EconomistMom.com

Today’s Washington Post contains an article by Rob Stein reporting on new research proving that dogs feel emotions more complex than just “happiness” or “fear”; the article focuses on “envy”–more sophistically referred to as “inequity aversion”:

[P]ooches would eventually get upset if their partner was getting rewarded while they got nothing.

“The dogs that were not getting the reward started to hesitate. You had to prompt them more often to give the paw,” said Range, noting that some of the deprived dogs would start acting frustrated, scratching themselves, licking their mouths and yawning. “They would refuse to look at you, start looking at their owners or at the other dog chewing, and eventually refuse to cooperate. They would look away or lay down and not give the paw anymore if they were not getting rewarded.”

…to see if the dogs were refusing to give their paw more out of frustration than from a sense of inequity, [the researchers] repeated the experiment with dogs by themselves sometimes rewarding them and sometimes not. In that situation, the dogs continued to cooperate for much longer even when they were not getting a treat. The same thing happened when neither dog in a pair got rewarded.

“It’s not just ‘Oh, shoot. I’m not getting rewarded, so I stop working,’ ” [scientist Friederike] Range said. “If both are not rewarded, that is not a big problem. But if you rewarded one and not the other, that’s where you saw a problem.”…

The story on dog envy concludes with an interesting analogy between dogs and dog treats, and humans and government spending (or more specifically “bailouts”):

The findings are especially intriguing given the current economic crisis…

“If you look at the crisis in the U.S. and the automobile industry, people are upset because the executives are driving private jets and we are driving lousy cars,” [scientist Frans B.M.] deWaal said. “There are many studies of inequity aversion in humans. Economists have studied this and said only humans have this. This shows it’s not limited to our species. Some of these elements are also evolved in other animals.”

I think the analogy can be more broadly applied to why fiscal discipline has been so hard to do given the way fiscal policy negotiations and compromises have tended to work lately (at least in the past eight years or so).  When different parties want different things, the compromises have been “OK, I’ll let you have your spending if you let me have mine”–rather than “I’ll give up some of my spending if you give up some of yours.”  And once the government has already agreed to a $700 billion “rescue” for the financial sector, well, it creates a lot of envy and resentment when the auto industry’s plea for help seems to get snubbed, and suddenly there seem to be a lot of envious industries and people lining up at the feet of federal policymakers saying (begging?) “what about me?”

And reports like this one on the now “toothless” restrictions on executive compensation at those rescued Wall Street firms sure don’t help control the envy from the auto industry and its supporters–nor that of taxpayers more generally.  Everyone now seems to have the inclination and perhaps the right to ask “when is it my turn?”

That’s why I think the $700 billion TARP, and how it was constructed and implemented, and how it has worked so far, probably set a very bad precedent.