You Get Nothing! is an observation by Jack Rusher, published here Saturday, February 02, 2008. It is part of Journal.
Morality, economics and prison sex.
Walking through Chinatown with a friend some time ago, we passed two men — a Chinese employer and a Latin American employee — engaged in a ever-louder contract negotiation conducted in their shared second language:
“Fuck you.”
“You get nothing.”
“Fuck you!”
“You get nothing!”
They were still shouting these two phrases back and forth as we moved out of earshot.
This conversation now comes to mind when I observe any number of human interactions. In particular, there’s a classic behavioral economics experiment called the Ultimatum Game that goes like this:
Your game partner is given $100 to split with you. Whatever division of the money he proposes, if you accept it, you each get to keep your share, but if you reject it, neither of you gets any money.
Will you accept a $50/$50 split? Almost certainly. What if he wants to keep $90? Probably not. In fact, it turns out that almost everyone declines the offer if it’s worse than $70/$30. Economists consider this behavior irrational because rejecting any offer — no matter how small — means getting no money instead of some money, and they feel a rational person should take whatever he can get.
Another way to state the economists’ position is:
If your choice is between getting raped by your cellmate or putting up a struggle, receiving a beating, then getting raped by your cellmate, you should just take the cock. After all, you’ll have saved yourself a beating.
The point of enduring the beating — and hopefully getting a few shots in — is that it serves as a disincentive for future abuse. The instinct to increase the rapist’s transaction cost by fighting back is the same one that leads us to decline the shitty offer.
This willingness, or even moral obligation, to hurt ourselves to punish the wrongs of others developed over ten million years ago in our primate ancestors, and is shared in all of them that we’ve been able to test. It’s part of our collective social immune system, designed to punish those who would cheat other members of the tribe.
Those who wish to educate this impulse out of us are trying to make us more tolerant of unfairness, and thus less human.
So remember: if someone tries to take advantage of you, say “fuck you!” Even if it means you get nothing.