Calculating Economics of an Eye for an Eye

[groovedaddy]

>
Vengeance: it is as old as humanity, as natural as blinking. It has been examined and pondered by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, poets, playwrights and even primatologists, who have recently found that chimpanzees will punish thieves by overturning their food tables so they cannot enjoy the fruits of their crime.

Only recently, however, have economists turned their attention to vengeance and tried to measure it in the real world. In a working paper published last month on the Web site of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org), Naci H. Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University, gathered information on 89,000 people in 53 countries to draw a map of vengefulness. What he found was that among the most vengeful are women, older people, the poor and residents of high-crime areas.

“There was a question of whether or not we can quantify vengeful feelings in a scientific fashion,” Mr. Mocan said. “It’s the first analysis of the issue looking at actual data.”

It turns out that personal attributes — age, income, gender — as well as the characteristics of one’s culture and country contribute to a person’s desire for revenge, Mr. Mocan said. “A feeling such as vengeance,” he said, “which can be considered primal, is nonetheless influenced by the economic and social circumstances of the person and the country he or she lives in.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/arts/29veng.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

[Igel]

1. I don't think I've ever considered vengefulness "primal".

There's usually a response that precedes it, one that often doesn't have a good name in English. There are those who believe that all thought and consciousness is first linguistic, so they'd probably say that response can't really be described or examined.

But to an economist, all things are economic.

I think a couple of good anthropologists should look at the data. They'd probably have a few nifty insights, as long as they're not into Whorf-Sapir.