A Global Public Good
Well-Being Across
Self has no moral space separate from the well-being of Other…
However, Well-Being Across Individual, Cultural and DNA Differences faces a socio-genetic problem: the intergenerational transmission of social hierarchy and socioeconomic inequality.
The article “Predatory Well-Being” summarizes the problem in the following two paragraphs:
Natural selection, in favoring heritable variation in human traits, created a paradox of the right and the good (what is right or good varies across individual DNA differences) resulting in social hierarchy and conflicts over income, wealth, privileges and power due to differences between individuals in their inherited DNA (genetic propensities) and the interplay of these differences with environmental conditions (e.g., social, political, economic, technological, natural and biophysical).325
Due to the interplay, people evoke, create, modify and select into environments that align with their genetic propensities, forming groups, coalitions and social hierarchies in a competition to influence and control how norms and institutions regulate the distribution of income, wealth, privileges and power.325
Beginning with the appearance of the first cities and states some 5000+ years ago,189 the default solution to the prosocial dilemmas of the interplay and its paradox has resulted in social hierarchy…and a complex pattern of violence and inequality.
Historian Walter Scheidel describes a pattern across thousands of years of civilization:
“For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality. This was as true of Pharaonic Egypt as it was of Victorian England, as true of the Roman Empire as of the United States.”193
“Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics.”193
“Thousands of years of history boil down to a simple truth: ever since the dawn of civilization, ongoing advances in economic capacity and state building favored growing inequality but did little if anything to bring it under control. Up to and including the Great Compression of 1914 to 1950, we are hard pressed to identify reasonably well attested and nontrivial reductions in material inequality that were not associated, one way or another, with violent shocks.”193
Scheidel continues: “…increases in inequality were driven by the interaction of technological and economic development and state formation…effective leveling required violent shocks that at least temporarily curtailed and reversed the disequalizing consequences of capital investment, commercialization, and the exercise of political, military and ideological power by predatory elites and their associates.”193
In a social hierarchy, individuals and groups with the income, wealth, privileges and power to create and control rules, laws, regulations and policies advantageous to their genetically-influenced social preferences enforce their preferences with discriminatory punishment–harms turned into social and moral goods (justified harms).
Inevitably, when a harm is used to produce what is considered morally right, fair, just or fully deserved social outcomes, people are being punished for their inherited DNA differences.
This is social eugenics.
When people are punished for their DNA differences the result is socioeconomic inequalities that can remain steadfast across generations because they are heritable.301
Moreover, a typical justification of these inequalities is the belief low socioeconomic status (SES) individuals and groups, which includes many in the middle class, are undeserving–they could have done otherwise, making them moral scapegoats for hierarchy elites in their effort to justify their SES privileges and dominance.
No one freely chooses their DNA differences (genetic propensities) and the socioeconomic influences–genetic and environmental–they inherit from their parents. When people evoke, create, modify and select into environments that correlate with their genetic propensities they do not freely control the gene-environment interplay or the molecular processes that drive their behavioral outcomes.
Freedom From Selection’s Grip on Well-Being
In a social hierarchy, the alignment or misalignment of a child’s genetic propensities with social norms and institutions, for instance educational opportunities and outcomes, is a determinant of socioeconomic status (SES), life course well-being and quality life years lost or gained. Driving this alignment and its SES effects is the interplay between genes and environments.
For example, research has shown that differences in cognitive development between children early in life is driven by the interplay of genetic and environmental factors that include the SES of parents.10,13
In their article “Gene-environment interplay in early life cognitive development,” psychologist Sophie von Stumm et al. make this key point: “The two best predictors of children’s educational achievement available from birth are parents’ socioeconomic status (SES) and, recently, children’s inherited DNA differences that can be aggregated in genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS).”13
They summarize their research findings: “77% of children with high GPS <genome-wide polygenic scores> from high SES families go to university compared to 21% of children with low GPS from low SES.”13
In addition, they make the following important point about heritability: “…SES is often assumed to represent solely environmental advantages of wealth and privilege, but it is actually just as heritable as most other complex traits, with estimates from twin studies of about 50%. The main ingredients in most SES scores are parents’ educational attainment and occupational status, both of which are substantially heritable.”13
These heritable socio-genetic factors fuel the intergenerational transmission of SES hierarchy and inequality. Moreover, these heritable effects are reinforced by norms and institutions that make SES hierarchy look ‘prosocial.’
These prosocial deceptions are low-cost forms of social control–the ability to make low SES individuals and groups, in particular those in the middle class, feel loyal, altruistic, fulfilled and even happy in their social hierarchies when they are, nonetheless, considered inferior and less deserving.
For example, psychologist William Von Hippel and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers write: “…system-justification theory as elaborated by Jost and colleagues argues that there are a variety of motivational reasons why people support the status quo, even when they are clear losers in the current system with very little likelihood of improving their situation. Such system-justifying beliefs among those at the bottom of the social ladder serve the purposes of those at the top of the ladder, in part by preventing agitation for social change. This argument suggests that system justification might be considered a variety of self-deception imposed onto low-status individuals by high status people who benefit when those beneath them accept their low status as legitimate and do not struggle against it. This argument also suggests that the consequences of self-deception might be wide ranging, as a process that evolved to facilitate the deception of others appears to have effects that manifest themselves from an intrapersonal all the way to a societal level.”22
For individuals whose DNA differences (genetic propensities) and traits, learning capabilities and social preferences are a poor socioeconomic match to a society’s norms and institutions, it becomes practical to ‘know your place’ even when doing so makes one worse off.
Furthermore, people will pay a price–absorb a cost–to punish individuals or groups who violate norms they have internalized as fair and legitimate. For example, neuroscience research shows reward centers in the brain fire up not only when we cooperate with others, particularly when we like them, but also when we punish.302
Neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs explains “not only agreeing with liked others, but also disagreeing with disliked others may both be rewarding.”303 When people punish norm violators, or people they don’t like, a “warm glow” feeling may be activated that is associated with altruistic acts and charitable giving.304
The Jekyll and Hyde duplicity of helping and punishing adds to the moral and ideological confusion that makes social hierarchy rewarding because everyone in the hierarchy, high and low, whether helping or punishing can share in this “warm glow.”
Stephen Pinker provides this evolutionary perspective on genes and how they shape and reinforce such ‘groupish’ social affinities.
Pinker writes: “The evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, replied “No, but for two brothers and eight cousins.” He was invoking the phenomenon that would later be known as kin selection, inclusive fitness, and nepotistic altruism. Natural selection favors any genes that incline an organism toward making a sacrifice that helps a blood relative, as long as the benefit of the relative, discounted by degree of relatedness, exceeds the cost to the organism. The reason is that the genes would be helping copies of themselves inside the bodies of those relatives and would have a long-term advantage over their narrowly selfish alternatives.”192
“Critics who are determined to misunderstand this theory imagine that it requires that organisms consciously calculate their genetic overlap with their kin and anticipate the good it will do their DNA. Of course, it requires organisms be inclined to pursue goals that organisms that are statistically likely to be their genetic relatives. In complex organisms such as humans, this inclination is implemented as the emotion of brotherly love.”192
Pinker continues: “As with all aspects of our psychology that have been illuminated by evolutionary theory, what matters is not actual genetic relatedness…but the perception of relatedness…”192
“Among the contributors to the perception of kinship are the experience of having grown up together, having seen one’s mother care for the other person, commensal meals, myths of common ancestry, essentialist intuitions of common flesh and blood, the sharing of rituals and ordeals, physical resemblance (often enhanced by hairdressing, tattoos, scarifications, and mutilation) and metaphors such as fraternity, brotherhood, family, fatherland, motherland and blood.”192
One of the major goals of Well-Being Across is to eliminate the ‘social eugenic’ effects of the gene-environment interplay where individual differences in inherited DNA (genetic propensities) are a determinant of differences in life course outcomes and well-being.
We are all in our DNA boats, each the same but for .4% difference between individual genomes, each hoping for a rising tide of health and prosperity but for this critical difference…some will face the changing tides of fortune and misfortune in their DNA yachts while all others drift and bail water in their rowboats.305
Institutional barriers protect the genetic interests of hierarchy elites (social eugenics), creating political and SES advantages for individuals and groups better aligned to norms, institutions and policies that regulate resource distribution and power in their favor.
For example: The political forces that maintain these SES advantages are explained by economist Branko Milanovic when he makes this observation, “if high inequality is positively associated with income growth of the rich, there is no reason for the rich to change such a pattern of growth. And since the recent empirical political literature shows that the rich largely control the political process it is unclear from where the pressure to change would come from.”306
According to Milanovic, we are witnessing a concentration of income and wealth, resulting in a “global superclass…decoupled from the rest of society.”307
Economist Thomas Piketty writes: “…the top centile is a relatively broad elite that plays a central role in shaping the economic, political, and symbolic structure of society.”308
Notable researchers Alexander Isakof and David Rand reinforce this point. The authors found “large-scale societal change can occur based on the decision of only a small number of individuals in positions of power.”309
Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz makes this additional point: “When one interest group holds too much power, it succeeds in getting policies that benefit itself, rather than policies that would benefit society as a whole. When the wealthiest use their political power to benefit excessively the corporations they control, much-needed revenues are diverted into the pockets of a few instead of benefiting society at large.”310
This is what the SES gap has always been about…and even more so in the globalized ‘predatory’ economics of 21st century well-being.
Well-Being Across is the replacement of social hierarchy and its eugenic structures with a conception of quality life–a long, healthy, happy and purposeful life—where well-being does not depend on the extraction of quality life resources and years from individuals and groups whose inherited genetic propensities make them vulnerable and slavishly indebted to the genetically-influenced social preferences of hierarchy elites.
No Quality Life Outsiders
Differences between individuals in their inherited DNA and the interplay of these differences with environmental conditions (e.g., social, political, economic, technological, natural and biophysical) is a determinant of differences in life course outcomes and well-being.
As a result, the interplay creates a competition between individuals and groups to create, modify and control environments advantageous to their inherited DNA differences, creating a paradox of the right and the good where the distribution of income, wealth, privileges and power is manipulated by harms that function as social and moral goods (justified harms).
In a social hierarchy, rules regulating behavior and resource distribution may be deemed right while the socioeconomic environment created by these rules is far from good for every person in the hierarchy.
In a democracy, rules favor the socioeconomic preferences of a majority. In an authoritarian society, those preferences are narrower and more exclusive. However, in both cases, what is good varies based on the effect of these rules on individuals’ gene-environment status in a social hierarchy–their SES (socioeconomic status) and life course well-being.
When justified harms determine what is good across all individual DNA differences, the result is social hierarchy and SES inequality.
For example, justified harms and their equality exclusions (EQEXs) are a low cost means for hierarchy elites to reinforce altruistic loyalties to the eugenic structure of a social hierarchy. The lower cost of maintaining the legitimacy and stability of SES inequality allows hierarchy elites to extract resources from descending levels of the hierarchy with minimal cost and resistance.
When high SES individuals and groups use justified harms to create and sustain their genetically-influenced SES advantages, this is social eugenics.
An important step in penetrating these eugenic structures is to remove the moral illusion self-is-good when self physically or mentally harms other to satisfy a need or desire.
When preventing harm depends on the threat or infliction of a harm (punishment), the harm may be right in the sense it is preventing another harm. However, this does not mean harming people to prevent a harm is a social and moral good. When harms can function as social and moral goods, harms become an instrument of power necessary to uphold and sustain what is considered good.
In the “Principles of Biomedical Ethics” the problem of harmful actions is described as follows: “Harmful actions that involve justifiable setbacks to another’s interests are, of course, not wrong. They include cases of justified criminal punishment, justified demotion of an employee for poor performance in a job, and discipline in schools.”311
While the examples cited are important social issues that require solutions, if justified harms are the solution to these and other problems involving socioeconomic fairness, justice and well-being, we will never free ourselves from the moral consequences of quality life outsiders—people being punished for their inherited DNA differences—social eugenics.
The resolution of these ‘eugenic-driven’ prosocial conflicts over resource distribution & well-being will be a key determinant of the future of humankind and the planet
Freedom from ‘selection’s grip’ is understanding how the interplay of your inherited DNA differences (genetic propensities) and environmental conditions (e.g., rules, laws, regulations and policies) affect not only your life course outcomes and well-being but the life course outcomes and well-being of others.
Self does not freely choose or control the biological processes that create it moment by moment.9
Moreover, people do not freely choose or control how their inherited DNA differences align with their social environment.
While people make choices, the choices they make are shaped and influenced by the interplay of their inherited DNA differences and environmental conditions.
The ability to predict a bad choice does not prevent it from being chosen.
However, if choices came with predictions showing how doing A rather than B would improve health, happiness or longevity, would we be capable of making better choices?
If you found a preference you had for A rather than B was deleterious to your future well-being, would you (or could you) change your preference?
It is a task that opens a door for artificial intelligence (AI) and its role as a personal assistant helping people make better choices based on their DNA differences.
Penetrating the Puzzling Complexity of Genes and Environments
Every art, every science, every innovation and invention, government structure or corporate enterprise should be first and foremost about solving the global problem of Well-Being Across Individual, Cultural and DNA Differences.
The good news is the resources and technologies necessary to accomplish this goal—to escape the jungle and change the course of human evolution—are at hand.
There is a positive gene-environment state of individual welfare where positive well-being does not result in negative well-being for others
Psychologist Sophie von Stumm and Katrina d’Apice explain the environmental aspects of the gene-environment interplay:
“Just like SNPs are spread across the entire genome, these environmental factors occur across all times, locations, and types of experiences, including—but not limited to—natural, biophysical, social, cultural and economic environments—that is, the environome. And just like a single SNP, a single environmental factor is unlikely to independently account for much variance in psychological differences.”1
“In contrast to the genome, the environome is pure change: No moment in people’s lives is like any other before or in the future. Notwithstanding some environmental factors exert relatively stable influences over time, such as the characteristics of the family home that children are raised in.”1
Psychologist Robert Plomin et al. write: “A comparison between the genome and … the environome is instructive. In the genome, millions of inherited differences in DNA sequence have been identified and their tiny individual associations with a trait can be summed to create polygenic scores…In contrast, for the environome, there is no fundamental unit of transmission…”118
While penetrating the puzzling complexity of the interplay and the environome is daunting, it is where the secret of well-being across individual, cultural and DNA differences lies.
No one freely chooses or controls how their inherited DNA differences will align with the rules, laws, regulations and policies in their social environment.
This makes machine technologies and AI key to identifying and managing the complexities of the gene-environment interplay, in particular the role of the environome and how it affects gene expression and well-being.
AI can be the low cost means to identify and remove the justified harms that social hierarchies depend on to transmit their ‘eugenic’ structures across future generations.
By penetrating the environome, democracy based on well-being across individual and cultural differences becomes possible.
When the complexity of the environome is revealed there will no longer be ‘DNA winners’ and ‘DNA losers.’ Social hierarchy and its inefficient ‘eugenic’ structures will lose their political and economic legitimacy. Individuals and groups that flourish from socioeconomic disparities will no longer be in a position to manipulate and exploit political and economic environments to reinforce their social dominance and power.
Eventually, the complexity of each person’s genetic individuality will be disentangled from the myths and illusions that make some individuals nothing more than “economic beasts of burden” for those born lucky.
When we arrive at that moment in history, probably by the end of this century, will fairness norms be based on inclusion and shared well-being or punishment and exclusion?
This is where moral talk about making the world a better and more equal place faces its denouement…Which way will human ‘prosociality’ turn?
Will the fences of prosocial inequality continue to grow in their complexity and divisiveness, making it inevitable billions of people in future generations will be fenced off on the day they are born?
Will we remain lost in a jungle of “Gloomy Prospects’ where the hopes, ambitions and dreams of billions of people are trapped in the bowels of a social hierarchy–punished for their DNA differences?
A Fork in the Road of Human Evolution and Well-Being
Is there a moral, political or economic purpose to human life greater than well-being across individual, cultural and DNA differences?
In 1890 Alfred Marshall wrote the first great text in neoclassical economics with this optimistic view of the future of economic growth and shared prosperity:
“Now at last we are setting ourselves seriously to inquire whether it is necessary that there should be any so called “lower classes” at all; that is whether there need be large numbers of people doomed from their birth to hard work in order to provide for others the requisites of a refined and cultured life, while they themselves are prevented by their poverty and toil from having any share or part in that life.”320
In 2012 Branko Milanovic, an economist at the World Bank, revealed a new trend in global income inequality. Although startling in terms of its implications, it is not surprising as to its inevitability.
“…there are 7 points in the world where rich and poor countries are geographically closest to each other, whether it is because they share a border, or because the sea distance between them is minimal. You would not be surprised to find out that all these 7 points have mines, boat patrols, walls and fences to prevent free movement of people. The rich world is fencing itself in, or fencing others out.”143
More than 250 years after Adam Smith introduced the phrase “invisible hand”319 and more than 120 years since Marshall penned his encouraging words for the future of humanity, the self-regarding invisible hand of “economic man” that was to eliminate the “lower classes” has revealed its moral claw.
Robert Frost makes the point…there is something strange and morally defective about people who think political and socioeconomic barriers are the best solution to their social dislikes.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out…
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down…
–An excerpt from Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall”
Where do we begin?
Self has no moral space separate from the well-being of Other
At the core of human civilization, every belief or desire aimed at producing something good is influenced and in an ultimate sense bounded by the conditions and limitations of how genes and environments affect behavior and life course outcomes.
Well-Being Across is an attempt to create new moral and political spaces where social hierarchy and inequality cannot go, moral and political spaces where costly social and institutional punishment cannot prevail. In these moral spaces, social eugenics and its hierarchies of heritable inequality cannot survive.
While solutions to the ‘social eugenic’ problem of hierarchy and SES inequality will require global coordination between governments coupled with research and technological innovations, there are immediate actions one can take.
Ask yourself this question–
How much of your Quality Life Supply Chain reinforces status consumption and social hierarchy– the extraction of resources from the environment in ways that threaten the biosphere of the planet and the health, happiness and longevity of current and future generations?230
Refuse to accept the moral validity of SES structures across different governments. Develop groups and coalitions to protest and morally reject economic models and policies that reinforce social hierarchy, targeting the ‘prosocial lies’ that make SES inequality appear fair and just, putting pressure on governments to develop policies focusing on stopping the intergenerational transmission of social hierarchy and socioeconomic inequality.
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Key Policies We Support:
We endorse an editorial in Nature March 2022 on climate change:
“Although there’s now a consensus that human activities have irreversible environmental effects, researchers disagree on the solutions — especially if that involves curbing economic growth. That disagreement is impeding action. It’s time for researchers to end their debate. The world needs them to focus on the greater goals of stopping catastrophic environmental destruction and improving well-being.” The editorial concludes “…the world is running out of time.”
Universal Health Care
Wage Subsidies
Minimum Basic Income
Supply Chain Transparency in Food & Over the Counter Drugs
The Paris Accord
UN Sustainable Development Goals
Smart Machine Technologies (AI) as a Global Public Good
Public Banking Concepts…as described by Angus Deaton
Global Wealth Tax
Public Ownership of Natural Resources
Anti-Death Penalty
Public Ownership of Energy Supply
A Global Consortium to Establish Policies Regarding Private and Public Rights
Regulation of Ownership and use of Space and Planetary Bodies
All for-profit corporations should develop social enterprise projects designed to reduce the political and socioeconomic effects of hierarchy, justified harms, economic inequality and inequities in health, happiness and longevity.
Written by WGW
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