Following in the footsteps of Kropotkin

Daniel Finkelstein provides some interesting commentary on David Willetts' latest efforts to put some new intellectual impetus behind British Conservatism:

For 30 years the most interesting ideas for Conservatives have come from economists. Now it is being proposed that sociobiology, game theory and social psychology power the Tory agenda. Alongside well-known thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, new names are being bandied about - Robert Axelrod, E.O.Wilson, John Nash, Ken Binmore and others.

The starting point of the argument is, ambitiously enough, the starting point of life. The sociobiologists argue that our minds and our behaviour - not just our bodies - are the products of evolution. That behaviour that made us fitter in an evolutionary sense has been selected over that which did not. This was an immensely controversial theory when first proposed, but over the past 20 years has won out over its critics.

What's new for Tories about that? Isn't this just the sort of crude winner-takes-all, dog-eat-dog, social Darwinism people associate with them? No. And that is where game theory comes into it.

Game theory uses maths and logic to analyse how people should respond to the choices of others. The most famous piece of game theory is the prisoner's dilemma. Two prisoners, separated from each other, are asked to choose between confessing and staying silent. If one confesses and his partner-in-crime stays silent, the confessor gets off scot-free, the other a ten-year sentence. If both stay silent they each get a token one-year sentence. If both confess they get nine years each.

What should they do? The maths is clear. They should both confess. But game theory introduces a twist. If the prisoner's dilemma is repeated over and over again, it can make sense to co-operate - for instance you don't betray until you are betrayed. In other words, game theory shows that co-operation is a natural and successful evolutionary strategy for individuals in circumstances where they have repeated interactions with others, or believe they might have.

This bit of maths explains observations made by biologists. Vampire bats, for instance, feed other bats with extra blood they have collected, even though those others are not related genetically. They expect the same favour in return on another day. This behaviour is known as reciprocal altruism - self-interested and interested in others at the same time.

And we know that it is hard-wired into human behaviour because of the work of social psychologists. Any number of experiments show how easily the response can be triggered. A Hare Krishna devotee presses an unwanted flower into your hand and you are more likely to donate, despite yourself.

What does all this suggest politically? That Tories should design institutions that encourage reciprocal altruism. A dry-stone wall, like the one David Willetts pointed out to David Cameron, does not have any glue or cement holding it together. It holds together because of the way it has been designed.

Similarly, the aim of Tories is not to pour social glue on civil society through public policy, and armies of new laws, nor is to enunciate some new abstract principle of justice that might be at variance with human nature. It is to help society find different kinds of equilibrium.

This new thinking justifies the Tory preference for decentralisation, favouring smaller, independent institutions in the public sector. It explains why you might want schools, say, small enough for pupils and teachers to know each other properly. And hospitals that care about their own reputation and not just the amorphous NHS ethos.

So far so good. However, we feel obliged to point out that the suggestion that co-operation may be naturally hardwired - or that altruism may be an advantage in evolutionary terms - is not altogether new. The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (who was also a geographer and zoologist) published Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution in 1902, partly as a response to Social Darwinism. The idea that co-operation may be more effective as a survival strategy than competition is hardly a standard Conservative position, and it will need to be deployed with care.

The key problem is that human beings are not vampire bats. While the bats may instinctively feed each other, it does not necessarily follow that human beings will adopt the same strategy if they are guaranteed another source of food from elsewhere. In other words, the factor which is not taken into account is the phenomenon of dependency: human beings can only be expected to support each other when external means of support are removed.

This is, essentially, what was seen before the advent of our welfare state - not only with families and communities supporting each other informally, but also with more formal institutions such as friendly societies. In the anarchist's terms, "mutual aid" can only really bear fruit when the government gets out of the way and allows the people to get on with the job.

Government waste

Stephen Pollard notes this shocker from an economically illiterate "political researcher" at University College, London:

Overseas aid charities have dismissed an academic's suggestion that donors should be able to bypass third sector groups and give money directly to the Department for International Development .

Meg Russell, a political researcher at UCL, made the suggestion in an article in Fabian Review, a left-wing think tank publication.

"I would rather trust DfID with my money," Russell wrote. "Because DfID doesn't operate in the same competitive environment, there is less danger of waste."

What, the government waste our money? Perish the thought:

Patrick Watt, policy co-ordinator at ActionAid, said the idea "didn't bear close scrutiny" and that DfID had higher administration costs than the NGOs it funds.

"When people donate to development NGOs, they're wanting us to do something different to the UK government," he said. "We are able to innovate and take risks."

Meanwhile, Peter Hoskin provides more evidence of our government's failure to make good use of public money:

On Tuesday it was tax credits. And now the Public Accounts Committee delivers a boot to another of Gordon Brown's pet projects - the New Deal. The findings should (but won't?) put pay to those claims that the UK's achieved "full employment". Some six million people now live in homes where "no-one has a job and 'benefits are a way of life'". Put another way: one-in-six households are now benefit dependent.

And then there are the pots and pots of taxpayers' cash that have been used to reach this unedifying position. Those households cost some £12.7 billion a year in public money. One New Deal scheme found jobs for only 61 people in a year, at a cost of £1,100 each.

And we won't even talk about the NHS, or local government, or state education, pen-pushing police officers, MPs "employing" their offspring to do nothing...

On the other hand, unlike some charities we could mention, at least the Department for International Development is not in the habit of posting millions of biros to people who are quite capable of buying their own. But perhaps the idea just hasn't occurred to them yet.