Fairness & Gift Exchange

I found the three New York Times articles to be interesting. Each article focused on different things however there was an overlapping theme of humans being good and fair people. 

The article titled, The Power of Altruism, focused on the problem that western society has created the assumption that people are naturally selfish. The article talked about how expecting people to be selfish effects their inclination to be good. They talked about examples of implementing fines for parents that are late picking their children up from school and limiting vacation days of firefighters and the negative impact it had created in that community or organization. Creating situations to become more economic and less focused on altruism has caused, “utilitarian thinking has become the normal way we do social analysis and see the world. We’ve wound up with a society that is less cooperative, less trusting, less effective and less lovely.”

The article titled, When a Child Thinks Life is Unfair, Use Game Theory, focused on the behavior and children and how they demand equality. Researchers have found that children as young as 19 months seem to understand the concept of fairness. The article discusses several strategies for parents to help keep things fair for their children. ‘I cut, You Pick’ was one of the strategies discussed where one divides the desired good, and the other chooses. ‘Tit for Tat’ was another strategy discussed where you pick up one, then he picks up one. ‘Random Dictator’ was another strategy examined in the article, where each family member writes down a selection, then draws a single one from a hat and one person ultimately chooses but who “wins” is random. The ‘Auction’ strategy was the final strategy presented in the article, auctioning the desired reward to the highest bidder. These game theory strategies were talked about to help parents do their best keeping it fair with their children, however, like the article said, “Even grown-ups know it’s hard when someone else gets a gift you wanted or more ice cream on their cone.”

The article titled, How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles, focused on the politics of economics and fairness. The article talked about an experiment where there was a marble machine that dispensed marbles when you pulled on the rope. There were many different outcomes with the different scenarios that were done during the experiment. The results of the experiment showed that when partners believed that they worked together to pull the rope and release the marbles, there was a 75% chance they would share the reward. However, when the partners found the marbles without any work only 5% of the reward was split. The author, Jonathan Haidt, related this experiment to politics and made the point that “the problem isn’t that some kids have much more marbles than others. The problem is that some kids are in cahoots with the experimenters. They get to rig the marble machine before the rest of us have a chance to play with it.” Haidt believes that people need to, “focus less on distributive fairness — which is about whether everyone got what they deserved — and more on procedural fairness—which is about whether honest, open and impartial procedures were used to decide who got what.”

After reading these New York Times articles, I was reminded of my living situation with my roommate. My roommate is a much better cook and enjoys cooking more than myself. Some nights we both will stay home and eat together. She cooks the meal that we share and in return, I will clean the dishes. We both believe that this is a fair situation and are always happy with the trade. However, when we both bring carry-out home both of us are less inclined to share the food as well as do the dishes for one another. This is similar to the scenario where the marbles were found at the marble machine without the partners working together.