DocumentCode :
257876
Title :
Towards a theory of societal co-evolution: Individualism versus collectivism
Author :
Ahuja, Kartik ; Zhang, Simpson ; Van der Schaar, Mihaela
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. Eng., UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA
fYear :
2014
fDate :
3-5 Dec. 2014
Firstpage :
769
Lastpage :
773
Abstract :
Substantial empirical research has shown that the level of individualism vs. collectivism is one of the most critical and important determinants of societal traits, such as economic growth, economic institutions and health conditions. But the exact nature of this impact has thus far not been well understood in an analytical setting. In this work, we develop one of the first theoretical models that analytically studies the impact of individualism-collectivism on the society. We model the growth of an individual´s welfare (wealth, resources and health) as depending not only on himself, but also on the level of collectivism, i.e. the level of dependence on the rest of the individuals in the society, which leads to a co-evolutionary setting. Based on our model, we are able to predict the impact of individualism-collectivism on various societal metrics, such as average welfare, average lifetime, total population, cumulative welfare and average inequality. We analytically show that individualism has a positive impact on average welfare and cumulative welfare, but comes with the drawbacks of lower average life-time, lower total population and higher average inequality.
Keywords :
evolutionary computation; social sciences; average welfare; collectivism trait; cumulative welfare; individual welfare growth; individualism trait; societal co-evolution theory; societal metrics; societal trait; Biological system modeling; Economics; Mathematical model; Sociology; Statistics; Steady-state;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP), 2014 IEEE Global Conference on
Conference_Location :
Atlanta, GA
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/GlobalSIP.2014.7032223
Filename :
7032223
Link To Document :
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