(Drivebycuriosity)
- It seems that economics is out of fashion. Economists assume that people are rational & follow their self-interest. They claim that humans behave economically because their resources - time, food, land, money etc - are limited. Many pundits disagree and declare economics as useless. Last year Prof. Richard Thaler, one of the loudest deniers of economics, received the Nobel Prize for economics!
But dolphins don´t care about Nobel Prizes and they ignore the pundits. The "Guardian" describes the rational behavior of Kelly, a dolphin, who lives in a research institute in Mississippi ( theguardian):
"All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter
that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can
trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their
pools clean. Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper
into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The
next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a
piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes
back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so
on.
…Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into
her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to
them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish.
This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead
of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid
it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers
were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure
the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering
this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves,
and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.
The dolphins are not only gaming the system they are saving and using a capital structure to increase total output".
The Rules Of Supply And Demand
Kelly certainly behaves rationally. The dolphin is spending energy & time to get more food, a strategy which is called profit maximizing. And dolphins aren`t alone. Researchers from the Max Planck Society discovered that at least some birds, the African Grey Parrots, also are rational and follow their self-interest (phys.org). They report:
"The birds have learned how to trade a token for food: one each for a low, medium or high-value food. The task was to choose between an instant food reward and a token that they could exchange for higher quality food. In controlled tasks, however, selecting a token resulted in an equal or lower payoff. The parrots only rejected the immediate reward and chose the token, if the token's value corresponded to a higher quality food compared to that of the immediately accessible food. The results show that parrots are capable of deliberate and profit-maximizing decisions."
Animals also respond to rising prices and consume less of something when it gets more expensive. Animals don´t use money of course, but they pay by burning energy and spending time to get some preferred food. The Dictionary of Animal Behavior says, if an animal expends a certain amount of energy on a particular
activity, then it usually does less of that activity if the energy
requirement is increased (oxfordreference). Studies show that animals invest in auspicious assets the same way stock market investors do. Researchers from the University of British Columbia and Warsaw
University of Life Sciences found that dairy cows are willing to expend
energy (for instance for opening a gate) to gain access to a grooming brush (phys.org).
Scientists are observing "biological markets" where animals trade goods (food) and services (grooming, shelter, protection etc.), following the economic rule of "supply and demand" (ronaldnoe). For instance 'helper wasps' raise the offspring of dominant
breeders in small social groups in return for belonging in the nest (sciencedaily). Scientists from the University of Sussex noticed that "the helper wasps provide less help to their own 'bosses' (the dominant breeders) when alternative nesting options are available. The dominant wasps then compete to give the helper wasps the 'best deal', by allowing them to work less hard, to ensure they stay in their particular nest".
I don`t assume that animals think. They follow their instincts which are shaped by evolution. If a species would behave irrationally it would lose against their competitors (getting less food and inferior shelter for instance) and would have gone extinct over time. The best strategy wins and their genes survive. This way animals inherited behavior which leads them to act economically.
If animals can behave rationally and follow their self interest, why don´t people? Prof. Thaler is wrong and does not deserve a Nobel Prize for economics.
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