God is My God : The Generative Integrity of Louise de Marillac

Psychology and spiritual theology are used in this personal reflection on Louise de Marillac’s generative integrity. Christian generativity is fulfilling others’ needs and doing God’s will without any expectation of return or even success. Louise had trouble trusting God, herself, and others because she lacked nurturing in her early childhood. She was able to overcome this through her friendship with Vincent de Paul and “her unique relationship with the generative Jesus.” These two elements enabled her to become generative herself. She wanted to imitate the hidden life of Jesus by doing God’s will, unseen by all but God. Author Vie Thorgren notes that Louise was particularly concerned with “the generativity of Jesus on the cross who cries out in thirst.” Louise wrote that when he thirsted without asking for relief, he “increased His own sufferings” in order to “apply His merits to all souls.” According to Thorgren, the Daughters of Charity were to “unite [their] service” with “the thirst of Jesus which is perfect charity.

Relationships: Gift for Elizabeth, Gift for Us

Vie Thorgren identifies three “gifts of relationship” in Elizabeth Seton’s life that empowered her and others around her. She explains how these are relevant to us and how they are “helpful for an understanding of charity that embraces justice.” First, Thorgren explores Elizabeth’s relationship with her father, and with God by extension, and how both gave her the first gift, “the authority of the Father’s Daughter.” In Jungian psychology, the Father’s Daughter is a woman who is practical, adaptable, and capable of gaining others’ trust. As a Father’s Daughter, Elizabeth knew the difference between authority and control. Authority is legitimate because it is exercised within the context of a relationship. Control is simply domination. Thorgren says the second gift was Elizabeth’s capacity to “midwif[e] the laboring Spirit”—she was able to make death a “blessed time” for the dying because she was unafraid of it. Similarly, Thorgren concludes, we must be unafraid of the death of old ways of life as fairer ones are created. The third gift, “real presence,” enduring love without barriers, is something we must demonstrate to bridge the gap between rich and poor

Long-run equilibria, dominated strategies, and local interactions

The present note revisits a result by Kim and Wong (2010) showing that any strict Nash equilibrium of a coordination game can be supported as a long run equilibrium by properly adding dominated strategies. We show that in the circular city model of local interactions the selection of 1/2 -dominant strategies remains when adding strictly dominated strategies if interaction is decentral". Conversely, if the local interaction structure is central" by adding properly suited dominated strategies any equilibrium strategy of the original game can be supported as long run equilibrium. Classification- JEL: C72, D83

Why evolution does not always lead to an optimal proto-language.An approach based on the replicator dynamics

Sender–receiver models in the style of Lewis (1969), Hurford (1989), or Nowak and Krakauer (1999) can be used to explain meaning of signals in situations of cooperative interaction. Importantly, meaning here is not an ex–ante concept, but arises as an equilibrium property of a game. A strategy of this game is a pair of a sender and a receiver matrix, where the sender matrix links events that possibly become the object of communication to signals, and the receiver matrix links potentially received signals to events. A Nash equilibrium strategy of this game can be interpreted as a so–called proto–language, that is, a set of event–signals relations that facilitate communication over a finite number of events. A typical property of this game is that it admits a multiplicity of Nash equilibrium components, where two (or more) events share the use of one signal or where two (or more) signals are associated with the same event, leading to a situation where some of the potential of communication if left unexploited. W¨arneryd (1993) as well as Trapa and Nowak (2000) show that only the strict Nash strategies, where each event is bijectively linked to one signal and where the inverse of this mapping is used to associate signals with events, which therefore guarantee the full potential of communication, are evolutionarily stable. Evolutionary stability implies asymptotic stability in the replicator dynamics. Interestingly, simulations with this model in the style of a replicator dynamics as reported in Nowak and Krakauer (1999) typically give rise to a suboptimal proto–language, where more than one event is linked to the same signal whereas another signal remains idle. In view of W¨arneryd (1993) and Trapa and Nowak (2000) this raises the following questions: Does this reflect generic behavior of the replicator dynamics for this model? And, if so, what are the properties of a strategy that can protect itself from being driven out by this dynamics despite the fact that it cannot be evolutionarily stable? This paper gives answers to these questions in terms of neutral stability and its dynamic consequences. It, first, provides a complete characterization of neutrally stable strategies for this game, showing that in such a situation, indeed, there can be two (or more) events that are linked to the same signal or two (or more) signals that are linked to the same event, as long as the degree of ambiguity is not too high. Second, it analyzes the long–run behavior of the replicator dynamics of this model. This essentially derives from neutral stability together with the symmetry properties of this game. Building on a result by Bomze (2002), which establishes equivalence of neutral stability and Lyapunov stability in the replicator dynamics for doubly symmetric games with pairwise interaction, it can be shown that the replicator dynamics of this model does not necessarily lead to an optimal proto–language, but that it can be trapped in situations of ambiguous event–signal relations, where some of the potential of communication is left unexploited.