Prelude to Chapter 8

GENERATING CLASSES WITHOUT CONQUEST

 

 

THE preceding chapter concerned norms of retirement. We turn now to norms of a different, overtly discriminatory, type. In the Classes model, initially meaningless “tags” acquire socially organizing salience: tag-based discriminatory norms arise, and persist for long periods. The Classes model illustrates once more a core theme of the Generative chapter: that simple rules of individual behavior can generate—or map up to—macroscopic regularities, in this case, class structures. Of course, social classes can arise through outright conquest and subjugation. But, it is notable that they can “self-organize” as well. Indeed, a nice title for chapter 8 would have been “Classes without Conquest.”

In some respects, this self-organizing (no conquest) model seems particularly disturbing in that a discriminatory—and, in welfare terms, suboptimal—social order emerges in a population of individuals, all of whom are behaving rationally. In this respect, the result is reminiscent of mutual defection in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma Game (discussed in the subsequent chapter).

The generativist motto, we recall from chapter 1, is “If you didn't grow it, you didn't explain it.” The distinction between existence and attainment—the focus of chapter 3—arises again here. While it has been proved analytically that the state with highest long-run (asymptotic) probability is the equity norm, we demonstrate computationally that the waiting time to transition from inequitable states to the equitable one can be astronomically long. In particular, the waiting time scales exponentially in a number of variables. In such cases, the transient, outof-equilibrium dynamics are of fundamental interest, and can be studied rigorously in the multi-agent system. The model thus illustrates a useful hybrid of analytical asymptotic equilibrium analysis and computational nonequilibrium analysis.

Finally, it is worth stating outright that we do not engage in any concerted defense of the term classes in this research, and will readily grant that scholars steeped in the vast sociological literature on that topic may justifiably bridle at our cavalier usage. Indeed, Tom Schelling, upon seeing the model, suggested that—in the spirit of understatement—we rename it the Sneetches model, after Dr. Seuss's wonderful tale of baseless discrimination, which begins as follows:

Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches

Had Bellies with stars.

The Plain-Belly Sneetches

Had none upon thars.¹

 

Those stars weren't so big. They were really so small

You might think such a thing wouldn't matter at all.

But, of course, just as in our model, a baseless tag matters a great deal, as Seuss recounts. For example,

When Star-Belly children went out to play ball,

Could a Plain-Belly get in the game…?Not at all.

You could only play if your bellies had stars

And the Plain Belly children had none upon thars.

Moreover, while the Sneetches ultimately—“asymptotically”—arrive in the equity norm, just as in our model the inequitable regime is long-lived:

When the Star-Belly Sneetches had frankfurter roasts

Or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts,

They never invited the Plain-Belly Sneetches,

They left them out cold, in the dark of the beaches,

They kept them away. Never let them come near.

And that's how they treated them year after year.

Well, you get the idea; Tom's point is well taken. Whether what follows is a better model of Sneetches or classes, I therefore leave for you, the reader, to judge.

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¹ Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches and Other Stories (New York: Random House Children's Books, 1961).