Gowdy & Krall (G&K) aim to provide an “economic” logic to characterize the unusual ecology of H. sapiens, but at no point do they strip away the biological features of the story to expose the economic core. So let us do that. The convergently evolved ultrasociality of humans, ants, and termites is a pattern of organization on what economists call the production side, in which individuals develop extreme and varying comparative advantages that tightly link the overall productive capacity of groups to specialization of labour. Following the classic argument of Adam Smith, such specialization allows for exponential increases in output capacity, which explains why the ultrasocial species have come to dominate their competitive spaces. Proportionately large aggregate biomass of ultrasocial species is analogous to dominant market capitalization in a firm. Domination is also reflected in radical asymmetries in the extent to which the strategic alternatives available to competitors are restricted by the presence of the dominant firm (ultrasocial species). The dominant firm or ultrasocial form of organization crowds alternatives into ever more marginal niches, or else drives them to bankruptcy (extinction), in the same way that, to invoke a standard textbook example, mass production of standardized goods tends to crowd out artisanal manufacturing.
This is a useful theoretical perspective for a variety of purposes, though it has been developed in greater detail by others. Herrmann-Pillath (Reference Herrmann-Pillath2013) has arguably explored it with the most rigour among treatments to date, though he obscures the clarity of the logic by not drawing attention, as G&K do, to the difference in economic kind between ants and their close genetic relatives, social bees and wasps, that live in large cooperative colonies but do not practice agriculture.
G&K rightly devote attention to differences among the ultrasocial species. Ants and termites specialize by evolving varying morphological forms, whereas humans do it by following, and guiding their offspring along, alternative learning paths that are culturally constructed as responses to market opportunities. But any economist is likely to be struck by the familiarity of a specific limitation in the extent to which G&K work through the implications of this difference, a limitation that recapitulates the history of economic thought after Smith.
Smith's intellectual successor Thomas Malthus (Reference Malthus1798/2008) noticed, like G&K, that agriculture led to exponential growth of human populations. Unfortunately for the sake of his own subsequent reputation, Malthus maintained this central emphasis on the causal weight of agriculture into his forecast for the future economic career of the species. Ultimately, he predicted, human populations would exceed the carrying capacity of agricultural resources that was optimal for per capita human welfare, even while maximizing productive output. Famously, Malthus neglected to consider that human technological innovation might promote increases in agricultural efficiency that would allow yields to expand faster than populations, and which would in turn liberate labour and capital for investment in expanding non-agricultural production. By almost all sensible methods of aggregate measurement, human material welfare has massively improved since Malthus's time, even as the global population has become eight times larger.
G&K's perspective is so similar to this as to deserve the label “neo-Malthusian.” When they explain how the emergence of ultrasociality has been driven by radically multilevel selection, in which the fitness of the group can compete with the fitness of individuals, they echo in modern biological terms Malthus's point that aggregate increases in production can accompany per capita welfare decline. They then reiterate Malthus's central claim that the effects of human ultrasociality will catastrophically erode the conditions necessary for the flourishing of individuals unless humans can use their cultural flexibility to fundamentally modify their economic dynamics. G&K are not very hopeful about this prospect, so they echo Malthus's generally pessimistic forecast.
It is easier to excuse Malthus, who lived at the dawn of industrialization, for ignoring the impact of technological change than to overlook this gap in G&K's reasoning. Given the unimpeachable evidence of human-caused rapid climate change and the game-theoretic barriers to the forms of collective action that might reverse it, we have good grounds for resisting anti-Malthusian complacency. But the point remains that Malthus's argument was overturned by subsequent history, and G&K's argument is ultimately just Malthus's in modern biological dress.
G&K are rightly ambivalent about the extent of the analogy between human and insect ultrasociality. Ultrasocial insects, they say, do not tend to push their ecological circumstances beyond sustainable equilibria because they cannot use technology to transcend the mutualism of monocultural farming. This may well be a valid disanalogy, but it curiously acknowledges only one side of the coin, as it were, of the importance of technological innovation to human social evolution. G&K stress that ultrasocial evolution tends to undermine the capacities of individual ants and termites, and they imply that this is also analogous to the historical pattern in humans. They thereby bury another disanalogy, this one related to the amplification of enlightenment norms that was promoted by industrialization (Phelps Reference Phelps2013). As G&K note, the transition to agriculture fostered widespread adoption of slavery in many human populations. But, initially in European and subsequently in almost all other cultures, technological modernity encouraged the emergence and eventual dominance of normative individualism (Morris Reference Morris1972; Ross Reference Ross, Sterelny, Joyce, Calcott and Fraser2013; Reference Ross2014). Modern humans are likely more individualistic, not less so, than pre-ultrasocial hunter-gatherers.
Some critics contend that this individualism, which encourages tragedies of the commons, is among the forces currently obstructing collective action to resist climate change and environmental destruction (Hamilton Reference Hamilton2010). But it is at least as plausible to predict that incentives operating at the scale of individuals will produce the technology that delivers planetary salvation (Keith Reference Keith2013); and there is strong reason indeed to think that it is the individualism of women who seek education and careers instead of serial child production that is causing global human population growth to level off. At the very least, to the extent that individualism is among the obstacles to collective environmental action, the dynamics that threaten the human future are importantly different from G&K's neo-Malthusian picture.
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Gowdy & Krall (G&K) aim to provide an “economic” logic to characterize the unusual ecology of H. sapiens, but at no point do they strip away the biological features of the story to expose the economic core. So let us do that. The convergently evolved ultrasociality of humans, ants, and termites is a pattern of organization on what economists call the production side, in which individuals develop extreme and varying comparative advantages that tightly link the overall productive capacity of groups to specialization of labour. Following the classic argument of Adam Smith, such specialization allows for exponential increases in output capacity, which explains why the ultrasocial species have come to dominate their competitive spaces. Proportionately large aggregate biomass of ultrasocial species is analogous to dominant market capitalization in a firm. Domination is also reflected in radical asymmetries in the extent to which the strategic alternatives available to competitors are restricted by the presence of the dominant firm (ultrasocial species). The dominant firm or ultrasocial form of organization crowds alternatives into ever more marginal niches, or else drives them to bankruptcy (extinction), in the same way that, to invoke a standard textbook example, mass production of standardized goods tends to crowd out artisanal manufacturing.
This is a useful theoretical perspective for a variety of purposes, though it has been developed in greater detail by others. Herrmann-Pillath (Reference Herrmann-Pillath2013) has arguably explored it with the most rigour among treatments to date, though he obscures the clarity of the logic by not drawing attention, as G&K do, to the difference in economic kind between ants and their close genetic relatives, social bees and wasps, that live in large cooperative colonies but do not practice agriculture.
G&K rightly devote attention to differences among the ultrasocial species. Ants and termites specialize by evolving varying morphological forms, whereas humans do it by following, and guiding their offspring along, alternative learning paths that are culturally constructed as responses to market opportunities. But any economist is likely to be struck by the familiarity of a specific limitation in the extent to which G&K work through the implications of this difference, a limitation that recapitulates the history of economic thought after Smith.
Smith's intellectual successor Thomas Malthus (Reference Malthus1798/2008) noticed, like G&K, that agriculture led to exponential growth of human populations. Unfortunately for the sake of his own subsequent reputation, Malthus maintained this central emphasis on the causal weight of agriculture into his forecast for the future economic career of the species. Ultimately, he predicted, human populations would exceed the carrying capacity of agricultural resources that was optimal for per capita human welfare, even while maximizing productive output. Famously, Malthus neglected to consider that human technological innovation might promote increases in agricultural efficiency that would allow yields to expand faster than populations, and which would in turn liberate labour and capital for investment in expanding non-agricultural production. By almost all sensible methods of aggregate measurement, human material welfare has massively improved since Malthus's time, even as the global population has become eight times larger.
G&K's perspective is so similar to this as to deserve the label “neo-Malthusian.” When they explain how the emergence of ultrasociality has been driven by radically multilevel selection, in which the fitness of the group can compete with the fitness of individuals, they echo in modern biological terms Malthus's point that aggregate increases in production can accompany per capita welfare decline. They then reiterate Malthus's central claim that the effects of human ultrasociality will catastrophically erode the conditions necessary for the flourishing of individuals unless humans can use their cultural flexibility to fundamentally modify their economic dynamics. G&K are not very hopeful about this prospect, so they echo Malthus's generally pessimistic forecast.
It is easier to excuse Malthus, who lived at the dawn of industrialization, for ignoring the impact of technological change than to overlook this gap in G&K's reasoning. Given the unimpeachable evidence of human-caused rapid climate change and the game-theoretic barriers to the forms of collective action that might reverse it, we have good grounds for resisting anti-Malthusian complacency. But the point remains that Malthus's argument was overturned by subsequent history, and G&K's argument is ultimately just Malthus's in modern biological dress.
G&K are rightly ambivalent about the extent of the analogy between human and insect ultrasociality. Ultrasocial insects, they say, do not tend to push their ecological circumstances beyond sustainable equilibria because they cannot use technology to transcend the mutualism of monocultural farming. This may well be a valid disanalogy, but it curiously acknowledges only one side of the coin, as it were, of the importance of technological innovation to human social evolution. G&K stress that ultrasocial evolution tends to undermine the capacities of individual ants and termites, and they imply that this is also analogous to the historical pattern in humans. They thereby bury another disanalogy, this one related to the amplification of enlightenment norms that was promoted by industrialization (Phelps Reference Phelps2013). As G&K note, the transition to agriculture fostered widespread adoption of slavery in many human populations. But, initially in European and subsequently in almost all other cultures, technological modernity encouraged the emergence and eventual dominance of normative individualism (Morris Reference Morris1972; Ross Reference Ross, Sterelny, Joyce, Calcott and Fraser2013; Reference Ross2014). Modern humans are likely more individualistic, not less so, than pre-ultrasocial hunter-gatherers.
Some critics contend that this individualism, which encourages tragedies of the commons, is among the forces currently obstructing collective action to resist climate change and environmental destruction (Hamilton Reference Hamilton2010). But it is at least as plausible to predict that incentives operating at the scale of individuals will produce the technology that delivers planetary salvation (Keith Reference Keith2013); and there is strong reason indeed to think that it is the individualism of women who seek education and careers instead of serial child production that is causing global human population growth to level off. At the very least, to the extent that individualism is among the obstacles to collective environmental action, the dynamics that threaten the human future are importantly different from G&K's neo-Malthusian picture.