The Rational Animal

July 31, 2000
Agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, which bills itself as "supermarket to the world," had its wholesome image tarnished in 1998 when a federal trial in Chicago found two of its top executives guilty of fixing prices with the firm's competitors; each got two years in prison. The FBI informant who put them there, Mark Whitacre, former president of ADM's bioproducts division, secretly made audio and video tapes of ADM meetings. According to Whitacre, ADM's bizarre unofficial motto was: "The competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy." Thanks to Whitacre, ADM in 1996 agreed to pay a record antitrust fine of $100 million for price-fixing schemes that cost consumers much more than inflated prices for soft drinks, detergents, poultry and other products. Amazingly, Whitacre, who himself pleaded guilty in 1997 to money laundering and tax fraud, got a far more severe penalty--nine years in prison--than the corporate crooks he exposed. In this thoroughgoing, devastating expos , Lieber (Friendly Takeover) suggests one reason for this disparity may be that ADM, a premier beneficiary of federal subsidies and tax loopholes, is a politically well-connected behemoth whose law firm had unbridled influence at the Justice Department. The book's centerpiece, a labyrinthine re-creation of the 1998 trial, includes testimony alleging that ADM used prostitutes to gather information on competitors, that it set up phony trade associations as camouflage and that it stole technology by bribing rival companies' employees. Lieber meticulously serves up a seamy stew of sex, lies and videotape, revealing corruption that taints an entire industry. Photos include stop-action shots from the FBI tapes.

June 24, 2013
Did you just do something stupid? Don’t worry—psychology prof Kenrick (Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life) and “decision scientist” Griskevicius have some good news: even your worst decisions are rational—at least as far as evolution is concerned. The authors structure their argument around two key “insights”: “human decision making serves evolutionary goals,” and “human decision making is designed to achieve several very different evolutionary goals.” They assert that each person has seven “subselves” (the “self-protection,” “disease-avoidance,” “affiliation,” “status,” “mate-acquisition,” “mate-retention,” and the “kin-care subself”), each of which can be forced to react to environmental conditions in ways that are honed by evolutionary pressures to increase the chances of biological reproduction. Kenrick and Griskevicius present some interesting psychological studies to support their thesis, but their near-Panglossian view of human decision-making—one that could be marshaled to justify nearly any action according to an evolutionary standard that fails to take ethics into account—is distressing. They posit, for example, that overconfidence is favored by evolution to ensure that people “persist in the face of failure”—never mind the fact that this attitude “has been blamed for World War I, the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq.” Ultimately, their study is as readable as it is simplistic. 4 b&w illus.

July 1, 2013
How do people make decisions, and how has the brain evolved to make the choices that it does? Kenrick (Psychology/Arizona State Univ.; Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human Nature, 2011) and Griskevicius (Marketing and Psychology/Univ. of Minnesota) argue that our choices reflect a deep evolutionary wisdom. "Although it feels as if there is just one single self inside your head," they write, "your mind actually contains several different sub-selves, each with a specific evolutionary goal and a completely different set of priorities." For the most part, the authors avoid scientific jargon and touch on game theory only when it enters into their popular bailiwick. They vigorously investigate the subselves that readers may be wary of from the outset, since it is so much more comfortable to think of ourselves as a single creature. They lay out the subselves' interests--roughly: kin care, mate retention, mate acquisition, status, affiliation, disease avoidance and self-protection--and give evident examples of how they make us appear to be inconsistent decision-makers. But not so: Each is in service to reproduction, and if dead ends are a hearty part of the mix, then "[m]any of our seemingly irrational biases in judgment and decision making turn out to be pretty smart on closer examination." They account for why an African president turned down food assistance that was labeled GMO and why the peacock strategy works--also why Don Juan looks good at first flush, but canny females know that he has trouble with commitment. Sharp, piquant science/behavioral-economics writing.

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