Re: Re: GT [was: Re: McArthur grantee
G'day Mine, >I have not seen among game theorists any Marxists, any socialists with a >progressive agenda. Show me one? The ones who have applied a >rational-choice brand of game theory to Marxism (Elster, Perzeworski, >Roemer, Wright) have moved away from Marxism in their attemps to build >economics on micro-foundations and individual decisions. I've read some Elster, and he deploys mainstream methods (like games theory) to destroy mainstream stuff like public choice theory, transferred preferences, stability therof etc etc, doesn't he? Good work, I'd've thought! And, anyway, we don't want to react to the institutional blindness to institutional constraint (in which connection, incidentally, I think we could frame Marx as an institutionalist par excellence - as Tsuru claims) by effectively positing an absolutely determinant economic base and a helpless subject - some Marxists have gone that route, and I don't reckon it works as theory - neither explaining our lives today nor making thinkable a humanity that is as much subject as object of its history. >first of all, don't correct my words or intervene in the text. You are not >the editor here. I write quickly, and sometimes misuse letters. Knowing >that English is my second language, you are being *disgustingly racist*, >like once upon a time you called third world people *irrational* here. You >should consider an apology to the list, or at least to the international >members of the list! Well, if Jim is disgustingly racist, you can give up on all hope here and now, Mine. If I make mistakes, I'd like them corrected - whatever the nature of my mistake. That's how we learn. It's not fair that cyberspace is dominated by American English, but it's not the fault of American English speakers either. English is my second language, too, but now I've been corrected so often, and so well, that I speak and write it rather better than my first. >Altruism has a pragmatic connotation in cooperative game theory. You give >in order to receive. As Richard Dawkins wrote in _Selfish Gene_, the book >that is a prototype of fascism and sexism, men compete to fuck women in >order to transfer their superior genes to their offsprings. The >possibility of being fucked or selected from the pool depends on how men >are altrustic to women as well how much women can offer. I think there's a lot to Dawkins' theory - and it is a theory that may or may not be deployed to support fascism and sexism (I think Dawkins himself read too much and too little into his theory, especially in his first edition), but I maintain it is not *necessarily* what you say it is. Part of the environment within which our genes march through history is human culture and the particular power relations of the moment - that makes our genetic history a rather particular and complex business - but it doesn't deny Dawkins so much as introduce a dialectical relationship into the mix. Fine. And anyway, experience tells us that women in liberal capitalist polities compete no less than men when it comes to the mating game (I imagine this would be true in much, but perhaps not all, of Turkey, too). I mean, we are, at least in part, talking about individuals engaged in competition, aren't we? You'd need strong rules and stronger enforcement to have it otherwise, I reckon (Taliban-like patriarchy. for instance). And, yeah, its those rules (especially uncodified cultural norms) that GT can miss. BTW, just to get a bit humanistic about all this, I don't reckon we're a purely cooperative species at all, myself. We're just not purely competitive, that's all. Cooperation was, I submit, how we competed as a species - and we must not confuse competition at the unconscious species level with that at individual, and often conscious, level (like the Spencerian 'social darwinists' and their latter day acolytes seem to think). >My alternative is not to use game theory as a methodological tool. >Just like socio-biology crap, game theory is inherently non Marxist, if >not anti liberal-left. I just don't find the outcomes of game theory to explain much at all about the world within which I live (on the strength of introductory economics and public choice texts, anyway), and I don't think it privileges what's most important to decision-making. So I don't like it insofar as I understand it. I'd accept non-Marxist in that sense. 'Anti-Marxist', it seems to me, remains rather moot. >How can a black "choose" to fit within a white society? If we start the >game with this individualistic assumption, then we end up saying that >blacks are responsible for causing racism by consciously choosing the >conditions they live in. One can *not* start the game with the assumption >that blacks and whites share the same circumstances, rules of the game and >the social institutions limiting their choices. Institutions do not limit >blacks and whites' choices equally. They discriminate... I agree. >>I wasn't apologizing for GT
Re: Re: Re: GT [was: Re: McArthur grantee
I have been on pen-l now for 8 years. Calling people racists on this list is infantile to say the least. Storm in a tea cup I hope:) Cheers, Anthony xxx Anthony P. D'Costa, Associate Professor Comparative International Development University of WashingtonTaylor Institute & South Asia Program 1900 Commerce StreetJackson School of International Studies Tacoma, WA 98402, USA University of Washington, Seattle Phone: (253) 692-4462 Fax : (253) 692-5612 xxx
Re: Re: GT [was: Re: McArthur grantee (fwd)
>G'day Mine, G'day... I wrote: >Altruism has a pragmatic connotation in cooperative game theory. You give >in order to receive. As Richard Dawkins wrote in _Selfish Gene_, the book >that is a prototype of fascism and sexism, men compete to fuck women in >order to transfer their superior genes to their offsprings. The >possibility of being fucked or selected from the pool depends on how men >are altrustic to women as well as how >much women can offer. >I think there's a lot to Dawkins' theory - and it is a theory that may or >may not be deployed to support fascism and sexism (I think Dawkins >himself >read too much and too little into his theory, especially in his first >edition), but I maintain it is not *necessarily* what you say it is. >Part of the environment within which our genes march through history is >human culture and the particular power relations of the moment - that >makes our genetic history a rather particular and complex business - but >it doesn't deny Dawkins so much as introduce a dialectical relationship >into the mix. Fine. Rob, as the author himself said in many occasions, the main purpose of Dawkin's book is to reject Marx's dialectic and instead to introduce the _primacy_ of genes in determining human behavoir. In other words, Dawkins is not saying the things you would like to attribute to him-- ie., evolution of human genetic structure throughout history. On the contrary, he is saying that social environment, history, power relations have no influence on the development of human nature. He is trying to eliminate the role of external factors to openly say that we (like other non human animals) are "machines created by genes". In the book, Dawkins goes into a deep explanation of what genes are, what they serve for and how they survive. The politically dangerous aspect of this genetic reductionism is that it sees the charecteristics human beings learn in society (competitiveness, selfishness, egoism, possessiveness, private property, rape etc..) in the human genetic make up. His argument is implicity reactionary not only because he sees human nature as fixed and unchanging but also because it ahistorically projects the charectristics of competitive market society (which he *reifies* like neo-classical economists) onto human nature to *imply* that capitalism is what we *naturally* have and it is what we are doomed to have in the future. Accordingly, he is ridiculing at the Marxist agenda of replacing capitalism with socialism or an egalitarian form of society. The man's problem is with equality. >And anyway, experience tells us that women in liberal capitalist polities >compete no less than men when it comes to the mating game (I imagine this >would be true in much, but perhaps not all, of Turkey, too). Correct, but this is not Dawkins. Dawkins is *not* saying that "liberal capitalist policies" force men and women to act in certain ways, though I would still suggest capitalism reinforces traditional sexual practices by disempowering women in the mating game. Yes, women compete no less than men, but when it comes to how women expect men to treat them in certain ways, you will see that capitalism maintains the hierarchial structure of gender relations. Regarding competition and cooperation, many anthropological studies show that these concepts gain their meanings within the form of social organization and type of society individuals live in. It also depends on which historical period we are talking about. We can not expect ancient Athenians, for example, subscribing to the notion of capitalist rationality and competitive individualism that we understand in the modern sense of the term today. They had a different societal structure and property regime.or think about hunting gathering societies; Eventhough in those societies, there was still a division of labor by sex, gender inegualities were not as systemic and cumulative as they are under capitalism. Furthermore, cross-cultural and cross-historical studies have proven variations among how these terms apply given country's situatedness with the capitalist world system. in any case, as somebody's post clarifed about what Rabin's work is and where the source of funding comes from,I see neither Rabin's work nor Dawkin's particulary useful for leftist politics..whoever thinks it is useful is mistaken and does harm to Marxism. DAwkins say: "Each individual wants as many surviving children as possible. The less he or she is obliged to invest in any one of those children, the more children he or she can have. The obvious way to achieve this desirable state of affairs is to induce your sexual partner to invest more than his or her fair share of resources in each child, leaving you free to have other children with other partners. This would be a desirable strategy for either sex, but it is more difficult for the female to achieve".
