Title: Book Review: Cailin O'Connor's <em>The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution</em>
-Date: 2020-01-20
+Date: 2020-01-20 22:20
Category: commentary
Tags: categorization, feminism, game theory, review (book)
-Status: draft
[This is a _super-great book_](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-unfairness-9780198789970) about the cultural evolutionary game theory of gender roles! (And also stuff like race and religion and caste, I guess, but I'm ignoring that because I haven't gotten around to broadening the topic scope of this blog yet.) I am _unreasonably excited about this book_ for supplying the glue of _analytical rigor_ to a part of my world-model that had previously been held together by threads of mere handwaving! (Three years ago on this blog, I wrote, ["social-role defaults are inevitably going to accrete around [sex differences]"](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/#views-have-changed), but I didn't, and couldn't, have told you _how and why_ in a form suitable for verification by computer simulation.)
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-Book Review—The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution
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-On my secret ("secret") blog, I reviewed a book about the cultural evolutionary game theory of gender! I thought I'd share the link on this website, because you guys probably like game theory?? (~2400 words)
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-gender makes inequitable coordination equilibria possible in a way that isn't available in a uniform population—O'Connor gives an example about splitting a pizza, but my example: gay relationships have to coordinate anew
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-Hawk-dove has two pure-strategy equilbria Hawk/Dove and Dove/Hawk. (The Hawk has no incentive to switch to Dove and settle for a lower payoff, but the Dove has no incentive to switch to Hawk and destroy the surplus fighting)
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-greetings are symmetric (both shake right hand), unless you have types (gentleman kisses lady's hand); everyone drives on the right
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-gradient markers: if type value is continuous (like age or skin color), you can use "If my tag value is greater"
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-categories provide the extra information needed to break symmetry, but precisely because people can't switch roles
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-the coordination problem of how much parental leave to offer could be different payoffs to men and women even with equal treatment
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-bargaining with the Nash demand game: fair demands are the only ESS, but it's possible for 4/6 equilibria to emerge
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-> "Since many jobs take time and effort to learn to do well, families could save time by dividing duties and encouraging individuals to specialize. Little girls could learn to do the labor expected of women, and little boys the labor expected of men" https://behavioralscientist.org/gendered-division-of-labor-served-a-purpose-to-make-progress-dont-erase-it-replace-it/
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-> "Even if [Larry Summers] was right, he ought to have kept his mouth shut." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/women-math-and-science_b_6573074
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-If inequality emerges under minimal conditions without biases, then bias training can't help
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-one coordination problem can affect the conventionality of another: childcare being incompatible with big game hunting, shrinks the basin of attraction for women hunting big game
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-threatpoints (or disagreement points): if bargaining fails, someone has a worse BATNA. If you have a high threatpoint, the difference between demanding Low and getting the threatpoint isn't a big deal, which makes less of an incentive to learn to demand Low and less risk to demanding High—and if they learn to demand High, that forces the other type to learn to demand Low
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-(0 as disagremeent point isn't special)
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