Cave-man brain vs. global economy

How evolution explains the left and right’s disgust for free markets

President Donald Trump presenting new tariffs, often massive, on most nations.

Market economics is the great success story of the modern world. Nothing has done more to eradicate extreme poverty, raise life expectancy and standards of living, and expand and apply our species’ technoscientific capabilities to meet the various challenges we face. (I put aside for now the devastating impact of industrial development on the broader biosphere, something communist economies often managed even worse.)

Capitalism of course comes in many varieties. It is clear that market economies generate superior outcomes than command economies, which eventually lead communist countries (like, formerly, the Soviet Union and China) to abandon their centralized economic experiments and emulate foreign capitalist models.

There is more dispute as to whether broadly freer market economies (United States, Switzerland, Singapore) produce better outcomes than more regulated/redistributive ones (France, Sweden). The question is open to some legitimate debate¹—especially given differences on what outcomes we value (e.g., how much weight to give to overall wealth, freedom, equality, or other ends) and the diversity of ways for a state to intervene in the economy.

What’s more, assessing different policy approaches according to their economic outcomes is confounded by numerous other factors, such as differentials in human capital and social trust. E.g., policies that work relatively well in high-trust Nordic countries may not work in more corrupt southern European or Middle-Eastern regions, and policies that work in brainy East-Asian countries (as measured by PISA testing) are unlikely to yield the same results in regions deficient in human capital.

What is clear however is nobody likes markets. It is often thought that the right is more favorable to markets than the left. It is true that the left is defined by more attachment to equality and therefore actively dislikes markets insofar as these inevitably lead to inequalities. The free market, defined as the aggregate of voluntary exchanges between individuals, inevitably produces inequalities reflecting individuals’ differing capabilities and preferences. Market ourcomes are then inevitably offensive to the left.

But in most cases center-right and right-wing parties are not themselves actively pro-market. Conservative (let alone nationalist) parties generally do not make market economics central to their messaging. Reagan, Thatcher, and now Milei in Argentina are exceptions to the rule. Center-right parties tend to campaign on issues like “common sense,” stability, immigration, crime, and pragmatism, not free market economics as such. If they tend to be more free-market than the left, this is because the center-right has no active revulsion towards markets, rather than any particular attachment to them.

I believe we dislike markets because these do not jive with the social emotions that developed to help us survive and thrive throughout our evolutionary history. Most of that history was spent as hunter-gatherers in small tribes, hence, these emotions are best suited to surviving as individuals and groups in that context, not for managing interconnected hypertechnological global economies. As E. O. Wilson said:

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

What are the human social emotions that influence politics? I would highlight two clusters that have dominated recently: egalitarianism and tribalism. (There are also others, e.g. nostalgia and sanctity, but I put them aside.)

Egalitarianism, the preference for equality of status and outcomes, emerges from the confluence of several emotional tendencies. As biological creatures, human beings are fearful (in the biological realm: eat, don’t be eaten). As social creatures, human beings are obsessed with status. It is not hard to see how individuals unendingly worried about these things would out-reproduce more mellow individuals. As social creatures, we also have a degree of sympathy for others, including those who suffer economically.

Hence, multiple pressures lead democratic governments to become more socialistic over time: economic redistribution reduces (but cannot eradicate) inequalities causing offensive lesser status for the majority, welfare states respond to economic worries (though we still, unendingly, worry), and these same policies assuage our conscience by helping out the worst off.

Egalitarianism appears to have been the norm in hunter-gatherer societies for the last 200,000 years, as notably measured by meat-sharing. Typically, meat is shared equally among tribe members, without regard for the greater contributions of different hunters. Christopher Boehm has described a hunter-gatherer phenomenon of “reverse dominance hierarchy” whereby tribe members gang up on individual members who become too powerful through mechanisms like criticism, ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, and ultimately execution. Perceived “bullies” are thus kept in line.

It would seem that egalitarianism reflects very deep-seated evolved human emotions. In any event, the desire for equality manifests whenever there is mass participation in political life and seems unquenchable. Unlike hunter-gatherer tribes, traditional civilizations are almost always defined by extreme status hierarchies, with kings, aristocrats, clergy, merchants, artisans, and peasants holding extremely unequal amounts of power and wealth.

Traditional civiliations’ inequality likely partly reflects technological limitations leading to specialization and dominance of small groups that are easier to coordinate. E.g., a mass of peasants scattered across the land will necessarily be less organized than a tight military-fiscal bureaucracy under the command of a king. Traditional civilizations typically suppressed political life, making any aspirations to equality among the masses moot outside of occasional rebellions (which usually would simply put another undemocratic elite in place).

It is striking that controversies over equality are central across civilizations whenever the masses have the opportunity to participate in political life. The ancient Greek historians and political philosophers identify struggles over political and economic equality as the central controversies in their city-states’ domestic political life, often leading to vicious and devastating civil wars. The Roman Republic’s history is marked by near-continuous political strife between the Patrician upper class and the Plebeians, as well as disputes over unequal land ownership.

Equality was again a central issue, often the central issue, with modern politics’ return to mass participation. This was true of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Even the Italian Fascist and German National Socialist movements (especially their revolutionary wings) had significant egalitarian elements emphasizing mass participation, equality for coethnics, and the idea of a “third way” between capitalism and communism. (Fascist egalitarianism coexisted uneasily with more elitist and hierarchical thinking as well.)

The point is this: the desire for equality is continuous regardless of massively improving material living conditions or equalizing reforms. This strongly suggests the desire for equality is simply built into our evolved psychology and cannot actually be fundamentally quenched by modifying external conditions. As Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America (1840):

The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.

If there are profound in-born human impulses favoring egalitarianism, smart politicians will of course appeal to them to get elected. In my studies of history at university, I was quite fascinated by the figure of François Mitterrand. He became president of France in 1981 by promising something other than capitalism. What that “something other” is no one could or can define. Promising a “somewhat more mixed and redistributive market economy” doesn’t have quite the same ring. Promising “something other” was quite enough to get Mitterrand, the wily devil, handsomely elected and go on to serve two terms, even if it meant his economic reforms did considerable short- and long-term damage (inflationary chaos and then abrupt reversal in 1983, then permanent 8-10% unemployment).

Tribalism as an emotional complex is arguably more straightforward. People come to identify with groups, very prominent among which are ethnic/national groups. The ethnic/national group to some extent begins to act as a collective person, at least so far as pride is concerned. An attack or insult against against an ethnic or racial group is felt, to varying degrees, as an attack or insult against each member individually.

As E. O. Wilson notes in The Social Conquest of the Earth, inter-tribal warfare, often leading to extermination, is a tragic and utterly common feature of our evolutionary history. It is not hard to see how humans evolved to be tribal, to have a sense of group identity and extreme sensitivity towards sleights against their group, could outcompete tribes lacking such sentiments.

Tribalism of the left manifests in cultivation of ethnic minorities’ identities and grievances. Tribalism of the right does much the same, but with respect to the ethnic majority (or legacy majority, if it has become a minority). Ethnic tensions and conflicts of various degrees are utterly pervasive across societies across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The pervasiveness of tribalism and pessimism regarding multiculturalism is one common motive for opposing large-scale immigration.

Right-wing tribalism is often associated with nationalism, because the ethnic majority is much more likely to associate their ethnic identity (consciously or not) with their political nation.

Just as markets are offensive to the left by causing inequalities between individuals, markets are offensive to the right by causing (or, really, emphasizing), inequalities between nations. Free markets mean individuals, capital, and economic activities are allocated according to aggregate desires and comparative advantages. This means foreign capital may buy up your companies and land, your jobs are offshored to cheaper jurisdictions, and your people may emigrate in search of better opportunities.

All this may increase economic economic growth, but it is all deeply offensive to national pride. If you’re Donald Trump, you consider every trade deficit to be a national insult.² In the of globalization’s economic insults to the nation, the instinct among nationalists will be to institute protectionist measures and industrial policies to achieve a greater degree of national self-sufficiency. While such policies may be justified on strategic grounds (e.g., to not be dependent on hostile foreign powers), however generalizing such policies often sets the nation further back and thus ironically leads to further national humiliation down the road.

Egalitarianism and tribalism then lead to similar political-economic cycles. Egalitarians and tribalists will, in earnest pursuit of what emotionally resonates with them, wreck their economies. Eventually, the euphoria of the revolution wears off, the reality of stagnation and international inferiority sinks in, those who can emigrate (especially among the educated) do so, and reformists reconcile themselves to the market. This can either be done enthusiastically as part of a freedom agenda—Reagan, Thatcher, Milei—or more commonly as part of a miserable foot-dragging technocratic agenda in partnership with the IMF and similar bodies.

The pervasiveness of egalitarian and tribal emotions is probably why more or less nationalistic / socialistic governments have been so common. Mao’s revolution in China was both communist and nationalist. Left to their own devices, the communist regimes of eastern Europe tended—like Ceaușescu’s Romania and Hoxha’s Albania—tended to become nationalist over time. A vague “nationalist socialism” was in many ways the default ideology for postcolonial governments across Africa, the Arab world, and much of Asia.

These governments could take great actions to meet the aspirations of their people for social justice and national pride… while ultimately making things worse. The postcolonial typically became dictatorships, just as unaccountable as the previous colonial regimes, but significantly more incompetent and corrupt. As Lee Kuan Yew explains, insofar as postcolonial leaders embraced national-socialist economics, their countries’ lost access to the expertise, capital, and good habits of more developed societies and of multinational corporations.

There is no sense in simply suppressing egalitarian and tribal instincts. Egalitarianism and tribalism are simply tendencies reflecting facts of human nature. Right-wingers who oppose equality must reflect on the fact that inequality and egalitarianism are equally ineradicable parts of human nature. Equally, cosmopolitan universalists must take the tribal instincts very serious and not create dangerously brittle societies based on wishful thinking.

As the American Founders said time and again, one has to work with human nature as it is, not as we may might wish it to be. The point was to harness and channel emotions in way conducive to human flourishing. The sex drive and romantic attachment were positively harnessed and channeled by the institution of marriage to create and educate the next generation, as well as provide economic security to women and children. Sentiments some might dismiss as ignoble, such as ambition and pride, could similarly be positively channeled if economic and political institutions created avenues for ambitious men to achieve things without harming the rights of others.

I would argue that egalitarianism and tribalism must be prosocially harnessed and channeled in the same way, though finding the right balance is difficult. The great statesmen will be those who can appeal the deep longings of the human heart while instituting prudent policies that create the best conditions to unleash human capabilites. Such figures are rare but will be needed to meet the populist challenge.

If you want to read up on the Trumpsanity, I recommend:

• Richard Hanania, “Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism”

• Nathan Cofnas, “MAGA Communism and the End of America”

And on the uneasy relationship between evolved human psychology and markets:

• Filipe Nobre Faria, “Is market liberalism adaptive? Rethinking F. A. Hayek on moral evolution.” (I recently discovered Hayek tried to give his libertarian economic thinking a biological/evolutionary basis later in life, very interesting.)

1. I qualify this because, to be frank, in terms of technoscientific capacities, the United States’ rise to absolute domination of high-tech sectors relative to Europe and Japan has for me decided the issue. Mariana Mazzucato’s idea, popular among policymakers, that the “entrepreneurial state” can be the lead actor in innovation is bunk. Private capital investment, the latter itself being available thanks to moderate taxation rewarding previous investments, in a vast market is inevitably going to make better investment gambles in aggregate than a lowest-common-denominator politically-correct committee of civil servants investing other people’s money. In any event, Europe is now massively dependent on the U.S. digital, space, and AI sectors.

2. Beyond the fact that Trump has instinctively hated trade deficits since at least the 1980s, the tariffs have the effect of massively empowering the president: every affected company and world leader on the planet will now be begging for exceptions from him. It remains to be seen whether the economic damage to the U.S. will be limited enough for this strategy to be sustainable.