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We develop a model of adaptive learning with social comparisons. Actors are more likely to choose actions that recently yielded satisfactory payoffs; satisfaction is evaluated relative to an aspiration level that reflects previous payoffs and possibly other players' payoffs. This captures the phenomenon of social comparison viareference groups. We show that if agents compare themselves to those who are receiving higher payoffs then in stable outcomes all payoffs must be equal. If, however, agents' aspirations are driven by less ambitious social comparisons then very unequal distributions can be stable. We apply our general results to collective action problems in socio-political hierarchies and derive conditions for stable exploitation. Finally, we develop a computational model, which shows that increases in payoff inequality make outcomes less stable.

Whether to accept or to challenge conventional notions of 'reality' and 'common-sense' is a question that has beendebated since antiquity. Do we contentedly accept the 'cages' or constraints seemingly imposed by the human condition, as well as by the intellectual frameworks of science, language, history, and ethics? Or do we aspire to escape and transcend them in an endless quest for something preferable ₆ some indefinable 'sublime'? Beverley Southgateexplores both traditions, identifying two seemingly distinct 'classes of men', variously exemplified by such thinkers as Aristotle and Plato, Bentham and Coleridge, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Having its starting point in intellectual history, his investigation crosses disciplinary boundaries, drawing on evidence and ideas from philosophers, psychologists, theologians, novelists, poets, and artists. With its recommendation of continuing tension or (in Emerson's terminology) 'oscillation' between acceptance and aspiration, and its positive agenda for the humanities of a 'duty of discontent', this work has important practical implications for politics and education.

The authors present a theory of the general enabling conditions for war which predicts that war is possible, though not inevitable, when the conditions of the theory are satisfied. Whether a war will actually occur depends upon the idiosyncratic situational factors that are outside the scope of the theory. Three conditions make war possible: (i) Aspirations do not match achievements: governments only initiate wars when their achieved share of global capabilities differs from their aspired share of capabilities. (2) Salience: governments only initiate wars against other governments when there is a history of substantial interaction. (3) Power: governments never initiate wars against other governments that have a substantially greater military capacity. These conditions may be viewed as a series of three filters that identify pairs of countries between which war is possible. The theory predicts that wars will not occur in any dyad that does not pass through all the filters. In testing this theory for all nations between 1816 and 1980, the authors allowed for the fact that governments may preemptively initiate wars against other governments that meet these conditions.