Homo denaturalis, Violence, and Global Governance

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I entitle my three-part talk "Homo denaturalis, Violence, and Global Governance,"and it involves three logically linked theses. In light of the shortness of time I have been allocated, I shall be able to present only the first of these, and even that one but in abbreviated form. Those interested may obtain a copy of the full text of my remarks via my web-site.

Thesis 1a:

The 20^th century was characterized by the overwhelming dominance of (a) physics and chemistry, (b) of biology in its incarnation as medicine, (c) of economics, and (d) of the nation-state and of its wars.

Thesis 1b:

Human life is undergoing a rapid evolutionary transition from homo sapiens to homo denaturalis. Scholarship of the late 19^th and of the 20^th century lay the foundations, and I expect that scholarship of the 21^st century will complete this evolutionary "leap." (I mean "evolutionary" in a figurative, not technical, sense.)

The first of my three theses consists of two parts, one pertaining primarily to the 20^th century, the other to what I expect to happen in the 21^st century. Note that the first part, with the exception of literature, defines the scope of the Nobel-Prize awards: physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, and peace, i.e., non-war.

Recall with me that the century that spans the entire history of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi (1897- 1996), under whose auspices we are meeting today, is also the century of some most remarkable milestones of science. For today's speech I pick and choose, somewhat arbitrarily, scientific events that roughly correspond to the year 1897, the year in which Phi Kappa Phi was founded. Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), the inventor of dynamite, left a will upon his death in 1896, providing for the establishment of a fund to award annual prizes "to those who ... shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." The first awards were made in 1901, the first physics award going to one Wilhelm Roentgen (1845-1923), who discovered X-rays in 1895, and the eventual consequences of his discovery for medical and other diagnostic work -- for example, in examining the structural soundness of buildings -- are undisputed.

In the area of transportation, Henry Ford (1863-1947) has his first "horseless carriage," i.e., the automobile, parade through the streets of Detroit in 1896; this invention was to transform the nature of land-based warfare. 1897 sees the invention of the world's first modern submarine by Irish-born American John P. Holland (1840-1914), and by 1905, just eight years later, Germany began its famous submarine program, transforming the conduct of naval warfare. The year 1900 sees the invention of the dirigible (the "blimp") by German Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917), making air-warfare possible (surveillance and bombings) as from World War I onward.

In the area of communications technology, the seminal event occurs when German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) proves in 1887 the existence of radio waves (i.e., electromagnetic waves or Hertz waves as they were known for a time). This stimulated Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) to work on and to invent the wireless telegraph in 1898, with the first transoceanic transmission taking place in 1901. Of course, the wireless telecommunications revolution is upon us today: infrared remote control gadgets, wireless telephony, satellite communications, and so on, all are derivatives of Hertz' work on radio waves or electromagnetic radiation. Another derivative of Hertz' work is the communications function of modern warfare, warfare which has become independent of the platforms on which weaponry is mounted (submarines, ships, armored vehicles, aircraft) and ever more dependent on rapidly communicated intelligence.

1900 is the year of quantum mechanics, the year when German physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) worked out its foundations. In 1905, another German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) publishes, at age 26, five papers that forever transform our notions of the universe. "Space and time," he says, "are not conditions under which we live, but constructs by which we think." The work of Planck and Einstein, and others, led directly to the discovery of the secrets of nuclear fission in 1939 by Germans Otto Hahn (1879-1968), Lise Meitner (1878-1968), and Fritz Strassmann (b. 1902), and hence on to nuclear energy and nuclear warfare.⁽¹⁾

Whereas Meitner was a physicist, Hahn was a chemist and Strassmann a radiochemist. As regards chemistry, then, let me highlight but one achievement apart from nuclear chemistry, and apart from the plastics revolution and the textiles revolution (where natural fibers such cotton, wool, and silk have been replaced by synthetic fibers such as acrylic, polyester, and nylon in which all of you are dressed today). That achievement is artificial, nitrogen-based fertilizer. As you may know, nitrogen is required for DNA and RNA -- the molecules that store genetic information -- and is also required to make the proteins indispensable for all plant and animal cells. According to a recent report in Scientific American (August 1997, pp. 76-81), up to one-third of the nitrogen in people's bodies ultimately derives from artificial fertilization to grow our food supplies. Putting it another way, fertilization by purely natural means could sustain perhaps only four of the earth's six billion people alive today. That we have banished food-shortages as a cause of hunger in this world, in spite of a quadrupling of the world's population in this century, must be credited to the scientific wizardry of chemists.

The inventor of ammonia synthesis -- the process by which artificial fertilizer is made -- was the German Fritz Haber (1868-1934). For this work, he was awarded the Nobel-Prize in chemistry in 1918. A few years earlier, in 1915, Haber's wife committed suicide, tormented as she was by the impeding use in World War I of another of her husband's inventions: chlorine (poison) gas, first used in the battle of Ypres on April 22, 1915 causing several thousand French and British casualties. Just as his earlier work ensures that we all are well-fed today and need not suffer hunger, Prof. Haber also became, in effect, the inventor of chemical warfare. Ironically, Fritz Haber, a Jew, fled Germany in 1933 to avoid persecution under Hitler.

And so it goes. Ours was and is a century of discovering secrets, put to good uses -- and to bad ones: the polio vaccine and the hydrogen bomb both came in 1952. Sputnik astonished the world in 1957; Prof. Barnard astonished also, performing the world's first heart transplant in 1967; Voyagers I and II were launched in 1977, the first space probes eventually to leave our solar system! 1987 seems to be remembered for nothing else but the "collapse" of the US stock market -- in hindsight nothing more than a trivial blip in an otherwise unprecedented stellar century of economic progress that for the first time in the history of humankind brought permanent prosperity and wealth to hundreds of millions of people -- and 1997 of course saw the announcement of the birth of Dolly, the fatherless, cloned lamb.

Surely, the late 19^th and the entire 20^th century are a time of intense exploration and discoveries about the physicality of life. Another German, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), reached a prescient and prophetic conclusion. In the 1880s, even before the 20^th century commenced, he saw and foresaw "a civilization so self-confident over its mastery of science, technology, politics, and economics that for it 'God is dead'" (quoted from Compton's Encyclopedia, CD-ROM, 1995).

Now, I am of course no Friedrich Nietzsche. But just as Nietzsche foresaw that humans were to take their life's destiny out of god's hands, as if god were dead, so I foresee that homo sapiens is "dead" (in a figurative sense). The writing is on the wall. All I need to do is put a fitting label on what to me is so overwhelmingly apparent: the 20^th century has begun, and the 21^st century will complete, homo sapiens' transition to homo denaturalis (a term to which I lay claim) -- the "de-natured" human.

Let me explain what I mean.

Just as in the past century we have learned to increasingly de-link ourselves from the limitations physical nature used to impose on us, my thesis is that in the coming century we will increasingly de-link ourselves from the limitations biological nature imposes on us. As I illustrated with numerous examples, we already intervene in nature and in natural processes as a matter of routine. Every time you sit down to eat, you eat the fruits of human intervention, you eat what nature would not and could have produced on its own accord! (If you doubt that, just research what corncobs used to look like before humans began raising corn in a serious way.) Every time you drive, or fly, or scuba-dive you defy the physical limits of human nature. Every time you swallow an antibiotic pill you intervene in natural processes of illness in an unnatural way. Every time you telephone, you do what human nature cannot do.

Our ears now "hear" what nature did not mean them to hear, i.e., sound frequencies beyond our natural range of hearing (whale songs and elephant rumblings), and our eyes now "see" what nature did not make them to see, i.e., light frequencies above and below the visible light spectrum -- which bring us back, full circle, to Wilhelm Roengten and his X-rays on one side of the visible light spectrum (frequencies as high as 10²¹ and wavelengths as small as 3x10^-13) and Heinrich Hertz' radio waves on the other side (with frequency of 10¹⁰ and lower and wavelengths starting of 3x10^-2 and longer).

No doubt, advances in scholarship in the past century have brought with it incredible and finely controllable power to disentangle homo sapiens from the chains of physical limitations. And the new century will bring with it the power literally to re-make ourselves, to unchain homo sapiens from the very nature that birthed us. Let me illustrate this point with a single, well-known, example.

Prof. Francis Crick and James Watson discover the secrets of DNA in 1953, a seminal event laying the groundwork for all kinds of present-day genetic adventures, including genetic engineering, a method by which genes are taken from one organism and inserted into the DNA of a completely different organism. Illnesses are now much more efficiently treated than was ever even imaginable. Insulin-dependent, i.e., type-I diabetes mellitus, for instance, involves an insulin deficiency. (Insulin being the hormone produced by the pancreas that helps to regulate glucose-levels in the body.) Production of insulin used to be a difficult, costly process. But genetic engineering, in a technique that already is some twenty-odd years old, allows the human gene responsible for insulin production to be inserted into a bacterium that is then grown to multiply. Since bacteria multiply much faster than humans, large quantities of human insulin can be grown by non-human organisms in what is obviously a completely "unnatural" method. This insulin is then extracted from the bacteria cultures and injected back into humans for treatment of their condition. More work of this nature is on its way as the human genome and the genomes of other plant and animal species are being unraveled.

Not only do we scholars make, for good and for bad, history (our legacy up to and including the 20^th century), we also -- and literally -- make nature, and re-make our own nature (our future legacy as from the 21^st century onward). We have of course always "made" nature by such means as cross-breeding, for instance, but what is new is the increasingly high degree of precision to make nature in the direction we desire. Not only do we cross-breed two dogs and see what lovely puppy will result, but it is the premeditated, determined direction that our understanding of the elements of life itself gives us that makes these scientific developments so vastly important. Not only do we cross-breed two dogs, but we design -- as was just announced a few days ago -- frogs without heads, i.e., frogs without brains! The possible importance of that invention is that within ten years we may produce human hearts, human livers, human kidneys, and who knows what, in wombs without women, to help relieve the shortages in the market for human replacement organs.

Homo sapiens, the learning and knowing human, is crossing the threshold -- that is my thesis -- to where our knowledge permits us to de-link ourselves from our very own nature, to the point at and beyond which we will become "de-natured" humans -- homo denaturalis. What the coming century will bring is that we are tampering with our very own selves. Instead of genes controlling us, we will begin to control our genes! The 21^st century will be the century during which we turn the table on nature! What exactly the 21^st century will bring in its specifics, I cannot know, just as no one could know and foresee the specifics of the 20^th century's defiance of human's physical limits. But I am sure that the 21^st century's defiance of our biological limits will be an exciting, exhilarating journey. Scholars and scientists are, after all, glorified three-year olds with whom we share at least three characteristics: (a) we forever and incessantly love to ask "why;" (b) we forever and incessantly love to take things apart, never mind the putting back together (which is on occasion more harmful than helpful); (c) and, exceptions and parental meddling notwithstanding, we also love to dress like them!

My fifteen minutes are coming to a close. Perhaps there will be, at some other time, opportunity to explore theses two and three with you: meanwhile, thank you for your attention and for bearing with me.

Recall that my topic for today is to share with you what I foresee will be the major topics of scholarship and education in the coming century. My second thesis suggests that the study of conflict and its resolution will be the other major theme of 21^st century scholarship. Here is the thesis:

Thesis 2

Sex-and-violence is a phrase that handily characterizes life up to and including the out-going 20^th century. As from the in-coming 21^st century onward, human life will be better characterized as eat-and-breed. Violence, as a means of addressing conflict, is on the way out. We will come to see violence as one of the contingencies of human life that we may overcome as we continue to de-link ourselves from the nature that birthed us (homo denaturalis).

It might have surprised you that an economist should have spent so much time speaking about the natural sciences such as physics and biology. Have I got nothing to say for myself, or for my own discipline? To think so would be to misunderstood modern-day economics whose past, it turns out, relates closely to physics and whose future, I believe, will relate closely to biology.

One area of increasing co-operation and cross-disciplinary studies between biology and economics will involve, I believe, conflict and conflict resolution or -- if you will -- the making of war and of peace within and among species. Allow me to explain what I mean.

As you know, two reasonably universal features characterize life: they are popularly referred to as sex-and-violence. It is not surprising, really, that these two should dominate the TV-airwaves. Why, even the presumably more agreeable and educative "nature-shows" on public TV show in terrific (and horrific) detail animals stalking each other, pursuing each other, hunting each other, ripping each other apart, maiming each other, killing each other, and dining on each other. To my mind, no barrage of million-dollar special-effect displays on commercial TV can depict violence more satisfyingly than nature shows on public TV. As to sex ... surely it cannot get any more explicit than what public TV dishes up nearly every night.

Sex-and-violence then. But it should be a triplet: sex, violence, and economics. Why economics? All species, including our own, need to sustain themselves. To do that, they need to arrange their economic affairs in some manner. All economic arrangements across all species share four common features: first, members of the species need to allocate resources such as time, effort, and skill to the potential production of goods and services; second, members of the species need to employ various production techniques to achieve the actual production of desired goods and services; third, members of the species need to distribute what is produced; and fourth, members of the species consume the fruits of their labor. These four features are particularly interesting to study, and grow more complex, for social insects and mammals, such as wasps, termites, ants, naked mole rats, wolves, various primates, and of course humans.

I like to think of individual lives in terms of the allocation of time among three tasks: sustenance (i.e., a time to produce and to consume), procreation (i.e., a time for romance, love, child-bearing, and child-rearing), and recreation (i.e., a time for recuperation, primarily, but not only, in the form of sleep). But if one abstracts from periods of rest -- recreation -- then one is left with sustenance and procreation, that is, not with sex-and-violence, but with eat-and-breed, and one recognizes that of the sex-and-violence couplet, only sex (breeding) is a foundational feature of life, whereas violence is but one of the means to achieve reproductive success as in, for instance, violent, or certainly aggressive, confrontations (ritualized or actualized) among males over access to and mating rights with females.

If violence is but one of the means to obtain breeding-rights, so violence is but one of the means to obtain eating-rights. That is, aggressive or violent behavior is one of the ways by which animals obtain nourishment, or secure their sustenance. A lioness hunting a gazelle comes to mind, as does say a mantis lying in wait to prey on another insect, or even on a lizard or frog. Humans, of course, also participate in this food chain. They, too, prey on animals -- even though my animal-loving daughter does not like to be reminded of this when she devours yet another hamburger.

Violence is a means of displaying dominance and thereby to gain rights of first pick of food and mates or of gaining large or larger shares of food and mates or of otherwise securing future supplies of food and mates. For instance, the violence of the Persian Gulf War was justified, in the US, on the grounds that the United States needed to secure vital, independent oil-supplies to keep its economy (i.e., "sustenance") running in the accustomed order. (That this was a bogus argument, from an economic point of view, is beside the point. The point is that the general public believed the argument that violence was necessary to secure future sustenance.)

So, instead of the couplet sex-and-violence, or the triplet sex-violence-and-economics, what we really have at bottom is the couplet eat-and-breed, where violence is but one means of achieving both ends. But what is eat-and-breed other than economics-and-biology, economics as the study of sustenance, and biology as the study of breeding -- taken in the widest sense, of course.

From this, let me draw an important conclusion. If violence is but one of the means of securing two of the foundational conditions of life -- eat-and-breed -- then violence is an aspect of life that can be subjected to treatment, a feature that can be overcome -- at least in principle, at least amongst humans who, as I claimed before, are entering their homo denaturalis phase of evolution. We can transcend the limits of our nature, we can de-link ourselves from our aggressive, violent instincts because, nearly alone among species, we can reflect upon our own selves and can more deliberately foster traits advantageous to our species and limit those deemed disadvantageous.

I believe that conflict and conflict resolution will be a major theme of scholarship in the next century. We will come to see -- "we," again not meaning the professors, but the general public -- that aggressive, violent behavior to secure eating-and-breeding rights is a behavioral contingency of life that we can change. This change can occur by design, by accident, or by gradual learning as eons pass. Among humans, the institution of monogamous marriage, for instance, can be interpreted as collusive behavior among males to limit male competition for already-accessed females. This collusion thereby preserves precious male resources such as time, strength, and cunning to be applied toward the pursuit of improved sustenance for oneself and one's offspring. Likewise, a human mother's investment in her offspring is so extraordinarily time-intensive that she needs a long-term, if not necessarily life-long, undisturbed relation with her offspring's father (since males are reluctant to provide sustenance to other males' offspring) to provide sustenance for herself and the child. Adultery is, therefore, a form of "cheating" on the collusive, if evolutionarily implicit, no-compete agreement among males, an agreement that liberates males to expend energy toward the pursuit of economic progress rather than toward the defense of mating-rights, even as it tends to restrict females to a one-in-a-lifetime choice of a mate in exchange for a higher probability of improved sustenance for herself and her offspring. (In all this, I am, of course, not speaking about social-security developments in certain industrialized countries during the past fifty years, but am speaking in evolutionary terms over the past several million years.)

As we all know from watching public TV nature-shows, competition for mating-rights among non-human animal species often takes violent forms. Even among humans, even today, adultery often results in violent behavior. But if violence is one of the instinctual conditions of life that we can address and overcome, we need first to realize that violence is not synonymous with conflict; violence is merely a form of conflict. Conflict is of course already studied in many scholarly disciplines: in psychology, in biology, in business and economics (customer-to-firm and management-to-employee relations; economic competition among buyers and sellers, and so on), as well as among historians, political scientists, international-relations experts, and others. But what is missing, still, and what will be an important new discipline in its own right in the 21^st century, is conflict studies. Conflict studies not as yet another cross-disciplinary comparison of notes but as a field of studies in its own right, developing generalized models of conflict applicable across a wide spectrum of, and feeding back into, specific other disciplines.

There exist a number of so-called peace studies programs around the world, and there are conflict resolution programs available at a variety of academic institutions. The former tend to focus on conflict between and among large groups of peoples, typically nations or large well-defined ethnic groups, the latter tend to focus on person-to-person or relatively small-group conflict, for instance, victim-offender reconciliation programs, neighborhood ethnic or racial conflict management, human-resource management issues as in managing employer-employee relations or relations among employees, and the like. In the US, though not as much in other countries, the general public has sometimes tended to view these peace and conflict study programs with anger ("more tax dollars for another useless, left-wing program") or with belittling bemusement ("ghee, what useless stuff people don't think of"). But the general public, I believe, is mistaken in its dismissive attitudes. These programs are not useless. To the contrary, they are absolutely crucial forerunners to the comprehensive study of conflict: how to define it, to study the conditions that give rise to it, how to influence these conditions, and to study how to manage conflict even more than how to resolve it. These programs are forerunners to a field that will help us improve our lives just as much as the forerunners of physics and chemistry one-hundred years ago help to improve our lives today.

Recall my earlier quoting of Albert Einstein's dictum: "Space and time are not conditions under which we live, but constructs by which we think." Just as physics and chemistry help push out the boundaries of the physical limits of our lives, and just as I expect that biology will help push out the boundaries of the biological limits of our lives, so economics will help us to better understand, manage, and "push out" certain personal and collective behavioral limits. In particular, I claim that violence is not a condition under which we must live, but a behavioral construct of life that we can change.

Thesis 3

In managing these contingencies, increasingly we will seek recourse to global governance. Economics will play a major role in studying how to structure the incentives and institutions of global governance, including the governance of conflict.

Economics will play an important role in the study of conflict. It already does. Conflict occurs because two or more parties hold different interests. Interests are generated because behavioral incentives differ, i.e., the parties involved perceive the pertinent costs and benefits of their actions differently. Incentives, in turn, are shaped by the institutional framework within which they occur. Institutions refer to the "setting," to the "rules of the game," to explicit laws and regulations and to implicit cultural understandings and social norms of behavior. For example, one cannot have a free, private, and competitive market economy in the absence of the institutions of private-property rights and contract law, and mechanisms that protect and enforce these rights and laws. The incentives that prevail in the absence of protection and enforcement differ from those that prevail in their presence. This is one of the reasons why we see, in the US and elsewhere, more money spent on private than on public security forces -- from plant-security at industrial sites, to shopping mall police personnel, to guards at gated communities, to public safety officers at universities -- because public police forces do not sufficiently protect and enforce property rights any more.

To tell you why and how economics will play an important role in the study and management of conflict, I must tell you a bit about economics itself. Fortunately, a substantial part of modern economics may be summarized by two "laws," as formulated by the distinguished Prof. Mancur Olson of the University of Maryland:⁽²⁾

1. "Sometimes, when each individual considers only his or her interests, a collectively rational outcome emerges automatically."

2. "Sometimes, the first law does not hold: no matter how intelligently each individual pursues his or her interest, no socially rational outcome can emerge spontaneously."

Prof. Olson's first and second laws of economics correspond to what economists call, respectively, "private goods" and "collective goods," and to the proposition that what is individually rational may be necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, for collective rationality. Indeed, collectively irrational outcomes may result from the pursuit of individually rational decisions. Consider a couple of examples. When I decide to buy and plant rose stocks in order to edge and beautify my front lawn and driveway, then I am doing so in consideration of the expected private costs and private benefits that this purchase entails to me. The costs are partially monetary -- I have to pay a certain amount of dollars to buy the rose stocks, and I have to pay the, however minuscule, depreciation on my car when driving to and from the garden center, etc. -- and partially non-monetary: the time-cost involved in driving to the garden center, selecting the stocks, driving back home, planting, and maintaining the roses. By the same token, the garden center receives a net benefit from its private transaction with me: its benefit is the money I pay them, its costs involve buying the rose stocks from a wholesaler, providing a physical location where to display the rose stocks, employing various workers to work in the garden center, and so on.

Perhaps I even would have been willing and able to pay more money than I actually did pay for the rose stocks. In that case, I am not only obtaining the rose stocks, but I am also obtaining a "good deal," a buyer's surplus, as economists call it since I have money left over relative to what I would have been willing to pay. Similarly, the garden center may have been willing and able to sell for less than what it actually got from me. If so, it obtains a seller's surplus, monies beyond what it would have been willing to take.

In any event, the crucial point is that both parties to the trade gain. I gain from the trade by bringing to the table an amount of money which I value less than the rose stocks I am about the get (or else I wouldn't buy the rose stocks); the garden center brings to the table rose stocks which it values less than the money it is about to get from me (or else they wouldn't sell them). Economists have shown the conditions under which free, private, competitive markets, markets in which individual buyers and sellers act only according to their individual calculus of privately received benefits and privately incurred costs, automatically generate -- as if they were guided by some "invisible hand" -- the greatest possible surplus and the greatest possible economic welfare for society-at-large. Exactly this is Olson's first law: "Sometimes, when each individual considers only his or her interests, a collectively rational outcome emerges automatically," namely the maximum economic welfare theoretically possible.

But, "sometimes, the first law does not hold," for their exists a class of goods that clearly would bestow on society a benefit greater than its costs -- and yet no one individual supplies these goods (unlike my garden center), or only imperfectly so, since to any potential supplier the individual cost of supplying these goods outweigh the individual benefits (payments) that can be derived from its provision. Similarly, no one individual demands these goods (unlike my demand for rose stocks), or only imperfectly so, since the individual benefit derived from consuming these goods outweighs the individual costs that it is necessary to incur in order to obtain these goods. This strange class of goods is known as collective goods. Thus, the paradoxical result obtains that even though these goods are known to provide a sum of collective benefits that exceed their collectively incurred costs, in the absence of compulsion, no one individual will demand them and no one individual will supply them.

What are some examples of these goods? Flood control along a ten-mile stretch of a flood-prone river is one example. If I own a piece of property along that ten-mile stretch of water, clearly I would benefit from flood-protection (levees, dams, etc.) But if my individual cost of building a levee amounts to $10 million dollar to protect a small piece of land somewhere along that stretch, worth perhaps $200,000 dollars, clearly my benefit is smaller than my cost. It is individually rational for me Not to build the levee myself. It is also individually rational for each and every one of my neighbors Not to build the levee since for each and every one of my neighbors the individual benefit also is less than the individual cost they would incur in building the levee themselves.

I can, of course, simply go ahead, obtain financing, build the levee along the ten-mile stretch of river, and afterwards go around to my neighbors to collect what I consider each neighbors' "fair share" contribution to the cost of the levee. But the problem is that once the levee is built, I cannot exclude any one of my neighbors from enjoying the benefits the levee yields. This conundrum is captured in the definition of a pure collective good: (a) once provided no one can be excluded from enjoying its benefits (the criterion of non-exclusion) and (b) once provided the good can be enjoyed by more than one person at the same time (the criterion of non-rivalry). Like a 4^th of July fireworks display, since I can enjoy the good at the same time as all others can, and since I cannot effectively be excluded from enjoying the good, what incentive do I have to share in the cost of its provision?

Putting it another way, as Prof. Joseph Stiglitz does in his Economics of the Public Sector textbook, collective goods are those for which (a) "it is not feasible to ration their use" and (b) "it is not desirable to ration their use."⁽³⁾ Clearly, it is not feasible for me to go around the neighborhood and try to start charging my neighbors a fee for their use of the levee. If any one refuses to contribute, there is nothing I can do. Also, it is not socially desirable to exclude my neighbors from the benefits the levee provides since, once it is built, it provide its benefits at zero additional costs so that society's welfare increases at no extra cost.

The flood-control example illustrates that even though the collective benefit of all my neighbors together would outweigh the collective cost of building the levee, our individual benefit is small relatively to the cost if we had to provide the good individually. If I build the levee by myself, it is quite rational to expect my neighbors to free-ride on the benefits it provides. In contrast to private goods, the free, private, competitive market will not provide this collective good, the levee, because as the supplier, I cannot effectively exclude free-riding non-payers. Thus, Olson's second law of economics emerges: "sometimes, the first law does not hold: no matter how intelligently each individual pursues his or her interest, no socially rational outcome can emerge spontaneously," or, putting it more strongly, the pursuit of what is individually rational can lead to socially irrational outcomes -- the levee won't be built even though all recognize that its collective benefit outweighs its collective cost.

If the free, private, competitive market cannot provide these desirable collective goods, how then shall their provision be assured? The traditional answer to that question has, of course, been to employ the very "visible hand" of Government, i.e., the involuntary extraction of compulsory payments (taxation) to pay for the provision of collective goods, as contrasted to the use of voluntary payments to pay for the provision of private goods (like my rose stocks). Government itself, of course, is nothing more than a group of individuals engaged in, or arranging for engagement in, collective action. Collective action provides for collective goods. Indeed, as Todd Sandler reminds us, "the existence of a market economy depends on necessary conditions that are, themselves, collective actions."⁽⁴⁾ For instance, what is perhaps the most important necessary condition for the existence of a private-market economy -- the provision, protection, and enforcement of private property rights -- is, itself, a set of collective goods provided through collective action, involving all three branches of democratic governance: the legislative branch to create private-property laws, the executive branch to protect private property against unlawful taking, and the judicialbranch to adjudicate disputes over private property.

As it turns out, there is a large number of goods that will fail to be provided by private markets and need to be provided by collective action: a common currency for instance, a common set of weights and measures, a common agreement to drive on the right-hand side of the road and to stop at red lights. The benefits to society are large, the costs to society are small. Imagine the difficulties our modern economy would face if we still engaged in barter trade, i.e., goods-for-goods, instead of using a common currency employed as a standard of value with respect to which the value of all private goods can be compared. Like flood-control, a common currency is a good example of a socially desirable good (i.e., one whose benefits outweigh its costs) that is difficult, if not altogether impossible, to provide privately. There was, as you may know, a time in American history during which a variety of private monies circulated. Banks issued their own currency. But with each currency uncertainties arose: how "solid" is this currency? What if the issuing bank fails? What if a particular shop-keeper with whom I wish to trade does not accept that bank's currency? And so on. Clearly, industry and commerce have benefitted greatly from a unified, universally accepted, common US currency.

Over the past quarter-century, economists have paid increasing attention to the study of collective goods. There is a very large number of such goods. In addition to flood control, 4^th of July fireworks, private property rights, traffic laws, common weights and measures, and a common currency, consider the following list of (pure and impure) collective goods:

antitrust legislation and enforcement; preventing the spread of communicable diseases; the prevention of international terrorism; protection from environmental problems such as acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, possible global warming, tropical deforestation, soil erosion, and desertification; maintaining biodiversity and gene pool diversity; overfishing of oceanic fish stocks; overgrazing of federal lands; overharvesting of timber on unregulated lands; overuse of water, soil, and air resources (e.g., by using them as "free" dumping grounds for effluents, wastes, and emissions); the provision of goods of cultural merit; scientific, engineering, medical, and other research and scholarship; national defense, regional defense alliances, global peace and security; the use of the electromagnetic spectrum; geostationary satellite orbits; the provision of generalized education, good health, minimum living standards, and safety from attack on one's person and livelihood; severe weather warning systems; communal snow removal; volunteer fire departments; remaining silent during a classical music performance; not remaining silent during a rock concert performance; the provision of economic infrastructure such as highways, bridges, airports and seaports; a common language and culture; an open global trading system and freedom of the seas.

In intensively studying these and other collective goods, economists have come to understand more about this class of goods. There are two characteristics of particular interest here. One characteristic is that a local private or local collective good may become a global collective bad. For instance, electricity production in the mid-western US is presumably a (mostly) private affair between electricity suppliers and electricity demanders. Among the by-products of coal-based electricity production are sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions that, due to prevailing wind patterns, precipitate as acid rain in Canada, despoiling the natural environment there. What is a private good in the US -- electricity -- becomes a collective bad in Canada since, collectively, Canadians don't appreciate acid rain from the US. Essentially, US sellers and buyers of electricity free-ride on Canadian territory by using it as a "free" dumping ground for US-produced emissions.

How can this negative externality, the imposition on costs on Canadians who are unrelated to the private buying and selling of electricity in the US, be eliminated? If I were to dump my yard wastes on my neighbors' side of our common fence, the harm I do my neighbors would be quickly put to a stop. They would justly claim that I had violated their private property, applicable property laws would be enforced, and I would need to pay some form of restitution (clean up the mess myself, pay monetary compensation, or the like) and would need to refrain from similar action in the future. The negative externality would be internalized, meaning, in future, I would have to pay the full private cost of having a yard and of having yard waste to dispose of. But in the case of Canada, the US, and acid rain, there is no joint governing authority to which Canadians can appeal! Some form of supra-national governance is needed. And that is the other characteristic of collective goods of particular interest here: not only can a local good become a global bad, as in the case of US transboundary pollutants precipitating as acid rain in Canada, but to redress the problem we need not necessarily seek recourse to global government, but need to seek recourse to global governance.

To understand the difference between government and governance is hugely important, and I will clarify it in a moment. First, consider another example, namely the classic example of a pure local collective good that turns out to be a global public bad even as it meets the formal definition of a collective good. The example is national defense. Once national defense is provided, everyone living within that nation's boundaries comes under its defensive umbrella. National defense is non-rivalrous in nature since my usage of the collective good does not detract from your usage of it. If I am defended, you are not any less defended. National defense also meets the second criterion: once provided, it is not feasible to exclude any citizen from its benefit (it is non-exclusionary). If I refuse to pay the military-related portion of my taxes, it is practically impossible for government to exclude me, and only me, from the benefits national defense would appear to offer.

But what is a local collective good can become a global public bad: if the (former) Soviet Union arms itself to its teeth in pursuit of its national defense, that very action causes the United States to feel threatened. So the US arms some more which, in turn, causes the Soviet Union to feel threatened. And so on. An arms race ensues, precious economic resources are diverted, and the two nation-states are far from being safe! Similar arms races ensued in the middle East and in South-East Asia. The threat of destroying all life through a nuclear holocaust surely is a global collective bad. National defense may be a local collective good; but in the form of arms races, national defense becomes a global collective bad, illustrating once again, the second law of economics: what is individually (locally) rational (e.g., national defense) may be collectively (globally) irrational (e.g., the threat of global nuclear annihilation). The real global collective good that all parties strive for is global peace and international security. But if nation A unilaterally disarms, it makes itself irrationally vulnerable. The same is true for nation B. Thus, neither nation disarms, and the global collective bad continues, even as it remains a local collective good.

Economists have contributed, in the past twenty-five years, a large number of thoughts, methods, and applications (particularly in the form of game-theory) that study how and under what conditions conflicts arise and how they may be managed, mitigated, and resolved. As human life continues to become ever more globalized, and as nation-states come into ever sharper conflict with each other over the use of scarce global resources over which no nation-state in particular has any property rights, we will need to seek recourse to conflict resolution not by means of violence and war -- in which one side wins and the other side loses -- but by means of seeking negotiated solutions in which benefits are jointly maximized, and costs are jointly minimized.

In the example of the nuclear arms race between the US and the former Soviet Union, note that there was no recourse to global government whatsoever. But what was there was private governance between the two parties involved -- certainly helped immensely by the collapse of the old Soviet Union -- that allowed both parties to obtain greater economic benefits at lower costs, i.e., higher living standards at reduced military outlays, and to feel and become, in fact, safer than at any time since the end of World War II.

It is absolutely critical to note that I am are not talking about the creation, in the 21^st century, of a global government, but about the increasing need for and appearance of global governance to help address and resolve conflicts. The United Nations -- whose entire operations budget, incidentally, is less than that of the New York City police department -- is not and will not be a global government, but it is an excellent start, and by no means the only body, for global governance to help talk about, initiate, negotiate, regulate, and gain access to globally scarce resources, to help address and negotiate solutions to global problems, i.e., to help humankind de-link itself from its aggressive, violent instinct in which "might is right." As I explored earlier today, homo denaturalis will be able to leave this "might is right" approach behind and look at conflict in a more detached, more scientific, more benign, and, ultimately, mutually more beneficial manner.

In Sum:

I posited three theses today: (a) the predominance, in the 20^th century, of the physical sciences and their applications for purposes of war and of peace, and the explicit recognition that human life is undergoing, and in the 21^st century will complete, figuratively speaking, an evolutionary transition from homo sapiens to homo denaturalis; (b) the recognition that the dominant sex-and-violence mode of living can and will be replaced by a more deliberate, considerate eat-and-breed mode of living as we will come to see violence as one of the contingencies of human life that homo denaturalis can overcome; and (c) my own discipline, economics, will play a major role in the study of conflict management, i.e., in the structuring of the incentives and institutions of the global governance that the 21^st century will undoubtably bring.

Perhaps I have, as Abraham Lincoln suggested, removed all doubt about my foolishness when addressing you on these topics -- and I take preemptive comfort that even a court jester, the joker, stimulates and entertains his audience while leaving it with a grain of salt (cum grano salis). Yet, consider that, with respect to peace as a global collective good, Abe Lincoln also said: "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"

Thank you for bearing with me; thank you for your attention.

1. Meitner was born Austrian, but I count her and others in this sketch of 20^th century science as

"German" not in terms of official nationality, but in terms of a language-culture grouping. Lots of eminent "German" scientists are Czech or Hungarian or Austrian by nationality, but spoke German at home and derive from Germanic culture.

2. This is quoting from Olson's foreword (p. vii) to Todd Sandler's book Collective Action: Theory and Applications (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992).

3. Joseph Stiglitz, Economics of the Public Sector, 2^nd edition, p. 119 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).

4. Todd Sandler, Collective Action, pp. xvii/xviii (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).