The Price of Altruism (57 page)

52.
Box 10, SSP.

53.
Samuel Schwartz letter to Dr. Avram Goldstein, January 25, 1978, box 33, SSP.

54.
Box 1, SSP, undated.

55.
George Price letter to Bob and Marjorie Sheffield, December 3, 1953, GPP.

56.
George Price letter to Al Somit, February 1, 1953, GPP.

57.
John Lewis Gaddis,
The Cold War
(London: Penguin, 2005).

58.
Jean and Fairfield Hoban telegram to George Price, September 30, 1953, GPP; Julia Price letter to Alice Avery Price, December 10, 1953, GPP; Alice Avery Price letter to George Price, September 22, 1953, GPP.

CHAPTER 5: FRIENDLY STARFISH, SELFISH GAMES

1.
Clay Blair, Jr., “Passing of a Great Mind,”
Life
, February 25, 1957, 89–90, quote on 89.

2.
William Poundstone,
Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb
(New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 5; Blaer, “Passing of a Great Mind.”

3.
Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776; reprint edited by Edwin Cannan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

4.
Veblen first used the term “neoclassical” in “Preconceptions of Economic Science,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
13 (January 1899).

5.
Lucy Sprague Mitchell,
Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), 86; Thorstein Veblen,
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions
(1899; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1953) and “The Limitations of Marginal Utility,”
Journal of Political Economy
17 (November 1909), 622, 624. On Veblen see Rick Tilman,
Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891–1963
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

6.
C. Wright Mills of Columbia University wrote this in his introduction to Veblen’s own
The Theory of the Leisure Class
, ix.

7.
Frank Knight, “The Newer Economics and the Control of Economic Activity,”
Journal of Political Economy
(August 1932), 458;
Chicago Tribune
, May 28, 1972; Frank Knight,
Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921).

8.
Frank Knight,
The Economic Organization
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933).

9.
W. C. Allee, “Evolution of a Mechanist,” circa 1915, 9–11, quoted in Gregg Mitman,
The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 52. Mitman’s book is the best study of Allee and Chicago ecology.

10.
Karl Patterson Schmidt, “Warder Clyde Allee,”
Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences USA
30 (1957), 3–40; Alfred E. Emerson and Thomas Park, “Warder Clyde Allee: Ecologist and Ethologist,”
Science
121 (May 13, 1955), 686–87; David W. Blight,
Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2002); on Earlham see Thomas Hamm, “A Brief History of Earlham College,” at the school’s Web site: www.earlham.edu/EC_history.html.

11.
Warder Clyde Allee, “An Experimental Analysis of the Relation Between Physiological States and Rheotaxis in Isopoda,”
Journal of Experimental Zoology
13 (1912), 270–344; Mitman,
The State of Nature,
53.

12.
Springfield News-Record
, February 9, 1917, quoted in Mitman,
The State of Nature,
56.

13.
See ibid., 58–62.

14.
Peter Weikart,
From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 10; Oren Harman, “On the Power of Ideas,”
Minerva
45 (2007), 175–189. Many American biologists connected German militarism to Darwinism. See Mitman,
The State of Nature,
220, n36.

15.
Quotes from Mitman,
The State of Nature,
60.

16.
On Spencer see Robert J. Richards,
Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 234–330.

17.
Blair, “Passing of a Great Mind.”

18.
Poundstone,
Prisoner’s Dilemma
, 22, 21, 24. See also Stanislaw Ulam, “John von Neumann, 1903–1957,”
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society
64, no. 3 (May 1958), 1–49.

19.
John von Neumann, “Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftspiele,”
Mathematische Annalen
100 (1928), 295–320. See Robert J. Leonard, “From Parlor Games to Social Science: Von Neumann, Morgenstern and the Creation of Game Theory, 1928–1944,”
Journal of Economic Literature
33 (1995), 730–61.

20.
John Maynard Keynes,
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
(London: Macmillan 2007; 1936), 3.

21.
Hyman Minsky,
John Maynard Keynes
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); GeoffTily,
Keynes’s General Theory, the Rate of Interest and “Keynesian” Economics
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

22.
Don Patinkin,
Essay On and In the Chicago Tradition
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), 299; Leonard Silk,
The Economists
(New York: Basic Books, 1976), 46; Henry Simons,
A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire: Some Proposals for a Liberal Economic Policy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); Craufurd D. Goodwin, “Martin Bronfenbrenner, 1914–1997,”
Economic Journal
(November 1998), 1776.

23.
Jacob Viner, “Mr. Keynes and the Causes of Unemployment,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
, November 1936; Johan Van Overtveldt,
The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business
(Canada: B2 Books, 2007), 81. Van Overtveldt provides a thorough overview of the rise of the Chicago School.

24.
Edward O. Wilson and Charles D. Michener, “Alfred Edward Emerson, 1896–1976,”
Biographical Memoirs
,
National Academy of Sciences USA
53 (1982), 159–77, 162. Emerson’s collection was donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

25.
Sewall Wright, “Genetics of Abnormal Growth in the Guinea Pig,”
Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology
2 (1934), 137–47, quote on 139. On Wright see William Provine,
Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

26.
For an up-to-date, modern appreciation of the idea of the superorganism see Bert H
lldobler and E. O. Wilson,
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

27.
See William Morton Wheeler,
The Social Insects
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1928), and “Animal Societies,”
Scientific Monthly
39 (1934), 289–301.

28.
Alfred E. Emerson, “Biological Basis of Social Cooperation,”
Illinois Academy of Science Transactions
39 (1946), 12, quoted in Mitman,
The State of Nature,
158.

29.
Frank Lillie, “The Department of Biology in Relation to the New Organization,”
Daily Maroon
, December 11, 1930; Warder Clyde Allee, “Science Confirms an Old Faith,”
American Friend
35 (1928), 780. Quoted in
Mitman
, 52.

30.
See Warder Clyde Allee, “Animal Aggregations,”
Quarterly Review of Biology
2 (1927), 367–98, and
Animal Aggregations: A Study in General Sociology
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1927).

31.
A good description of Allee’s aggregation work appears in Dugatkin,
The Altruism Equation,
41–50.

32.
W. C. Allee, “Concerning Biology and Biologists,” quoted in ibid., 57.

33.
W. C. Allee, “Reexamination of One Fundamental Doctrine in the Light of Modern Knowledge,” and “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” quoted in ibid., 48, 56.

34.
Oskar Morgenstern, Diary, April–May 1942, quoted in Leonard, “From Parlor Games to Social Science,” 730.

35.
John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern,
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), 2.

36.
Van Overveldt,
The Chicago School
, 215. Many of the professors at the Chicago Department of Economics did not endorse the research methods used at the Cowles Commission. All, however, considered von Neumann a genius.

37.
Actually, game theory as Neumann and Morgenstern had defined it was probably least applicable to economics compared to other fields: Zero-sum games between two people are negligible in economic situations, whereas cooperative, many-people games were not strictly solved in the book. That would have to wait for John Nash.

38.
Mitman,
The State of Nature,
159.

39.
Alfred E. Emerson, “The Biological Basis of Social Cooperation,”
Illinois Academy of Science Transactions
39 (1946), 12, quoted in Mitman,
The State of Nature,
158.

40.
George Gaylord Simpson, “The Role of the Individual in Evolution,”
Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences
31 (1941), 16, quoted in Mitman,
The State of Nature
, 165. Simpson’s accusation was directed against the neurobiologist Ralph Gerard. See Ralph W. Gerard, “Organism, Society and Science,”
Scientific Monthly
50 (1940), 340–50, 530–35.

41.
Not that Emerson wasn’t a democrat. His problem was how to hold on to a biological view of the democratic state while combating the organicism of fascism. Emerson chose to save organicism by arguing that fascism had misused it by stamping out individual variation—a crucial component of progressive integration of the group.