Values[1]
Chapter overviews
Gordon Burt[2] draft: 1 July 2021
Books
Topics
Topics and titles
Books and titles
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter overviews
Books
What is presented here are the overviews for selected chapters in ‘CCMSS’ and ‘YB’:
CCMSS Burt, Gordon. Conflict, Complexity and Mathematical Social Science. Bingley: Emerald, 2010.
[yb16] unpublished Yearbook 2016
[yb20] unpublished
Topics
Values: individuals and relationships
Values in everyday life
Values in relation to key aspects of life and society
Values in particular settings, spheres
Life and values
Society and values
Models of values
Models of individual choice
Models of social choice
Topics and titles
The following chapter titles relate to the above topics.
Values: individuals and relationships
YB14 3 Individuals: Activities, Happiness and Other Values, Emotion, Personality
YB14 4 Relationships: Family and Friends, Care and Therapy, Nurturing Flourishing
Values in everyday life
[yb20] Satisfaction with life
[yb16] 2 Wellbeing, discourse and death - statistics and headlines
To be added: activities and goods
Values in relation to key aspects of life and society
YB15 6 Social and psychological space - geographical variation
YB15 7 Time series: social value, violence and population
YB17 7 Value Trajectories: Wellbeing, Wealth, Health, Peace and the Environment
Values in particular settings, spheres
[yb20] Part 2 Satisfaction and democracy in The Middle Opinion USA 2020
https://sites.google.com/site/gordonburtmathsocsci/the-middle-opinion-usa-2020
See Football and Mathematics. (online book)
Life and values
YB14 5 The Life of an Individual ... Feeling at Home in the World
YB15 3 Life as a journey
Society and values
YB14 2 Individuals and Societies, Needs and Cultures
YB14 6 ‘Our Values’: Unanimous? Universal? Exceptional? Good? Safe?
YB15 4 ‘Our values’: the Enlightenment … the Prophet
YB17 6 Cultural Trajectories: Languages, Religions and Political Cultures
YB15 2 Transcending adversarialism: The John Burton Memorial Lecture
See Humanities and mathematics
See Religion and mathematics
Models of values
YB1514 Value spaces …
Models of individual choice
CCMSS 9 Models of individual choice
Models of social choice
CCMSS 4 Possibility and probability: value, conflict and choice
CCMSS 5 Theory, evidence and reality: the mean and median of competing groups
CCMSS 6 Social design, ethics and the amount of value
To be added: economy and social
Books and titles
In Values, World Society & Modelling Yearbook, 2014:
2 Individuals and Societies, Needs and Cultures
3 Individuals: Activities, Happiness and Other Values, Emotion, Personality
4 Relationships: Family and Friends, Care and Therapy, Nurturing Flourishing
5 The Life of an Individual ... Feeling at Home in the World
6 ‘Our Values’: Unanimous? Universal? Exceptional? Good? Safe?
In Values, World Society & Modelling Yearbook, 2015:
2 Transcending adversarialism: The John Burton Memorial Lecture 2015
3 Life as a journey
4 ‘Our values’: the Enlightenment … the Prophet
6 Social and psychological space - geographical variation
7 Time series: social value, violence and population
14 Value spaces …
In Values, World Society & Modelling Yearbook, 2017:
6 Cultural Trajectories: Languages, Religions and Political Cultures
7 Value Trajectories: Wellbeing, Wealth, Health, Peace and the Environment
In Conflict, Complexity and Mathematical Social Science:
4 Possibility and probability: value, conflict and choice
5 Theory, evidence and reality: the mean and median of competing groups
6 Social design, ethics and the amount of value
In The Middle Opinion. USA 2020 (unpublished):
9 Satisfaction with life
Acknowledgements
When I joined the Conflict Research Society in 1982, there were two key figures. I never met John Burton but everybody talked about him. Values were at the heart of John Burton’s approach to conflict resolution. ‘World Society’[3] was the title of one of his books. Michael Nicholson I did meet – and continued to meet over the next couple of decades. ‘Formal Theories in International Relations’[4] was the title of one of Michael’s books – ‘formal theories’, in other words modelling. So there you have it: values, world society and modelling …
… In 1964, in the preface to the book Conflict in Society, Tony de Reuck wrote about the formation in 1963 of the Conflict Research Society; about the appointment of a senior research fellow at Lancaster University, namely Michael Nicholson; and about the contribution by John Burton (who has a chapter in the book), founding Chair of CRS. Kristian Gleditsch’s centre at Essex is called the Michael Nicholson Centre for Conflict and Cooperation.
Introduction
Values are central to life and society and so it is no surprise to find values at the centre of many academic disciplines. Values are sometimes grounded in the humanities or in religions …
In the 2014 Yearbook, Chapter 2 considers the relationship between individuals and societies and the attendant values of needs and cultures, noting in particular the work of John Burton. Chapter 3 looks at the values, emotions and personalities of individuals; and Chapter 4 follows on from this with a look at the relationships with family and friends, introducing the notion of nurturing flourishing. Chapter 5 considers the life of an individual and whether they can ever feel at home in the world. Chapter 6 reflects on conceptions of the self, one’s own country, and “our values”, inviting the questions of whether these values are Unanimous? Universal? Exceptional? Good? Safe?
The 2015 Yearbook returns to some of the topis of the 2014 Yearbook. The work of John Burton is discussed, seeking to move beyond adversarial relationships. Life is thought of as a journey. The notion of ‘our values’ is revisited, this time discussing the Charlie Hebdo killings. Finally we turn to the modelling of values with a consideration of value spaces.
Trajectories in world history is the central theme of the 2017 Yearbook. We look at the Cultural Trajectories of Languages, Religions and Political Cultures; and the Value Trajectories: Wellbeing, Wealth, Health, Peace and the Environment.
The CCMSS book takes a mathematical social science approach. How are values placed on a set of objects? One can think of people either as having preferences between pairs of objects or as attaching an amount of value to objects, Chapters 3 and 4 respectively. Chapter 5 relates this to the topic of ethics and social welfare …
… although not discussed here the rest of the CCMSS book looks at how this modelling approach is manifested in various social science disciplines – and, in part and at least implicitly, at the presence of values in these disciplines.
In Values, World Society & Modelling Yearbook, 2014
Part I of the book is about Values. Values are fundamental. They are both cause and consequence. Values drive our actions and values provide the criteria for judging the consequences of our actions. Sociologists’ concern about the relationship between the individual and society is reflected in the field of conflict resolution, in the contrast between John Burton’s invocation of ‘Basic Human Needs’ and Kevin Avruch’s attention to culture (Chapter 2). Society presents a complex structure of activities for individuals to participate in. The activities reflect the society’s culture and an individual’s participation in these activities generates value for the individual (Chapter 3). Participation in many activities involves relationships at the personal level and the nature of these relationships is crucial, as John Burton noted: ‘how we communicate and relate with each other is fundamental to producing harmonious and hence peaceful societies’ (Chapter 4). The life of an individual engages with the history of a society. Pavel notes that “the novel asks whether individuals can ever be morally reconciled with the world”, and feeling at home in the world is central to people’s lives (Chapter 5). At the group or societal level, ‘our exceptional values’ may be seen as being under threat and this is exemplified by debate about British values and the question ‘is Britain Christian?’ (Chapter 6).
2 Individuals and Societies, Needs and Cultures
Chapter 2 is about a social system and its values and is largely devoted to a talk by Kevin Avruch about his book, Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution. Society is a multi-level system with individuals at one level and society as a whole at another level. Values exist at each level: individuals have needs and societies have cultures. The chapter opens in a somewhat informal way with my personal reminiscences of the 1980s. It was a time when UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher championed the individual and denied the existence of society. This viewpoint was in sharp contrast to the view of sociologists such as Anthony Giddens and Stuart Hall (1932-2014). Turning now to the field of conflict resolution, Ramsbotham, Woodhouse and Miall note a contrast between John Burton and his invocation of ‘Basic Human Needs’ and Kevin Avruch’s attention to culture. The core of the chapter is the talk given by Kevin Avruch on jointly receiving the award of Conflict Research Society Book of the Year (2014) for his book, Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution. In his writings in the 1980s and 1990s Avruch had criticised the prevailing theories of conflict resolution by John Burton and others for their “imperious universalism” and for being “devoid of notions of difference, of context, of culture at least as cultural anthropologists understood the term”. However Avruch recognised that there was a “problem with ‘culture’ as a term of reference” and realised that “I now had to examine critically what I and others had helped bring about”. The problem was that culture could be used as a pretext and the more powerful pretexts were the pretexts of those who had more power.
3 Individuals: Activities, Happiness and Other Values, Emotion, Personality
Chapter 3: society presents a complex structure of activities for individuals to participate in. The activities reflect the society’s culture; and an individual’s participation in these activities generates value for the individual. The diversity of everyday activities – work, money, home, fun, leisure, culture, style, travel, sport, driving, advertised consumption - can be seen in the various sections of a newspaper like The Sunday Times. The values placed on these activities are reflected in wishes for the future and in regrets about the past as well as in present actions. The experience of value is not constant, it changes in response to major life events – family events such as marriage, divorce, bereavement or childbirth; and work events such as unemployment, reemployment, retirement, relocation or migration. The trajectory of value over an individual’s lifetime is studied, particularly the relationship between childhood well-being and adult well-being and the effect of earlier well-being on longevity. Value exhibits continual fluctuations at a more detailed level: momentary happiness depends on perceptions of the present, memories of the past and anticipations of the future. Values attach to action and to causation. While there has been much research into happiness and wellbeing, it has also been argued that consideration needs to be given to other values. In particular the conflict between the value of life and other values, and the conflict between value for the self and value for others, is considered. Another perspective on value is provided by research on emotion which identifies the dimensions of valence (positive or negative), strength and activation. Whereas emotion often refers to a specific situation or event, personality concerns a more durable aspect of an individual, the Big Five dimensions being agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability, extraversion and openness.
4 Relationships: Family and Friends, Care and Therapy, Nurturing Flourishing
Chapter 4 is about relationships at the personal level. We consider relationships between children and parents, between couples, between friends, between humans, pets and other animals, and between an individual and their carer or therapist. Our focus will be on whether the relationship is positive – “harmonious” in Burton’s terms – or negative. Just before his death in 2010 John Burton called for a Universal Harmonious Human Relations Research Association: “how we communicate and relate with each other is fundamental to producing harmonious and hence peaceful societies”. Steven Pinker and others have suggested that our relationships – at all levels of society - are becoming less violent. There is a great demand in society for emotional and relationship advice and such advice is offered by newspapers on a daily or weekly basis. We start by looking at the emotional and relationship development of babies. Parenting style can be positive or negative, active or passive. We then consider adults and their closest personal relationships. A key distinction is between singles and couples and a change in status is a major life event – either a change from being single to being a couple (for example a marriage) or a change from being a couple to being single. The latter change may come about through separation, divorce (in the case of a marriage) or death. Gottman emphasises the importance of the balance between positivity and negativity in marital interactions. There is a cultural debate about the values of being a couple or being single, the value of marriage and divorce. The overall pattern of an individual’s relationships with family, friends and strangers is resource-limited with differential resource investments and differential value and a possible gap between expectations and reality. We consider the relationships between humans, pets and other animals. Humans can be positive or negative towards animals and animals can be positive or negative towards humans. Finally we consider the relationship between an individual and their carer or therapist. One account of the field is implied by the UK school syllabus for Health and Social Care. Like the mother-baby relationship, care and therapy relationships are about ‘nurturing flourishing’ – the quality of the therapeutic relationship is key.
5 The Life of an Individual ... Feeling at Home in the World
Chapter 5 is about the life of an individual. An individual engages with society. Individual and society, both are dynamic: so the life of an individual engages with the history of a society. The engagement relationship can be positive or negative: in other words an individual may ‘feel at home in the world’ or not. At each point in life there is a past, present and future, and the relationship at each stage may be positive (A) or negative (B), giving eight possible trajectories:
AAA persistently positive ‘feeling at home in the world’
BAA improving ‘happy ending’
BBA about to improve ‘hope of happy ending’
ABA fluctuating
BAB fluctuating
AAB about to deteriorate ‘a way of life under threat’
ABB deteriorating ‘a way of life destroyed’
BBB persistently negative ‘not feeling at home in the world’
Steven Pinker and others argue that the humanities provide a powerful insight into how individuals engage with society. Pavel’s account of the novel is considered and the quotation that “the novel asks whether individuals can ever be morally reconciled with the world” is noted. The subsequent sections consider the lives of specific individuals ... the Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thomson characters, a football-unfeeling mother, a Jihadist, a lion-tamer, an infantryman, rampage-killer Elliott Rodger ... and whether or not they feel at home in the world, whether or not their way of life is under threat and how they react if they do not feel at home or if they feel under threat. Throughout life an individual is presented with different options, different paths to follow. The set of possibilities constitute a tree of branching paths. This is illustrated by the branching paths for homicide, suicide and rampage killing.
6 ‘Our Values’: Unanimous? Universal? Exceptional? Good? Safe?
Chapter 6 considers values at the group or societal level. How do ‘we’ see ‘our values’? Do we think of them as unanimously held within our own group? Comparing ourselves with other groups, do we think of our values as ‘exceptional’ ... do we think of them as ‘universal’? Are ‘our values’ good or bad? Are ‘our values’ safe or under threat? In many conflicts there are positive perceptions of self and of ‘our values’ and negative perceptions of the other and of ‘their values’. These perceptions are regularly reinforced, for example in anniversaries of historical events: 1914, the start of the First World War; 1815 the Battle of Waterloo; 1314 the Battle of Bannockburn; and so on. In some cases the possession of arms itself is a celebrated part of nationalism. The two world wars were global events but they were locally experienced and are locally – differentially - remembered. The main focus of the chapter is on exceptionalism, the belief in ‘our exceptional values’. The idea of American exceptionalism is similar to other nations’ perceptions of their own exceptionalism. An extended analysis is given of contemporary discussion in the UK about British values and about the question “is Britain Christian?”. The dimensions of the debate are charted and the views of Prime Minister David Cameron and secularist A C Grayling are analysed. Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, talking of the loan of one of the Elgin Marbles to the Hermitage in St Petersburg for its 250th anniversary, referred to ‘this stone ambassador of the Greek golden age and European ideals’. But is it true that the values of the European Enlightenment are uniquely aligned with the values of Ancient Greece?
In Values, World Society & Modelling Yearbook, 2015
2 Transcending adversarialism: The John Burton Memorial Lecture 2015
“Transcending adversarialism to satisfy Basic Human Needs: John Burton’s relevance for 21st century conflict transformation?” John Burton was a very complex diplomat, scholar and practitioner. In the first role he made many important contributions to the formation of an independent foreign policy for Australia and in the second he was one of the founding fathers of peace and conflict studies. Chapter 2 aims at evaluating his theoretical and practice contributions to conflict resolution and peace studies.
Burton’s experience as a key player in Australian government gave him a deep awareness of power and decision-making in complex situations – and a deep scepticism. As an academic he challenged the dominance of the state-based power politics paradigm and argued for attention to Basic Human Needs and world society. As a scholar-practitioner, Burton’s Problem Solving Workshops aimed to create an environment where individuals changed their perception of others, recognised the presence of frustrated human needs, thought about positive relationships and generated options for transforming relationships. Before and since, there have been many other individuals and organisations engaged in somewhat similar processes. Kelman’s work is of particular interest. How useful are these approaches? The workshops are important at the micro level but the re-entry problem and the transfer problem remain important challenges.
Turning to the challenges of the 21st Century, it is noted that there were over 100,000 battle-related deaths last year (2014), just a tip of the vast iceberg of human misery with 60 million people being displaced. While the Basic Human Needs of these millions are not being met, it is hard to see how problem-solving workshops and other well-intentioned interventions can make much of a dent in these figures. We need to rediscover our common humanity; provide immediate assistance; raise consciousness about responsibility; accept responsibility; and together devise global solutions. Even though non-adversarial politics are a stretch from interactive problem solving, there is no doubt that this was Burton’s final vision and moving in this direction would ensure that the Burtonian legacy continues as we devise practical processes for 21st century challenges.
3 Life as a journey
A life is the journey of an individual in the history of society. What happens is affected by randomness and by coincidence – as the tenth anniversary of the London bombings reminds us. Life involves interactions and relationships with others; and life engages with the structure of society. Life is characterised by values. Of central importance is ‘feeling at home in the world’ – exemplified by Ted Short’s love of the Lake District. Life involves ‘the speculative pursuit of value’ and what is experienced is a journey of fluctuating fortunes.
The Gideon Bible offers advice on life’s various ups and downs. Robert Louis Stevenson’s El Dorado, a popular Jack Berch song of the 1950s, and Constantine Cafavy’s Ithaca – all agree that life should be embraced positively. In relationships, Pinker, Burton, Mitchell and Richardson advocate empathy, harmony and love - and the reciprocation of these. Social institutions such as family, friends, schools and religious communities can provide support and advice, care and therapy and ‘the nurturing of flourishing’. The cases of Sidwell School and Eton are considered, as are the writings of Jonathan Sacks.
Society is characterised by division and by stratification and its attendant inequality. A life has a location in this structure and life is characterised by movement within the structure - sometimes the upward social mobility of Andy Burnham, Michelle Obama and Sathnam Sanghera. But lives may be lived in separate ‘cities’ - Ronald Reagan’s ‘shining city on a hill’ and Mario Cuomo’s city of those who are excluded.
4 ‘Our values’: the Enlightenment … the Prophet
Chapter 4 considers values at the group or societal level. How do ‘we’ see ‘our’ values? Are our values unanimous? universal? exceptional? good? safe? The focus is on the values of the Enlightenment. There has been recent debate between optimistic advocates of the Enlightenment such as Grayling and Pinker and pessimistic sceptics such as Gray and Taleb. The history of the Enlightenment takes us back to the period of the French revolution and the American Revolution and Napoleon’s campaigns of the 19th century … and the poetry of Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns. His poem 'Is there for honest poverty?' has been referred to as 'the Marseillaise of humanity'. The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 might be seen as a postscript to the French Revolution (and a prelude to the First World War and the final collapse of the Austrian, Russian and Ottoman empires) – and two hundred years later still prompts debate about values. Are the values of the French Revolution - Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (and Laïcité) – compatible with one another?
On 7th January 2015 the debate between the Enlightenment and religion took on a tragic form: the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists valued their Enlightenment freedom of expression to satirise Muhammad and the Paris killers loved Muhammad and took revenge on the insult to his honour. The reactions can be classified as for or against the cartoonists, and for or against the killings - and within these broad categories there is a great diversity of specific reactions. There was discussion of freedom of speech and the right to offend; the threat to Jews and Christians; Muslim moderation and Islamic fundamentalism; extremism on both sides and their interaction; security and the restriction of intolerance; the French Empire and the marginalisation of Muslims; and Western intervention and the casualties of conflicts elsewhere.
6 Social and psychological space - geographical variation
This chapter looks at the relationships between a variety of social and psychological variables and, on this basis, places the variables in an abstract space. Variation between nations and between regions is studied rather than variation between individuals. The focus is on per capita variables not aggregate variables. This chapter is the first of several in which the abstract concept of space plays a central role.
The chapter has two parts. The first part is on social value. How do countries differ? How do different dimensions of social value relate to one another? Does more money lead to more social value? World maps of social progress for 133 countries are given in the 2015 Report for the Social Progress Index (SPI). The overall SPI correlates +0.8 with GDP per capita. It correlates +0.8 with life satisfaction and -0.8 with extreme poverty – but it has only a weak negative correlation, -0.4, with inequality. An analysis of the twelve main variables in the SPI identifies a first principal component which explains almost 50% of the total variance, running from basic features of progress to more advanced features. The correlations between variables suggest ‘divergent sequential development’. A separate study considers the relationship between GDP per capita and democracy: does more money lead to more democracy? - or is there a U-shaped relationship?
The second part of this chapter is on psychology and geography and a range of important social variables. How do regions within the UK differ? How do the different variables relate to one another? ‘Friendly Scots and grumpy Londoners’ was typical of the superficial newspaper headlines, belying the depth of the actual study of 380 Local Authority Districts in the UK by Rentfrow and his colleagues. The pattern of results was similar to findings from previous research: personality traits are unevenly distributed geographically and this is associated with a range of important social outcomes. Personality was assessed using the Big Five Inventory. An analysis of the correlations at the individual and group level locates the Big Five along a continuum: from Agreeableness to Conscientiousness to Stability to Extraversion to Openness. The correlations for each of the Five have a single-peaked profile on the continuum. Likewise, the correlations for each of twenty-four political, economic, social, health and demographic variables have a single-peaked or single-troughed profile on the continuum.
7 Time series: social value, violence and population
This is the first of two chapters about how things change over time. Here we discuss social value, violence and population. In a later chapter, we discuss the history of party fortunes in UK general elections.
Whereas the previous chapter looked at how social value varied between nations, the present chapter considers how social value changes over time. Has social value increased? Whereas the measure of social value used in the previous chapter was the Social Progress Index (SPI), the measure of social value used in this chapter is the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI). The previous chapter noted a correlation between social value and GDP per capita. Given that world GDP per capita has increased, social value should also have increased. This is what we find: the HDI shows a linear increase in the period 1980-2013. Turning to a specific aspect of social value in a specific country, life expectancy in England has had a linear increase over the period 1991-2014. There is some inequality between regions which has reduced slightly over the period. At least in these studies then, social value has increased.
Whereas the word ‘violence’ is normally used to refer to physical harm, the phrase ‘structural violence’ is sometimes used to refer to a broader lack of social value. So measures such as the HDI might be taken as measures of the lack of structural violence, with increases in HDI representing decreases in structural violence. So, according to the above studies, structural violence has decreased.
Measures of social value can be aggregate totals or per capita averages and this prompts us to look at population trends. The simplest model of population dynamics is an exponential one with a constant growth rate. Applying this model to De Long’s data, we find that growth rates increase: low in the early period up to 5000BC; and 0.0007 in the period 5000BC-1500AD, 0.004 in the period 1500AD to 1940 and 0.02 in the period 1945 to 2000.
One specific aspect of social value is peace - or its opposite, violence. In 2013 the journal Sociology published a Book Review Symposium on Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and this was also discussed by Scott Gates and Larry Ray at the 2015 annual conference of the Conflict Research Society. This prompts a re-examination of Steven Pinker’s Chapter 5, ‘The Long Peace’, and its thesis of declining violence. The underlying equations are formulated. Attention then focuses on the war death rate and its probability distribution. A beta distribution gives a fair approximation to the data. Finally models for the time series of the war death rates are considered.
14 Value spaces …
The present chapter is the second on modelling and continues the work of Chapter 13. The chapter is in two parts. The first part continues the discussion of space in Chapter 13, now addressing the topic of value spaces. The second part considers the concept of space and time in relation to the Earth and two of the news stories which appeared in 2015.
We consider value spaces in three different contexts: amount of value, preference and voting percentage. In each case there is a set of individuals and a set of objects.
The first context is where each individual places a value (an amount of value) on each object. For example in one of the studies discussed in Chapter 11 each individual places a value on each possible coalition government. A possible model for this situation is that objects are located in an object space and that people have different ideal points in object space and different single-peaked value functions on object space. Both the inverted modulus function and the quadratic function are discussed. The latter gives the result that the social welfare of a situation depends on the population sensitivity, the population-weighted variation, the deviation of the situation from the welfare ideal and the welfare ceiling.
The second context is where each individual puts an order of preference on the set of objects. For example in one of the studies discussed in Chapter 11 each individual puts an order of preference on the candidates for the Labour party leadership. The set of orderings of four objects forms a tetradecahedron in which single-peaked transversals can be identified.
The third context is where each individual identifies only their first preference amongst a set of objects. This enables an aggregate social value, the percentage of first preferences, to be placed on each object – as in the various elections studied in Chapters 8 to 12. The overall result is a point in percentage space and the set of constituency results gives a set of points. The case where the set of points lie on a circle inscribed in a tetrahedron are discussed.
There is a relationship between value space, preference space and percentage space: preference orderings correspond to regions of value space; and percentage space is a finite polytope contained in value space. For example the preference hexagon can be inscribed in the percentage triangle – and the preference tetradecahedron in the percentage tetrahedron.
The chapter ends with two examples from the physical world, both involving modelling space and time in the solar system: the total eclipse of the sun which occurred on 20 March 2015 in the Faroe Islands; and the notion of midsummer.
In Values, World Society & Modelling Yearbook, 2017
6 Cultural Trajectories: Languages, Religions and Political Cultures
The previous chapter was about the rise and fall of nations. Perhaps though what is important is not which countries have power but which cultures have power. There is of course a tendency for the ruling culture to be the culture of the ruling country – or sometimes the culture of a country which was formerly the ruling country. In this chapter we look at the cultural trajectories of calendars, religions, languages and political cultures. The chapter ends by returning to religious strife and struggling with the question: what really matters?
The notion of ‘the year 2017’ is a cultural form. It is part of Western culture and is internationally widespread but it is not universal. Its reference is to the birth of Christ two thousand years ago. It is a cultural event which has travelled far in space and time.
The dating of the October revolution of 1917 leads us to look first at the schism between the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, then at the further schism caused by Martin Luther’s starting of the Reformation in 1517 and finally at the great diversity of churches and religions which exist today. More than half the world has religious beliefs with a four-thousand-year cultural history which runs from the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq, to the Middle East to the world.
There are 7102 languages in the world. There is a typical power law distribution: a few languages have many speakers and many languages have few speakers. Nine of the twelve most common languages are European. However Chinese is top, Hindu-Urdu 2nd and Arabic 5th. The ‘language export ratio’ is high for the European languages spoken in the Americas: English and Spanish with a ratio of 8 and Portuguese with an astonishing 19.
We then consider political cultures. Prompted by Cederman’s analysis of the liberal world order we reflect on the political culture of world society: the domestic political culture, the political culture of inter-state relations and the political culture of global norms. We consider: the transition from monarchies/empires to republics; the contestation between liberal democracy, capitalism, socialism and fascism (quoting Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump); and dissatisfaction in democracies and in non-democracies. A consideration of “the human costs of history” focuses on the debates and actions in 2017 relating to colonialism and empire and to Western discourses. Finally a foundational aspect of political culture is the balance it places between cooperation and conflict: in international relations theory between interdependence and power politics; and in game theory between positive-sum games and zero-sum. Illustrating this we contrast Barack Obama’s farewell speech and Donald Trump’s national security strategy; different perceptions of Xi Jinping’s view on a new global political culture; and Narendra Modi and Trump at Davos 2018.
7 Value Trajectories: Wellbeing, Wealth, Health, Peace and the Environment
Are things getting better? Are people better off? Are people healthier? Is the world more peaceful? Has environmental quality improved? What of the future? What threats do people perceive?
Good things happen and bad things happen. Sometimes things improve and sometimes things get worse. So we are left with the question, are things getting better on average?
Human history thus far has been characterised by an increasing population, and technological, economic and social development.
The IMF Annual Report of 2017 reports that GDP has grown over the past seventy-six years. This growth has been uneven: GDP has grown fivefold in advanced economies and tenfold in emerging markets and developing countries. However there are concerns about productivity growth.
In The Lancet, The global burden of disease reported that mortality rates have decreased and life expectancy has increased (by 14 years) in the period 1970-2016. The rate of change has been fairly constant over the period. In the under-5 age group there were 16 million deaths in 1970 but just 4 million deaths in 2016.
National media sometimes emphasise ‘our combatant deaths’. What about ‘theirs’? What about non-combatants? What about other human costs besides death?
Is the world more peaceful? Pinker and others conclude from the evidence that it is, but Sarkees offers an alternative analysis and conclusion. The research on this question has examined a wide variety of variables. A conceptualisation of variables is offered. Statistical models have a variety of possible trajectories with varying probabilities … in particular lowest and highest, and mean, median and mode trajectories … so there are both optimistic and pessimistic possibilities. A unit root model of war death rates exemplifies these points.
What is global warming? Does global warming exist? Are specific extreme events caused by global warming? Is it caused by human society? Is it a serious threat? Can the threat be averted? Are the proposed actions sufficient to avert it? An overview of the radiation flows between the sun, the earth’s surface and atmosphere and space is presented. A recent report revises the global warming estimates used in the Paris 2015/2016 agreement and a simplified model is presented.
An international survey by the Pew Centre asked about the threats perceived by people in 38 different countries. The top four threats were: IS, climate change, cyberattacks and the global economy. An analysis identified two clusters. The threats in cluster A were: US, global economy, climate, cyberattacks and China; and the threats in cluster B were: Russia, IS and refugees. (Note: correlation does not imply cause.)
In Conflict, Complexity and Mathematical Social Science
4 Possibility and probability; value, conflict and choice
Complete knowledge of a particular world involves knowing the truth values of all the propositions concerning that world. Complete ignorance involves knowing nothing at all. The first major step beyond complete ignorance is knowing the set of all possibilities within which the particular world might occur. Between complete knowledge and knowing just the set of possibilities, there is partial knowledge which can be expressed in terms of the probability of events. In some situations it is appropriate to assume a priori that each (elementary) event is equally likely.
Possibilities and probabilities are to the fore in the discussion of value, conflict and choice. In the absolute notion of value, value may be binary, ordinal or quantitative.
In the comparative notion of value a preference is expressed in relation to each pair of objects. Multidimensional value arises when values are placed on a set of objects by a set of individuals – either by individual people or by individual criteria. The likelihood of value consensus decreases and the likelihood of value conflict increases as the number of individuals and the number of options increases.
How should we choose? All of five sets - options, methods, criteria, choosers and situations – need to be thought about when addressing the fundamental problem of social choice: there is conflict between choosers, methods and criteria in that in some situations the different choosers, methods and criteria select different options. For example there are situations where the Condorcet majority principle, the De Borda ranking principle and the welfare principle select different options. Also there are situations where a voting cycle occurs – a result which provides the basis for Arrow’s general impossibility theorem. The likelihood of those undesirable situations is considered.
An individual may seek success or power (or influence or decisiveness). ‘Success equals power plus luck’. The likelihood of success and the likelihood of power depend on the social choice function; and both likelihoods decrease as the number of individuals and the number of options increases. In their discussion of possible voting rules for the European Council of Ministers Laruelle et al. (2006) ask whether states seek power or success and argue that states which are concerned about their sovereignty and states which are concerned to deepen integration are likely to press for different voting rules.
5 Theory, evidence and reality; the mean and median ideals of competing groups
Mathematical truth require consistency with axioms whereas scientific truth requires correspondence between theory and reality. Theory may be more restricted than reality and reality can be more restricted than theory. Sometimes reality can be represented by a simple equation and at other times a complex structure of context-dependent equations may be required. Evidence from social science investigations often require us to consider empirical probabilities and approximations.
The notion of value in this chapter is that objects can be located in a continuous space and that preferences for objects are single-peaked or Euclidean. There is some evidence that the population distribution of peaks (or ideals) is itself sometimes peaked. Under certain circumstances these features eliminate the possibility of voting cycles and give the median ideal or the mean ideal as the majority winner. If the outcome is the mean ideal then it can be shown that an individual’s power decreases as the size of the population increases. Larger groups have greater power. In the absence of equal democratic power the outcome may be modelled as the weighted mean ideal with overall power being a combination of egalitarian power and non-egalitarian power. The presence of non-egalitarian power can be detected by looking at the social outcome in terms of the relationship between the overall mean (or median) and the means (or medians) of competing groups. Wiseman and Wright’s investigation of evidence of partisan policy in the US Senate is used as a case study.
6 Social design, ethics and the amount of value
Ethics is a complex subject and here we focus on a specific ethical criterion, the utilitarian social welfare function. The ideas are relevant to other values besides welfare and the maximisation of total welfare may under certain circumstances be associated with the minimisation of inequality. The notion of value in this chapter is that an object can have a certain amount of value for an individual. Limitations on social value are noted. There are tensions between competing options. The provision of more than one option allows some relaxation of these limitations and tensions. If the option space is continuous then the social value function can take a variety of specific forms. The notion of value-generating power is introduced. Given certain assumptions, the mean social value is a maximum at the mean ideal. Sub-optimal social value can arise as a result of the following factors: a sub-maximal value of the best option; population variation in ideals; the distance of the provided option from the best option; and sensitivity to deviation from the ideal. Practical social design requires attention to a variety of design dimensions and knowledge about people’s values regarding these dimensions. This knowledge may not be known in advance and so the design process can be usefully informed by the identification of design dimensions and the obtaining of evidence about people’s values regarding these dimensions. An application of these ideas to educational design is described.
In The Middle Opinion. USA 2020 (unpublished)
9 Satisfaction with life
This chapter’s account of satisfaction with life provides some background for the discussion of people’s satisfaction with democracy which is given in a later chapter – although it has to be said that politics is not given any reference to in the studies considered in the present chapter.
We judge situations according to their value; and in our choices we pursue value. One aspect of value is subjective well-being – which itself is a multidimensional concept. Recent studies of wellbeing find that on average the average individual has ‘halfway positive’ wellbeing. Also, most individuals have around ‘halfway positive’ wellbeing, most of the time. The life of an individual involves a variety of activities and different individuals have different activity mixes. Activities vary in their capacity to generate happiness. In particular intrinsic activities generate more happiness than do instrumental values. Activity situations are multidimensional and a variety of factors affect the impact on happiness. Different groups – defined by a variety of social attributes - have different wellbeing. However variation between groups is very much less than variation between individuals. Changes in social attributes – for example, changes in geographical or relationship location - are associated with changes in wellbeing.
In terms of methodology the scales used are unipolar whereas values such as satisfaction are more appropriately conceptualised as bipolar. Results are reported for the surface scales and not for any underlying scale. Most of the attributes are positive but one attribute is negative, namely anxiety.
NOTE: this was written in 2016 and had been intended to be in the 2016 Yearbook but this was never produced.
[1] This is Paper 84.5, part of ANA Commentary for September 2020, revised June 2021.
https://sites.google.com/site/gordonburtmathsocsci/home/a-new-agenda;
[2] Gordon Burt: gordonjburt@gmail.com. Website: https://sites.google.com/site/gordonburtmathsocsci/vwsm-values-world-society-and-modelling.
[3] Burton, John W. World Society. London: Macmillan, 1972.
[4] Nicholson, Michael. Formal Theories in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.