Toward a Textbook on Human Interdependence

or maybe it should be a GPT

I am thinking of organizing the material in The Main Routine and elsewhere in terms of three levels of games. The individual level, the small group level (below the Dunbar number of approximately 150), and the large organization level.

At the individual level, the game is survival. You win if you pass along your genetic inheritance to later generations. Usually, this requires that you have children who thrive. But you can get some survival value out of helping your siblings or other relatives to have children who thrive.

Survival strategies include;

• mating strategies

• learning from successful individuals

• prestige

• dominance

• competing for resources

• competing for status

• embedding within successful groups

• deception and self-deception

At the group level, the game is collaboration. Your group wins if it obtains the benefits of working together. To do so, it must identify and reward cooperators, meaning people who take actions that benefit the group. It must identify and punish defectors, meaning people who follow individual survival strategies that hurt the group. A group could be a high school clique, a criminal gang, a sports team, an academic department, a family business, a small unit within a large organization, and others.

Collaboration strategies include:

• face-to-face communication

• gossip

• initiation rites

• rituals and celebrations

• loyalty tests

At the organizational level, the game is cooperation at scale. An organization wins if it provides stability and prosperity to its members. Its challenge is to align the interests of the various groups inside the organization. Organizations include corporations, large political units, trade associations, professional associations, hospitals, school districts, universities, and others.

Strategies include:

• written rules and procedures

• positions with defined rights and responsibilities

• hierarchical authority

• markets

• agreement on overall mission

• fostering conformity through education or religious instruction

• processes for testing and approving innovation

• processes for resolving disputes

• competing against similar organizations

The above outline makes it seem simpler than it will turn out to be. For example, under “markets” there is virtually the whole field of economics! But thinking in terms of three layers of games helps me to sort out the organization.

In addition, the three-layer model can be used to discuss the tensions among the layers. What is rational behavior for an individual may be considered defector behavior in a small group.

Norms in a small group may cause problems for a large organization. In a corporation, Marketing may be at odds with Finance. You don’t want either one to get so cohesive that you cannot reconcile the two.

The Civil Rights act of 1964 was the large organization (the U.S. Congress) over-riding the smaller groups of businesses and states that engaged in racial discrimination. Opponents of the act argued that however desirable the anti-discrimination ends, the means of over-riding freedom of the smaller groups was wrong. Recently, that view has drawn some new support, in books by Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania.

The conflict between a central government and small groups looms large in political theory. North, Weingast, and Wallis argue that outside of Western democracies, central state authorities see small groups as competition and try not to allow them to become large organizations.

Tocqueville, Burke, and their followers point out how small groups serve as a check on potential abuse of power by large states. Many of us suspect that there is a dangerous affinity between big government and corporate power, as in “too big to fail” banks, that exacerbates the tension between large organizations and small groups.

This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.