L. Sun - The Fairness Instinct: The Robin Hood Mentality and Our Biological Nature

The idea for this book was conceived over a decade ago. Its long-delayed birth was due to two daunting challenges: the limited scope of my knowledge, and my lack of confidence in my ability to write in English for a general audience. Fortunately, many have helped me overcome my self-doubt. The Fairness Instinct represents a collective intellectual journey I have traveled with them.

David Barash has been an inspirational figure. In addition to providing encouragement, he also made many insightful suggestions. Marte Fallshore was an invaluable resource, especially for issues related to psychology as well as English. Lisa Norris generously took me as a student in her writing courses. Stephen Maurer, Elizabeth Maurer, Ariel Knafo, John Dunlop, Eric Dolin, Charles Li, Erik Borst, Debbie Lewis, and Amy Zhang all contributed in various ways. Several staff members at the library of Central Washington University helped me to obtain reference books and articles. Wikipedia was a constant companion, providing leads for further research and making it much easier to synthesize information from vastly different domains of knowledge.

My heartfelt thanks go to Andrew Willden, whose contributions were comprehensive, from grammar, rhetoric, readability, and book organization to information about religion and history. His expertise in Mormonism and ancient Western history was essential in helping me avoid basic mistakes. His superb editing skill has considerably improved the prose and enriched the context of several historical episodes. I am equally grateful to Alan Honick, who passionately edited the entire manuscript in addition to engaging with me in many hours of discussion. The book would have been less readable without his contribution. Another major and unfailing helper was my son, Shine. Unusually mature in writing and editing skills for a middle school student, Shine was always present throughout my writing process, and he offered countless insights on issues ranging from wording, grammar, and rhetoric to logic, flow, and the structure and organization of every chapter from rough draft to final version.

My sincere thanks also go to my agent Don Fehr, who spotted the merit of the project and guided me through to the finish line. It has also been a wonderful experience working with Prometheus Books. Efficient, enthusiastic, and always encouraging, Brian McMahon is every author's dream editor, and I am lucky to have had him as mine. Many others, including Steven Mitchell, Melissa Shofner, Cate Roberts-Abel, Mariel Bard, and Mark Hall, also helped immeasurably in bringing out this book.

Finally, my wife Crystal willingly played devil's advocate, relentlessly probing the potential weaknesses in my writing. This book was much improved as a result of my effort to meet her high standards.

Because many ideas in the book are new, they are yet to be further examined and criticized. I take full responsibility for any mistakes that may be found. I believe that the issues surrounding fairness are extremely important and that the risk of ignoring them is extremely grave; for this reason, I am willing to risk my reputation to the gnashing teeth of the critics. As the old saying goes: throw out a minnow to catch a whale. In this sense, I will be satisfied if this book fulfills its role as a bait minnow to bring in a bigger catch: an earnest, informed discussion of how societies may be reformed to satisfy the basic human instinct for fairness.

The person in Time magazine's 2011 Person of the Year is the protester. It is the tenth time since its founding in 1927 that Time has recognized a class of people instead of an individual. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movements, from Russia to India, the protesters in 2011 around the globe shared two commonalties: Facebook and a desire for fairnessthe new and the old. The new social-networking tool made manifesting the old fairness sentiment all the more rapid, all the more contagious, and all the more potent.

Whether at home in the United States or abroad, these protest movements largely hinge on a widespread disaffection that stems from what many perceive as growing political, social, and economic inequalities. In many ways, the OWS movements epitomized these global convulsions provoked by the public ire over the corporate bailouts, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the basic unfairness in tax policies, the last of which continues to be a divisive issue in America. While the Occupy Wall Street slogan seems to have slipped from parlance after the 2012 election season, the 99% slogan continues to gain in potency.

Contrast this to just four years earlier, how mute such rhetoric was in the election of 2008. Even after the massive Wall Street sell-off in September 2008, the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Great Depression, Republican John McCain was still vilifying Democrat Barack Obama as a modern-day Robin Hood for Obama's proposal to raise the income tax on the rich. Obama, McCain warned, wanted socialism and would go so far as to wage class warfare to spread the wealth. McCain's pitch was apparently based on his take that Americans disliked playing Robin Hood. Such a public mentalityeven if true at the timewould soon retreat.

In March 2009, the stock market continued its downward spiral, and the resulting financial tsunami wiped out American jobs en masse. In the meantime, executives at AIG were pocketing large annual bonusessome $165 million in total. Americansliberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicanswere furious. Only a few months earlier, the insurance behemoth was on the verge of bankruptcy. AIG would have gone belly-up if not for the timely infusion of $182 billion in bailout money, courtesy of American taxpayers. For the American public, rewarding fat bonuses to rich executives at a difficult time seemed equivalent to robbing people of their possessions. Amid a national outcry, the US Congress on March 19 passed an urgent bill to levy a staggering 90 percent tax on all similar payouts, only days after the news about the bonuses broke. Considering that Congress had been partially paralyzed by partisanship for years, it was surprisingly efficient in passing this special bill, intended to seize the bulk of the money from the bonus recipients. Among the supporters of the bill were eighty-five Republicans, who would otherwise hold lower taxes among their core conservative principles. Due to mounting public pressure, their decision was more about political survival than political principle, for the time being.

Company executives at AIG felt victimized. Despite the fact that 80 percent of AIG was owned by the government, the bonuses at the time accounted for only 0.076 percent of the company's value, a minute proportion, making it hard to claim they were entirely from taxpayers. Also, the bonus agreement had been set up well before the bailout. It was a contract that should, in principle, be honored. Furthermore, AIG was not the only company handing out extravagant bonuses, compensations, and golden parachutes to executives. All major financial firms either taken over by the government or resuscitated by TARP moneysFannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargohad done the same thing.

For AIG, it was unfortunate to be situated in the bull's-eye of public fury, but the political storm left a trail of questions in its wake. Why did bonuses and executive compensations suddenly matter so much in the psyche of the American public? Why was the voice against lavish pay packages for company executives so feeble before the election? Why, in a short four-month period, was there a sea change in public opinion? What was the powerful force behind this dramatic turn of events? The key to these mind-boggling questions lies in our Robin Hood mentalitya metaphor for our sense of fairness.