Excerpt
PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour): Same with the keen eyesight of hawk -- the better their eyes, the better their meals -- or the markings on these butterflies that mimic big bad owls, protecting them from predators.
Thus, the invisible hand of natural selection promotes the survival of the individual and the prosperity of the species. In economic terms, this is the greatest good for the greatest number, the grand achievements of a market economy, made possible by competitive individuals like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or Steve Jobs.
But to Frank, the Darwin show also depicts the dark side of competition, individuals vying in ways that stultify the species. In the evolution of male elk, for example, the fight for females results in outsized antlers.
ROBERT FRANK, Cornell University: Having bigger ones than your rival made you more likely to win your fight. And so every mutation that coded for larger antlers was very strongly favored. And they grew generation by generation.
We see bull elk now with antlers that are four feet across. They weigh 40 pounds. That's great for doing battle with other bull elk, but it's horrible if you get chased into a densely wooded area by a wolf.
PAUL SOLMAN: You can't get out of the forest.
ROBERT FRANK: There's nowhere to turn, literally. That's a feature that absolutely captures the conflict between individual and group.
PAUL SOLMAN: But returning to Darwin the economist, how does competitive evolution hurt the species known as Homo sapiens?
Years ago, Frank began thinking that we engage in the same sort of wasteful, self-defeating contests that Darwin documented in other animals. In "The Winner-Take-All Society" in the mid-'90s, a younger Bob Frank wrote and explained to us, that, though the use of strength-enhancing steroids in sports was hurting the general health of athletes, for example, it was in no way enhancing the game.
ROBERT FRANK: But, from an individual point of view, it's compellingly attractive to take the drug, because, otherwise, you don't land a spot on the team, you don't have a shot at the NFL roster.
PAUL SOLMAN: Frank's line of thinking continued to evolve. The winners were separating from the rest in almost every field, and their sky-high pay was fueling "Luxury Fever," his 1999 book where he warned of competitive, conspicuous consumption among the super-rich, taunting and tempting us all.
ROBERT FRANK: There's no question but that we're in the midst of another Gilded Age. The robber barons had accumulated great wealth, and they spent it in very visible ways. The cyber-barons of today have accumulated great wealth, and they're spending it in visible ways.
PAUL SOLMAN: Ways so visible that those down the ladder began emulating them. And that's the downside of conspicuous competition, says Frank. With humans, as with other animals, the survival of the so-called fittest may come at a cost to the species as a whole.
ROBERT FRANK: So, in one species of seals, for example, 4 percent of the males sire 88 percent of all offspring. That's like the rich get richer that we're seeing in modern society.
And, so, I think you see a very parallel processes. The sexual selection that arises from battles among males in those species produces enormous, outsized animals with huge weaponry that's all self-canceling in the end, wasteful. When you see incomes concentrating at the top of the income ladder, as we have seen for the last three decades, then you see spending patterns that are essentially a duplicate of the waste that Darwin saw.
Another excerpt
ROBERT FRANK: The political conversation these days seems to be dominated by the idea that, if the society tries to act collectively, it's always going to make matters worse. But you can't just turn selfish people loose and hope for the best. In those cases, both in nature and in the marketplace, you get very bad results oftentimes.
PAUL SOLMAN: So then yours is the message of the benevolent economist, if you will, who says both left and right are, in some fundamental sense, wrong because they don't understand both the value of the market from the left and the importance of government from the right?
ROBERT FRANK: That's exactly the point of the argument, yes, that -- that there really is much more to the market than its critics realize, and the people who say government can do no good for the society are way off base. They don't understand the fundamental conflict that often arises between individuals and groups.
So, I'm not the only one who sees the reality of economics.
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