Women and Children First?

At the Los Angeles Times, "Women and Children First? Maybe":

Whether it is "Women and children first" or "Every man for himself" in a shipwreck may depend on how long it takes the ship to sink, researchers said Monday.

When the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, it sank in 18 minutes and the bulk of survivors were young men and women who responded immediately to their powerful survival instincts.

But when the Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912, it took three hours to go down, allowing time for more civilized instincts to take control. -- and the bulk of the survivors were women, children and people with young children.

Economist Benno Torgler of the Queensland University of Technology in Australia and his colleagues studied the two sinkings in order to explore the economic theory that people generally behave in a rational and selfish manner. The two tragedies provided a "natural experiment" for testing the idea, because the passengers on the two ships were quite similar in terms of gender and wealth.

The primary difference was how long it took the ships to sink.

Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the researchers found that, on the Titanic, children had a 14.8% higher probability of surviving than a man, a person accompanying a child had a 19.6% higher probability and women had more than a 50% higher probability.

On the Lusitania, in contrast, fit young men and women were the most likely to make it into the lifeboats.

Social class was also important. On the Titanic, first-class passengers were about 44% more likely to survive, while on the Lusitania, passengers from steerage were more likely to emerge safely.

The authors considered other possible complicating factors, but concluded that the most likely reason for the differences was the amount of time passengers had to effect escape.

They suggested that when people have little time to react, gut instincts may rule. When more time is available, social influences play a bigger role.

More at the link.

This is extremely interesting.

In my World Politics course every fall, for the module on the global environment, I use a mini-case study focusing on "lifeboat ethics." It's a version of the "tragedy of the commons," which in turn is a metaphor for "global pool resources." How much can each individual actor (shepherd) consume (graze) without overloading the commons. Each actor (shepherd) has a rational incentive to consume (graze) as much as he wants. But if each actor (shepherd) pursues his narrow self-interest, the common pastureland with be depleted and all actors (shepherds) will face ruin.

In the case of lifeboats, from Dan Caldwell's, World Politics and You, the discussion begins with tourists taking a grand voyage on an ocean cruise liner:

As luck -- of the bad variety -- would have it, your ship runs into an iceberg (like the Titanic) and begins to sink." Not to worry; you proceed to your preassigned evacuation area. As the ship begins to take on water and begins to sink, the captain orders everyone to abandon ship. A panic ensues; a number of frantic passengers jump into the water, and several lifeboats cannot be released from their cleats and cannot be lowered into the water.

You are fortunate to be on one of the functional lifeboats. Your boat is lowered into the water, and it is immediately surrounded by a number of the passengers who have jumped into the water. The officer on your boat announces that the lifeboat can accommodate an absolute maximum of 60 passengers; anymore will cause the boat to capsize. You and the other passengers are confronted with several excruciating questions:

* There are ten available places left in your boat. How should you decide which passengers are allowed into your boat: the first ten to board it? Children, old people, the sick?

* What about the people in the water? Would you allow them to climb over the sides of the boat? Would you prevent, by force if necessary, more than ten coming on board?

* Would your thinking about these questions be different if you were one of those in the water rather than in the lifeboat?

* To what extent is this metaphor applicable to contemporary world politics?

The answer, of course, is that the metaphor is perfectly applicable to contemporary world politics, because we can conceive of the earth as a vessel with a finite carrying capacity (as a theoretical assumption, not a fact). Those in the "lifeboat" are the developed nations of the advanced industrialized north. What incentive do they have to help the less developed nations of the south? According to the logic of the Queensland University study cited at the Times, there's little incentive in the short term for states to abandon their rational self-interest (cut economic production, reduce consumption) to help the nations of the south through more globally sustainable policies. (Think Copenhagen.) But perhaps over the long term, if states had more time to "escape" the tragedy of the global commons, and cost-efficient technologies, new resources, etc., became available, advanced nations would agree to binding limitations on emissions, and hence production and potential living standards.

I'd have to see the Queensland study, as well as the full economic literature on the global commons, but my sense is that rational self-interest is not likely to give way to "women and children first" very soon. States, like people, act on the basis of self-interested, rational cost-benefit calculations. If the global commons is indeed finite, it's more likely we'd have a Hobbesian war of all against all than a massive kumbaya moment across the globe.

Leftists don't get this ... or they do, but push their totalitarian agenda anyway, for the sake of pure power.

FOOTNOTE: As you'll recognize at the video, that's Joseph Bruce Ismay in the 1997 film Titanic. Ismay's character is historically accurate -- he really did hop on a lifeboat before women and children. Ismay was subject to international condemnation upon his return to society after the Titanic catastrophe. In the film, he's simply a coward. But he acted rationally, and saved his own life. Only God knows the real circumstances of the moment, and God forbid any of us would have been in the same, er, boat.