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The Story of Herb and Andy:

Herb and Andy share the same profession. They rob convenience stores. Their lives therefore are remarkably similar.

They both sleep in late, they don’t get ready to go to work until after 5pm. They both have learned to never work in the same neighborhood within two days in a row or even two weeks in a row. So every night they head off to some new neighborhood remote from their last night’s work. They leave home before 7 or 8 pm. They then head to their target neighborhood. They drive around until they find a convenience store they think looks safe and easy to rob. Then, they find a nearby bar and where they go in to wait until  sometime after 11pm to go rob the convenience store. They typically enter a bar, sit at the bar, and order some dinner and a few drinks to help them scrounge some courage to help facilitate their evenings work. Once it becomes late enough, and once they feel confident enough, they then leave the bar, go rob the convenience store and then try to quickly hurry home and hide out and hope the police do not catch them.

As it happens, one day Herb and Andy find themselves in the same neighborhood and at the same bar, sitting right next to each other. They begin talking, and bye-and-bye they soon figure out each one of them are thieves, and that they both rob conveniences stores.

After trading war stories and anecdotes, they both start complaining about the late night working hours, the high risk of robbing convenience stores and the low pay of only $200 for a night’s work against the risk of going to jail.

Herb then mentions how much better it would be to rob banks. Same risk, but much higher pay, more like $200,000 minimum “you only have to rob a few banks and your good for the entire year”. “The problem is, it’s a two man job: one guy has to go in the bank, another guy has to wait outside as a lookout in the getaway care.”

Then Andy mentions the obvious: that they are two people. Working together they could rob a bank instead and increase their earnings. “Think of the opportunity that comes with working together,” says Andy.

So they agree.

The next day Andy robs a bank, Herb waits in the getaway car. Andy comes out of the bank with a big bag full of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, just like they talked about, but a police chase ensues. Andy and Herb pull down a side street ahead of the police. They get out of the car and hide the bag of money in a hole, under a rock, under the cover of a thick bush; then they get in the car, drive a few more miles then they both take off on foot in opposite directions. The police eventually catch both men and put them in separate jail cells, reasonably suspecting each man participated in the bank  robbery.

The police then interrogate them separately. The police want to find out everything that happened, they want to throw both criminals in jail, and importantly, they want to get the money back as does the bank.

Because they don’t know where the money is, and because they want to get it back, the police decide to make a deal: the first criminal who confesses as to what happened, correctly, and tell them where the money is hidden will get to go free, while the other one will be prosecuted. They will make the offer to both Andy and Herb, but the first one that accepts will then send the other to jail.

So here is the prisoner’s dilemma:

If both Andy and Herb continue to cooperate with each other, that is, keep quiet, they might both avoid prosecution, and even if they some how do get prosecuted and sent to jail, the money will be waiting for them there when they get out. So the highest pay off comes if they both cooperate with each other.

The most reliable payoff comes with being the first person to confess. That is, “to defect” from cooperation.

The worst situation is not confessing after the other person does. This creates the incentive to “defect” from cooperation at the earliest possibility.

This is what is called the prisoner’s dilemma.

If the relationship between the two parties is limited, then defection from cooperation is going to be the default choice for all rational players of the game.

But what if Andy and Herb are brothers? Will they still defect?

What if they are twin brothers, who are also orphans, and the only family, the only close relationship they have or have ever known and trusted is the brotherly bound that they have shared since before they were born?

What if they love each other more than they love themselves?

Will they still defect from cooperation?

(Thus, I could teach my students that cooperation emerges from (1) a perceived -by both parties- perpetual relationship AND (2) is can be reinforced (strengthened?) by opportunity (that is, where life is made better, easier as a result of the relationship.)

Thus we see the mechanics of the prisoner’s dilemma laid clear and bare: it is the fundamental mechanisms that underwrites community, society and civilization.

The fundamental mechanism that underwrites the role of community is laid out in the classic case of the prisoner’s dilemma in Robert Axelrod’s seminal work “The Evolution of Cooperation.”(34)

In the prisoner’s dilemma there are two parties (egoist), each having a choice of whether to cooperate or defect from cooperation. In most presentations of this situation, the payoff is highest if both parties cooperate, but the most reliable payoff comes with defecting.

If the relationship between the two parties is limited, then defection is going to be the default choice for all rational players of the game. However, if the relationship is of a perpetual nature then the best strategy is cooperation. If the relationship is of a perpetual nature then cooperation becomes a more likely choice.

There, then, are two dynamics that facilitate cooperation:

  1. (Seemingly) Perpetual Relationship
  2. Opportunity

As long as a relationship seems to have an ongoing perpetual nature, cooperation is possible, maybe even probable.

As long as cooperation provides opportunity (for a better life or existence), cooperation is rational and the most probable outcome.

Now, about defection from cooperation.

“People are at their worst when they are least accountable for their actions.” (M. Scott Peck “People of the Lie: The Hope of Curing Human Evil”)

(I believe John Milton Keynes said something similar, along the lines of “it is becoming increasingly clear that absentee landlordism as one greatest of the evils among men.” – It was in reference to the Irish famine. At the time of the famine, England was the most prosperous country in the world as then the words first and most intensely industrialized country – it’s productivity higher than almost all of continental Europe’s combined, but England was so crowded it  had to import food from food exporting countries, which it could easily pay for with the wealth earned from manufacturing. Much of Ireland’s land and much of  the best of it for growing things, was owned by landlords living in England who insisted upon the receipt of rent for their land, which could only be achieved by exporting Irish food stuff to England. As a result millions of Irish starved, even as Ireland was exporting food to England, so that landlords living in posh London, could collect their rent. Keynes point is that remoteness from the problem  triggered callous calculations and hard hardheartedness that resulted in millions having to suffer terribly. Had those landlords been local members of  the communities where they drew their rent, would they have been so hardhearted?  Keynes and Peck both would say no. I think some of this phenomina is covered in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” but I leave that to you to ponder next time you watch it.)

The aspect of commitment to a community needs to be broadly acknowledged. This creates the conditions for accountability.  Commitment to a community means the participants in a community cannot easily exit nor enter the community, that is, it has a perpetual nature.

So, the role of community, provided it has a perpetual nature, is to shift all parties towards cooperation and away from defection. The the fundamental foundation for community, society, civilization, law and justice is found in the hard mechanics of the prisoner’s dilemma and “The Evolution of Cooperation.”

Tit-for-Tat:

Imagine you and I are marooned on a very tiny tropical island together. Lets say neither one of us is inclined to like each other. You are a young whippersnapper from a privileged backGround, a college athlete. I’m a salty old working class man, big and strong  from a long life of hard work, most lately as a fisherman, but with lots of practical skills  from working various other trades in my time. You are polite and polished, I’m rude, crude and don’t smell very well.  We have natural antipathy to each other. Though you are in good shape and quick, I’m still much bigger and stronger.

Anyway, to amuse myself from the boredom of  being a castaway on this tropical island, I punch you in the nose. It hurts and stings  you real good. You’re thinking “ouch! how rude!” I’m thinking, “that was fun and satisfying to see the way you reacted, privileged bastard.”  So, every so often, to amuse myself, I punch you in the nose. As time goes by, I do this more and more frequently. Its really the only amusement I  have.

You think its wrong and rude to punch people. How could he be like this. So you ask me to stop. That doesn’t work. Instead, I’m punching you more frequently then  ever. You ask yourself, “how in the world can you get me to stop punching you in the nose?”

And then it comes upon you: next time I punch you in the nose, you are going to punch me back. I do, then you do, then you quickly scamper off, and because your young and quick and I’m old and slow, I can do nothing but feel the sting and pain of you punching me back. Anyway, I’m thinking, this is a one off thing. So a little later, I get my chance and I punch you in the nose again, for my amusement, only again for you to punch me back. And its stings and hurts. Now every time I punch you in the nose,  you punch me back. This is called “Tit-for-Tat.”

After a while, I realize, if I don’t want my nose to sting and hurt, then I have to stop punching you in the nose.

You see that don’t you?  It’s quite simple and it’s quite clear.

I stop punching you and you stop punching me.

And so its also mechanical. I punch you, you punch me. I stop punching you and you stop punching me.

What this suggests is that tit-for-tat can create the conditions for cooperation. In fact, it ought to.

In our fictional story, it turns out I know how to fish, and in your dexterity, youth and strength, you are good at climbing trees to get coconuts and foraging for edible plants. Once we graduate from tit-for-tat we can explore the opportunity for both of us to live a better life through cooperation, despite our differences.

Axelrod covers this in his book – by backing into it. His first question is,  under what conditions does it pay to cooperate, and the answer comes back through game testing (therefore the name “Game Theory”) that in a seemingly perpetual relationship it pays to cooperate, especially if there is opportunity.

But then he asks “what’s the second best strategy” and through game testing, the answer came back, again and again, tit-for-tat. The good news is that tit-for-tat should lead to cooperation. The bad news is that cooperation is often only underwritten by a credible  threat of violence from both sides. There is also more bad news: if you as a game player engaged in cooperation because of a seemingly perpetual relationship, suddenly can foresee the end to the relationship, even if it is very far off in the distance, according to Axelrod’s study, it pays to stop cooperating immediately.

Game Theory/Tit-for-Tat/Prisoners Dilemma/the Evolution of Cooperation is a hard mechanism in civics. It can be and is applied all over the place, underwrites all kinds of events in history (some of which we’ll talk about in later installments) and is often the subject of dramas.

Some Examples:

1) The Irish Republican Army engaged in terrorism in order to demand that Great Britain bargain with it’s political branch, Sin Fein. The British refused. The terrorism kept coming. Punches in the nose.  Eventually the British decided to negotiate, the Good Friday accords was the outcome, and the terrorism ended.

2) The movie “Munich”  is an example of tit-for-tat terrorism between Palestinian terrorist groups and Israeli secret service. Eventually the main character sees the insanity in a situation where neither party wants to arrive at cooperation, and so he walks out of  his role as one of the administrators of “tat”. Also, most Mafia type movies involve tit-for-tat dynamics.

3) The American – Soviet Union detente that began in the 1960s was based upon the theory of mutually assured destruction: the ultimate tit-for-tat scenario. This lead to increases  in cooperation and global security (but not total cooperation) until the fall of the Soviet Union.

4) Incidentally, the “Munich accord of 1938” may have been an example of a rather complex multiparty cooperation breaking down as a result of one party seeing the game of cooperation coming to an end. In the eyes of then British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, both Stalin and Hitler were rogue rulers. By the 1930s, Europe had had roughly 1500 years of near constant warfare as a result of political fragmentation after the fall of the Roman Empire, culminating in tens of millions dying in the four year struggle we now call World War I, with virtually no decisive conclusion to it. Before World War I, Europe was the political, cultural, economic center of the world. World War I had left all of Europe in debt to America (and its bankers). By 1930s it was clear to everyone that cooperation in diplomacy was the only rational choice. Another general European war would simply make the European states satellites to  one of the flanking powers, of the United States or  Russia (which is exactly what happened) (by the way, this point was made in “Wages of Destruction” by Adam Tooze). For Chamberlain, dealing with any of the rogue European leaders/dictators would have been distasteful: Mussolini, Franco, Hitler or Stalin. However, the rational thing to believe was that cooperation made the most sense. (Chamberlain also thought that another war  with Germany would mean another blockade, leading to German starvation, ruin and defeat – the same thing that, arguably, brought down Germany in World War I.)  But for ideological reasons both Chamberlain and Hitler did not want to cooperate with Stalin, especially as Stalin was a flanking power more likely to gain from any substantial conflict at the expense of the European states.  But still, in Chamberlain’s calculus, cooperation, somewhere with someone was necessary to avoid conflict and thus avoid further political/economic decline  of Europe in general. So Chamberlain chose to attempt to cooperate with Hitler. Chamberlain’s further calculation might have looked like this: Hitler couldn’t overcome a British blockade, Hitler didn’t want to become a fief to Russia, so  cooperation in terms of general European diplomacy would make the most sense. So Chamberlain  bent over backwards to signal to Hitler that he would cooperate with Hitler, so much so as to  inflict an injustice onto the only Democratic nation in Central Europe, Czechoslovakia. At Munich, Britain, France, Italy and Germany agreed to sign over to Hitler’s Germany the Czech borderlands (along with Czech defensive fortifications) of Sudetenland. Shortly after that Hitler occupied all of the Czech part of Slovakia. You see, Hitler foresaw  the end of cooperation, because he intended to end it. Game Theory says, it pays to stop cooperating, even if its well in advance to the actually game ending. Meanwhile, Stalin, seeing that he couldn’t cut deals with the Western powers of France and Britain, cut a deal with Hitler. The Soviet-Nazi pact was economic centered, neutralizing the effect any British blockade would have in the short run on the German diet. By foreseeing and end to cooperation, Hitler caught all of the Western powers off wrong footed, and gave him enough of an initial advantage to make enormous advances: taking France and only failing to take Britain by virtue of the English Channel, the British Navy and the Royal Air Force. Hitler later did similar thing to the Russians, with similar results. Eventually though, the other sides found their footing and reversed the advances. After the war, Eastern  Europe was a satellite to the Russians and Western Europe a satellite to the Americans (just as Adam Tooze believes Chamberlain believed).

5) A robust social contract was applied in the United States at the end of World War II, leading to one of the most Golden Ages in  history. The chiseling away of that social contract began formally in 1981 with the Reagan Presidency.  However, informally it had already been going on for 15 years. In the mid 1960s, American business executives began expirementing with off shoring (exporting)  factories to Singapore. Singapore, haven recently been separated from Malaysia, and thus lost its natural trade hinterland, was looking at a bleak future. Desperate to gain any kind of economic traction, Singapore stumbled upon the knowledge that American executives would export factories to places like Singapore for the right deal (i.e. low transaction cost + red carpet treatment). Singapore invested heavily in building infrastructure intensive industrial parks and providing a disciplined,  low cost work force that spoke good English. The outsourcing of factories proved an immediate success for both Singapore and the American companies. What began with a trickle soon became a flood as Singapore’s neighbors copied it. Eventually China would copy this too, on a massive scale. As a result of this trend, the American worker lost his bargaining power. From 1945 to 1972 wages in all sectoresin the American economy had doubled almost in lockstep to each other: the poor, working class, middle class, professional and upper middle class and upper class all advanced equally together. Since 1972, despite another doubling of the GNP, the median wage has remained flat.

The question is, what held the American Social Contract together for the nearly 30 years following the end of World War II?

Could it be that the workers lost their ability to do “tit-for-tat”with executives?

In the 1990s, during the middle of negotiations between a major manufacturer (employing at the time around 100,000 people) and a machinist union, the company hired an executive to handle the negotiations with the union – and he set up, immediately, plans to move the factory to a southern sun-belt state with  low labor and relaxed union laws. This was an obvious and bold ploy by the executive to give his employer added leverage, vis-a-vis the machinist union. It was all over the news and on the cover of all the newspapers. This would undermine not only the family of the machinist but also the community.

During this time, I asked a very power savy construction worker I knew how he would handle a situation like that if he were head of  the machinist union. His reply caught me off guard but reminded me how savy he was: “I’d go into a very poor neighborhood, or have someone do it for me, maybe the  ghetto, find some poor kid with good athletic skills, and pay him $1000 to throw a brick squarely through the living room window of the executive  that was handling the negotiations. Much later I would read the Evolution of Cooperation and would learn Gandhi’s saying “poverty is a form of violence.”  The construction worker was instinctively demonstrating that he understood both Gandhi’s saying and that “tit-for-tat” was the next best strategy to cooperation – and to signal to the executive that he understood that.

If you can’t “tat” back, you will get “titted” relentlessly.

During the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, it was said that there were ties between “the mob” (mafiosa families/organized crime) and unions. I never understood the logic of this until the discussion with the construction worker. Unions bargained with corporations, the same way Sinn Fein bargained with the British Government, but it was “the mob”,  like the IRA, that provided the tit-for-tat that underwrote the cooperation that was to emerge.

Beginning with the Kennedy Administration, after 1961, organized crime was relentlessly attacked and defanged at the federal level in the United States, culminating in the RICO statutes around 1970. Could it be that the decline of the American Social Contract is in part a result of the defanging and decline of America’s organized crime families?

Without any ability for workers to meet “tit-for-tat”, American executives  were free to outsource jobs and not suffer for having done so. The median American wage has remained flat (or declined) since 1972. While American wages remained flat, the compensation for executives has climbed staggeringly.

In Japanese companies, the CEO makes about 35 times more than the average worker, which was roughly the way it was for American executives in the 1960s. Today, in America the CEO makes about 300 times more than the average worker in their company. The white working class is the only major subgroup in America with declining health and well being statistics. Obviously the Japanese worker has a way to exercise bargaining power vis-a-vis their executives more  than the American workers do. How and why they are able to do that will also be covered  in other installments.

(But as a hint, Oliver Wendall Holmes in his great work “The Common Law” points out that the basis of law lies in revenge – or vengence – perhaps another way of saying tit-for-tat. The miracle of the evolution of law is how it has found away to resolve dispute without recourse to violence. In Japan, large companies provide tenure – jobs for life – and courts have recognized tenure as akin to a property right – so companies cannot just inflict the violence of firing workers indiscriminately. In doing so, Japan has found a way to resolve employment dystopia without recourse to violence.)

(If you want to understand the uniqueness of Japanese culture and how it was shaped by these mechanisms you can read this (very short) paper I wrote for Nobel Laureate, Economic Historian Douglas C. North in a “History of Property Rights class” [with added annotations for you related to this subject], [and yes, I received an A on that paper] click here:

The principle of “Tit-for-Tat” implies that cooperation is  underwritten by the credible threat of violence – with no clear winner (perpetual relationship). Attempting to reduce the occurrence of violence is the main business of civics.

You may be wondering how civics works to do this. Basically through organizational arrangements that make better use of the mechanisms in civics. This will eventually lead us to the study of law from the stand point of it as a complex set of mechanisms and structures in civics.

However, in the  mean time,   I would immediately direct you to Oliver Wendell Holmes seminal work “The Common Law” in which he states that Law has evolved out of revenge or vengeance. That sounds like another way of saying that law evolved out of the mechanism  of “tit-for-tat” –  remember, its “the” fundamental mechanism in civics.

The early role and use of courts was to find a civilized means to handle dispute resolution, short of violence.

The law itself is an organizational arrangement invented for this purpose. It has a long evolution in regard to this pursuit. Some of which we cover in other areas. The fact that the social contract in the United States is eroding suggests that there is a need for more organizational  arrangements. The posted paper just above this paragraph shows just how such arrangements were arrived at in post World War II Japan. (Basically, Japan created corporations that gave workers tenure and company unions [company  unions proved ineffectual in the west but when tethered to tenure they are effective – the union must have a monopoly/cartel upon the supply of labor in order to bargain effectively, since the company cannot fire a worker, the company union arrives at this point of leverage because of tenure].

This alignment of institutions: corporation, company union, worker tenure creates a proper (in fact perfect) alignment of two collective institutions: the company and the union, which are both collectives – the corporation is collective ownership, the union is collective labor, which creates balance between the two, tenure creates seemingly perpetual relationship, the profits from the corporation operating properly, competitively, and effectively provides opportunity.  Investors/Shareholders,  executives, workers,  they all sink or swim together.  The issue is, and always has been, how the economic rents are going to be divided up. When one party is too big or powerful, dystopia erupts which eventually endangers society. Here society is delegating to this  arrangement much of the job of working out the social contract in a equitable (fair) manner – and it works because of the proper alignment of collectives of equal size, interest and concern. Japanese courts have recognized tenure as a quasi-property right. Because they have done that, whatever violence underwrites cooperation, is done inside the company to their own mutual harm.)

 

EXAMPLE IN ANCIENT  HISTORY – The Emergence of Roman (Private) Law:  

(Note this is a narrative of history’s trend not specific history)

The foundation of Rome is clouded in myths. Some of the early records of Rome were destroyed when Rome was sacked by Celtic tribes descending from the Po valley during Romes formative years. There are two myths: that of Romulus and Remus being raised by a she-wolf and the Aeneid (Rome being founded by refugees from the fall of Troy). Perhaps there is a mix of fact and fancy in these myths. But we can use Game Theory as a gap filler to explain to us what might have actually happened.

The Neolithic (agricultural) Revolution with its reliance upon farming made humans more sedentary. Their lives became tied to the land. This creates a fundamental basis for a perpetual relationship. However, in such societies, farming produced enough of a surplus that many people could work at occupations that did not involve production of food. New jobs popped up: warriors to protect the food from raiders, accountants to keep track of how much food was produced, priests to encourage farmers to work hard. In time the warrior and ruler class realized that they had a monopoly on coercive force and so did not have to cooperate with the farmers. They could take what they wanted. During times of poor harvest, it was the farmers who starved, not the warriors. However, the warrior class still relied upon the farmers, so if they took too much, the entire society or civilization was at risk for collapsing. As a result, Neolithic states were typically small, brittle and did not last a very long time. (There are exceptions to this: Egypt and Pre-Warring States era China – which both seemed to produce large long lasting societies). Quite often these societies could be quite cruel affairs (see the movie “Apocalypto”).

The Neolithic dilemma was how to ensure a more fair and just society, so as to create a more stable and robust society.  The answer began to emerge in the Axial Age.

It’s called the Axial age because epistemologies of fairness began to sprout simultaneiously in several independently distinct societies throughout the Eurasian Periphery around 500b.c.e (give or take 150 years or so): Confucius and Lao Tze in China, Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Iran (perhaps the earliest), Deutero-Isaiah, in Bablyon-Israel, and the sophist philosophers in Greece (most lastly), most notably, Socrates. The civilizing product of the axial age was essentially the creation of The Golden Rule (first mentioned by Confucius but nearly identical in all of its various manifestations). It was a simple and essentially a fair norm. To the extent it was adopted and spread as a norm, it stabilized societies and civilizations.

Almost immediately, in some cases, we see giant, long lasting states emerge in these various regions: Achaemenid Persion Empire, replaced by Alexander’s Greco-Macedon empires, the Mauryan Empire in India, Han Dynasty in China.

These were all great civilizations that produced great responses to the Neolithic dilemma in the form of religions or philosophies.

Now for a narrative example in history: (this is a narrative of history based upon mechanism in civics)

However, perhaps the best example of dynamic pressures and the cooperative response came from Rome at this same time period, which manifested in the creation of Roman Law and Rome’s constitution. Rome’s expansion begins shortly after these two pieces were created.

The Perpetual Relationship that shaped Rome:

In ancient Europe, settlements were typically on the top of hills. The reasons for this are two fold: hill tops are easily defended and they don’t get flooded. The acropolis of Athens was the center of ancient Athens. Originally it was the fortified bastion of the Acropolis in Athens that formed the nucleus of the city in its earliest days. At the other end of the Mediterranean basin, the Alhambra in Granada represents a fortified palace complex built upon a steep hilltop in the late middle ages. Remnants of ancient fortified hilltop villages can be found as far north as the British Isles and pretty much all over Europe, especially up and down Italy.

The site that was to become the City of Rome was famously surrounded by seven hills. Five of these hills were occupied by five different tribes – so that there were five different villages situated in five different hill forts that provided protection. These communities were engaged in agricultural production. In theory, the biggest one or two communities might have made an attempt at hegemony over the others, but the presence of five separate communities meant it was unlikely for any one village to prevail over the others. One can imagine a constantly shifting set of alliances kept a balance of power between attacking and defending communities. Because they worked the land in agriculture immediately beneath their hilltop villages/fortresses, these five tribal communities were in a perpetual relationship. When they weren’t busy trying to destroy each other they engaged in mutual celebration of religious festivals. So the proto-condition for cooperation, (seemingly) perpetual relationship existed.

The Opportunity that Cooperation Provided that shaped Rome:

These five villages and seven hills were situated adjacent to a ford of the Tiber river, below of which was too deep to ford, and above of which was either too deep or too rugged to cross.

To the north of Rome were the Etruscan peoples. They spoke a complex, difficult to acquire non Indo-European language. The implication from this is that they inhabited their area for a very long time – even before the indo-europeans showed up. The Etruscan knew where and had access to all the raw metals and salt mines to be found in their section of the Apennine mountains and they were highly skilled in producing craftwork from these minerals. To the south of Rome were the Greek colonies of the far south in Greco-Magna. These colonies were highly prosperous from engaging in trade with the Greek cities and colonies spread throughout the Mediterranean basin.

So a natural gravity of flow of trade existed on the Italian peninsula for the products produced in the Etruscan north to the affluent markets in the Greek colonies to the south. All the land born trade then passed over the ford of the Tiber river near Rome.

Here is the opportunity for cooperation: Whoever could dominate that ford would thus be able to tax the trade that used it and thus dominate all the land born trade running up and down the Italian peninsula. However, no single tribe or village had the ability to do so because of the geography of the seven hills and their being inhabited by five tribes.

So, the five tribes had the two prerequisits for cooperation: they had perpetual relationship and they had opportunity. The only way to realize the opportunity was through cooperation.

Cooperation was initially achieved through a constitutional framework. The elders of the five tribes, and almost all tribes have respected elders, no matter what the culture or the location, met in the senate to hash out and work out the relationship. Proposals were then voted on by the tribes, in descending order of size and prosperity. In essence, then,  Rome was a joint venture between the five tribes living on the seven hills that surrounded the ford of the Tiber river. Realizing that opportunity meant controlling the valley and marshes between the seven hills and the ford. In other words, realizing the opportunity presented by geography meant coming down from the hills and occupying the land in between.

The combination of the five tribes was perhaps somewhere less than 7,000 people and perhaps as little as 3,000. Those were big enough numbers to protect fortified hilltop villages, but nowhere near enough to protect the exposed valley. To augment their numbers, Rome opened up and made available citizenship to anyone willing to come and live in Rome. As one might imagine, they got an odd lot of runaway slaves, debtors and criminals: mostly males. This buttressed Rome’s numbers greatly. But those new male citizens needed female companions to form families. This lead to the mythological “Rape (abduction) of the Sabines.”  The Romans threw a festival for religious celebration and invited their neighbors, the Sabines. During the celebration they then abducted the Sabine women. The combination of opening up settlement of the city and the abduction of neighboring women pushed Rome’s population over 10,000 and made it possible for the city to produce enough numbers to defend itself. These arrangements produced two classes in Rome: the wealthy Patricians (patre meaning father, or founding fathers) and the plebians,the lower class. The plebians were given two tribal affiliations. In the course of an election vote they were the last two tribes to cast their votes. So, often a decision was arrived at before they even got their chance to vote.

Another issue was how to choose an executive to lead and administer over the city. The fear was if the executive came from one tribe, then that tribe would achieve hegemony over the rest. So the Romans imported foreigners to be their executives or “kings.”  Usually these were well educated Etruscans who also spoke Greek – this presumably, to facilitate the trade relationships to both north and south (because of the uniqueness of the Etruscan language, finding a Greek foreigner who spoke Etruscan would have been virtually impossible.) After roughly 250 years of this arrangement the Romans got tired of having foreign Kings and so the senate conspired to throw them out. This left them with the dilemma of how to select an executive without risking one tribe becoming hegemonic over the others.

Their answer to this question was ingenious.

The Romans replaced the King as executive with, not one, but two councils, nominated by the Senate, from the Senate, (therefore the patrician class), to serve for only one year, and  each council had the power of veto over the other. So no one person from one tribe could obtain hegemony over the rest and no executive could hold office long enough to monopolize it.

Fifty years into this arrangement lead to restlessness of the plebeians. By this time some had gotten rich, perhaps through trade. The wealthy plebeians were seeking status. They wanted to know how to join the patrician class, how to become senators, how to become nominated for and then elected to council. The patricians said that it was all set forth by the law. The plebeians then demanded to know the law. The patricians said, don’t worry about it, we know it and that’s all that counts. The plebeians were not satisfied with this answer. During a threat of conflict, they therefore abandoned (succeeded from) Rome and camped out atop a nearby hilltop. Without the plebeians numbers, the Roman aristocracy was heavily exposed.  As the wealthiest of Roman’s they also had the most to lose. They then agreed to publish the law, that would become known to us as the 12 tables of Roman law. The trick was, the plebians thought they were going to receive public law (the law that regulates relations between the state and the people). What they got was an invention, mostly private law (before then had never existed): law of property, law regulating trade and lending, religious law, criminal law (this is a form of public law), family law (property law of inheritance). All of this law protected the wealth and therefore status of the wealth patricians. Finally there was a single law that forebode the marriage of plebeians to patricians, which had the effect of denying plebeians from ever becoming part of the ruling class. This single measure impelled the plebeians to succeed once again to a nearby hilltop. In the negotiations that followed, plebeians gained the right to marry patricians and thus marry into the ruling class and also they were allowed to select two Tribunes to intercede on their behalf in executive matters (the ability to veto some legal provisions).

The key was the 12 tables of Roman law. While it heavily favored those with property, all were equal before the courts in which the law was adjudicated. It had to be that way to ensure that none of the constituent parts of Rome succeeded from the constitutional arrangement. It is from the creation of Roman law in 450 b.c.e. that Rome immediately began to grow and expand. As it expanded throughout Italy, the conquered peoples were assimilated into the Roman civic system.

While Roman law was nowhere near as fair as the Golden Rule, it was “fair enough”. What Roman law lacked in fairness it more than made up for by having the power of law behind it.  The Golden Rule says: do to others the way you want done to yourself.  The weakness in that is if one selfish person violates the Golden Rule nothing happens to them in the immediate. Maybe peers will shun them. Maybe religion will cast them into hell in the next life. But there is little power in the Golden Rule itself to force people to be fair. However Roman law, while not as fair as the Golden Rule, had the power of throwing a person into jail if they violated it. So “fair enough” in Roman Law was augmented by law enforcement. The result was a social contract that proved elastic enough to incorporate more and more peoples and good enough to exceed all competition in the Mediterranean basin.

Essentially the creation of Rome was a joint venture between the neighboring tribes in an attempt to exploit favorable economic-geography. Like all collectives (including corporations) rules and bylaws have to be created, spelled out and have true, real world efficacy if the collective is to succeed. Rules cannot be aspirational, they have to be real, and effective applied in order for the collective/corporation to succeed, thrive and continue.

(Incidentally, the DNA of Rome and its success was stamped into it at it’s very creation. Rome was essentially an agricultural enterprise augmented by trade. Its numbers were augmented, from the very beginning, by assimilating diverse peoples. Its success was augmented by the construction of public works – a bridge over the Tiber at the ford, draining of the marshes and valleys to at the base of the hills which became the Roman Forum. The Romans quickly extended these skills to build roads to the south that, while intended to facilitate the movement of troops, was along the very trade routes that the north south trade moved along. Later these skills went into building aqueducts, irrigation and agricultural terracing. These skills turned most of North Africa into a bread basket of the Roman Empire. The population of Roman North Africa at its peak exceeded 11 million people – a number not exceeded  until the mid 19th century.  Meanwhile a Road network extended from Egypt in the south east of the Roman empire all the way up into Britain.)

Appendix:

Exerts and extensions from “Of War, Crime and International Restorative Justice” by Timothy Kane and Bo Hyuk Kim on the Prisoners dilemma and the evolution of cooperation: 

 

  1. The mechanisms in civics behind the Japanese restorative justice system

 The relevant, important aspects of community are widely acknowledged.  Haley insists that Japanese restorative justice is founded on communitarian principles.[1]  The most important principle is accountability.  Haley traces accountability to commitment to a community. Commitment to a community means the participants in a community cannot easily exit nor enter the community.  Continuation in a community then forces a person into accountability to that community. [2]

Mechanistically this is laid out in the classic case of the prisoner’s dilemma in Robert Axelrod’s seminal work “The Evolution of Cooperation.”[3]  In the prisoner’s dilemma there are two parties (egoist), each having a choice of whether to cooperate or defect (from cooperation, perhaps striking out at each other).  In most presentations of this situation, the payoff is highest if both parties cooperate, but the most reliable payoff comes with defecting. If the relationship between the two parties is of a limited duration, then defection is going to be the default choice for all rational players of the game. However, if the relationship is ongoing and of an indeterminate amount of time (or seemingly forever) then the best strategy, cooperation, becomes a more likely choice.[4]  This is why commitment amongst the community members is so important. Furthermore, the second best strategy, as articulated by Axelrod, called “tit-for-tat”, allows for one defection for each of the two egos but otherwise always mimicking the other player’s prior move. This strategy should have the benefit of leading the two parties away from striking at each other and back towards cooperation. Thus the ‘tit-for-tat’ strategy suggest that forgiveness is a better strategy over extending a grudge: in tit-for-tat, where one mimics the other player’s previous move, if the other player quits striking you in his previous move (his defection), then the best strategy is to mimic that behavior, which implies to not strike back even if one is still harboring a grudge (in a tit-for-tat context, once striking each other occurs, then defection=forgiveness, and in Axelrod’s “tit-for-tat” strategy, each player is allowed one defection from “tit-for-tat”).[5] So, a fundamental foundation for the validity of restorative justice can be found in the hard, inanimate mechanics of the prisoner’s dilemma.

The economist John Maynard Keynes made oblique reference to the problem of lack of accountability when he wrote about the “remoteness between ownership and operation … [as] … an evil in the relations among men.”[6]   Doctor M. Scott Peck, M.D. a psychiatrist studying the causes of the U.S. Army’s Mai Lia massacre in Vietnam concluded that humans are at their worst when they are least accountable for their actions.[7]  Peck subsequently found a solution to accountability in communities with the characteristic of high levels of commitment between members.[8]  Haley reinforces the point: accountability in the Japanese system of restorative justice comes from a lack of mobility from easily exiting or entering a community.[9]

In regard to whether or not these dynamics can be applied to an international setting, Robert Axelrod, in “The Evolution of Cooperation” states that  “…cooperation can evolve from small clusters of individuals who base their cooperation on reciprocity and have even a small proportion of their interactions with each other…”[10] and that cooperation can emerge in a world “without a central authority”[11] such as we find in the world of international law.  Furthermore, because of the fixed nature of geo-politics, the nations of the world are, for better or worse, forced into a community of nations from which they cannot easily exit: this provides the accountability that Peck, and Keynes imply is necessary for cooperation, and Haley finds essential for Japanese system of restorative justice.  The base operative mechanism for Japanese style restorative justice then is found in the communitarian dynamics associated within the context and mechanism of the prisoners dilemma found in Game Theory analysis.  Those same conditions are echoed in the conditions found in the international context.

[1] John Owen Haley, Inside Japan’s Community Controls: Lessons for America? Supra at 30-31

[2] John Owen Haley, Supra at 33-34

[3] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 7-11 (Basic Books, Incorporated, Publishers 1984)

[4] Robert Axelrod, Ibid.

[5] Robert Axelrod, supra 32-39

[6] Robert Kuttner The End of Laissez – Fair 37 (Alfred A. Knopf 1991) (1991)

[7] M. Scott Peck, M.D., People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil 215 (Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1983)

[8] M. Scott Peck, M.D., People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil 284 (Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1983)

[9] John Owen Haley, Supra at 33-34

[10] Robert Axelrod, Supra p.21

[11] Robert Axelrod, Supra p. 20