Or consider male peacocks paying a price, in terms of natural selection, for their garish plumage—it costs a fortune metabolically to grow, restricts mobility, and is conspicuous to predators. But it sure boosts fitness via sexual selection.
Costly Signals
Actions must be expensive to be believed.
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That’s why the best signals—the most honest ones—are expensive. More precisely, they are differentially expensive: costly to produce, but even more costly to fake. ... Sometimes it’s even necessary to do something risky or wasteful in order to prove that you have a desirable trait. This is known as the handicap principle.
For instance, as evolutionary psychologists confirm, sometimes the motivation behind conspicuous displays of virtue by the very rich are far from pure. When shown a photograph of an attractive man and asked to write a story about an ideal date with him, a woman will say she is prepared to spend time on conspicuous pro-social volunteering. ... (A man in the same ‘mating-primed’ condition will want to spend more on conspicuous luxuries, or on heroic acts.)
Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious among outside observers for the delight they took in displays of excess. They were best known to European ethnologists for the festivals called potlatch, usually held by aristocrats acceding to some new noble title (nobles would often accumulate many of these over the course of a lifetime). In these feasts they sought to display their grandeur and contempt for ordinary worldly possessions by performing magnificent feats of generosity, overwhelming their rivals with gallons of candlefish oil, berries and quantities of fatty and greasy fish.
Sacrifice not only strengthens your faith in the story but also often substitutes for all your other obligations toward it. ... Unable to live up to the ideal, people turn to sacrifice as a solution.
Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent causes of disastrous behavior. For example, much of the deforestation of Easter Island had a religious motivation: to obtain logs to transport and erect the giant stone statues that were the object of veneration.
Glory is largely a theatrical concept. ... We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.
You hit me, so I hit you back a little harder, so you hit me back a little harder, and pretty soon we have a real fight going. “I’ll raise you one” is the decision rule that leads to escalation. Escalation comes from a reinforcing loop set up by competing actors trying to get ahead of each other.
It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much.
In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away. (Even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.) But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.