Harman Oren Solomon. The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness
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Since supply had been short, George was the only Price not to get his gamma
globulin. Away from his family now, he had contracted the disease and was in a
hospital bed, exhausted. Alice begged him to remember how much she loved him.
Hoping to pick up her boy’s spirits, she wrote of a lavish banquet at the Waldorf
thrown by her Japanese boarder Mr. Washio in honor of the imperial prince of
Japan. It gave him little comfort. He was thirty-one years old. His future was
uncertain. Depressed and alone, George Price was helplessly roaming.
58
John von Neumann (1903–1957)
Warder Clyde Allee (1885–1955)
Friendly Starfish, Selfish Games
I am violently anti-Communist,” the man intoned in a low accented voice, “and a
good deal more militaristic than most.” It was January 1955, Capitol Hill, and not
a senator in the confirmation hearing room stirred. John von Neumann was going
to be sworn in as a new member of the Atomic Energy Commission, and John von
Neumann was a man to listen to.
1
The H-bomb was on everyone’s mind. Back in 1952 the “Ivy Mike” trial had
destroyed the Enewetok atoll. It was official: The bomb was terrible and viable.
But it would take years to build an arsenal, be massively expensive, and would
have to be accomplished under a veil of complete secrecy. Still, in possession of a
large stockpile, America would unequivocally rule the world. That is, if Russia
didn’t have its own program too. If it did, the arsenals would cancel each other
out, with the already costly expense and effort incurred. Should she “defect,”
then, and build the arsenal, or “cooperate” and hold off? Clearly each side would
prefer that no one stockpile, rather than both stockpiling for no net gain. But each
side might also decide to build its H-bombs either in the hopes of gaining the
upper hand or out of fear of being caught without them.
It was a prisoner’s dilemma, and for von Neumann the solution was clear. The
Soviets could not be trusted. To save itself and the world, America would need to
wage a preventive war, to become, as Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews
had called it earlier in the decade, vicious “aggressors for peace.” But when? Von
Neumann was adamant. With the room hanging on his every word, he said: “If
you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5
o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”
2
Why was a mathematician being asked by the U.S. Senate whether and when to
use the most destructive weapon in history? Surely he was one of the few people
who had the knowledge to make the crucial calculations that would make or break
the project. But the real reason was different. The H-bomb dilemma hinged on the
mystery of human nature. It had been a quest that traveled through economics and
biology. And John von Neumann, people said, had finally cracked the nut.
The eighteenth century Scottish economist Adam Smith had a simple message to
convey: Under certain conditions free economic competition will lead to the best
allocation of society’s resources. It sounded like a paradox, but it was
unequivocally true: Unfettered contest will by an “invisible hand” maximize
society’s benefits. The more ruthless the competition, the greater the social good;
individual selfishness leads to collective benefit and plenty.
3
By the time Thorstein Veblen arrived as a professor at the University of Chicago
when it opened its gates in 1892, this economic worldview was referred to as
“classical.” Welded now more strongly to the political theory of laissez-faire,
Adam Smith’s legacy beckoned a new name. Veblen called it “neoclassical
economics” and didn’t shy away from expressing his view: He absolutely hated
it.
4
It was said of Veblen—born in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant
parents—that taking one of his classes was like “undergoing a vivisection without
anesthetic.” A notoriously bad teacher, he was also a formidable critic. The basic
assumption that individuals pursuing their own self-interest necessarily promote
the good of society was to him both insipid and false. Capitalism was leading to
“conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure.” Not only did this bring
waste and inefficiency, it suppressed fundamental human instincts:
acquisitiveness, workmanship, parenthood, and idle curiosity. Forms of social
control could be used to reawaken them, but this could only be accomplished with
the help of a broad science of human behavior. With its exclusive dependence on
price theory, neoclassical economics was nothing but a narrow “hedonistic
calculus.” Based on “immutable premises,” it had little to do with reality.
5
At Yale political economy was associated with social science, at Johns Hopkins
with political science, and at Columbia with politics. Chicago was the first
university in North America to create an independent department of economics.
Veblen had long been kicked out of the university for impropriety; girls liked him,
it was said, and he didn’t exactly object.
6
Gradually, a worldview almost directly
opposed to his own became dominant.
“All talk of social control is nonsense,” Frank Knight was often heard saying in
his deep, magisterial voice. The oldest of eleven children raised in religious
orthodoxy in McLean County, Illinois, Knight had grown up to become a Chicago
professor of economics and a notorious slayer of sacred cows. Clergy and medics
were quacks, the institutions of social order imposters, the prevailing moral
norms—slaves to fashion. Knight was suspicious of the political system and even
more of politicians. “The probability of the people in power being individuals
who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the
probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping
master in a slave plantation.” In Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit he provided the first
complete formulation of perfect competition—unfettered, unencumbered,
uncontrolled. Perfect competition was important not because it was always most
economically efficient, though it most certainly usually was. Perfect competition
was important because it guaranteed individual freedom, and nothing—not the
injustice of luck nor the trampling of acceptable standards of fairness—was more
important than that.
7
The way Knight saw things, societies have five economic problems: How to
decide which goods and services to produce and how much of them; how to
organize the available productive forces and materials among the various lines of
industry and coordinate their use; how to distribute the goods and services; how to
bring consumption in line with production; and how to ensure continued
economic growth and improvement of the social structure. All five of the
problems involve making choices, and there are two alternative mechanisms for
directing how such choices should be made: at one extreme, central planning
based on the command principle, at the other—a free-market system with
voluntary exchange. More and more people in the Economics Department at
Chicago had fewer and fewer doubts about which was the superior system.
Central planning inevitably became linked with political totalitarianism;
free-market went hand in hand with democracy.
8
“The theory and teaching that there is a God is a lie.”
The words hit Warder Clyde Allee on the head like an iron gavel hurled from a
heavenless sky. He had not been prepared for this. There was silence in the lecture
hall. He was confused, saddened. Most of all he was filled with a surge of pity. He
felt sorry for the misguided man, his animal evolution professor, a controversial
figure who would leave his post some years later on account of an ugly courtroom
divorce. He had often heard of such people—infidels, atheists and that sort—but
this was the first one he had met, and he planned to show him the error of his
ways.
9
It was the fall of 1908, Hull Court, University of Chicago. Allee had arrived that
summer from Indiana, a strapping, broad-faced twenty-three-year-old, his burly
frame and callused hands signs of years of labor on the family farm. Balding and
sporting round spectacles, he looked like an intellectual football player, which, in
fact, he had been as an undergraduate at Earlham College. Warder’s father, John
Wesley Allee, was the son of a Methodist minister from Parke County. When he
fell in love with and married Mary Emily Newlin, whose forefathers had
established the nearby Quaker settlement of Bloomingdale, he became a
“convinced Friend,” but still took the family to the Methodist church from time to
time. At eleven Warder was officially converted at a revival meeting. Earlham
was the pride of the old Quaker settlements south of Lake Michigan, which had
played a role in the Underground Railroad, sneaking black slaves on “Tracks to
Freedom” into Canada in the mid-1800s. When he graduated from high school it
was only natural that Warder enrolled, joining the football team and becoming a
“Hustlin’ Quaker.”
10
Now he was at Chicago, a graduate student in the Zoology Department. The
cloistered walkways, grass quads, and stone Gothic buildings were a far cry from
the open fields and broad woodlands of Indiana where, as a boy, he had fallen in
love with nature. Still, Oekologie had been a term invented by the German
biologist Ernst Haeckel back in 1866 to designate the study of the relations of
organisms to their environments, and Chicago was one of the few places in
America where ecology could be studied. Warder had arrived a traditional
believer. He was excited: Here he would study the nature God had instilled in all
His creatures. Wide-eyed, he did not yet know that science would soon fix all that.
Isopods are ugly little creatures. Leggy and segmented, they look like a
mysterious aquatic blend of scorpion and cricket. Allee was in love. Excited, he
determined he’d crack the mystery of the tiny crustacean, abundant in shallow
waters, the deep sea, and freshwater streams and ponds.
Creating artificial currents in the lab, he observed that stream isopods moved
toward the current more than pond ones, except when their metabolic rate was low
when they were breeding. Since oxygen and carbon dioxide affected metabolic
rate, and differed from streams to ponds, it had to be the gases that explained the
creatures’ behavior.
Using depression agents like low oxygen, chloretone, potassium cyanide, low
temperature and starvation, he could make stream isopods act like pond ones.
Conversely, with high oxygen, caffeine, and elevated temperatures, lazy pond
dwellers morphed into energized stream sprinters. Since all the isopods were from
the same species, differences in behavior could not be due to heredity. Clearly it
was all about interaction with the environment.
The discovery shook his religious foundations. Hadn’t the Deity instilled
behavior in His creations? If so, how could coffee be so powerful? The iron gavel,
he now saw, really did fall from a heavenless sky. There was no “hand of God” to
behold, only physics and chemistry. Science was winning out over the
supernatural.
11
After graduating with a doctorate, Allee was growing uneasy. Married now with a
child, he was increasingly disturbed by the war. Why, for heaven’s sake, this
horrific bloodshed and carnage? At Chicago science might have laid his
childhood belief in an all-powerful God to eternal rest, but at times like this roots
provided comfort. If he couldn’t pacify unbelief, he could sure as hell deify
pacifism. That March he was appointed chairman of the Quaker War Service for
civilian relief in Chicago, an outfit that had grown out of the Monthly Meeting of
Friends.
It was early 1917, and the United States still remained on the sidelines. Already
conscientious objectors were being humiliated and beaten in military training
camps and prisons. Couldn’t enlistment in the newly formed American Friends
Service Committee, aiding relief and reconstruction work abroad, qualify as
conscription, a form of noncombatant service during war? After all, liberal
pacifism held both the individual and the state responsible for the welfare and
rights of the citizen. Conscription to go kill and die in war was in direct violation
of this most holy of commitments. Individualism was the bedrock of democracy
because it meant the assertion of human freedom, not the vulgar triumph of
egoism. The least government could do in times of war was to allow pacifists to
provide their service in nonviolent currencies.
Allee had recently been appointed professor of biology at Lake Forest College.
He had read Kropotkin and in his gut knew that he must be right. But he had yet to
convince himself of the biological justification for peace and cooperation with an
original scientific discovery of his own.
In the college chapel he preached on the rights of conscientious objectors. When
the administration forbade him to preach in the chapel again, he spoke up in the
classroom. The college docked his salary. A few faculty and students were heard
murmuring the word “traitor” under their breath. Traitor? The local Springfield
News-Report wasn’t so inhibited: “Sometimes war is unavoidable, and college
professors are no more necessary to civilization than carpenters and cobblers.”
Allee’s was a “most convenient theory.” If a choice had to be made, “we should
prefer to give up the professors.”
12
In April, Congress voted to enter the Great War. The requests of the American
Friends’ Service had been rejected. At Lake Forest, Allee waited for more
peaceful times. If he wanted to find scientific proof to combat the folly of human
warfare, he would need to go someplace else.
On the afternoon of December 28, 1917, the delegates shuffled into the Animal
Morphology Building at the University of Minnesota blowing into their freezing
hands. The newly established National Research Council could easily envision
how physicists and mathematicians, chemists and geologists, might lend a hand to
the war effort. But what about biologists? At the annual meeting of American
Society of Zoologists, a special session on “The Value and Service of Zoological
Science” had been hurriedly convened. The delegates settled quietly in their
chairs.
13
Darwinism had become about as German as liverwurst. Back in 1859, when he
was under attack in England for The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote to a
colleague: “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for
hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” And although he himself had
carefully avoided any political implications for man, in Germany, Darwinism was
interpreted as having repercussions for the future of civilization. It was Ludwig
Woltmann, a German, who first gave the enterprise its name. Amounting to a
revolt against Judeo-Christian and neo-Kantian ethics, “social Darwinism”
advanced a set of biologized beliefs: The moral sense is a biological instinct, not a
spiritual endowment; human races are unequal; biology is destiny; the welfare of
the individual is subservient to the health of the group; the struggle for existence
renders war and death necessary to progress; progress and biological purification
are one and the same. It was this distortion of Darwin’s theory, many American
zoologists claimed, that was blowing wind into Germany’s war sails.
14
No one made this clearer than the Stanford entomologist Vernon Kellogg.
Published earlier that year, Headquarters Night was an account of his war
experiences as the chief liaison of the Commission for Relief of Belgium to the
German high command in France. “The creed of the Allmacht of a natural
selection based on violent and fatal competition is the gospel of the German
intellectuals,” Kellogg wrote; “all else is illusion and anathema.” Former
president Theodore Roosevelt agreed. In the preface to the book, he broadcast:
“The man who reads Kellogg’s sketch and yet fails to see why we are at war, and
why we must accept no peace save that of overwhelming victory, is neither a good
American nor a true lover of mankind.” Formerly a pacifist, Kellogg had now
changed his colors. Only a “war to end all wars” could save civilization.
15
The delegates perked their ears in attention. If they could defeat German
Darwinism on the scientific battlefield, they’d be lending their shoulders to the
war effort. One by one, the big guns were paraded to make the cooperatist case:
Did not Herbert Spencer argue that evolution led life from the simple to the
complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous? Had he not explained how
the ensuing specialization of function necessitates cooperation, the better to bring
about an integrated whole? And wasn’t society just like an organism, comprised
of individual parts each contributing to the community? Sure, he had later
abandoned such ideals to paint a picture of a cutthroat struggle for survival, but he
had been more insightful as a young man. And what about Kropotkin, that stellar
exemplar of humanity: Had he not defeated Huxley’s “gladiator” in Nature’s
glorious arena? Weren’t the fittest, after all, not the fiercest or the strongest but
those who acquired the habit of mutual aid and cooperation for the benefit of all?
16
Answering such questions in the affirmative, they suddenly felt like physicists.
They left freezing Minneapolis immeasurably more important than when they’d
arrived just two days before.
“How much is sixty million, five hundred and fifty-three thousand, eight hundred
and ninety-one divided by twenty-seven?”
“Two million, five hundred and one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five point
ninety-six.”
“Good boy!”
Johnny von Neumann could divide eight-digit numbers in his head by the time he
was six. Visitors to the Budapest family home of the successful Jewish banker
Max Neumann were as stunned by his son’s ability to memorize phone books as
by the jokes he told in classical Greek. When he grew older he studied chemical
engineering, physics, and mathematics at Europe’s finest universities: Berlin,
Zurich, Budapest, Göttingen. Soon the word was out: Von Neumann was a
genius. By 1930, at twenty-six, he was sitting in the room next to Albert
Einstein’s at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. Einstein’s mind, they
said, was “slow and contemplative. He would think about something for years.
Johnny’s mind was just the opposite. It was lightning quick—stunningly fast. If
you gave him a problem he either solved it right away or not at all.”
17
Unsolvable problems were rare, though. Living with his wife, daughter, and an
Irish setter, Inverse, at a Princeton mansion on 26 Westcott Road, von Neumann
was famous for hosting lavish weekly alcohol-fuming parties, and even more for
scribbling mathematical formulas with pencil and paper in the middle of it
all—“the noisier,” his wife said, “the better.” He wore prim, vested suits with a
white handkerchief in the pocket, “an outfit just enough out of place to inspire
pleasantries.” Von Neumann was balding and porky; his diet consisted of yogurt
and hard-boiled eggs for breakfast and anything he wanted for the rest of the day.
He loved fast cars, hard liquor, classical music, and dirty jokes. He was a
prankster. Once he offered to take Einstein to the Princeton train station and then
put him on a train in the opposite direction. He was known for scribbling
equations on the blackboard in a frenzy, erasing them before students could get to
the end. Klara, his wife, claimed that he wouldn’t remember what he had for
lunch, but could recall word for word books he had read twenty years before. He
had produced groundbreaking papers in logic, set theory, group theory, ergodic
theory, and operator theory. He had described the single-memory architecture of
the modern computer, and performed the crucial calculation on the implosion
design of the atom bomb. Along side these accomplishments, he loved toys and
was observed unaffectedly scrapping with a five-year-old over a set of building
blocks on a carpet. Though he was charming and witty in public, few felt that they
really knew him well. People joked that John von Neumann was not human but a
demigod who could imitate humans precisely.
18
Above all he was fascinated by games, especially the kind, like poker, based on
bluffing and deceit. “It takes a Hungarian to go into a revolving door behind you
and come out first,” he used to say. In fact John von Neumann loved games so
much that he had decided to study them, seriously, as a mathematician. What he
discovered amazed him: In games where two opponents were in absolute conflict,
where the loss of one is the gain of the other and only one side can ever win; in
such “zero-sum” games there is always an optimal strategy for both players to
pursue. Tic-tac-toe is the simplest example, but here is an illustration from life:
Imagine two sweet-toothed kids being given a cake and told to share it. When a
grown up carefully divides the cake down the middle, one side always feels
slighted, even by a crumb. It is best for one of the kids to divide the cake, knowing
that the other can choose which piece he wants. Since both kids know that the
other wants as big a part of the cake as possible, cutting the cake precisely down
the middle is the optimal solution.
It was mathematically airtight. It applied to games that involved perfect
information (both kids know that the cake must be divided), complete self-interest
(both kids want as big a piece of the cake as possible), and rational decision
making based on a calculation of the other side’s agenda (the kid cutting the cake
understands that the other kid wants as big a piece as possible, and vice versa, and
both act accordingly). The issue was always how to maximize the minimum the
other side strove to leave you with, or, in other words, to minimize maximal
losses. The “minimax theorem” proved that there was always a best way to do
this. With the relevant information, the right strategy could be known.
19
The economists at Chicago had picked a hard time to wage their battle. In Europe
the Great War was now over, but Adolf Hitler had risen to become führer of
Germany, and Mussolini ruled with an iron fist in Italy. The Great Depression had
taken hold. Reeling citizens looked to their governments for salvation.
Enter John Maynard Keynes. “I have called this book the General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money,” he wrote, Cambridge-style, in his magnum
opus in 1936,
placing the emphasis on the prefix general. The object of such a title is to contrast
the character of my arguments and conclusions with those of the classical theory
of the subject, upon which I was brought up and which dominates the economic
thought, both practical and theoretical, of the governing and academic classes of
this generation, as it has for a hundred years past. I shall argue that the
postulates of the classical theory are applicable to a special case only and not to
the general case, the situation which it assumes being a limiting point of the
possible positions of equilibrium. Moreover, the characteristics of the special
case assumed by the classical theory happen not to be those of the economic
society in which we actually live, with the result that its teaching is misleading
and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience.
20
If government didn’t intervene in the economy it would be betraying its citizens.
Since employment was not determined by the price of labor but by the spending
of money (what is called “aggregate demand”), the assumption that competition
will deliver full employment in the long run was patently false. On the contrary,
underemployment and underinvestment were the likely natural state of
competition; unless active measures were taken, that is. Lack of competition,
Keynes was arguing, was not the fundamental problem; the reduction of