A cooperative species Bowles, Samuel; Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert
2011., 20110531, 2011, 2011-05-31
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Why do humans, uniquely among animals, cooperate in large numbers to advance projects for the common good? Contrary to the conventional wisdom in biology and economics, this generous and civic-minded ...behavior is widespread and cannot be explained simply by far-sighted self-interest or a desire to help close genealogical kin.
Since Darwin, intergroup hostilities have figured prominently in explanations of the evolution of human social behavior. Yet whether ancestral humans were largely "peaceful" or "warlike" remains ...controversial. I ask a more precise question: If more cooperative groups were more likely to prevail in conflicts with other groups, was the level of intergroup violence sufficient to influence the evolution of human social behavior? Using a model of the evolutionary impact of between-group competition and a new data set that combines archaeological evidence on causes of death during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene with ethnographic and historical reports on hunter-gatherer populations, I find that the estimated level of mortality in intergroup conflicts would have had substantial effects, allowing the proliferation of group-beneficial behaviors that were quite costly to the individual altruist.
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High-performance organizations and economies work on the basis not only of material interests but also of Adam Smith's "moral sentiments." Well-designed laws and public policies can harness ...self-interest for the common good. However, incentives that appeal to self-interest may fail when they undermine the moral values that lead people to act altruistically or in other public-spirited ways. Behavioral experiments reviewed here suggest that economic incentives may be counterproductive when they signal that selfishness is an appropriate response; constitute a learning environment through which over time people come to adopt more self-interested motivations; compromise the individual's sense of self-determination and thereby degrade intrinsic motivations; or convey a message of distrust, disrespect, and unfair intent. Many of these unintended effects of incentives occur because people act not only to acquire economic goods and services but also to constitute themselves as dignified, autonomous, and moral individuals. Good organizational and institutional design can channel the material interests for the achievement of social goals while also enhancing the contribution of the moral sentiments to the same ends.
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Humans behave altruistically in natural settings and experiments. A possible explanation--that groups with more altruists survive when groups compete--has long been judged untenable on empirical ...grounds for most species. But there have been no empirical tests of this explanation for humans. My empirical estimates show that genetic differences between early human groups are likely to have been great enough so that lethal intergroup competition could account for the evolution of altruism. Crucial to this process were distinctive human practices such as sharing food beyond the immediate family, monogamy, and other forms of reproductive leveling. These culturally transmitted practices presuppose advanced cognitive and linguistic capacities, possibly accounting for the distinctive forms of altruism found in our species.
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Unequal chances Bowles, Samuel; Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert ...
2005, 2005., 20091015, 2009, 2005-01-01, 20050101
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Is the United States "the land of equal opportunity" or is the playing field tilted in favor of those whose parents are wealthy, well educated, and white? If family background is important in getting ...ahead, why? And if the processes that transmit economic status from parent to child are unfair, could public policy address the problem? Unequal Chances provides new answers to these questions by leading economists, sociologists, biologists, behavioral geneticists, and philosophers.
Explicit economic incentives designed to increase contributions to public goods and to promote other pro-social behavior sometimes are counterproductive or less effective than would be predicted ...among entirely self-interested individuals. This may occur when incentives adversely affect individuals' altruism, ethical norms, intrinsic motives to serve the public, and other social preferences. The opposite also occurs—crowding in—though it appears less commonly. In the fifty experiments that we survey, these effects are common, so that incentives and social preferences may be either substitutes (crowding out) or complements (crowding in). We provide evidence for four mechanisms that may account for these incentive effects on preferences: namely that incentives may (i) provide information about the person who implemented the incentive, (ii) frame the decision situation so as to suggest appropriate behavior, (iii) compromise a control averse individual's sense of autonomy, and (iv) affect the process by which people learn new preferences. An implication is that the evaluation of public policy must be restricted to allocations that are supportable as Nash equilibria when account is taken of these crowding effects. We show that well designed fines, subsidies, and the like minimize crowding out and may even do the opposite, making incentives and social preferences complements rather than substitutes.
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Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution Pranab Bardhan, Samuel Bowles, Michael Wallerstein / Pranab Bardhan, Samuel Bowles, Michael Wallerstein
2020, 2006, 2020-10-06, 2020.
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Can the welfare state survive in an economically integrated world? Many have argued that globalization has undermined national policies to raise the living standards and enhance the economic ...opportunities of the poor. This book, by sixteen of the world's leading authorities in international economics and the welfare state, suggests a surprisingly different set of consequences: Globalization does not preclude social insurance and egalitarian redistribution--but it does change the mix of policies that can accomplish these ends. Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution demonstrates that the free flow of goods, capital, and labor has increased the inequality or volatility of labor earnings in advanced industrial societies--while constraining governments' ability to tax the winners from globalization to compensate workers for their loss. This flow has meanwhile created opportunities for enhancing the welfare of the less well off in poor and middle-income countries. Comprising eleven essays framed by the editors' introduction and conclusion, this book represents the first systematic look at how globalization affects policies aimed at reducing inequalities. The contributors are Keith Banting, Pranab Bardhan, Carles Boix, Samuel Bowles, Minsik Choi, Richard Johnston, Covadonga Meseguer Yebra, Karl Ove Moene, Layna Mosley, Claus Offe, Ugo Pagano, Adam Przeworski, Kenneth Scheve, Matthew J. Slaughter, Stuart Soroka, and Michael Wallerstein.
Because mutually beneficial cooperation may unravel unless most members of a group contribute, people often gang up on free-riders, punishing them when this is cost-effective in sustaining ...cooperation. In contrast, current models of the evolution of cooperation assume that punishment is uncoordinated and unconditional. These models have difficulty explaining the evolutionary emergence of punishment because rare unconditional punishers bear substantial costs and hence are eliminated. Moreover, in human behavioral experiments in which punishment is uncoordinated, the sum of costs to punishers and their targets often exceeds the benefits of the increased cooperation that results from the punishment of free-riders. As a result, cooperation sustained by punishment may actually reduce the average payoffs of group members in comparison with groups in which punishment of free-riders is not an option. Here, we present a model of coordinated punishment that is calibrated for ancestral human conditions and captures a further aspect of reality missing from both models and experiments: The total cost of punishing a free-rider declines as the number of punishers increases. We show that punishment can proliferate when rare, and when it does, it enhances group-average payoffs.
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The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter–gatherers during the late Pleistocene, ...food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required—secure individual claims to the products of one’s labor—were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers—crops, dwellings, and animals—could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th- and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.
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