Reciprocity and size

Danny Finkelstein says the Tories "should design institutions that encourage reciprocal altruism." But how feasible is this? I fear there are at least  three barriers:
1. Britain's too big. One measure of fellow feeling is income equality. People who have more reciprocal altruism are likely to want greater equality. And this tends to be found in smaller countries than big ones; compare Scandinavia to the US, Brazil, China, Russia. 
Of course, equality is but one measure of reciprocal altruism. But others are also correlated with country size. People in small countries are more likely to trust (pdf) each other, for example.
2. Ethnic diversity. It's a shameful fact that the desire to help others - at least by paying more tax - is greater in more ethnically homogenous countries.
I suspect there's a simple reason for both these points. In large diverse societies people are more likely to regard likely objects of altruism as "others", and this increases the fear that one will be taken for a ride.
A story in Choosing Justice, a sadly neglected book by Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer shows this. They ran some laboratory experiments to discover what sort of redistribution people wanted from productive to less productive workers. In one experiment, a worker who had done well in one round of tasks stopped working in the second round in protest at having to subsidize a less productive team-mate. But when he saw that his colleague was genuinely trying, but was just not good at the task in hand, he began working frantically to make up.
The message is that reciprical altruism works better when we trust others not to rip us off. And sadly this is more likely in smaller homogenous nations. 
3. Hierarchy. This paper (pdf) found that trust in others - the basis for reciprocal altruism - is   much lower in countries which have been dominated by hierarchical religions. This suggests that hierarchy can break down the horizontal networks of cooperation that generate trust.
Insofar as civic conservatism stands against statism, it recognizes this fact. But the state isn't the only source of hierarchy. Are the Tories really ready to attack hierarchy in general? And if they are, isn't it to this government's shame that the Tories can credibly appear to its left?

Comments

[Mike Woodhouse]

1. If Britain (that's the island, isn't it? Don't we mean the UK?) is too big, let's make it smaller. Full autonomy for Scotland, Wales and NI, independence for Cornwall and Yorkshire (worked for Kosovo, so why not?) and other geographic regions to taste. That should improve homogeneity.

3. I can't believe that the Tories (the party of the bosses, shurely?) are anti-hierarchy, although I'd probably vote for them if it could be shown to be true.

[bob]

"Ethnic diversity. It's a shameful fact that the desire to help others ... is greater in more ethnically homogenous countries. "

Altruism is close to a monotonically increasing function of the % of genes that are shared between any two organisms so if you think that it's a shame then take it up with mother nature.
I presume that you don't think it a shame that you love your children more than you love other children in your neighborhood.

[john b]

Altruism is close to a monotonically increasing function of the % of genes that are shared between any two organisms so if you think that it's a shame then take it up with mother nature.

Aye, but skin colour is a *really really rubbish* proxy for the amount of genes that person X has in common with person Y, given the levels of variation found within the population of people from a particular ethnic group.

[john b]

[damn HTML-stripping blog. First para should obviously be blockquoted]

[bob]

"Aye, but skin colour is a *really really rubbish* proxy for the amount of genes that person X has in common with person Y"

It's a hint .... and a better one than many others

[john b]

A better one would be to assume all that people, aside from known relatives, will share roughly the same amount of genes with you as each other. The predictive power of the two strategies is so close as to be indistinguishable, but one involves acting like a despicable c*** and the other one doesn't.

[there's a suggestion that being a bit racist made some sense in the past, because in a close-knit society where everyone's related - think Norfolk - black skin is a genuinely useful indicator that someone's Not From Round Here. But assuming you don't live in Deliverance, it really makes no difference - it's one of those evolutionary traits that we'd do well to transcend, and that most of us are able to transcend most of the time - like murdering the men in the next village and raping the women.]

[ajay]

Quite. Variation between races is dwarfed by variation within races. The analogy I always like to use is two train carriages. Probably the people in one carriage will have a slightly greater average height (or whatever) than those in the other, but the difference will be tiny compared to the height difference between different people in the same carriage.

[Dr Dan H.]

What you have to remember with any of these sorts of studies is that the behaviour you're observing is mostly innate instinctive behaviour, i.e. Mk 1 Caveman behaviour, not Modern Civic Human behaviour.

For pretty much all our evolutionary past, humans have lived in small groups and most of the gene interchange has been females moving from one group to another; if you saw a strange man in your area then he was almost certainly up to no good and would get attacked by the local men who'd all be related.

So, people would almost always judge relatedness on how much the strange person resembled people they knew; the people they knew would all be family so that measure would work well as a way of telling if you were helping your kin.

A similar thing would operate in conflicts; the men on any one side would all be related, so genetically losing a number wouldn't matter that much; their genes would live on. This explains why our military operates so effectively; it is using the kin-group defence instincts by forming artificial groups of "kin".