been controversy about why that is and whether inequality itself is truly the problem or whether it's just a correlate of something else.
00:26:17.380And in this book, I try to make the case that, no, inequality really is the problem.
00:26:21.080And some of the arguments that have been advanced for suggesting that it's a mere correlate of violence rather than in some way causal to violence are wrong.
00:26:28.920So, can you tell us a little bit about how you calculate inequality and what the measure is?
00:26:36.260Income inequality, there's a number of different measures that are used by economists.
00:26:40.960And I'm just borrowing the dominant ones from economists.
00:26:44.280The number one one is something called the GINI Index, G-I-N-I.
00:26:47.960I used to assume that that was some kind of acronym, but actually it was the name of an Italian economist.
00:26:53.620And it's a measure that ranges from zero to one.
00:26:59.140It would be zero if everybody had exactly the same income or exactly the same wealth if you're doing wealth inequality.
00:27:06.520And it would approach one as income or wealth was concentrated more and more in the hands of a few and then a single individual.
00:27:15.220And in principle, it would go to one in the extreme if all wealth were held by Bill Gates and none of the rest of us had anything.
00:27:23.620And now you analyze the GINI coefficient at different levels of jurisdiction.
00:27:30.360So, I noted in your work that you've looked at countries and states within countries.
00:27:36.480And I think that's particularly true in the U.S.
00:27:39.340So, tell us a little bit about what you found.
00:27:41.820Yeah, well, within the U.S., and again, this has been known by sociologists for some time, within the U.S. and cross-nationally, the GINI coefficient is a very good predictor of homicide.
00:27:55.300The correlation tends to be on the order of 0.7 in many studies, which means that the variance in either measure, 50 percent of it, could be accounted for by the variability in the other measure, what I'm saying, between homicide and income inequality.
00:28:11.460And actually, it even works on the neighborhood level.
00:28:14.800My late wife, Margo, and I published some analyses in Chicago that showed that income inequality was a very strong predictor of homicide rates across neighborhoods within Chicago.
00:28:24.140Tell us a little bit about what you did in Chicago, because that research is extremely interesting, and also when you did it.
00:28:29.960Let's see, we did our work in Chicago in the early 90s, and at that time, Chicago had a very high homicide rate, not the worst in the United States, but one of the worst in the United States, and in fact had more homicides every year than the whole of Canada, which makes it a substantial enough phenomenon that you can sort of look for causal factors or correlates without a lot of stochastic noise.
00:28:56.640In Chicago, Chicago's divided up into some 77, I believe, neighborhoods by, there's a longstanding tradition of urban sociology in Chicago, and there's these sort of well-recognized 77 neighborhoods.
00:29:11.200And anyway, for these neighborhoods, we were able to amass a variety of neighborhood-specific information, including on income distributions, on homicides, and so forth, working with the Chicago police, who were collaborators in some of this work.
00:29:26.640And Margot went to the Illinois Department of Health to try and get information on other death rates and birth rates and demographic structure of each of the neighborhoods.
00:29:41.340And she wanted to compute the life expectancy, because the idea that she had was that local life expectancy would affect the extent to which people were willing to sort of escalate dangerously in competitive situations.
00:29:56.220And that was our construal of what most homicides in Chicago were about, were guys killing each other when dissed in bars, circumstances in which there's some sort of competition and it gets dangerous.
00:30:10.060And our basic idea there and elsewhere has been that a lot of the variability in homicide rates, the most volatile component of homicide rates, has to do with this male-male competition of where and when does it get dangerous and where and when does it sort of dampen down.
00:30:27.760And for Chicago, anyway, the Illinois Department of Health had never, nobody had ever computed neighborhood-specific life expectancy, but the data were available to do it, age-specific mortality and so on was available to do it.
00:30:43.680And so we computed age-specific life expectancy, income inequality, and many other variables that criminologists have considered relevant in past studies, racial heterogeneity and blah, blah, blah, and tried to see what were your best predictors of homicide.
00:31:00.960And in that particular study, everywhere else we've worked, we've mostly found income inequality to be number one.
00:31:07.980In that particular study, income inequality was a very good predictor, but the best predictor was male life expectancy at birth or at age 15.
00:31:18.940And in order to compute, of course, you say homicide rates, homicide reduces male life expectancy.
00:31:24.100So you have to remove homicide statistically as a cause of death and say life expectancy, net of the impact of homicide, that was our best predictor of homicide rates.
00:31:33.800So life expectancy is very variable in the city of Chicago and I assume in other U.S. cities.
00:31:39.520I mean, in the worst neighborhoods, male life expectancy at birth was down in the 50s, as bad as in the worst countries in the world.
00:31:46.140So in the best neighborhoods, male life expectancy was up in the, I think it was over 80, or in the high 70s in any case, corresponding to what you might expect in Scandinavia or the places with the best life expectancy in the world.
00:32:02.700Then if you try and do a multivariate analysis where you look for, well, what else predicts some residual variability?
00:32:09.220And there wasn't much residual variability.
00:32:11.180The second best, indeed the only secondary predictor that seemed to be statistically significant, was income inequality across the neighborhoods.
00:32:18.980That was the thrust of our study in Chicago.
00:32:22.740And I'd love to see more work on life expectancy as a predictor of violence.
00:32:33.520But he found that in Montreal, the difference in life expectancy for men between the worst and the best neighborhoods was only six years, whereas in Chicago it was 24 years, I think.
00:32:44.940So what do you think accounted for the vast difference in life expectancy between Chicago and Montreal?
00:32:50.140And was life expectancy itself associated with income inequality?
00:33:16.660So does percent below the poverty line alone.
00:33:20.660You know, but these things are all correlated with each other.
00:33:23.140And so trying to tease apart what's most important is tricky.
00:33:26.720So the low life expectancy in Chicago neighborhoods is not due to violence.
00:33:32.260It's due to it's it's due overwhelmingly to differential disease in Chicago.
00:33:38.940You know, privatization of medicine in the U.S. was so extreme.
00:33:42.680At the time we were doing this research, emergency rooms in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago had closed down because they got bankrupt.
00:33:49.880They didn't have enough money to remain open.
00:33:52.560And therefore, if you got stabbed or shot in a bad neighborhood in Chicago, you had to be transported somewhere else to try and keep you alive because there was, you know, the hospitals had shut their emergency rooms or had shut down completely.
00:34:06.240So there's all sorts of factors that contribute to to differential death rates.
00:34:11.520But, you know, kids in the worst neighborhood are exposed to high levels of lead.
00:34:15.840There's some evidence that lead exposure in childhoods is a big predictor of variability of life expectancy.
00:34:23.200All kinds of internal diseases they were more susceptible to the effects of bad nutrition they were more susceptible to.
00:34:30.100So if you if you divide causes of death into so-called external causes, which basically means homicides, suicides and accidents and internal causes, which is more or less synonymous with what we ordinarily think of as disease, internal causes were still the biggest source of differential mortality across neighborhoods.
00:34:50.440So you could make, by the sounds of it, you could make a reasonable case that the social safety net in Canada is flattening out the bottom of the of the income distribution, especially the provision of health care.
00:35:02.480And, you know, I also was informed a while back that the rate of entrepreneurship in Canada is actually higher than than in the U.S.
00:35:12.460And part of the reason for that is that because health care is provided, people can take a risk of walking away from their jobs without putting their family completely at risk.
00:35:21.000And so one of the perverse effects of socialized medicine is that it elevates the rates of entrepreneurship.
00:35:26.840So I also wanted to mention, you know, your your work was absolutely striking to me because of the effect sizes.
00:35:32.880Now, for people who don't know about how to compare effect sizes, I should point out that you never see a correlation of 0.7 between any two variables in the social sciences.
00:35:45.700So this guy named Hemphill, who did an empirical analysis of effect size comparisons about four or five years ago, might be longer than that now.
00:35:54.160And he concluded that 95 percent of social science studies had effect size of 0.5 or less.
00:36:00.980And so to see a correlation of 0.7 is absolutely overwhelming when you also take into account that measurement error is decreasing the potency of the relationship to some degree.
00:36:11.500And when you take into account that that 0.5 represents studies that were published because they got something.
00:36:20.280Yes, exactly. Exactly. So 0.7 is absolutely overwhelming.
00:36:24.340I've never seen effect sizes that big between two variables of interest in any other domain that I can recall.
00:36:30.380And then the other thing that that's worth pointing out, and we can talk about this a little bit, too, is the other thing that's so radical about your research is that it and this this what emerges out of the out of the manner in which the Gini coefficient is is calculated.
00:36:45.540Because it's only a measure of relative poverty and it's the predictor, you also generated data indicating that places where everyone was relatively poor or, say, relatively working class, like North Dakota and some of the Canadian provinces, had very low homicide rates and also places where everyone was rich.
00:37:06.740Right. So to reiterate, what you're seeing is that what's driving male homicide is the existence and correct me if I'm wrong, the existence of a steep economic dominance hierarchy that makes it difficult for the young men to obtain status through what you might describe as conventional and socially productive means.
00:37:27.620And so instead they turn to violence as a means of establishing status, and most of that's within race and between young men jockeying for position. Is that all correct?
00:37:38.100Yeah, I think that's a pretty fair characterization. It's worth stressing, yes, that income inequality is in principle and in practice dissociable from just average income or percent below the poverty line or other measures of so-called absolute deprivation.
00:37:56.280They're often correlated. You know, income inequality across a certain set of jurisdictions may be fairly strongly correlated with the percent below the poverty line, for example. It would be surprising if it was not usually correlated. But they're not necessarily, as you said.
00:38:13.360Yeah, so you demonstrated, or you were one of the first people to demonstrate, were you the first, in fact, maybe, that it wasn't poverty that was causing this kind of crime. It was relative poverty. And that changes the interpretation of the situation absolutely dramatically. So tell us a little bit about why you think the males are competing in this deadly manner. What's driving that behavior?
00:38:34.900Well, it's very interesting. I think men are sensitive to, are interested in relative position, status, maintaining face in competitive milieus. And in a sense, all milieus are a bit competitive. And the willingness to use violets partly can be thought of as kind of a disdain for the future, or I want mine now.
00:39:04.180Well, I'm willing to do something that threatens my life, like escalate in competition or not back down or not walk away from an insult. Because I'm thinking very short term, the rewards for being passive.
00:39:23.300You know, if you're, you know, if you're, if you're a nice, prosperous university student of age 20, you have good life prospects, your chances for eventually becoming well paid, maybe people will laugh at this are still reasonably good, your chances for eventually marrying are still reasonably good.
00:39:42.480But if you're the same age kind of guy in an urban ghetto with a 48% unemployment rate or something like that, then you have very much more.
00:39:53.680And with uncertainty about the stability of whatever income you do get with with the future unknown, then you're more willing to take a risk now, in the pursuit of status now in the pursuit of sexual opportunity now in the pursuit of monetary rewards, legal or illicit now.
00:40:13.680And also the maintenance of face like social reputation is the one resource you've got.
00:40:20.680If you've got other resources, you can walk away from threats or disrespect and reap your rewards later.
00:40:31.680If social status is all you've got, then it becomes an important thing to defend.
00:40:38.680So I read some research a while back that looked at the relationship between socioeconomic status among men and number of sexual partners and also socioeconomic status among women and number of sexual partners.
00:40:51.680And that's another domain where you see these kinds of whopping correlations.
00:40:55.680So the correlation between socioeconomic status for men and number of available sexual partners is about 0.6 or 0.7, whereas for women it's negative 0.12.
00:41:06.680And so do you think that it's reasonable to assume that either at the phylogenetic level or the ontogenetic level, either evolutionarily speaking or even as a consequence of rational calculation, that part of the reason that men or perhaps the main reason that men are engaging in these status competitions is because of female hypergamy?
00:41:31.620Hypergamy and, as you say, simple access, I mean, there is the association that you mentioned is presumably a very longstanding one.
00:41:43.620That is to say that men with status and resources have had access to partners for sure and probably multiple partners simultaneously or serially to a degree that men of lower status have not.
00:41:58.620High variance in eventual reproduction among males in mammals generally, and although the situation is less extreme in people than in many other mammals, the same is true for people.
00:42:10.980I mean, when you say they have high variance compared to what?
00:42:14.660Well, high variance compared to women, for example.
00:42:17.520The variability in eventual reproductive success is lower for women than for men or husband.
00:42:22.240Now, you say sexual access to women, and I think that's exactly the right level to be looking at in contemporary societies.
00:42:28.920But the reason why that matters is because ancestrally that translated into differential reproduction.
00:42:35.860In a moderate environment in which, you know, contraceptive technology is available, especially to women, then that correlation may be broken down.
00:42:45.000But the motives to seek sexual opportunity remain relevant.
00:42:52.960So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, too, is that you made a comment in your book about Adrian Rains.
00:43:00.600And Adrian Rains has written a book recently about the biological predictors of criminality.
00:43:05.140And you make a strong case that, in some sense, the turning to violence that's characteristic of men in uncertain situations is rational because it actually legitimately drives status increase, and that produces a variety of positive effects.
00:43:24.920So in some sense, it's a rational response to a radically uncertain environment where competition is high.
00:43:30.200Now, Rains would say, and the biological type researchers, they look more at the individual level and conclude that it's individuals who have various forms of prefrontal damage or characterological issues associated with antisocial personality disorder that are more likely to engage in violent acts.
00:43:50.260And you can track that, I mean, Richard Tromley has done some of this work in Quebec, you can track the emergence of aggression at an individual level all the way back to children at two years of age, because it turns out that children who are two are the most violent children, particularly the boys, but mostly a subset of boys who kick, fight, hit, and bite, and steal at two.
00:44:13.840Most of them, most of them, most of whom are socialized by the age of four, but a subset of whom are not socialized, and then they become, they're more likely to become the lifetime offenders.
00:44:24.100And so what I'm wondering is maybe you can reconcile the difference between the two research streams like this.
00:44:30.840So imagine that as the economic gradient increases and the dominance hierarchy becomes steeper and steeper, the men who are prone to be violent, like it's the disagreeable men that start to be violent first.
00:44:45.280Maybe the ones that have an impulse control problem or that are characterologically, like the violent two-year-olds, that are characterologically predisposed to be violent.
00:44:54.220It seems to me that those would be the ones that, you know, as the pressure increases, those men who are more prone to violence for other reasons are going to be the people who react with violence first.
00:45:04.820Do you think that's a reasonable hypothesis?
00:45:07.320Yeah, no, I think that's a very reasonable hypothesis.
00:45:09.220And I mean, my objection to Adrian Rayne's book was that I think he vast, you know, there's definitely evidence that many kinds of violent criminal offenders have got something wrong with their brains.
00:45:23.380Adrian Rayne wants to extrapolate to the conclusion that violent criminals, and indeed criminals in general, have got something broken about their brains.
00:45:31.620And it's like criminality is pathological.
00:45:34.900Well, criminality is not pathological.
00:45:37.220People steal for cost-benefit-related reasons.
00:45:44.260The crime is a, if you like, God help us, social construction in the sense that certain behaviors are criminalized by a larger social group in order to deter them, because self-interested individuals would otherwise pursue them.
00:46:03.120You know, how do you make people stop exploiting others, stealing from others, by criminalizing those activities and imposing penalties?
00:46:12.680And, you know, there's a rational choice stream of theorizing within criminology that other people like Adrian Rayne just dismiss out of head.
00:46:22.140No, no, no, no, criminal offenses are pathological.
00:46:27.560Well, it seems unnecessary, you know, because it isn't that difficult to make a marriage between the two issues.
00:46:33.340Like, one of the best predictors, you know, I do research on individual differences in personality, and the best personality predictor of incarceration is low agreeableness.
00:46:42.760That's one of the dimensions on which men and women differ the most.
00:46:46.440And so, as you become more disagreeable, you become more self-oriented, I would say, and that can push past the point where you're so self-interested that you're willing to prey on others.
00:46:58.760And so, those are the guys that, as well as the guys who lack impulse control, those are the guys, the first guys to turn to violence, let's say, when the socioeconomic conditions become sufficiently unstable so that a conscientious approach is not tenable.
00:47:13.920Yeah, and the marriage between that kind of thinking and thinking about the relevance of inequality is that there's guys at the top who are like the violent people you described.
00:47:26.580There's people doing very well who are very happy to exploit others, but the costs of individual violent action are high enough, and the opportunities to exploit other people through financial means, through your lawyers, through whatever tactics are available to, you know, well-heeled bullies are safe enough that they opt to behave in those directions.
00:47:51.080Right, because their long-term future is relatively stable, and so that long-term planning and regulation of behavior actually play an important economic role.
00:48:01.940And, you know, and then in the case of somebody like Donald Trump, I mean, he looks like somebody who's suffering a little bit of an impulse control problem, especially sort of during the night when he wakes up and his Twitter account is too close at hand.
00:48:16.580But he's rich enough to bully people in other ways that actually hands-on violence, although, come to think of it, the famous remark that he made during the campaign about women suggests perhaps that, you know, depends on your definition of hands-on violence, I guess that qualifies.
00:48:36.260Okay, so there's a very large body of research that indicates that alcohol is a major contributor to criminality, too, especially with regards to men, and so about 50% of people who are murdered have a decent blood alcohol level, and about 50% of murderers, and I think that's partly, that stat is equal, equalizes, I think, because much violence among men is exactly the sort that you described, where it's a status dispute, and it's more or less a toss-up who's going to come out as a winner.
00:49:05.900But then, I guess, what's happening with alcohol, perhaps, is that because it's a disinhibitor, because it reduces anxiety, and anxiety is one of the suppressors of aggressive behavior, that men who are already on the edge, let's say, because of the unstable environment and the steep dominance hierarchy are also more likely to lose control when they're drinking.
00:49:25.040Right. And maybe that's also fueled, this is something, too, that I'm curious about. I mean, you can think about it as a rational calculation, but I'm also curious about the degree to which it's fueled by emergent negative emotions.
00:49:37.460So, it's easy for people who are in steep dominance hierarchies to regard the system as unfair and to become resentful and angry about it, as perhaps they should be.
00:49:49.420I'm not suggesting that that's necessarily an irrational response, but it seems that if the anger is simmering underneath the surface, that it's waiting, in some sense, for an opportunity to break free, and alcohol in a bar or at home perhaps provides that root.
00:50:07.460Yeah. What you say makes eminent sense to me. I mean, it's probably worth injecting a bit of a caution about the word rationality, generally.
00:50:15.980When one talks about rationality in crime, but perhaps especially in confrontational violence, the point is not that the person is making good and carefully weighed decisions.
00:50:28.100I mean, I think, you know, emotions are the handmaiden of what I would call ecological rationality.
00:50:33.080They help you know how you should feel about certain things and how you should react to them.
00:50:39.260And the rationality claim is more a claim of this person gets riled up, resents X, and he should.
00:50:48.960There's good reason to get riled up and resent X.
00:50:51.680But the fact that alcohol perhaps disinhibits so that, you know, the truly rational balance between inhibitory and aggressive emotions is altered.
00:51:04.540The idea that alcohol interferes with cognitive processes to the point that people start making stupid decisions when they're drunk, decide to get behind the wheel or whatever.
00:51:17.220I think this plays very heavily into the reason why so many homicides tend to happen in contexts like to drunks insulting each other or, you know, people who are somewhat under the influence of alcohol insulting each other rather than, you know, if you have more mental wherewithal at the moment,
00:51:39.580you probably have better capacities to defuse dangerous situations through, you know, ways that don't entail losing face by being articulate.
00:52:03.340So, if I remember correctly, too, in your Chicago studies, this is one of the things that I found particularly fascinating, was you tracked the consequences of killing someone in Chicago.
00:52:15.760And the consequences were something of the following sort.
00:52:18.980Well, first of all, you were likely to be charged with something like second-degree murder.
00:52:23.140It would be difficult for the police to find people to testify against you.
00:52:26.860And if they did, generally what they would say is that it was a two-way altercation.
00:52:32.660And so, in many cases, you could plead self-defense.
00:52:36.720Often it didn't go before a jury because the perpetrator plea bargained it down to manslaughter.
00:52:42.980The sentence was something on the order of a couple of years, and people were generally out of prison in 18 months with a substantial boost in their social capital
00:52:52.800because now they were like dangerous sons of bitches not to be messed with, and that was quite clear.
00:52:58.280And also, perhaps, also improved, so to speak, by their sojourn in prison.
00:55:26.600Yeah, the more warlike men have a much higher reproduction rate, the ones who've killed more.
00:55:33.660Now, I don't know, obviously, it isn't necessarily the case that that's directly translatable.
00:55:37.460But there is some utility in being a successful warrior.
00:55:41.620That's actually one of the reasons that I think that capitalism, so to speak, is underappreciated.
00:55:47.860Because I'm speaking in a very specific sense, is that there are disagreeable and warlike men.
00:55:55.500And some of them are very powerful in many ways, not only physically, but intellectually and characterologically and with great ambition.
00:56:05.760And the thing about capitalism is that it enables them to wage war in a manner that's not deadly.
00:56:12.620And to become successful that way and to channel their intense competitive energy into something that, well, I think is often for a social good.
00:56:24.740Now, it depends on how disagreeable the person is and how selfish they are, of course.
00:56:28.680But people like that also tend to get punished in their cooperative interactions with other people.
00:57:12.700So now, I also wanted to ask you, in the last couple of chapters of your book, you turned to what I would regard as more political issues.
00:57:21.300And so I'm very interested in inequality because we'll recapitulate for a minute.
00:57:28.800So your work and the work of other people seems to indicate that as inequality increases and dominance hierarchies get steeper, not only do young men get more violent and so society becomes less stable, but there's also detrimental impacts on things like population health.
00:57:44.260And that was documented quite nicely in the spirit level.
00:57:48.260And so I'm going to address a couple of criticisms of the research, and then I want to ask you, I want to have a discussion about your more prescriptive views, if that's okay.
00:58:00.920So the first issue, someone just emailed me this a while back when I was talking about inequality, and they said, well, what about places like China, where the rates of inequality are starting to skyrocket quite substantially,
00:58:13.700and have been for, you know, several years, maybe several decades, yet the homicide rate doesn't seem to be budging much.
00:58:22.240And so I thought, well, that was interesting.
00:58:24.640Maybe there's something different about East Asian communities.
00:58:27.580They tend to have very low crime rates to begin with, like places like Japan, for example, have very low crime rates.
00:58:33.920And so I'm wondering if what you think about that, is that a reasonable criticism, and how would you address it?
00:58:41.500Well, I don't think we can characterize, you know, Orientals as less violent than Occidentals or anything like that.
00:58:50.480I think, you know, history tells us otherwise, that there's been a lot of severe and dangerous violence in Japan in history and in China in history.
00:59:02.140I don't know how good data we have on Chinese homicide rates, but what I've seen is that they have been going up a bit lately.
00:59:08.780But still, the point that inequality has been skyrocketing.
00:59:12.700I mean, partly, there's an interesting question about time lags and the effects on people.
00:59:18.760You know, how soon is an increased inequality effect going to play out as nasty interpersonal behavior?
00:59:27.120And, you know, people respond to inequality as a result of their lifetime experiences.
00:59:34.440You know, you were talking about young kids, very young children, already being predictable in the extent to which they're willing to, you know, use violent tactics against other people.
00:59:45.180And that, you know, assaying three- and four-year-olds could give you some surprisingly good prediction of how they'll behave as adults.
00:59:51.160It's not inconceivable that the effects of inequality even are influencing people's development prenatally.
01:00:00.160And so, you know, the uterine environments that they experience as a function of inequitable environments and the stresses and fraught social comparisons and so on that happen in those environments could be influencing them at all life stages.
01:00:12.760So I don't think we have any strong basis for expecting rapid change in inequality to be accompanied in the short term by rapid change in violence.
01:00:22.860That said, there, you know, it's certainly the case that there's other things that matter.
01:00:31.940I think strong governments that monopolize the legitimate use of violence can keep a lid on violence for a long time.
01:00:43.440I, you know, I would question whether they can keep a lid on it indefinitely, but they can keep a lid on it for a long time.
01:00:50.640If you execute all charged murderers, I presume that that would keep the incidence of murder down, and not only because those people could be recidivists.
01:01:12.280And then the other element that I think is particularly interesting is the time lag argument.
01:01:16.280I mean, you don't know over what period of time precisely inequality has its pernicious effects, and maybe it's not even the span of one lifetime.
01:01:27.080Do you have any data on that that would help answer the question?
01:01:33.020Well, I did make reference in my book, Killing the Competition, to one sociological study that was looking at effects of inequality on mortality generally.
01:01:44.120And the notion that inequality affects mortality generally is mediated by what you were talking about, about health effects, the idea that, you know, stresses and fraught social comparisons produce greater vulnerability to stress-related diseases.
01:01:59.580And, in fact, many diseases, most diseases maybe even are stress-related in their ultimate impacts on people.
01:02:06.420So there's this one sociological study by a guy named Zheng in Ohio State, which sought effects of economic inequality on mortality in general, and came to the conclusion that the effects were lagged, that the maximum impact on current mortality was inequality seven years ago, which sounds kind of funny.
01:02:28.540But he had analyses which seemed to show, and I'm a bit wary about the legitimacy of these analyses, but they seemed to me to show, they seemed to show to him that inequality of a few years ago affects the chance that you'll die now, net of the effects of, you know, age and sex and other predictors of mortality.
01:02:51.660And that there's sort of a cumulative consequences of many years of past inequality.
01:02:58.660So seven years ago was the worst, but six and eight also mattered additively.
01:03:03.500Five years ago and nine years ago also mattered additively.
01:03:08.800So that how bad the inequality was in your past seems to affect your likelihood of dying now.
01:03:14.700The effects of violence haven't been looked at.
01:03:18.740It's hard to figure out how you could get a decent enough data set to do that right, but I don't think it's impossible.
01:03:26.480Okay, so with regards to health effects, so I'm going to lay out an account of them, and you can tell me what you think about this.
01:03:33.640All right, so your brain is always trying to calculate to some degree how good things are going for you, and that's an extraordinarily difficult calculation because life is uncertain and ultimately uncertain, and it's difficult to predict the future except perhaps by using the past as a marker.
01:03:53.340And so what seems to happen is that our nervous systems are always interested in how prepared we should be for emergency at any given moment.
01:04:03.040And as far as I can tell, there are a number of ways that we calibrate that.
01:04:07.300One is baseline levels of trait neuroticism.
01:04:11.260So that's sensitivity to anxiety and uncertainty and emotional pain.
01:04:14.820And so you seem to be born, roughly speaking, at your average level of neuroticism, which can vary substantially between people.
01:04:24.920It can be also adjusted at puberty, and then the environment can move you in one direction or another.
01:04:30.380So, for example, if you have a highly anxious child and you encourage them to go out and explore, then you can move them towards the normal range.
01:04:38.820Jerry Kagan has demonstrated that quite nicely.
01:04:40.940Okay, so the first estimate of how worried you should be about the future is like genetic roll of the dice.
01:04:48.500Some people will be born extraordinarily worried, roughly speaking, and some people will be born hardly worried at all, and then that can be modified by the particulars of the social environment.
01:05:08.280And that seems to be adjusted by mechanisms that associate perceived social status with serotonin, serotonergic activity, such that as you move up a dominance hierarchy, your serotonin levels rise so that your impulsivity, which would be partly sensitivity to immediate reward, declines.
01:05:29.720And so does your sensitivity to negative emotion, whereas if you plummet down to the bottom of a hierarchy, you start to become more reward-seeking and also more anxious.
01:05:41.240And the reason for that, more anxious, is because the bottom of the dominance hierarchy actually is a more dangerous place to be because you don't have access to, you don't have reliable access, as reliable, to shelter or food or mating resources or health care.
01:05:56.640And you even see this in birds, you know, so if a flu sweeps through an avian population, it's the bedraggled birds at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy that die first.
01:06:07.040And so then, one more thing, and then tell me what you think about this, is that the other thing that seems to happen is that as you plummet down the dominance hierarchy and your mind settles into a more depressed and anxious state, the levels of cortisol that you produce chronically rise.
01:06:25.040And cortisol is a good hormone for activating you, but in high doses, high continual doses, it starts to produce brain damage, particularly in the hippocampus.
01:06:36.440And it also suppresses immunological function, which makes you more susceptible to infectious diseases.
01:06:43.320So that seems to be approximately the process.
01:06:45.640And so it's no wonder that people are trying to flee away from the bottom of the dominance hierarchy.
01:07:10.800Yeah, I wish I were a better behavioral endocrinologist and knew a bit more, was more expert in some of the processes that you're talking about.
01:07:45.460The more power and status and, if you like, decision making authority you have, the less vulnerable you seem to be to stress related diseases.
01:07:54.520So, you know, a lot of what you're saying makes evident sense to me.
01:07:58.240And the developmental story that you're telling, I mean, I think it's right that people, I don't know how important the throw of the genetic dice is.
01:08:10.540I think it's an extremely interesting puzzle evolutionarily, why there's as much heritable genetic variability in seemingly important domains as there is.
01:08:21.180And I'm not convinced anybody has, you know, really understands what modulates, how much variability there is.
01:08:27.220But in any case, that things are adjustable in response to what you encounter and in response to social status, perceived social status, in response to social comparisons.
01:08:42.400And again, I don't know enough about the punitive damaging effects of excessively prolonged exposure to, say, high cortisol levels to be sure whether there isn't still some adaptation, some actual functionality to the response to long-term exposure lurking beneath the seeming breakdown of the system.
01:09:10.200Because it just seems to me that sort of a Darwinian, non-evolutionary social scientists and psychiatrists and psychologists have been too quick to assume pathology when they see states of affairs that do indeed have damaging consequences, but may in some nevertheless have some utility.
01:09:32.940I wish I knew a little more about that.
01:09:34.800Well, I think both the low serotonin and the high cortisol levels are interesting in that regard, because what does happen is the combination of those two things makes you, A, more impulsive, and B, more prepared for emergency action.
01:09:49.100Both of those things are very useful in an uncertain environment.
01:09:53.000The detrimental consequences seem to occur as a consequence of prolonged overload, is that because your body is utilizing, imagine that what your body is doing is utilizing more units of resource per moment of time, because of the necessity for preparation for unexpected events, and that can become physiologically exhausting in the long run.
01:10:14.640So I think it does, it seems to me that those biochemical effects do underlie the sort of adaptive responses that you describe, except that, you know, too much is too much.
01:10:28.760And if it's hard to live at the bottom, what that means is you age faster, and you don't live as long, and you also have higher susceptibility to disease.
01:10:36.640And maybe in some sense that's the price you pay for the adaptive impulsivity that's also necessary to give you a chance to shoot back up the hierarchy, if that's the sort of thing that you're looking for.
01:10:47.280Yeah, no, and I can't help thinking about sort of the evolutionary theories of senescence and bodily repair that were pioneered by Sir Peter Medowar back in the 50s and developed more by George Williams.
01:11:05.800The idea that many, many things involve some sort of tradeoff between expenditure for expenditure of energy, of accumulative resources, of capacity, in the pursuit of something now, at the expense of reduced capacity to be successful later.
01:11:28.580And so, you know, one reason why these chronic states may have long-term damaging effects is because selection against being in these chronic states has not been strong, because those who were in them for a long time didn't historically tend to live very long anyway.
01:11:47.760And they're being, if you like, motivated or prepared to engage in high-risk activities that at least have some chance of short-term payoff, which is more or less what you said, actually.
01:11:59.740Well, and, you know, you talked about this, let's call it a misbegotten idea that there's stress at the top of the dominance hierarchy, just like there is stress at the bottom, and the stress at the top is responsibility and decision-making and all of that.
01:12:12.760And, you know, I do believe that there's truth in that, but there's an important, another important biological element that needs to be considered.
01:12:20.580And so, there's plenty of work done in the domains of clinical psychology, and some of this is psychophysiological and neurophysiological, for that matter, showing that a stress of an equivalent magnitude has fewer negative effects if it's taken on voluntarily.
01:12:39.900So, because what happens, what happens is that if you voluntarily engage in the stressful activity, your approach systems are activated rather than your defense systems.
01:12:51.280And the approach systems are associated with positive emotion, and with much, whereas the negative emotions are associated with this defensive posturing that includes preparation for emergency, and that's much more physiologically damaging.
01:13:04.780And so, whether something, whether you pick up a load voluntarily or have it thrust upon you, seems to make a big difference to how heavy it is.
01:13:13.740And that's a very interesting piece of, set of research studies as far as I'm concerned.
01:13:20.320It's quite fascinating that that can be the case.
01:13:23.600Okay, so let me ask you another question.
01:13:26.620Let's get down to, we might say, brass tacks here.
01:13:29.500So, we can make a case that inequality destabilizes societies and cranks up the male-on-male homicide rate.
01:13:38.180And the destabilization occurs because young men become more and more unpredictable and violent.
01:13:43.660And so, you could make a conservative case, as well as a liberal case, for not having a society that takes inequality to an extreme, because conservatives, at least in principle, should be concerned with the maintenance of social stability over the long run.
01:13:59.740So, but, but, okay, and so then you might make a case for income redistribution, but that gets very, very troublesome, because it's not that easy to redistribute income.
01:14:08.800And, and, and that's what I want to talk to you about.
01:14:11.800So, you know, we're in a situation, of course, where the top 1% of the population controls a substantial proportion of the economic resources.
01:14:22.560And the top 1% of that top 1% controls the bulk of that.
01:14:27.080Now, I looked into that quite deeply, and that, that distribution is, it's not a normal distribution of money.
01:14:36.680But the weird thing about Pareto distributions, and so that's a distribution where many, many people end up with zero, and, you know, just a few people end up with a lot, is that a Pareto distribution characterizes zero-sum games that are played out to their conclusion.
01:14:51.960So, like Monopoly, everybody starts in the middle, but then random trading produces an eventual Pareto-shaped distribution where lots of people start to stack up on the loser side.
01:15:02.600One person accelerates towards victory until finally everyone's at zero except one person.
01:15:07.840So, it's the logical outcome of a random trading game.
01:15:11.060So, that's the first thing that's interesting about the Pareto distribution.
01:15:13.960The second thing that's interesting is that Pareto distributions, they, Pareto distributions emerge in every domain of creative human production, not just the distribution of money.
01:15:27.260So, for example, we did an analysis of the, of creative achievement across the lifespan using a, using an instrument called the Creative Achievement Questionnaire.
01:15:37.940So, what it did was assess people's levels of competence across 13 potential domains of creative activity.
01:15:45.320And so, we were looking at production rather than creative thinking per se, right?
01:15:49.320Although those two things are related and quite tightly.
01:15:51.780We wanted to know who actually accomplished things in the world.
01:15:55.640And so, for musical ability, for example, the zero score would be, I have no training or, or talent in this area.
01:16:04.400And the maximum score would be, you know, my, my, my, my original compositions have been played for international audiences.
01:16:12.840And so, we've now administered that to hunt, to hundreds of people.
01:16:16.040And the median score is zero across all 13 domains.
01:16:19.860It's a very, very, uh, precise Pareto distribution with a few people who are the outliers producing the overwhelming majority of the goods.
01:16:28.480And you also, and that, there's a, there's also a law that de Sola Price, uh, came up with back in the 1960s, governing the output of scientific papers.
01:16:39.380And he found that the square root of the number of people operating within an academic domain produced half the papers that were published in that domain.
01:16:48.500So, so that's not so bad if there's 10 researchers, because then three of them are producing half the papers.
01:16:54.680But if there's a thousand researchers operating in a domain, then 30 of them are producing half the papers.
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01:18:18.380Okay, so and then one more complication, and then I'm going to let you have at this.
01:18:26.080So I've been looking for, now you can think that the Pareto distribution, which by the way characterizes the distribution of wealth in every known society,
01:18:33.640although the degree to which the distribution is skewed differs.
01:18:37.680You can say that the Pareto distribution is a consequence of the final playing out of a random trading game, but then here's the complication.
01:18:47.420This is something that's been, you know, bothering me for years.
01:18:50.760There are predictors of long-term life success in relatively stable societies, and the best predictors are in this order.