The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Dr Martin Daly

Episode Date: May 12, 2017

I'm speaking with Dr. Martin Daly, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, a pioneer in the field of evolutionary psychology, and author of Killing the Competition . Dr. Daly has determined that economic inequality and male on male homicide rates are strongly linked, and makes a causal argument for why this is the case, attributing it to status competition under stressful conditions.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon accounts, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com. I'm here talking today with Dr. Martin Daly. Dr. Daly is a professor of psychology 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. And Felt, he and his wife, 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. He was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998. Daily is one of the main researchers

of the Cinderella effect and has been interviewed many times in the press about it. So I'm very pleased to be talking with Dr. Daily this morning. It seems to me that he's one of Canada's most outstanding psychologists and perhaps you could say that about psychologists in the world. And he's done some incredibly interesting research on the relationship between inequality and male violence and inequality and other topics too. So welcome, Dr. Daly. Thank you, Jordan. It's nice to be talking to you.

Well, I'm looking forward to a conversation a lot. So you just wrote a book which I'm going to show people called killing the competition. And I just read it. It was very interesting. So I thought maybe I could get you to start by talking a little bit about the book. And also tell us the story. That would be a good thing to do. Well, the general issue that is addressed in the book

is the relationship between economic and inequality, which is usually indexed as income inequality, and homicide rates. And 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 US, across cities within the US, and some other kinds of jurisdictional comparisons. And 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. And 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. So can you tell us a little bit about how you calculate inequality and what the measure is? Yeah, it come in equality. There's a number of different measures that are used by economists. So I'm just borrowing the dominant ones from economists. The number one one is something called the Ginni index, G-I-N-I. I used to assume that that was some kind of acronym, but actually it was the name of an Italian

economist. And it's a measure that is ranges from zero to one. it would be zero if everybody had exactly the same income or exactly the same wealth if you're doing wealth inequality, and it would approach one as income or wealth was concentrated more and more in the hands of few and then a single individual. And in principle, we'll go to one in the extreme if all wealth were held by Bill Gates and none of the rest of us had anything. And now you analyzed the digi co-efficient at different levels of jurisdiction. So I know that in your work that you've looked at countries and states within countries and I think that's

particularly true in the US. So tell us a little bit about what you found. Yeah, well, within the US, and again, this has been known by sociologists for some time, within the US and across nationally, the GD coefficient is a very good predictor of homicide. The correlation tends to be on the order of 0.7 in many studies, which means that the variance and 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. And actually, it even works on a neighborhood level. 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. Tell us a little bit about what you did in Chicago because that research is extremely interesting and also when you did it. Let's see we did our work in Chicago in the early 90s and at that time Chicago had very high homicide rate not the worst in United States, but one of the worst in the United States. And in fact, have 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. In Chicago, Chicago is divided up into some 77, I believe, neighborhoods by... There's a long-standing tradition of urban sociology in Chicago, and there's these sort of well-recognized 77 neighborhoods. And 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. And 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. And 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. In competitive, and that was our construe of what most homicides in Chicago were about, where guys killing each

other when dissed and bars, circumstances in which there's some sort of competition and it gets dangerous. And our basic idea there and elsewhere has been a lot of the variability in homicide rates. The most violent volatile component of homicide rates has to do with this male male competition, where, where, when does it get dangerous and where when does it sort of dampen down. And 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, age-specific mortality and so on, was available to do it. And so we computed age-specific life-expectancies, 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. And in that particular study, everywhere else we've worked, we've mostly found income in equality to be number one. In that particular study, income inequality was a very good predictor, but the best predictor was male life expectancy at birth or at age 15. And in order to compute life, of course, you say homicide rates. Homicide reduces male life expectancy. So you have to remove homicides statistically as a cause of death

and say life expectancy net of the impact of homicide. That was our best predictor of homicide rates. So life expectancy is very variable in the city of Chicago and I assume in other US cities. I 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. In the best neighborhoods, male life expectancy was up and I think 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. So it's a huge range. That was our best predictor. Then if you try to do a multivariate analysis where you look for what else predicts some the residual variability and there wasn't much residual variability, the second best indeed the only secondary predictor that seemed to be statistically significant was income inequality across the neighborhoods. That was that was the thrust of our was income inequality across the neighborhoods. That was the thrust of our study in Chicago, and I'd love to see more work on life expectancy as a predictor of violence.

The University of the Memorial, a criminologist, Mark Weimeh, tried to do the same thing in Montreal, but 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. So what do you think accounted for the vast difference in life expectancy between Chicago and Montreal, and was life expectancy itself associated with income inequality? Oh, yes, I mean that's part of the problem, of course, in all this kind of research. Here, it's not experimental research. You don't control independent variables and everything of potential interest is correlated with

everything else. So, you know, income inequality alone accounts for more than half the variance and homicide rates across Chicago neighborhoods. So does life expectancy alone? So does Perciple or the poverty line alone, but these things are all correlated with each other. And so trying to tease apart what's most important is tricky. So the low life expectancy in Chicago neighborhoods is not due to violence. It's due to it's due overwhelmingly to differential disease.

In Chicago, a privatization of medicine in the US was so extreme that the time we were doing this research, emergency rooms in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago had closed down because they got bankrupt. They didn't have enough money to remain open, and 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. So there's all sorts of factors that contribute to differential death rates, but you know, kids in the worst neighborhood

are exposed to high levels of lead. There's some evidence that lead exposure and childhoods is a big predictor of variability in life expectancy. All kinds of internal diseases, they were more susceptible to the effects of bad nutrition, they were more susceptible to. So 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 than on this book, what we ordinarily think of as disease. Internal causes were still the biggest source of differential mortality across neighborhoods.

So you could make, the sounds of it, you could make a reasonable case that the social safety net in Canada is flattening out the bottom of the income distribution, especially the provision of the income distribution, especially the provision of health care. And, you know, I also was informed a while back that the rate of entrepreneurship in Canada is actually higher than in the U.S. and 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. And so one of the perverse effects of socialized medicine is that it elevates the rates of entrepreneurship. So I also wanted to mention, you know, your work was absolutely striking to me because of the effect sizes now 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.

So this guy named Hampehill, who did an empirical analysis of effect size comparisons about four or five years ago, might be longer than that now. And he concluded that 95% of social science studies had effect size of 0.5 or less. And so to see a correlation of 0.5 or less. And 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. So that's the problem. And when you take into account that those, that 0.5 represent studies that were published because they got something. Yes, exactly, exactly. So point seven is absolutely overwhelming. I've never seen effect sizes that big

between two variables of interest in any other domain that I can recall. And then the other thing 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, what emerges out of the, out of the manner in which the genetic coefficient is, is calculated, because it's only a measure of relative poverty. And it's the predictor, you, 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. 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. And 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? Yeah, 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. They're often correlated.

Right. You know, income inequality across a certain set of jurisdictions, maybe fairly strongly correlated with the percentual of the poverty line, for example, and be surprising if it was not usually correlated. But they're not necessarily, as you said. Yeah, 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? Well, it's very interesting. I think men are sensitive to our interest in relative position, status, maintaining face in competitive millions, and in a sense all millions are a bit competitive. And the willingness to use violence partly can be thought of as kind of a disdain for the future or I want money now. I'm willing to do something that threatens my life like escalating competition or not backed out or not walk away from an insult. Because I'm thinking very short term, the rewards for being passive. 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. If you're the same age kind to guy in a

Urbagedo with a 48% unemployment rate or something like that, then you have very much more end with uncertainty about the stability of whatever income you do get with the future on node, 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 a whistle now. And also the maintenance of faith, like social reputation is the one resource you've got.

If you've got. If you've got other resources, you can walk away from threats or disrespect and repure rewards later. If social status is all you've got, that it becomes an important thing to defend. So 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 and that's another domain where you see these kinds

of whopping correlations. So the correlation between socioeconomic status for men and number of available sexual partners is about point six or point seven, whereas for women it's negative point one two. And so do you think, 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 are, or perhaps the main reason that men are engaging in these status competitions is because of female hypergamy. Is that a reasonable hypothesis? The association that you mentioned is presumably a very long standing one. That is to say that medifs with status and resources have had access to partners for sure and probably multiple partners simultaneously or serially. Two in degree that med of lower status have not. There's high variance in eventual reproduction among males in mammals generally, and although the situation is less extreme

in people that have many other mammals, the same is true for people. I mean, what you say they have high variants compared to what? Well, high variants compared to women, for example, of the variability in eventual reproductive success is lower for women than for women or husband. Now you say sexual access to women, and I think that's exactly the right level to be lucky, getting contemporary societies.

But the reason why that matters is because, had, cestually, that translated into differential reproduction in a modern environment which, you know, contraceptive technology is available, especially to women, that correlation may be broken down, but the motives to, you know, cut perceptive technology is available, especially to women, that correlation may be broken down, but the motives to seek sexual opportunity remain relevant. So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about too is the, like, you made a comment in your book about Adrian Reigns, And Adrian Reigns has written a book recently about the biological predictors of criminality. And 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. So in some sense it's a rational response to a radically uncertain environment where competition is high. Now To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon accounts, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com.

I'm here talking today with Dr. Martin Daly. Dr. Daly is a professor of psychology 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. And fast, he and his wife, Lake Margot 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.

Daily is one of the main researchers of the Cinderella effect and has been interviewed many times in the press about it. So I'm very pleased to be talking with Dr. Daly this morning. It seems to me that he's one of Canada's most outstanding psychologists and perhaps you could say that about psychologists in the world. And he's done some incredibly interesting research on the relationship between inequality and male violence and inequality and other topics too. So welcome, Dr. Daly. Thank you, Jordan.

It's nice to be talking to you. Well, I'm looking forward to a conversation a lot. So you just wrote a book, which I'm going to show people, called Killing the Competition. And I just read it. It was very interesting. So I thought, maybe I could get you to start by talking a little bit about the book and also how you tell us the story. That would

be the good, a good thing to do. Well, the general issue that is addressed in the book is the relationship between economic and inequality, which is usually indexed as income inequality, and homicide rates. And 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 US, across cities within the US, and some other kinds of jurisdictional comparisons. And 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.

And 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. So can you tell us a little bit about how you calculate inequality and what the measure is? Yeah, income inequality. There's a number of different measures that are used by economists, so I'm just borrowing the dominant ones from economists. The number one one is something called the Ginni index, G-I-N-I. I used to assume that that was some kind of acronym, but actually it was the name of an Italian

economist. And it's a measure that is ranges from zero to one. It would be zero if everybody had exactly the same income or exactly the same wealth if you're doing wealth inequality. And it would approach one as income or wealth was concentrated more and more in the hands of few and then a single individual. And in principle, we'd go to one in the extreme, if all wealth were helped by Bill Gates and none of the rest of us had anything. And now you analyzed the diginifficient at different levels of jurisdiction. So I know that in your work that you've looked at countries and states within countries. And I think

that's particularly true in the US. So tell us a little bit about what you found. Yeah, well within the US, and again, this has been known by sociologists for some time, within the US and cross nationally, the GD coefficient is a very good predictor of homicide. The correlation tends to be on the order of 0.7 in many studies, which means that the variance and either measure, 50% of it could be a counter for the variability in the other measure, what I'm saying between homicide and income inequality. And actually, it even works on the neighborhood level. 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. Tell us a little bit about what you did in Chicago, because that research is extremely interesting, and also when you did it. Let's see, we did our work in Chicago in the early 90s, and at that time, Chicago had very high homicide, right?

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. In Chicago, Chicago is divided up into some 77, I believe, neighborhoods by... There's a long-standing tradition of urban sociology in Chicago, and

there's these sort of well-recognized 77 neighborhoods. And 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. And Margo 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. And 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. In competitive, and that was our construe of what most homicides in Chicago were about, where guys killing each other when dissed, emb, circumstances in which there's some sort of competition and it gets dangerous. At our basic idea, there and elsewhere has been a lot of the variability in homicide rates, the most violent volatile component of homicide rates has to do with this male male competition and where where a blend does it get dangerous and where when does it sort of

dampen down. And 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. And so we computed a specific life expectancies, income inequality, and many other variables that criminologists have considered relevant and past studies, racial heterogeneity and blah, blah, blah, blah. And tried to see what were your best predictors of homicide. And in that particular study, everywhere else we worked, we've mostly found income inequality in the number one.

In that particular study, income inequality was a very good predictor, but the best predictor was male life expectancy at birth or at age 15. And in order to compute, of course, you say homicide rates, homicide reduces male life expectancy. So you have to remove homicide statistically as a cause of death and male life expectancy. So you have to remove homicides statistically as a cause of death and say life expectancy net of the impact of homicide. That was our best predictor of homicide rates. So life expectancy is very variable in the city of Chicago and I assume it other US cities. I mean, in the worst neighborhoods male life expectancy, a birth was down in the 50s as bad as in the worst countries in the world. In the best neighborhoods male life expectancy. A birth was down in the 50s as bad as in the worst countries in the world. In the best neighborhoods, male life expectancy was up in the, I think 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. So it's a huge range. That was our best predictor. Then if you try to do a multivariate analysis where you look for, well, what else predicts some the residual variability, and there wasn't much residual variability, the second best, indeed the only secondary predictor that seemed to be statistically significant was income inequality across the neighborhoods. That was the thrust of our study in Chicago, and I'd love to see more work on life expectancy as a predictor of violence.

Of the university, Tadeh de Montréal, a criminal, and just Mark Weimé, tried to do the same thing in Montreal, but 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. So what do you think accounted for the vast difference in life expectancy between Chicago and Montreal? And was life expectancy itself associated with income inequality? Oh, yes, I mean, that's part of the problem,

of course, in all this kind of research here. It's not experimental research. You don't control independent variables and everything of potential interest is correlated with everything else. So, you know, income inequality alone accounts for more than half the variance and homicide rates across Chicago neighborhoods. So does life expectancy alone? So does Percent below the poverty line alone? You know,

but these things are all correlated with each other. And so trying to tease apart what's most important is tricky. So the low life expectancy in Chicago neighborhoods is not due to violence. It's due to it's due overwhelmingly to differential disease. A privatization of medicine in the U.S. was so extreme the time we were doing this research, emergency rooms in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago had closed down because they got bankrupt. They didn't have enough money to remain open and 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. So there's all sorts of factors that contribute to differential death rates, but you know, kids in the worst neighborhood are exposed to high levels of blood. There's some evidence that lead exposure and childhoods is a big predictor of variability in life expectancy. All kinds of internal diseases, they were more susceptible to the effects of bad diseases, they were more susceptible to the effects of bad nutrition, they were more susceptible to. So 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. So you can make by the sounds of it, you can 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. And you know, I also also was informed a while back that the rate of entrepreneurship in Canada

is actually higher than in the US. And part of the reason for that is that because healthcare is provided, people can take a risk of walking away from their jobs without putting their family completely at risk. And so one of the perverse effects of socialized medicine is that it elevates the rates of entrepreneurship. So I also wanted to mention, you know, your work was absolutely striking to me because

of the effect sizes now. 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. So there's a guy named Hamhill, who did an empirical analysis of effect size comparisons about four or five years ago, might be longer than that now. And he concluded that 95% of social science studies had effect size of 0.5 or less.

And so to see a correlation of 0.7 is absolutely overwhelming when you also take into account that measurement error is decreasing the the potency of the relationship to some degree. So that's the one you take into account that those of those that point five represent studies that were published because they got something. Yes, exactly, exactly. So so point seven is absolutely overwhelming. I've never seen effect sizes that big between two variables of interest in any other domain that I can recall. And then the other thing 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 genetic coefficient is calculated. Because 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. 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. And 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? Yeah, 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. They're often correlated. Right. You know, income inequality across a certain set of jurisdictions may be fairly strongly correlated with the percent below the poverty line, for

example, and be surprising if it was not usually correlated. But they're not necessarily, as you said. Yeah, 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 a 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? Well, it's very interesting.

I think men are sensitive to our interest in relative position, status, maintaining face in competitive millions, and in a sense all millions are a bit competitive. And the willingness to use violence partly can be thought of as kind of a disdain for the future, or I want my now, I'm willing to do something that threatens my life, like escalating competition or not backed out or not walk away from an insult. Because I'm thinking very short term, the rewards for being passive, 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. If you're the same age kind of guy in a urban ghetto with a 48% unemployment rate or something like that, then you have very much more, and 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. And also the maintenance of faith, like social reputation, is the one resource you've got. If you've got other resources, you could walk away from threats or disrespect and reap your rewards later. If social status is all you've got, then it becomes an important thing to defend. So 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.

And that's another domain where you see these kinds of whopping correlations. So 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. And 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. Is that a reasonable hypothesis? Hypergamy, and as you say, simple access. I mean, there is... the association that you

mentioned is presumably a very long-standing one, that is to say that medifs with status and resources have had access to partners for sure and probably multiple partners simultaneously or serially. Two in a degree that med of lower status have not. There's high variants in eventual reproduction among males in mammals generally and although the situation is less extreme and people that have been the other mammals the same is true for people. I mean, what you say they have high variants compared to what? Well, high variants compared to women, for example, of the variability and eventual reproductive successes, lower for women and for men or husband. Now, you say sexual access to women, and I think that's exactly the right level to be lucky, getting contemporary societies. But the reason why that matters is because,

had, cesterly, that translated it to differential reproduction in a modern environment which, you know, cut perceptive technology is available, especially to women, that correlation may be broken down, but the motives to seek sexual opportunity of remade relevant. So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about too is the, you made a comment in your book about Adrian Reigns, and Adrian Reigns has written a book recently about the biological predictors of criminality.

And you make a strong case that in some sense the the 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. So in some sense, it's a rational response to a radically uncertain environment where competition is high. Now, rains would say, and the biological type researchers, they look at, they look more at the individual level

and conclude that it's individuals who have various forms of prefrontal damage or character logical issues associated with anti-social personality disorder that are more likely to engage in violent acts. And you can track that. I mean, Richard Traumley 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 can't fight, hit, and bite, and steal at two, 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. And so what I'm wondering is maybe you can reconcile the difference between the two research streams like this. 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. Maybe 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. It 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. Do you think that's a reasonable hypothesis? Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable hypothesis.

And I mean, my objection to Adrian Reigns book was that I think he fast, you know, he's there's definitely evidence that many kinds of violent criminal offenders have got something wrong with their brains. Adrian Reigns wants to extrapolate to the conclusion that violent criminals, and indeed criminals in general have got something broken about their brains.

And it's like criminality is pathological. Well, criminality is not pathological. People steal for cost-benefit-related reasons. The crime is a, if you like, God help a 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. You know, how do you make people stop exploiting other stealing from others by criminalizing those activities and imposing penalties? And there's a rational choice,

stream of theorizing within criminology that other people like Adrian Ray just dismissed out have had. No, no, criminal offenses are pathological. Yeah, and I think that's silly. Well, it seems unnecessary, you know, because it isn't that difficult to make a marriage between the two issues. Like 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. And that's one of the

dimensions on which men and women differ the most. And 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 pray on others. And 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. Yeah, 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 violet people you describe. There's people doing very well who are very happy to exploit others, but the costs of individual viola and action are high enough and the opportunities to exploit other people through financial needs, through your lawyers, through whatever tactics are available to well-heeled bullies are safe enough that they opt to behave in those directions. Right, because they've got their long-term futures relatively stable, and so that long-term

planning and regulation of behavior actually play an important economic role. And 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 head. But he's rich enough to bully people in other ways that actually heads on violence, although come to think of it the famous remark that he made during the campaign about women of suggests perhaps that depends on your definition of heads on violence, I guess that qualifies. Okay, 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.

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 describe where it's a status dispute. And it's more or less a toss-up who's going to come out as a winner. But 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, you're also more likely lose control when they're drinking. And maybe that's also fuel.

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. So 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. I'm not suggesting that that's necessarily a neurational 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 that that root. Yeah, what you say makes evidence sense to me, I mean, it's probably worth injecting a bit of a caution about the word rationality generally. What talks about rationality and crime, but perhaps especially a confrontational violence, the point is not that the person is making good and carefully weighed decisions. I mean, I think, you know, emotions are the handmaiden of what I would call ecological rationality. They help you know how you should feel about certain things and how you should react to them. And the rationality claim is more a claim of this person gets riled up Resets X. And he should, there's good reason to get riled up

and Reset X. But the fact that alcohol perhaps disinhibits so that the truly rational balance between an inhibitatory and aggressive emotions is altered, The idea that that alcohol interferes with with cognitive process, which is the point that people start making stupid decisions when they're drunk. Decide to get behind the wheel or whatever. I think this plays very heavily into the reason why so many homicides tend to happen. It contexts like to drunks as insulting each other and

or you know, people who are somewhat underneath with alcohol insulting each other rather than you know, if you have more, if you have more mental wear with all at the moment, you probably have better capacities to confuse, to defuse dangerous situations through ways that don't tail losing face by being articulate. Great, exactly. That's right. You have other tools at your disposal rather than immediate recourse to your fists. Thank you. Yes. So 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 and the consequences were something of the following sort. Well, first of all, you were likely to be charged with something like second-degree murder. It would be difficult for the

police to find people to testify against you. And if they did, generally, what they would say is that it was a two-way altercation. And so, in many cases, you could plead self-defense. Often, it didn't go before a jury, because the perpetrator plea bargained it down to manslaughter. The 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 because now they were like dangerous sons of bitches not to be messed with and that was quite clear. And also perhaps also improved so to speak by their soldier and in prison.

So if I got that right. whether sojourn in prison, that is if I got that right. Except for one detail, well, actually, in our Chicago studies, we didn't have as good follow-up information is what you're talking about. This was an earlier piece of research in the city of Detroit

that led to most of those findings, but yeah, exactly. Hardly, it's interesting. We had a single year sample of cases in Detroit, and there were, I think, 590 homicides in Detroit in that one year, 1972, at which time Detroit did have the highest homicide rate in the US. A large majority of these are male, male disputes of some sort, status disputes usually, but sometimes robberies. And just as you said, witnesses

are unlikely to come forward, and the prosecutors are stretched. They don't have the resources that they would need to pursue every case. And so, they, many cases were dismissed. I mean, not even prosecuted, never by a plea bargain, something like approximately half of all mail, mail, macho, dispute, homicides, and Detroit that were solved. We're not prosecuted on the expectation that there was a plausible self-defense argument that might, you know, win with a jury. Then of the half that were prosecuted, almost all of them. Yeah, we're plea bargain down to bad slaughter and the majority of them got a conviction. It's right. It's three years might even actually ultimately pay off for guys. I tend to the view that actually killing is always overstepping the bounds of utility.

That deadly threats are very self-interested and effectual. But that actually following through on this may be for exactly this reason that guys get some social capital out of having done it. Well, hypothetically among the Yanemamo that tribes in South America, I Central, I think it's South America. Yeah. The more warlike men have a much higher reproduction rate, the ones who've killed more. Now, I don't know, obviously, it isn't necessarily the case

that that's directly translatable, but there is some utility in being a successful warrior. That's actually one of the reasons that I think that capitalism, so to speak, is underappreciated, because in a very specific sense, there are disagreeable and war-like men, and some of them are very powerful in many ways, not only physically, but intellectually and characterologically, and with great ambition. And the thing about capitalism is that it enables them

to wage war in a manner that's not deadly and to become successful that way. And to channel their intense competitive energy into something that, well, I think often is often for a social good. Now, it depends on how disagreeable the person is and how selfish they are, of course. But people like that also tend to get punished

in their cooperative interactions with other people. Yeah, I mean, I partly agree, but I also feel that they often toward the social good is a bit hopeful, I mean, to the degree that people are successful at a fairly unrestrained capitalist competition. It's usually at the expense of large numbers of people at the bottom, but it depends how unrestrained that capitalist competition is.

I was thinking of social good as in better than war. Yeah, better than war for sure. Better than war for sure. And sometimes the way you succeed is by producing goods that actually make people's lives better. No quarrel with that. So 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. And so I am very interested in inequality, because we'll recapitulate for a minute. So 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 and that was documented quite nicely in the spirit level.

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. So the first issue, someone just emailed me this a while back and 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 and have been for several years, maybe several decades, yet the homicide rate doesn't seem to be budging much. And so that I thought, well, that was interesting. Maybe there's something different about East Asian communities. They tend to have very low crime rates to begin with, like places like Japan, for example, have very low crime rates. And so I'm wondering if

what you think about that is that a reasonable criticism and how would you address it? Fair enough. Well, I don't think we can characterize orientals as less violent than oxidant. Alls are anything like that. I think history tells us otherwise that there's been a lot of severe and dangerous violence in Japan in history and in China in history. I 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, but still the point that inequality has been skyrocketing. I mean, partly there's an interesting question about time lags in effect on people, you know, how sued is an increased inequality effect going to play out as nasty into personal behavior.

And people respond to inequality as a result of their lifetime experiences. You were talking about young kids, very young children, already being predictable in the extent to which they're willing to use violent tactics against other people and that assaying three and four year olds could give you some surprisingly good prediction of how they'll behave as adults.

It's not inconceivable that the effects of inequality even are influencing people's development prenatally. And so the uterine environments that they experience as a function of inequitable environments and the stresses and fraught social comparisons and so on that happened in those environments could be influencing them at all life stages. So 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. That said, it's certainly the case that there's other things that matter.

And government controls are one. I think strong governments that monopolize the legitimate use of violence can keep a lid on violence for a long time. I would question whether they can keep a lid on it indefinitely, but they can keep a lid on it for a long time. I would question whether they can keep it lit on it indefinitely, but they could keep it lit on it for a long time. If you execute all charged burners, I presume that that would keep the incidents in birder down and not only because those people could be recid. Great. So there's an element potentially of authoritarian control. Yeah. And then the other thing that I think is particularly interesting is the time lag argument. I mean, you don't know over what period of time precisely

inequality has its pernicious effect. And maybe it's not even the span of one lifetime. Do you have any data on that that would help answer the question? I did make reference in my book, going to the competition, to one sociological study that was looking at effects of inequality on mortality generally. The notion that inequality affects mortality generally is mediated by what you were talking about about health effects. The idea that stresses of fraught social comparisons produce greater vulnerability to stress-related diseases.

And in fact, many diseases, most diseases maybe even are stress-related in their ultimate impacts on people. So there's this one sociological study by a guy named Sheg, you know, 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, but 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, agent sex and other predictors of mortality, and that there's sort of a cubial of consequences of many years of emergency of past inequality. So seven years ago was the worst, but six and eight also mattered, additively. Five years ago and nine years ago also mattered additively five years ago and nine years ago also mattered additively. Ten years ago also mattered so that how bad the inequality was in your past seems to affect

your likelihood of dying now. The effects of violence have a look dead. It's hard to figure out how you can get a decent enough data set to do that right. But I don't think it's impossible. said enough data set to do that right. But I don't think it's possible. Okay, 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. Alright, 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. And so what seems to happen is that our nervous and our nervous systems are always interested in how prepared we

should be for emergency at any given moment. And as far as I can tell there are a number of ways that we calibrate that. One is baseline levels of trait neuroticism. So that's sensitivity to anxiety and uncertainty and emotional pain. And so you seem to be born roughly speaking at your average level of neuroticism, which can very substantially between people.

It can be also adjusted at puberty. And then the environment can move you in one direction or another. So 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. Jerry Kagan has demonstrated that quite nicely. Okay, so the first estimate of how worried you should be about the future is like genetic role of the dice. Some people will be born extraordinarily worried, roughly speaking, and some people will be

born, partly worried at all. And then that can be modified by the, by the particulars of the social environment. So then the next thing that seems to me to be part of the calculation is comparison. How well are you doing compared to others? And 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 sensitive sensitivity to immediate reward, declines, and 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. And the reason for that, more anxious, and 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. And 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 dominant hierarchy to die first. And 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 dominant hierarchy and your mind settles into a more depressed and anxious state, the levels of cortisol that you produce chronically rise, and 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, and it also suppresses immunological function,

which makes you more susceptible to infectious diseases. So that seems to be approximately the process, And so it's no wonder that people are trying to flee away from the bottom of the dominant hierarchy. Does that seem reasonable? Yes, give me a give me a moment. I've got a cough and blow my nose. Okay. Hey fever season in Southern Ontario. Okay. Yeah, I wish I were a better behavioral endocratologist and do a bit more expert in some of the processes that you're talking about. But a lot of that makes sense to me. The front social comparisons, I mean, the evidence certainly is that it's more stressful to be low ranking, that high ranking. We've had a little myth that, oh, being

a very high rank puts all this burden of decision making on you, and that's terribly stressful. It makes you vulnerable to heart attack and blah, blah, blah. And the data say the opposite. The data say that's not true. The more power and status and if you like decision making authority, you have the less vulnerable seem to be distressed related diseases. So, you know, a lot of what you're saying makes makes evidence says to me that the developmental story that you're telling. I mean, I think it's right that people. I don't I don't know how important the throw of the genetic dice is. I think it's right that people, I don't know how important the throw of the genetic dice is. I think it's extremely interesting puzzle evolutionarily why there's as much heritable genetic variability in seemingly important domains as there is.

And I'm not convinced anybody has, you know, really understands what modulates how much variability there is. But 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. Makes evidence sense to me. And again, I don't know enough about the putative 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, working beneath the seeming breakdown of the system. Because it just seems to me that sort of aid our

video 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 and sub-diver the less have some utility. I wish I do a little more about that. Well, 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. Both of those things are very useful in an uncertain environment.

The detrimental consequences seem to occur as a consequence of prolonged overload, is that because your body is utilizing, imagine 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. So 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. And 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. And 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. Yeah, no, and I can't help thinking about sort of the evolutionary theories of sedicence and bodily repair that that were pioneered by Sir Peter Mediwar back in the 50s and developed more by George Williams, the idea that many, many things involve some sort of trade-off between expenditure for expenditure of energy of accumulated resources of capacity in the expense of reduced capacity to be successful later. And 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 are in them for a long time didn't historically tend to live very

long anyway. And they're being, if you like, motivated or prepared to engage at high risk activities that at least have some chance of short term payoff, which is more or less what you said, actually. Well, and you know, you talked about this, let's call it a misspegot, an 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. 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.

And 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. So, 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, and the approach systems are associated with positive emotion, and with much, and whereas the negative emotions are associated with this defensive posturing that includes preparation for emergency, and that's much more physiologically damaging. And so whether you pick up a load voluntarily or have it thrust upon you

seems to make a big difference to how heavy it is. And that's a very interesting piece of set of research studies as far as I'm concerned. It's quite fascinating that that can be the case. Yeah. Okay, so let me ask you another question. Let's get down to, we might say brass tacks here. So we can make a case that inequality destabilizes societies and and and cranks up the male or male homicide rate and the destabilization occurs because young men become more and more unpredictable and violent. And so you could make a conservative case become more and more unpredictable and violent. And 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. So, 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 and and that's what I want to talk to you about.

So, you know, we're in a situation, of course, where the top 1% of the population controls a substantial proportion of the economic resources and the top 1% of that top 1% controls the bulk of that. Now I looked into that quite deeply and that distribution is it's not a normal distribution of money, it's a perido distribution of money. But the weird thing about perido 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 zero and 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. So like monopoly, everybody starts in the middle but then random trading produces an eventual Pareto shape distribution where lots of people start to stack up on the loser side. One person accelerates towards victory until finally everyone's at zero except

one person. So it's the logical outcome of random trading game. So that's the first thing that's interesting about the Pareto distribution. The 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. So for example, we did an analysis of the creative achievement across the lifespan using an instrument called the creative achievement questionaren. So what it did was assess people's levels of competence

across 13 potential domains of creative activity. And so we were looking at production rather than creative thinking per se, right? Although those two things are related and quite tightly. We wanted to know who actually accomplished things in the world. And so for musical ability, for example, the zero score would be, I have no trading or talent in this area. And the maximum score would be you know my my Comp my original compositions have been played for international audiences and so we've now administered that to

Hunt to hundreds of people and the median score is zero across all 13 domains. It's a very very precise pre-dote distribution with a few people who are the outliers producing the overwhelming majority of the goods. And you also, and that there's also a law that Dissola Price came up with back in the 1960s governing the output of scientific papers. And 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. So that's not so bad if there's 10 researchers because then three of them are producing half the papers, but if there's a thousand researchers operating in a domain then 30 of them are

producing half the papers. Okay, so and then one more complication and then I'm going to let you have out this. So, I've been looking for, now you can think that the pre-dodestribution, which by the way characterizes the distribution of wealth in every known society, although the degree to which the distribution is skewed differs. You can say that the pre-dodestribution is a consequence of the final playing out of a random trading game. But then here's the complication. This is something that's been bothering me for years. There are predictors of long-term life success in relatively stable societies. And the best predictors are in this order. The first predictor is IQ. The second predictor is trait

conscientiousness and it's about half as powerful as IQ. And the third predictor is low neuroticism and it's about half as powerful as conscientiousness. So if you get a good measure of IQ and a good measure of conscientiousness, then you can predict about 25% of the variance in performance, especially across managerial administrative and academic domains. And then with regards to entrepreneurial performance, you can use IQ and trade openness, which

is the creativity measure. So there are powerful individual differences that are driving differential performance and also driving this pre-dodistribution. And so it's not merely a random game, although how these people manage to make it into not a random game is beyond me. But there is evidence that our society does hierarchically arrange itself, at least to some degree, by ability and competence.

And so then the question is, how do you factor that into the equation when you're thinking about practical, let's call them income, I don't think it's so much income redistribution is that it's an attempt by society to stop too many people from stacking up at zero and therefore logically turning to violence and that sort of thing as an alternative. Well as well as an attempt to just improve the level of justice in society, the idea, you know, I mean, especially if there's an element, a strong element of redness and who ends up where, then there's something unjust about large numbers being stuck out of the zero. But, you know, you say, how is it possible to redistribute? But countries vary in the extent to which they do this.

They vary in the extent to which they tax inheritance. They vary in the extent to which they tax large incomes. They vary in the extent to which they provide education and health care, try and provide relatively universally, try to make opportunity, relatively universal, they vary in these things. And you know, some of the happiest countries in the world, and I think the most productive countries in the world, Middornet countries, Japan have been relatively equitable because they rig this game more than some other countries if you like.

So, you know, you say that what stacks up at the top tend to be the most competent creative people and to employ you into some degree we have a meritocracy. And to some degree we do have a meritocracy. But, you know, the four wall-mowered airs have as much wealth as the hundred million poorest Americans put together and They did nothing to earn it You could say well there

High quality people because they got half their genes from Sam Walton and he did something to earn it That seems like a pretty weak argument for why they should Control that much wealth if if inheritance were more for why they should control that much well. If inheritance were more severely taxed in order to provide public goods for everybody, would the society be worse off? Would flattening out that curve of accomplishment actually reduce productivity?

I think there's some evidence, I wish I could pull it to the forefront of my mind, about the utility of distributing grant money more or less equitably in certain sciences. The amount of science you get for your buck is better when you give lots of lots of people relatively small grants that we give small number of people relatively large grants. Yeah, well that's interesting because I've worked in the grant system in the US and Canada. And the grant system in the US is more of the give a few people a huge amount of money for a variety. And in candidates distributed more equitably. And I must say that I vastly prefer the Canadian system now. I agree with you. And I think the Canadian system has been moving regrettably

in the direction of the American. I mean, it partly depends on the field of science, of course. If you need a bloody haydron collider, then you need millions, millions of dollars. If you're a psychologist like you or me, things seem to work better in many ways when you fund a higher proportion of grants with lower variants in the, in the, yeah, awarded.

When I first came to McMaster, there was exactly, oh no, I shouldn't say what I first came by, by say, say the late 80s, and early 90s. Essentially, everybody in the department had a research graph for me, they're an NSERC that natural sciences and engineering research council of Canada are sure the social sciences and humanities research council of Canada are sure the social sciences and humanities research council of Canada, usually the former in our particular department. Everybody in the department had an active research lab. Everybody created the opportunity for two or three students

to do a bachelor's thesis in their lab each year. Then what things get more valuable, and people start people who are being productive, who are getting on a scientific paper or two, doing decent work, making a contribution to knowledge. When they start being denied these grants, you know, you refuse two or three times in the competition and say, well, hell with it, you know, I mean, I've got tenure, I've got a good pension lined up, I think I'll become a real estate speculator, the opportunities for the dissemination of research opportunity

to a larger number of students, shrink, I think it's been a disaster in certain areas. And you know, in area where I was raised, Admiral Behavior Studies, if you just look at either the number of papers and top-ranked journals by country according to how they allocate their funds or how much money is allocated to it, the money allocated to it is the less strong predictability you'd expect and the equitability is a stronger predictor. Sweet Canada used to last time I looked both rank far above the United States in numbers of papers per capita getting into top quality research journals in animal behavior.

You know, it's one little anecdote away, but I would be very surprised if there is some generality to this photo. Well, I wonder, though, to play devil's advocate, the thing about distributing research funds more equitably is that you are distributing them among a population that's already been extraordinarily highly selected for capability. And so it seems counter productive because it's for all the flaws of the university system, which are manifold, it is still extraordinarily difficult to become a professor. It's a it's a multi-tiered selection system. And so the people who do become professors are on average

very intelligent and on average very hard working. And we know that because we know what the predictors are of success in academia and its intelligence and conscientiousness unsurprisingly, although creativity seems to play almost zero role. Well, the thing, yeah, but that's partly because science is an algorithmic game, right? And just beadling away at it, busily, is a very, very powerful mechanism. So I'm not the least bit cynical about that. I mean, the reason that science works is because it's in some sense, it has the aspect of

factory production. It can be distributed. Anyone can learn to do it, and you get a long ways by nibbling at the edges. It's continual slow progress when millions of people are doing it is progress that's plenty rapid. So, okay, so there are definitely situations in which denying people resources seems to be completely counterproductive, and that would be one of them. So now the other question is I would say, and also that's the thing. There's also an effective means of funneling resources

to let's say a wide range of professors. It actually works. One of the problems with general income redistribution is as far as I can tell is that we don't really know how to do it very well. And one of the, I mean, look, here's an example. You can tell me what you think about this. So I used to work, I used to live in Northern Alberta

when the oil, sporadic oil boobs were going on. And my observation was that if you wanted to make money in Alberta when an oil boom was going on, you didn't go out and work on the rigs. Although if you did that, you could make a tremendous amount of money. Now, it was all a young man who did that, pretty much say, between the ages of 16 and 25, something like that. And they were making fantastic amounts of money, but they,

I've averaged almost all of them, came out of it with nothing to show for it, because they would work for two weeks and then go into town and just have a blowout party for four days and spend everything they got and high-expensive cars and wreck them and so forth. So it was reckless behavior. That I think was akin in some sense to that to the steep dominance hierarchy violence and that sort of thing that for status-seeking that you're describing. The people who really made money were the bartenders, right? Because they absorbed all the excess profits and actually generally speaking or comparatively speaking, were able to utilize the money properly. Now, the point I'm making is that an oil boom

is a very effective way of distributing wealth down the economic ladder. But it didn't necessarily seem to me to be a very effective one of distributing wealth down the economic ladder. But it didn't necessarily seem to me to be a very effective one, because the money flowed back up to the top 1%, damn near as fast as you can shovel it downwards. And that's the thing about that damn perito distribution, is that it seems there are people.

There's a group. There's a scientific subfield called Econophysicists, and they actually, they actually modeled the distribution of money in an economy using the same equations that modeled the distribution of a gas into a vacuum. So there's something that's natural law like about this, that the economist called the Matthew Principle, right?

To those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. And I don't think that we've done a good job of grappling with the actual complexity of this. And we tend to split up into politically opposed, what would you call camps and argue about the solution to inequality. And the left wing solution is something like, you know, distribute the money, take it from the rich, especially they are deserving rich if you can identify them and give it to the poor. And the conservatives say, well, no, the poor should, the poor should

bootstrap themselves up and maybe be provided with more opportunity and that might equalize things. But it isn't clear to me that we're actually grappling with the magnitude of the problem. No, it isn't clear to me either, but what you say about equalizing opportunity, for example, is an Assense, he disturbed the resources because one way we equalize opportunity is by having universal high quality health care that's paid for by sub-sort of government revenues, sub-taxes picked up somewhere. Free education, universal access to education is certainly another.

It's another way that in effect, you create a more egalitarian society. So I mean, there are certain domains, certainly education and healthcare, maybe some others that are not spring to mind. Well, I suppose the improvement of various sorts of infrastructure that make it easier to get from point A to point B. Yeah, so that's that. Publicly subsidized trends, things like that, conservative contributors as well. Now, that's

equalizing it itself, right. You know, taking it, giving it specifically to anybody else. Then there's things like a guarantee minimum income. At first, it sounds like a crazy idea. The idea that you should just, we should take government accrued resources, which come from some sort of taxation, and we should just make sure everybody has 15,000 bucks a year to start or something like that. It sounds kind of wacky because they standard argument against it from the right has been that it well underbited incentives and nobody will

produce bugger all if you know if we could all be welfare. Right. But what would be welfare queens mostly? And where this stuff has been tried by understanding is that it's been surprisingly successful that there was an experiment in meditova where a middle of income was tried for a while where and gosh yeah I remember that I know what I think Finland wrote to try it. Finland's about to try it. Meditova has tried it. It was an NDP government I think which then when replaced by conservative or nominally liberal government, then sort of canned the results, but the results came to light later and showed that, for example, the number of people who chose not to work did not go up under this,

and that it had various beneficial effects. I think it rebates to be seen, but I think even the idea of putting money in the hands of everybody from the great collective wealth that has accumulated could be socially beneficial, could be economically beneficial, could be environmentally beneficial. like education and healthcare, that's in effect a kind of redistribution that seems easy to effectuate. I mean, easy, not easy to effectuate in terms of convincing people politically or over-cubbing the propaganda against it, but we don't have a whole bunch of, obviously, a whole bunch of our wealth is embodied in the infrastructure. I really noticed this for example when I lived in Montreal because Montreal is a great city and one of the things that distinguishes Montreal from most cities that I've lived in, especially western cities, is that people live in the city, they don't live in their houses.

And the fact that the city is extraordinarily livable, so you can walk everywhere. There's always something to do that's exciting. There's a tremendously active street life means that there's access to infrastructure and social capital related wealth just distributed everywhere. And that's a lovely thing. So, because I'm kind of looking for solutions to the pre-do distribution problem that conservatives

and liberals alike could agree upon. And so, some of those you outlined improve the infrastructure of our society because those are public goods that benefit everyone, that also improve productivity. It seems to be no downside to that at all. Also raises employment, improve the quality of education right from day one, which is something that I think we do a very bad job of. And then the issue with healthcare, it's my understanding that the Canadian healthcare system

for it and it has flaws, because it's of course dealing with an impossible problem. Still, it uses much less of its capital on maintaining itself and, for example, having to maintain an infrastructure that collects money. I know that the hospitals in the U.S. spend something, some substantial proportion of the revenue. I can't remember precisely, but it's between 17 and 30%. If I remember correctly,

just gathering the money for their services, which seems to be a rather counterproductive use of the resources. And I wonder how much has spent on billboards advertising their hospitals too. If you drive the interstate highways of the US, it's astonishing how much information about, you know, come to such and such, where we have the best cancer, doctors, et cetera.

And it isn't, well, and Americans pay a lot for their health care. They do indeed. They do indeed. I spent three years there recently, and we paid a lot for health care coverage that turned out not in fact to be all that thorough a coverage Right, well when I lived in the States, too, and I had decent coverage of I was teaching in Boston there I had a pretty good program, but it wasn't I wouldn't say it was manifestly different from my Canadian experience Which has been mixed, but of course?

It is very important to note that mixed, but of course it is very important to note that making people healthy is impossible because everybody gets sick and ages and dies and so it's an impossible task and it also indicates to me that that's perhaps one of the reasons why it doesn't fit so nicely into a free market model because the free market assumes that there's not infinite demand for something and there is actually near infinite demand for healthcare, especially if you're dying. There's that and there's also just, you know, it's an impossible problem because of an aging population, it's an impossible problem because, you know, governments have one of the determinants of the costs of the healthcare system is how many MDs you've got out there, billing it. And governments have a tendency to un-re-spod to this by restricting the number of pneumatics.

So as to restrict the number of people billing, but this is not much of a solution when you have large numbers of people trying to find a family doctor unsuccessfully. Okay, so there is some merit to crowd and structure to our society in so far as IQ, conscientiousness and openness predict long-term life success. And that's a good thing because that's an indicator of health in the society.

I would say it's, if your society is set up to allow people who are intelligent and conscientious nearer the pinnacles of power structures. That's a good thing for everyone. Now, you could still have an argument about how steep that gradient should be. But then, with regards to the guaranteed annual income issue, I'm also concerned that the importance

of individual differences there are not being considered. So for example, I don't know what people who are extremely low in conscientiousness would do with an annual income. Because they're not inclined to work and it isn't obvious to me that providing them with an easy way out is the answer because providing unconscious people with an easy way out seems to be actually quite counterproductive. And conscientiousness is, you know, it's a decent predictor of long-term success.

And we also don't know to what degree necessity is a motivator, which is, of course, the conservative argument. So, and we also don't know how homogenous and small a society has to be before income redistribution programs will actually be successful. It seems easier to implement them in relatively homogenous societies like the Scandinavian countries or Japan, which is where they tend to have been implemented with more success. So that's a complicated phenomenon as well.

And then the other thing that's really going to come up on as hard in the next 10 years, I would say, this is how it looks to me, is that I think computational devices are a multiplier of intelligence and conscientiousness. Because if you're smart and you know how to use a computer and you're diligent, so as a conscientious person would be, then you're much more deadly than you would be without your computer, because it multiplies you. And there's a huge difference between someone who really knows how to use a computer, including

knowing how to program it, and someone who's, you know, literate enough to use their iPad to do a Google search. And so I think one of the things that's also driving inequality, particularly in societies like the United States, is that increasingly people who are smart and conscientious can do a tremendous amount of work without having to hire anyone. So we have these tiny companies that employ almost no one that gather massive resources to themselves. And that's going to be a problem.

Well, here's a good example. Here's one thing that's coming. So you know, the Tesla guys are working pretty hard on autonomous vehicles. And they're making a lot of progress, and they're not the only ones, obviously. But, you know, the biggest employer for males in North America is as driver. I didn't know that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the biggest single employment category. So, you know, we're increasingly eradicating the possibility for people who are on the lower end of the intelligence distribution and the lower end of the conscientiousness distribution to find a place in society. And it's possible that providing them with minimal resources to survive might be sufficient to solve that problem. But I doubt it because as they say, you know, man does not live on bread alone.

And it seems to me that people need, that quest, the degree to which people need to find a productive and credible place in a functional society is something that we haven't yet. We don't know the parameters of that. No, no, I don't disagree. I mean, the, of course, the loss of decently paying work and to date the major computer revolution,

to some extent, or at least the, you know, modern electronic device and your phone could do everything revolution. And, you know, I live in Hamilton, Ontario, where, where formerly a lunch bucket held within an enormous number of people working in decently paid working class jobs and those jobs that are evaporating. And if drivers evaporate, I mean, work is going to change.. Work is going to change. Work opportunities are going to change. And I take your point that people need something

that they can think of as useful work. Useful work, it's interesting. We're talking, we're two males talking about this and we're probably thinking from a somewhat male perspective. There's a lot of useful work that is minimally or not at all compensated that have been predominantly female domains, daycare kinds of things, various so-called charitable activities and so on. And, you know, the idea that people need something to occupy their time with that feels worthwhile, that enters them into a social arena where they engage with other

people that they come home satisfied that they've done something useful and they also have a chicken at every pot besides. I mean, if work opportunities shrink and if the next Mark Zuckerberg can employ a hundred people to pull in tens of billions of dollars, then where's that going to come from? It may come from various sorts of unpaid work with a guaranteed income that, you know, enables that work to be unpaid and still be fulfilling. I don't know. I don't know. Well, that's a good thing to think about.

I mean, maybe people will learn how to go out into the community and spontaneously do useful things. Although I can tell you that my experience trying to find gainful, let's call it, volunteer employments for people who are on the lower end of the ability distribution has been absolutely, it's difficult beyond imagination, because it turns out that finding a volunteer position is actually no less difficult than finding a job. For example, you have to go through a relatively complicated

process of police screening for most jobs. And you have to produce a resume and you have to be able to work in an office environment. And you need to have all the abilities that you would have if you were actually having a real job. And so that makes things complicated as well. So yeah, I wanna come back also to what you were saying about the predictive power of IQ and Couchy Edginess, which I don't dispute. And I'm also not one of these people

who suffers under the delusion that these things are totally open quotes, socially determined quotes, I mean, I understand and believe that they have high heritability and identifiable genetic sources in that variability and so on. But, you know, the standard old joke used to be, you can tell me because you know more about personality psychology than I do, the standard old joke used to be that everything's 50% heritable. That pretty much anything that you can measure as a trait that has any stability within

the lifetime also turns out to have a heritability somewhere to your point five. But there's the other point five. You know, some people have low IQs because they were exposed to too much land in the city. I believe that conscientiousness can probably be, like I believe you suggested earlier, that we know something about this already about developmental determinants of shifts in conscientiousness. And so, we have to caution ourselves against talking about these individual difference factors, as if they are a beautiful attributes of individuals that are going to undermine any sort of progressive improvement of status for people are going to create bad by products of attempts to produce social justice. It's just going to leave your, you're gonna leave your dumb

unconscious, just people out there being parasites or something. Well, you know, there is, of course, decent evidence that there are sociocultural effects on IQ. I mean, the Flynn effect, which is named after the man who described the phenomena indicates that the average IQ has been increasing quite substantially over the last 100 years. And the reason for that, no one knows for sure. But one of the punitive reasons for that

is that we've lifted the bottom out of catastrophe. So there aren't people whose IQs are stunted by exposure to zero information during critical developmental periods and who didn't get enough to eat. Yeah, I was going to say, it's your very well-dutrition, everybody's your information, yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we've wiped out, in many ways, we've wiped out the worst effects of privation, and that's increasingly true as well on the worldwide scale, worldwide stage. You know, there's about 150,000 people a day right now being lifted out of absolute poverty by

UN standards, the fastest improvement in the history of the world by a huge margin, and also about 300,000 people a day being hooked up to the electrical grid. So we are making some progress removing the absolute privation problem, which is a no-through-view problem. The problem with most of the attempts to raise IQ is that they don't change the variance in IQ. They tend to raise the average IQ across the population and that leaves the inequality, IQ inequality problem, basically untouched. So there have been studies trying to estimate how much socioeconomic pressure, let's say you have to place on an individual to raise their IQ, lowering it's easy, right?

Because making something worse is always easier than making something better. But if I remember correctly, if you take an identical twin who's adopted out at birth, in order to produce a 15 point increase in IQ compared to the other twin, which is a one standard deviation increase, and about the same as the average difference between a university student in an average state college and an average high school student, you have to move the one twin from the fifth percentile of socioeconomic status to the 95th percentile.

So you need about a three standard deviation improvement in socioeconomic conditions to produce a one standard deviation improvement, IQ. So it looks like it can be done, but it's expensive. I see what you're saying. I'm kind of surprised, actually. I mean, given we just mentioned malnutrition as one possible source of low IQ, one possible developmental

source, I'm kind of surprised that to the degree that the fluid effect might be due to things like a reduction of the number of people exposed to severe malnutrition, that it wouldn't have also simultaneously truncated the variance a little bit. That seems slightly... Well, it has truncated. It has truncated the variance. Although the data on that isn't clear, isn't as clear. But I do believe that it's a reasonable inference to make that the variance has been truncated. It's also hidden to some degree because the IQ tests are always renormed

to keep the variance out of standard 15 points. So it makes it difficult to look retrospectively and see what's happened to the variance. So, but the other problem too is that, you know, you get these stories now and then about these companies that come out with claims that their brain exercises can improve IQ and the literature on that is damn dismal. I can tell you it's that the holy grail is to produce cognitive exercises that produce a legitimate

impact on fluid intelligence and and like there has been a lot of work done on that and the answer so far is that it doesn't work. So what about the what about the video gaming? I mean, I know there has been the suggestion that playing video games actually improves at least some aspects of intelligence. Yeah, well, there's a couple of studies that indicated that video games might improve spatial intelligence, but here's the problem. And I think this is a critical problem, perhaps an insoluble one, at least no one solved it, is that what you get is that if you exercise yourself substantially on a given game, you can radically accelerate your performance in the game. So you can get much better at those specific skills, but you don't get generalization across cognitive

sets, which is what you're really hoping for. Yeah, I thought that was the claim from some of this. Yeah, well, they have shown some increases in spatial IQ, but there's not very many studies. And I would say they're far overbalanced by the other side of the research equation which continually says, and I've looked at this because I'm really interested in the improvement of IQ. I mean, that's the holy grail in some sense. And the overwhelming preponderance of evidence suggests that you don't get

generalization outside the narrow domain. Now why that is, and even this, it's even worse, say, because you might say, well, imagine that you could take five different domains of intelligence, still associated tightly with G, and you had people practice routines in all five dimensions. Maybe you'd get generalization under those circumstances, and the results of the research attempting that indicate that, no, as soon as you move away from those specific practice instances, you don't get generalization. So, I guess it's some ways, some of this is to be expected from the consideration that everything

is an allocation problem within the body and brain, that by a large, an improvement one domain tends to be bought at the expense of something else. You know, you, you just that. Right. And then conscientiousness, I can tell you some yeah, just that. Right. And then conscientiousness, I can tell you some research we've done. That's cool. Although we haven't been able to demonstrate that it's actually improved conscientiousness. The first thing to note about conscientiousness is that no one understands it at all.

Especially the industriousness element, there's no plausible biological, psychological, neurophysiological, or animal models for conscientiousness. All we've got is self-reports. We can't even find tasks that conscientious people do better. It's unbelievable. But self-reports really only? Well, you can get reports from teachers and parents and so forth, but it's all human report.

Okay. We can measure it. And in my lab, we probably tried 200 tasks trying to find something that conscientious people do better. No luck. We can derive it from linguistic analysis of verbal output now to some degree, but that's still not a task, you know. Yeah, yeah.

So, now we produced a series of programs called the Self-Authoring Suite and one of them, the future authoring program, it's a writing program that helps people lay out their plans for the future in detail. So they have to consider their intimate relationships, their career goals, their educational goals, their use of time outside work, their plans to maintain mental and physical health, their use of drugs and alcohol. They have to write for 15 minutes about what kind of life they'd like to have if they were taking care of themselves three to five years in the future, and then to write for the same amount of time about how terrible their life could be if all their bad habits took control. And then they have to turn the positive vision into

an implementable plan. We've managed to improve their college grades by about 20% and drop out their drop their drop out rate by about 25% over about 10,000 students now. But you know, we tried to see if that was mediated by an improvement in conscientiousness and there was no evidence for that. What it was mediated by was number of words written during the exercise. So it turns out that thinking more about your future helps, the more you think about it, the more it helps. And maybe that, you know, maybe that would translate into an improvement in conscientiousness across time, but there haven't been any credible studies that I know of indicating that there are exercises that can be done to improve conscientiousness. So that's also troublesome and worrisome because that would be a nice thing to be able

to do. Yeah, I haven't thought much about it. I don't know much about the literature on conscientiousness as a trait. But the word seems to connot to me as an ordinary English speaker, has a strong social element to it as well. It's kind of like a kachi at just person is somebody who doesn't forget his obligations. Your index of kachi at justness at the university professor is, you know, somebody has asked you to write them a reference letter, forget to get to graduate school or whatever, to

actually prioritize and get the damn thing done on timers. There's some risk that you'll just forget about it and shove it to them somewhere else. graduate school or whatever, do you actually prioritize and get the damn thing done on timers? There's some risk that you'll just forget about it and shove it to somewhere else. I imagine conscientiousness is having a strong element of attentiveness to social obligation and to the well-being of others. As it is defined in the personality literature, does it have any of that? Well, I would say not so much attention to the well-being of others, because that's more trait agreeab, because that's more

trait agreeableness. Okay. That's more the maternal dimension, but there's definitely a massive effect of social obligation, which is part of the reason why conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness than liberals, but it's not well-being of others. It's duty. And so the conscientious types may form and maintain social contracts. Yes.

They implement their plans. Yeah. And they seem to feel shame and self-contempt when they fail to live up to their social obligations. And so that's another thing that's interesting about the income redistribution idea, because it's conceivable to me that conscientious people would hate that, because conscientious people do very badly, for example, if they're laid off from work,

even if it's not their fault, they still take themselves apart for their failure. So, and so conscientious people in particular seem to find inactivity without productivity, highly aversive. And aversive enough to really cause them, you know, major health problems. So, well, yeah, that brings us back to what we were discussing a little while ago, the problem of ensuring that large numbers of people have access to meaningful work in an age of which it is more and more the case that big components of the economy are booming away with very few employees. And that's going to continue. That's probably going to escalate or back to that same topic to some extent. Yes, well, I mean, and again, I mean, I think, I think any quality of opportunity is sort of the

bond of our bedrock of any quality, having its impacts upon us. And it's certainly the bond of a bedrock of why we should care about it on moral and social justice grounds. It's like, well, why should people who, why should one's birthright affect the opportunity is available to what? Well, it's also a social catastrophe because hypothetically, you want to set up a society so that whatever someone has to offer is maximally offerable to the community because otherwise the community loses.

That seems to be, I mean, I think one of the great examples of that, although I don't think this accounts for all of it, is that the relationship between the provision of women's rights by countries and their economic productivity is staggeringly high. So I think that also has to do with openness in general to transformation and change with the provision of women's rights being an index of that, but nonetheless, it's a great predictor of eventual economic success. Well, partly an index and perhaps a more direct effect that after all slightly over half the population maybe their talents are better utilized.

Right, well that's certainly what we would hope and I think as you said I think the evidence at least suggests that. So okay, so let me recapitulate because we should probably fold this up. Okay, so let me recapitulate because we should probably fold this up. And so as far as I'm concerned, your work was revolutionary because it undermined the general proposition that the fundamental cause of climate, violent crime in particular was poverty. Instead, you flipped it on edge, so to speak, and made the claim well substantiated by the research that it's relative poverty that drives violent crime because of status seeking,

primarily among young men. And although there are effects of absolute privation, and that would be the poverty effect, the effects of relative deprivation of status are much more, let's say, especially in our societies, much more socially significant. Yes. And that the status competition itself is driven at least in part by the desire of men

to attain status, to obtain access to women, roughly speaking. And it's partly because women outsource the problem of mate selection to the male competition domain. So the males compete, the women peel off the top. It's like a market solution in some sense. And then having pointed out that inequality not only drives male homicide, but also tends to destabilize societies, there is an impetus for people to consider how we can stop

the winner from taking all without becoming unduly authoritarian about it or impeding individual productivity, given the fact that there is individual variation in the elements that actually produce productivity. That's our set of social problems exacerbated by the fact that we're going to be wiping out employment for huge categories, particularly of men over the next 15 years.

Yeah, let me, in this context, just make a point that I spent most of a chapter on my book, and that is that the notion that inequality is somehow the engine of productivity has been pretty much rejected by economists themselves in recent years. I've kept the conclusion that relatively equitable places actually have more economic productivity in the ensuing period of time than those that start out more inequitable. And there's a lot of reasons for that. The one that I think is most striking

to you that I would commend people to look into is the concept of useless, if you like, or wasteful expenditure on guard labor, and relatively unequal societies. And guard labor is a term coined by economists, sand bowls, and Arjun Jayadev. And what they've shown is that the number of people who are employed in just jobs like being security guards goes up as inequality goes up. It's no great surprise when you think about it, but you can define guard labor more broadly or more narrowly. And the general result is that a large proportion of people are engaged to work that is in a sense non-productive. It's just trying to prevent people from usurping the property of other people. And that this is a very wasteful consequence of extreme inequality and an economic waste

that's reduced to relatively equitable societies. And there are others. Right. So as the society becomes more unequal. It tilts towards authoritarianism at multiple levels of organization. It's also counter. Yeah, sorry. I was just gonna say, add towards exactly. And it's counterproductive even from the point of view

of simple economic criteria, GDP and so on. That inequality gets the way that for a bunch of reasons. Another really interesting one that Bowles has articulated in a recent book, Bowles B-O-W-L-E-S-S, Bowles of People on the Lookup, I think this book was called The New Politics, some inequality of redistribution, and I liked it a lot. Anyway, one thing that he's shown that I thought was very

interesting and never entered my head before I read him was that the actual quality of goods in a society can be damaged by severity quality when rich individuals and rich firms have the capacity to keep innovators and small companies from establishing themselves. You mentioned before about the differences in entrepreneurial undertakings. And where large numbers of people with worthy small business plans can't capitalize them properly and can't get off the ground, you've actually got the phenomenon of people with lots of wealth and shoddy products can drive people with better quality products. We're trying to get started at the bottom out of the barcap with negative

results for just the consumers. Right. Well, that's the problem with having people stack up at zero. Zero turns out to be a very, very difficult place to get out of because you can't leverage yourself out of it. And it's also in those really unequal societies too, like Central American societies, it's also becomes increasingly unpleasant for the people who are wealthy because they're only wealthy in a very narrowly defined way because they can't go outside. They can't let their children go out into public because they'll get kidnapped.

I mean, the societies get pretty ugly when the fences have to be really high. And so yeah, so the rich countries of the world, those problems are not absent. I mean they're certainly worse than the US than they are in Canada or most of Western Europe. Yeah. Well, all right. That was really good. I'm very happy that you agreed to do a podcast with me. And I mean, I found your work. Well, I definitely regard you as one of the people who's been highly influential on my thinking.

I mean, I think that work on relative poverty is just. And the effect size is the work you guys did in Chicago. Your work on indicating the adaptive utility of uncertainty related, dominous challenges in unequal societies, all of that's brilliant, I think, and nicely biologically predicated, and the science has done extremely soundly,

and it has remarkable policy implications, and it changes the view around crime and and and wealth and in a very important way to tilt it over towards the inequality side I think it's and it fits so nicely and with the dominance hierarchy literature and all of that it's it's really profound stuff as far as I'm concerned so I'm really glad you have the chance to share it with everyone. Thank you very much I appreciate those kind words. You can flatter you, we'll get you everywhere. Yeah, well, the thing is the best kind of flattery is truth. So, and I would certainly recommend that people take a look at your book if they're

interested in what we've been discussing. Again, that's killing the competition, which is, it's very readable. I would say it provides a lovely argument with regards to inequality. Addresses the major criticisms, I think, very effectively, and starts to lay out what is going to be an increasingly necessary public discussion about how civilized societies can ensure that they don't collapse into two extreme distribution, into two extreme distributions of wealth or other resources. It's a real danger. It's a conscious constant danger. It needs to be thought through and addressed very intelligently. So thanks again, hopefully.

Maybe we'll get another chance to talk. Hopefully a couple of hundred thousand people will watch this. That would be good. That would be great. Thanks a lot. You bet. Exciting off good. That would be great. Thanks a lot. You bet. Are you signing off? You signed an off.

Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye, though. Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at self-authoring.com. Thank you. you