We can learn everything we really need to know about politics and economics from watching dogs at play.<\/p>\n
We have two poodles, standard “Arlo” and mini “Tuffy” (well, he needs to be!).\u00a0 The theme of all play between Arlo and Tuffy is “Mine!<\/em><\/strong>”\u00a0 This is normal enough (and a good model for most human play), but yesterday I noticed a new nuance:<\/p>\n If there is one rawhide bone, they will spend all day snatching it from each other and running to hide it where they can gloat.\u00a0 If the other loses interest, they will bring it out in the open and growl to get things going again.\u00a0 You might think that big Arlo would have an unfair advantage over little Tuffy, but in fact it’s the other way around: Tuffy can get into places where Arlo can’t, and sit there with the bone, growling and barking.\u00a0 It’s cute — they are almost human!\u00a0 It’s also mostly good-natured competition.\u00a0 Things are simple and it’s all in fun.<\/p>\n It gets darker and more complicated when we foolishly give them two<\/em><\/strong> bones.\u00a0 You might think, as we did, that now there would be one for each and thus nothing to fight over.\u00a0 Wrong.\u00a0 The game now becomes “Both mine!<\/em><\/strong>”\u00a0 Which is tricky because neither one can actually hold both bones in his jaws at once.\u00a0 So they invent schemes for\u00a0 hiding Bone 1 somewhere and then fighting over Bone 2.\u00a0 Dominance can only be achieved by capturing all<\/em> the wealth and protecting it in clever hiding places.<\/p>\n Moreover, they don’t have fun any more.\u00a0 Because the competition is no longer simple and straightforward, it is perpetually frustrating and the growling turns to snarls.\u00a0 Tuffy and Arlo come close to a real dogfight until we take away one of the bones.<\/p>\n From this I deduced that a higher standard of living is unlikely to make people more willing to share the wealth unless we can change some basic instincts that go way, way<\/em> back.\u00a0 Dogs don’t compete to get what they need; they compete to have it all<\/em><\/strong>, because that’s where the fun<\/em> is, as long as scarcity<\/em><\/strong> is the rule.\u00a0 With abundance<\/em><\/strong> comes confusion, dissatisfaction and animosity, every time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We can learn everything we really need to know about politics and economics from watching dogs at play. We have two poodles, standard “Arlo” and mini “Tuffy” (well, he needs to be!).\u00a0 The theme of all play between Arlo and Tuffy is “Mine!”\u00a0 This is normal enough (and a goodRead More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"gutentor_comment":4,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}