Can Math Help Social Science?

A very different kind of event took place last week in the room at the top of the Mathematics building called ‘Mallvinden”. The words resonating in the room were not “Banach Space” and ‘Lebesgue Measure”, but “society” and “justice”. This was Society and Social Dilemmas: Game Theoretic and other Mathematical Modelling,a workshop organized by Olle Häggström, Mathematical Statistics and Kristian Lindgren, Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers. (Logically speaking, the event should have been subtitled “Computational and Mathematical Modelling”, for there was a lot more computational aspects to the modelling aspects on show than purely mathematical.)

The event began with corruption and human institutions and ended with climate change, with biology, psychology and linguistics in between!

The kickoff talk was by Bo Rothstein, a very well known personality in Sweden for his apparently unlimited access to the comment and viewpoint pages of the leading Swedish dailies such as Dagens Nyheter and Goteborgs Posten. Rothstein’s questions are very interesting ones. First, how do institutions develop that lead to a non-corrupt society, for example, Sweden today? The question becomes even more interesting when one discovers that Sweden was just as corrupt as other places in Europe not so long ago in history. The answer is probably some very complex combination of historical, cultural and religious factors. What could mathematical or computational modelling have to contribute to understanding this question? I really don’t know. Rothstein’s second question was: when corruption is the norm, it takes very different forms – why? I must confess to being puzzled by this question – given the very different cultural, historical and other settings in places like Nigeria, Naples or India, one would naturally expect corruption there to exhibit very different features as a rule. Why should it be surprising? One would be surprised if exactly the same type of corruption arose in these very different kinds of places, and that would need explanation! Rothstein showed us emails he exchanged with a leading game theorist asking why corruption takes very different forms, and the answer was essentially, “good question!”.

The final talk by Olof Johansson Stenman was entitled “Behavioural Economics Insights Applied to Climate Change”. What are the insights from behavioural economics? That people don’t always make decisions fully rationally, that they do not make them entirely motivated by material self interest, that they often cooperate only conditionally i.e. provided the others do too, and that they respond to rewards and punishments. I confess wondering if one should churn out dozens of experimental studies and sizable journal papers to arrive at these insights, but perhaps they serve a purpose in a discipline where ritual sacrifices are offered routinely at the altar of self interest. As for the application to climate change, this translated essentially into the prescription that one should punish the defectors from the collective agreement. All very well said, but who is going to punish the greatest culprit – the EE? Sanctions were mentioned.Well, the EE is great at threatening and imposing sanctions on others, but who is going to impose sanctions on the EE? A proposal by Stiglitz was mentioned about imposing trade sanctions on the EE. Once again, sounds good on paper, but who is going to impose the trade sanctions? The EU? Or China? They would shoot themselves in their own legs? In the end, the most depressing thing about combating climate change is the EE – who won’t even sign a very weak and non-binding agreement like Kyoto, what hope for a serious binding and drastic treaty that is required? There is some hope though, because with the exit of the Coward government in Australia, the coalition of the unwilling has been reduced to essentially one.

The highlight of the event for me was the talk by Olof Leimar which showed that while we humans run hopeless contortions around social dilemmas, animals appear to solve it effortlessly, demonstrated beautifully with the example of the cleaner fish.

Although, as hinted above, I am sceptical about what Math and CS can contribute to some grand questions from social science, I do hope that this event will initiate more collaboration between CS, Math and other disciplines in the social sciences. Life buried in Math and CS internals can be monastic and at some point at least, a bit uninteresting, whereas such interactions could make us, to use a phrase that was hammered at me growing up in India, “healthy, wealthy and wise”!