Title: Book Review: Cailin O'Connor's <em>The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution</em>
Date: 2020-01-20 22:20
Category: commentary
-Tags: categorization, feminism, game theory, review (book)
+Tags: categorization, convention, feminism, game theory, review (book)
[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.)
With types, this is no longer true: the population can settle on equilibria that favor the interests of one type over another (but are better for everyone than the absence of coordination), like an "always Bach" convention in [the Bach–Stravinsky game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_sexes_(game_theory)), or in the aggregation of [_many_ games that the type tags are being used for](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/).
-This is especially true if we drop the assumption that the type "tags" have no in-game significance (other than being visible for coordination) and introduce an asymmetric payoff matrix. Consider the Nash bargaining game: two agents have to decide how to divide a pie with 10 slices, but if their demands are incompatible (like when I demand 7 slices and you also demand 7 slices, but 7 + 7 = 14 is greater than 10), then the pie explodes, and no one gets any pie. If different types of agents have different fallback options, that affects their incentives in the bargaining game: if you wouldn't have anything to eat if you didn't get any pie, then you might want to make a conservative demand, like 3 slices, in order to ensure that you get _some_ pie even if it turns out that I'm a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices. But if I have a sandwich that's as valuable to me as 2½ slices of pie, then I'm not particularly worried about you being a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices: to me, the difference between a successful 3-slice demand and failing to make a deal at all is only half a slice, which gives me an incentive to demand more, because I have less to lose than you if bargaining fails.
+<a id="threatpoints-and-bargaining"></a>This is especially true if we drop the assumption that the type "tags" have no in-game significance (other than being visible for coordination) and introduce an asymmetric payoff matrix. Consider the Nash bargaining game: two agents have to decide how to divide a pie with 10 slices, but if their demands are incompatible (like when I demand 7 slices and you also demand 7 slices, but 7 + 7 = 14 is greater than 10), then the pie explodes, and no one gets any pie. If different types of agents have different fallback options, that affects their incentives in the bargaining game: if you wouldn't have anything to eat if you didn't get any pie, then you might want to make a conservative demand, like 3 slices, in order to ensure that you get _some_ pie even if it turns out that I'm a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices. But if I have a sandwich that's as valuable to me as 2½ slices of pie, then I'm not particularly worried about you being a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices: to me, the difference between a successful 3-slice demand and failing to make a deal at all is only half a slice, which gives me an incentive to demand more, because I have less to lose than you if bargaining fails.
This kind of dynamic explains [the differences in women's roles between patriarchal "plow cultures" (in which men do agriculture with plows) and non-patriarchal "hoe cultures" (in which women do horticulture with hoes)](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/hoe-cultures-a-type-of-non-patriarchal-society/): a coordination equilibrium in which Society's primary means of sustenance is considered "women's work" gives women more negotiating power _as a class_. (Even when individual women in a [patriarchal](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/) Society have high privilege (_e.g._, earning power), they're still women as far as conventions are concerned.)
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