Jane Austen, Game Theorist by Michael Chwe
Here’s my executive summary of
Jennifer Schuessler’s article presented below and an NPR interview.
First,
I clued into this fascinating interpretation of one of our romance pioneers by
listening to Freakonomics on NPR. Sheer luck on my part, because I had never
heard the show before.
Jane
Austen wrote Emma, 1815.
Emma, a
twenty year old, decides she’ll never marry, but that she’s very good at
matchmaking. She attempts to manipulate her friends into marriages she thinks
are right for them. What ensues I would best describe as a bowl of spaghetti,
with happily-ever-afters, in spite of and also because of her efforts.
In
walks NPR. Steve Levitt (with Michael Chwe and Stephen Dubner). He presents the
idea that Jane is the world’s first game theoretician. He defines game theory
as generally applied on a small scale with few players. Emma plays a
complicated game of matching people in Austen’s book. Gaming is all about
thinking strategically. Chwe references Clueless,
1995 as basically an Emma adaptation
and infers that all Austen stories highlight this type of strategic thinking
and that the author does it consciously. “…that there are lots of little
parables, or little asides in the novels, …but they do seem to be little explicit
discussions of aspects of choice and aspects of strategic thinking.
{Your
blogger, RWR adds: and tactical thinking}. I highly recommend checking out the
NPR podcast http://freakonomics.com/2013/07/04/jane-austen-game-theorist-full-transcript/
which will take you to the written version.
Game Theory: Jane Austen Had It
First
By JENNIFER
SCHUESSLERAPRIL 22, 2013
It’s not every
day that someone stumbles upon a major new strategic thinker during family
movie night. But that’s what happened to Michael Chwe, an associate professor
of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, when he sat
down with his children some eight years ago to watch “Clueless,” the 1995 romantic comedy based on
Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
Mr. Chwe
(pronounced CHEH), the author of papers like “Farsighted Coalitional Stability”
and “Anonymous Procedures for Condorcet’s Model: Robustness, Nonmonotonicity
and Optimality,” had never cracked “Emma” or “Pride and Prejudice.” But on
screen, he saw glimmers of a strategic intelligence that would make Henry
Kissinger blush.
“This movie was
all about manipulation,” Mr. Chwe, a practitioner of the hard-nosed science of
game theory, said recently by telephone. “I had always been taught that game
theory was a mathematical thing. But when you think about it, people have been
thinking about strategic action for a long time.”
Mr. Chwe set to
doing his English homework, and now his assignment is in. “Jane Austen, Game
Theorist,” just published by Princeton University Press, is more
than the larky scholarly equivalent of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” In
230 diagram-heavy pages, Mr. Chwe argues that Austen isn’t merely fodder for
game-theoretical analysis, but an unacknowledged founder
of the discipline itself: a kind of Empire-waisted version of the mathematician
and cold war thinker John von Neumann, ruthlessly breaking down the stratagems
of 18th-century social warfare.
Or, as Mr. Chwe
puts it in the book, “Anyone interested in human behavior should read Austen
because her research program has results.”
Modern game
theory is generally dated to 1944, with the publication of von Neumann’s “Theory
of Games and Economic Behavior,” which imagined human interactions
as a series of moves and countermoves aimed at maximizing “payoff.” Since then
the discipline has thrived, often dominating political science, economics and
biology departments with densely mathematical analyses of phenomena as diverse
as nuclear brinkmanship, the fate of protest movements, stock trading and
predator behavior.
But a century
and a half earlier, Mr. Chwe argues, Austen was very deliberately trying to lay
philosophical groundwork for a new theory of strategic action, sometimes
charting territory that today’s theoreticians have themselves failed to reach.
First among her
as yet unequaled concepts is “cluelessness,” which in Mr. Chwe’s analysis isn’t
just tween-friendly slang but an analytic concept worthy of consideration
alongside game-theoretic chestnuts like “zero-sum,”
“risk dominance” and “prisoner’s dilemma.”
Most game
theory, he noted, treats players as equally “rational” parties sitting across a
chessboard. But many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with
unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack
ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize
it even needs to think strategically.
Michael Chwe, the political scientist who wrote “Jane
Austen, Game Theorist.” Credit Reed Hutchinson
Take the scene
in “Pride and Prejudice” where Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands that Elizabeth
Bennet promise not to marry Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth refuses to promise, and Lady
Catherine repeats this to Mr. Darcy as an example of her insolence — not
realizing that she is helping Elizabeth indirectly signal to Mr. Darcy that she
is still interested.
It’s a classic
case of cluelessness, which is distinct from garden-variety stupidity, Mr. Chwe
argues. “Lady Catherine doesn’t even think that Elizabeth” — her social
inferior — “could be manipulating her,” he said. (Ditto for Mr. Darcy: gender
differences can also “cause cluelessness,” he noted, though Austen was
generally more tolerant of the male variety.)
The phenomenon
is hardly limited to Austen’s fictional rural society. In a chapter called
“Real-World Cluelessness,” Mr. Chwe argues that the moralistic American
reaction to the 2004 killing
and mutilation of four private security guards working with the
American military in Falluja — L. Paul Bremer III, leader of the American
occupation of Iraq, later compared the killers to “human jackals”— obscured a
strategic truth: that striking back at the city as a whole would only be
counterproductive.
“Calling your
enemy an animal might improve your bargaining position or deaden your moral
qualms, but at the expense of not being able to think about your enemy
strategically,” Mr. Chwe writes.
The darker side
of Austen is hardly unknown to literary scholars. “Regulated Hatred,”
a classic 1940 paper by the psychologist D. W. Harding, argued that her novels
explored containment strategies against the “eruption of fear and hatred into the
relationships of everyday social life.”
But Mr. Chwe,
who identifies some 50 “strategic manipulations” in Austen (in addition to a
chapter on the sophisticated “folk game theory” insights in traditional African
tales), is more interested in exploring the softer side of game theory. Game
theory, he argues, isn’t just part of “hegemonic cold war discourse,” but what
the political scientist James Scott
called a subversive “weapon of the weak.”
Such analysis
may not go over well with military types, to say nothing of literary scholars,
many of whom see books like Mr. Chwe’s or “Graphing
Jane Austen,” an anthology of Darwinian literary criticism published
last year, as examples of ham-handed scientific imperialism.
“These
ostensibly interdisciplinary efforts are sometimes seen as attempts to validate
the humanities by attaching them to more empirical disciplines,” said Jonathan
Kramnick, a professor of English at Johns Hopkins and the author of the 2011
essay “Against Literary Darwinism,” who has not read
Mr. Chwe’s book. “But for some, myself included, literary studies doesn’t need
to attach itself to any other discipline.” Even some humanists who admire Mr.
Chwe’s work suggest that when it comes to appreciating Austen, social
scientists may be the clueless ones. Austen scholars “will not be surprised at
all to see the depths of her grasp of strategic thinking and the way she anticipated
a 20th-century field of inquiry,” Laura J. Rosenthal, a specialist in
18th-century British literature at the University of Maryland, said via e-mail.
As for Mr.
Chwe, he said he was happy if he could spread Janeism among the game-playing
wonks. And which Austen character would he want leading America in a nuclear
showdown?
Easy, he said
with a laugh: “I would want Austen herself.”
