Saturday Morning Zombie Lie Hunt

I suppose it was inevitable that the corporatist right would eventually start trying to spin social-science research into supporting a free-markets-above-all worldview, and that right-wing pundits would further twist the outcomes. But of course it's highly dangerous to let that type of assault on reality go unchallenged lest it come to be taken as conventional wisdom - so let's take some time to point out the glaring flaws in the National Post's effort to push both yesterday.

Let's start with the article on the work of Joe Henrich. Naturally, the article itself is absolutely loaded with spin - but at base, here's what it's talking about:

The 13 researchers on Mr. Henrich's international team spent time -- and played clever psychological games -- with more than 2,000 people in 15 different societies.

One researcher trekked to Bolivia to play the games with the Tsimane people who hunt and forage for food in the rain forest. Another anthropologist introduced the games to the Hadza living in small nomadic groups on the savannah in Tanzania. At the other end of the human spectrum, the researchers studied wage earners in Accra, Ghana and Missouri, in the American Midwest.

In each of the 15 societies, they recruited volunteers to play Dictator, Ultimatum and Third-Party Punishment - games widely used by researchers to gauge people's willingness to share with strangers, and punish people who make unfair allocations.

The study found that the likelihood that people "played fair" with strangers increased with the degree people were integrated into markets and participated in a world religion. Participants in the larger-scale societies were also more likely to punish players who did not play fair.

Eliminate the obviously slanted language about markets, and there are plenty of grounds for distinction between the groups of people considered. Rather than simply consisting of "non-market" vs. "market", they can equally easily be framed as "tribal" vs. "non-tribal", which would seem to reflect reason for suspicion about the right's constant efforts to foment a war of civilizations. Or "interconnected to the broader world" vs. "not interconnected to the broader world", which would seem to fit particularly well with the findings related to "world religion". Or even as "not subject to stable democratic government which regulates social relations" vs. "subject to stable democratic government which regulates social relations", as evidence that democratic regulation is in fact the basis for good human behaviour.

Now, I'm not going to say that any one of the above is necessarily right. But the researchers look to have deliberately ignored obvious and important differences between the groups studied in order to pretend that capitalism is the fount of all that is right and good.

Naturally, that already-misleading message gets turned into such ever-less-plausible assertions as "markets have been a force for good over the last 10,000 years" and "people trust and play fair with strangers because (of) markets and religion". And all this in what's supposed to be a news report rather than a Fraser Institute polemic.

But it takes Tasha Kheiriddin to turn the study into proof of the divine wisdom of the prophet Gekko.

Keep in mind that the "market" societies studies in fact differ from the "non-market" ones in having both more capitalism as generally understood, and more government regulation. (Indeed, one could hardly imagine a type of individual more free of government interference in a true libertarian sense than somebody who has the opportunity every day to wander off and live off the land according to his or her own ability to survive.)

Notwithstanding the fact that the study as reported - even on its own biased terms - doesn't pretend to say anything about the effect of regulation on individual behaviour, Kheiriddin manages to emit this stunner:

(I)f governments act to curtail market forces, are they actually curbing our civilizing impulses as well? In other words, will a bigger welfare state take us back to our ruder, cruder nature?

Certainly, receiving a state entitlement demands less of the recipient than a voluntary transaction would. Getting a government cheque or benefit is not an exchange; it is a one-way transaction, and often faceless at that. If our sense of fair play depends on our integration into a larger commercial society, then it follows that the more we are taken care of by government, the less practice we will have with exercising these impulses.

In other words, access to health care is exactly the same as isolation in a remote rain forest with no contact with the outside world. And because of that common effect, if we just eliminate the government that makes an interconnected society possible and instead allow corporate monoliths to sell lead paint chips as children's snacks subject only to punishment in the "market", we'll all be able to better fulfill our true potential for human goodness.

Suffice it to say that anybody paying even a modicum of attention should know better than to take either the slanted research or the upside-down opinion linked to it as having anything useful to say. And the more the likes of Kheiriddin try to grasp at such broken straws in an effort to support their justification for crass me-firstism, the more obvious it should be that their beliefs don't hold up in reality.