Is Capitalism Natural?

Naomi Arbit
February 21, 2011

Is Capitalism Natural?

Introduction:
In the past, territory played a vital role in informing every aspect
of relational human life – peoples' entire worldviews were dependent on the
unique conditions and circumstances arising from the territories they
inhabited and evolved to survive in. A territory, defined as a specific
geographic location with unique physico-spatial properties, was critical to
the evolution of social, economic, and cultural relationships. The
interaction between specific environmental, geographical, social and
cultural conditions determined a person's reality or worldview, the lens
through which an agent sees the world. Reality, as defined this way, is
altogether unique from a person's consciousness, which is not the subject
of this paper.
Before the industrial revolution, and some would argue the
agricultural revolution, human beings used to be vitally connected to the
land. They hunted it, gathered on it, and tilled it in order to receive
nourishment and ensure their survival. They defended it with their lives,
sure, and that aspect of territory is one that still persists to this day.
However, part of what distinguishes this "terriroreality" of old, with the
modern one is that previously, land, labour, human interaction and
cooperation were intertwined with the social fabric. Territory, and
everything it encompassed, was not abstract from a person's reality. In our
contemporary, market-based society, these factors have been subsumed into
the marketplace, thus commodifying and alienating aspects of our lives that
had previously been fundamental in shaping our perceptions, reactions and
interactions.
Social dynamics and economic exchanges evolved in order to best
facilitate the survival of competing human groups. Gender roles were
defined based on differing skills to hunt and gather food and social groups
learned to cooperate and relate to each other based on the shared need to
survive. Over time, the evolution of social dynamics and accumulated
traditional ecological knowledge about a group's territory led to the
development of cultures, worldviews, and moral codes of behavior.
While each individual person has their own unique and specific
worldview as a result of their accumulated biological and environmental
experiences (among other things), a culture too can be said to have a
worldview that comprises its explanations for the world and any meaning
attendant to that. A culture's worldview is both based upon and informs its
ideological and moral paradigms.
The worldview that characterizes out current modern culture is
markedly different from most, if not all, human groups throughout history.
It encompasses such notions as the world was made for man, as explicitly
stated in Judeo-Christian theology; the premise of the Enlightenment views
of progress and the scientific/Baconian revolution, in which man had to
control, subdue, and predict nature as part of the continual striving for
progress, and the assumptions of neoclassical economics, which predicate
that man is inherently a self interested, utility maximizing agent. While a
member of our society may or may not prescribe to these assumptions is of
no matter so long as that person participates on our society. For
humanity's interaction both with the environment and with each other is
largely structured by the market. The social and economic participation of
people living in our civilization is largely organized by the free market
paradigm.
As will be elaborated further below, the principles upon which the
market-based society is founded make certain assumptions about the world
and about human beings. However, these assumptions are incomplete - they
are missing some crucial aspects of human life. As a result, the mode of
interaction that they facilitate is not complete either, with serious and
extensive consequences.
The neoclassical economic paradigm has left altruistic incentives out
of its economic equation and assumes only self-interest as the motivating
force behind human action. Given the importance of the structure, or
organization of an exchange towards determining its outcome, the fact that
altruism has been excluded has profound implications for the expression of
altruistic tendencies in exchanges.
Because land, labour and other factors of production have been
abstracted from society by the market, out connection to those facets of
human life have been lost, and our ability to connect with them and behave
altruistically towards them compromised. Land used to be completely
interchangeable with nature, now we are suffering a collective 'nature
deficit disorder' and are completely destroying the environment and the
diversity of species. Labour used to be synonymous with human activities of
life. These activities were not done solely for the sake of sale or
economic benefit, and to treat them as if they were is demoralizing. Never
before has humanity seen such pervasive environmental destruction and
greater social isolation.


Neoclassical Economics
The main tenet of neoclassical economics is that people are
inherently motivated by the self-interested pursuit of utility. Given this
objective, rational behavior consists of maximizing utility through
minimizing costs and maximizing benefits. Every action is evaluated by
comparing its costs to its benefits. There are two standards for
rationality that can be used interchangeably within microeconomic
theory[i]. The first is the self-interest standard of rationality, which
holds that rational people evaluate an action solely on the costs and
benefits which directly affect them. The second standard of rationality and
the one that is most applicable to real life is the present-aim standard of
rationality which holds that rational behavior consists of an agent acting
effectively in carrying out whatever his or her aims, regardless of whether
or not those aims are deemed self interested. The latter standard allows
altruistic motives to be considered as rational whereas the former does
not.
Given these decision matrices, freedom of exchange will ensure that
people are able to maximize their utility. A market is the place of
exchange, and is comprised of buyers and sellers for goods and services.
The laws of supply and demand ensure that demand and supply of goods and
services will find an equilibrium price. The law of demand holds that as
the price of a product falls, the quantity demanded for that product will
rise. The law of supply holds that as the price of a product rises, the
quantity supplied of that product will rise. In the free marketplace, the
price of good is determined by the interaction of these two factors. At the
point of equilibrium, there can be no reallocation that will make some
agents better off without making others worse off. This condition is known
as Pareto optimality. Following from this, any point that is not at
equilibrium will be able to undergo reallocation through trade so as to
make some agents better off without making any others worse off. In a free
marketplace, such reallocation will naturally occur as people behave in the
utility maximizing fashion. Thus, market outcomes are deemed efficient.
The role of prices in market operations is twofold. Firstly, and
predominantly in the short run, prices serve as a rationing function. They
insure that goods go to the people who value them most highly. The second
and longer-term role of prices is their allocative function. Prices act as
market signals to direct producers to produce goods and services in those
markets where the price is highest relative to the costs of production.
This mechanism is the main thrust of the invisible hand, and it is the
method by which resources are allocated among the different industries in
the market.
Through free market mechanisms the assumption is that an individual's
pursuit of his or her own interest will lead to the maximization of the
interest of all the members of society. "One of the most important insights
of economic analysis is that the individual pursuit of self interest is
often not only consistent with broader social objectives, but actually even
required by them."[ii] Consumers motivated by self interest will be guided
by what Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" to bring about the greatest
social good. As quoted from Adam Smith: "It is not the benevolence of the
butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from
their regard to their own interest, We address ourselves, not to their
humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own
necessities, but of their advantages."[iii] The 'ethic' of self-interest is
considered good for both the individual and the whole. An important
implication of this notion is that outside interference in these pursuits
should be minimized. From this maxim came the birth of the laissez faire
ideology. Laissez Faire holds that the free market, through price
corrections and allocation mechanisms, will maximize the utility of all
market participants and hence social good. Any goods that are demanded by
consumers will find producers, thereby eliminating the role of the
government as a provider of goods. The only role of the government in such
a scheme is to protect property rights, which are the necessary foundations
for a market economy, and ensure peace. The goal of such an economy is
continued economic growth.

Alternative Economic Perspectives
Despite the appealing simplicity and rationality of neoclassical
assumptions, the self-regulating market is a utopian vision and is not the
only natural outcome of human society. The self regulating market, which
first came to dominate in nineteenth century England, can be contrasted
with countless other market systems that have existed all throughout
history, both in Western and non-Western civilizations, and which were
predicated on different worldviews and ethical assumptions about man's
relationship to the world. The difference between the markets that were
present throughout history and the self-regulating market is that the
former were subordinated to the needs of society, whereas the latter
subordinates the needs of society to it. The former were controlled and the
latter controls. The dangers of having a market which controls society is
that it reduces all the inputs into such a market, notably land, labor, and
money to a commodity, with output distributed only according the market
rules of exchange.
In contrast to the claims of many economic liberals, the presence of a
market system is not dependent on the singular motive of self-interest.
Markets have existed throughout the history of human civilization. Economic
exchanges have always been part of human social organization. Economic
motivations, however, were not solely those of self-interested gain,
instead they included factors such as social status, fairness, altruism and
reciprocity. A person's economic relationships were inseparable from their
social relationships, and people did not behave so as to protect their
individual interests in the possession of material goods. Rather,
interactions were motivated by maintenance or gains of social standing.
While self-interest is certainly part of what motivates individual
behavior, it is not the only incentive. The sole motivation of self-
interest is thus unique to the market economy-oriented means of social
organization. Numerous research studies have corroborated this notion by
demonstrating that people are more motivated by relative standing in a
society than to absolute levels of material wealth. In other types of
society generosity and sharing were considered paramount and people were
incentivized by concerns for the group and the community, NOT only the
individual. Humans (in addition to chimpanzees and several other species)
have an innate sense of fairness, a moral intuition for notions of fairness
and reciprocity. In other words, our neural wiring has been engineered in
such a way that we are altruistically disposed and react negatively to
actions or behavior deemed unfair. There is ample research focused on the
different aspects of human altruism and its implications for the dynamics
of large groups of individuals. In one of their papers, Ernst Fehr and Urs
Fischbacher make the point that if two people from anywhere in the world
were randomly selected and put into a situation where they would repeatedly
exchange with one another, there would be a very high likelihood that
spontaneous "reciprocally altruistic behavior will emerge."[iv] Agents care
that they receive the same share as others. They will be satisfied in
getting one cupcake so long as they don't see another agent getting two[v].
The brain is hard wired for this task and has a certain "fairness
gauge"[vi] built into it.

Moral Intuition
One of the tests used by scientists to explore human altruism is the
Ultimatum game[vii]. The Ultimatum game is a one-off game with two
anonymous players, Player A and Player B. Player A is allotted a specific
sum of money and both players have to agree on the division of this sum.
Player A can offer just one specific sum to Player B. If Player B accepts
the sum, both get to keep their agreed upon share. If Player B rejects the
sum, neither receives anything. In this situation, B stands to gain nothing
by rejecting the offer. However, studies discussed in an article by Gary
Bolton and Axel Ockenfels and Fehr and Fischbacher's review demonstrate
that if Player A offers less than 25% of his allotted sum, it is highly
likely that Player B will reject his offer because it is viewed as unfair.
Most people in the position of Player A implicitly understand that this
will be Player B's response and therefore most frequently offer an equal,
50-50 split.
The Ultimatum game has been conducted with people in a variety of
cultures and consistently demonstrates the existence of strongly reciprocal
behavior and its effect on players' choices. People are willing to incur
costs to themselves in order to prevent an unfair split, and this is in
turn anticipated by agents, who modify their behavior accordingly. In many
instances, players will accept an unequal or unfair outcome if it is the
result of chance as opposed to interpersonal reaction[viii] There is a
variation of the Ultimatum game in which Player A can split the sum into
either shares of 50-50 or 80-20. If Player A chooses 80-20, Player B
rejects the offer 41% of the time[ix]. If a robot randomly chose this same
split, however, it would only be rejected 7% of the time, suggesting that
the effect of human-to-human interaction on people's perception of outcome
is large.
The rejection is a strongly reciprocal altruistic act intended to
punish Player A. When the ultimatum game is repeated successively, but with
different agent interacting in each round, Player A increased its offer by
7% after experiencing a rejection in the previous round[x]. Such a
rejection is explained as Player B punishing Player A for not following the
cooperative norm in an action intended directly for him. Often though,
agents will also punish another agent even for an action that was taken
against someone else. Through third party games, Fehr and Fischbacher
demonstrate that an impartial onlooker will incur a cost to punish an agent
that has acted unfairly to a third party. In this game there are three
players; Player A, Player B, and Player C. Player A is endowed with $100,
Player C is endowed with $50, and Player B is endowed with nothing. Player
A chooses a sum to give to Player B, without the option of Player B's
rejection. Based on the amount of money transferred to Player B, Player C
can spend money to punish Player A. For every dollar Player C spends, three
times that much is taken away from Player A. The studies show that, even
though a selfish and rational individual in Player C's position would not
punish Player A because it is costly, 55% of the people playing Player C's
role will punish Player A for allotting less than $50, and the punishment
increases as the sum that Player A transfers decreases. Furthermore, 70-80%
of the time, Player B expects that Player C will punish Player A for unfair
transfers[xi].
The Ultimatum game proved that strongly reciprocal individuals incur
costs to reward or punish in anonymous, single event interactions. Studies
have also shown that when actions are repeated, or there is the potential
for reputation formation, the same people will increase the level of their
reward or punishment, indicating that selfish concerns are also at play.
Further, the higher the cost of the reward or punishment in either a single
or repeated interaction, the less likely the person will be to perform the
altruistic action[xii].
Fehr and Fischbacher also studied how social reciprocity can affect
public good situations with large numbers of people (the previous
experiments were conducted in small groups of 2 – 3 individuals.) In public
goods situations people have a strong incentive to free ride on the
contribution of others. The authors show that in a situation with repeated
interactions and a large majority of strong reciprocators, even a small
presence of selfish free riders will be enough to lead to zero cooperation.
In order to ensure ongoing cooperation, the belief that others will be
acting cooperatively as well is therefore critical. If there are specific
opportunities for strong reciprocators to punish defectors, there will be
incentives for selfish agents to cooperate. Therein lies the benefit of
reputation formation. The knowledge of an agent's reputation has
considerable influence over whether or not agents will cooperate with
them[xiii][xiv][xv]. Numerous studies have shown that both altruistic
rewarding and reputation formation are strong incentives for donor's
behavior. Therefore, if agents know that there will be future interactions,
they will be much more cooperative.
One of the more curious results of these studies was the extent to
which the structure or circumstances of the trade incite people to behave
and respond differently. In a competitive online market in which players
have to outbid one another to get something which is desired, people
behaved selfishly and were far less concerned with the outcomes. Similar
studies have been conducted which show that the structure of the
institution, or mechanisms of interaction is significant in determining
people's behavior[xvi][xvii]. This effect is absolutely critical. In a
market based society organized as ours is, the structure of interactions do
not foster or allow for the expression of altruistic tendencies. The market
system has thus become somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy since it
organizes behavior in such a way so as to facilitate only self-interested
actions.
The research done on agents behavior in public goods situations is
highly instructive for our current society because it illustrates that
structured in a specific way, public goods situations requiring altruistic
behavior without adequate incentives for such behavior will undoubtedly
fail. Even a small number of free riders in a large group is enough to lead
the cooperation of the entire group to zero. Given that the likelihood of a
person behaving altruistically decreases as the costs of the punishment or
reward rise, the way our market is set up pretty much ensures that people
will behave selfishly, since the cost of punishment is zero and it is
logical to assume others will be behaving selfishly. In reality, our
society's ability to provide for such public goods such as environmental
quality, public health, decreased inequality, etc. are failing dramatically
and with serious consequences.


Altruism and Evolution
Humans evolved a capacity to detect the rightness or wrongness of an
action based on an unconscious moral grammar or program. In the same way
that humans innately have the aptitude to learn and develop complex
languages, so too do they have innate moral programs that enable them to
learn the moral language of their culture. A moral dilemma is a conflict
between different obligations, beliefs, and duties, and emotions are
innately and importantly involved in the moral decision process.[xviii]
These precise analyses are what comprise our moral faculty. Evolution has
thus led to the organization of the human brain in ways that innate
programs of action guide and inform our decisions. Morality and altruism
are biological features that are common to human and animal populations and
influence behavior.
Moral systems are crafted according to the behavioral norms of the
group. They are therefore culture-specific and can vary significantly in
the same way that languages can vary dramatically. Experiments illustrate
that cultural norms are highly influential in determining the extent of
human altruism in behavior. Different tribes or groups exhibit widely
different rates and amounts of altruistic behavior[xix][xx]. That morality
is biological can be supported by studies conducted on certain animals that
demonstrate the parallel existence of certain moral feelings as
reciprocity, altruism and fairness across species[xxi].
On an evolutionary level, the development of a moral intuition likely
occurred through cultural group selection or gene-culture co-evolution.
Cultural group selection would involve the comparative survival advantage
of groups with high levels of reciprocity or cooperation, either of which
can be learned through imitation and teaching. Such traits would be
selected for in inter-group conflicts and would be passed on over
generations because after a conflict, the culture of the losing group is
subsumed and integrated into the culture of the winning group[xxii].
Selection will favor those traits that allow for greater cooperation and
the identification of cheating behavior. When humans evolved, it was
critical that they could rely on counterparties to follow through with
their ends of social contract and cooperate with one another. Cheating
detection is an important trait in human and animal societies. There have
been studies of certain birds that show that when a Jay hides its food, if
it notices that another bird may be watching it returns to the hiding spot
at a later point and hides the food, in anticipation that it will be
stolen.[xxiii] Cheating detection is an incredibly important skill. In one-
off social interactions where an exchange is taking place, two parties have
to trust one another because there are incentives to cheat. The greater the
ability an agent has to detect such cheating behavior in a person; the
greater will be his ability to choose trustworthy and cooperative trading
partners.
A moral system doesn't necessarily have to be encoded in DNA, which
explains why totally different moral systems can develop in different
cultures. People have evolved general but abstract principles for deciding
which actions are forbidden, permissible, or obligatory.[xxiv] These
abstract principles behind morality are inherent to people the same way the
abstract principles of grammar are, but the unique moral norms and
expectations of a community are learned. Experience refines the moral
structure so that it will render the individual more adapted to his or her
particular culture and more successful as a cooperative citizen.
Recent experiments in neurobiology have indicated that the brain has
its own activity center surrounding cooperation. If a subject playing the
prisoner's dilemma game mutually cooperates with another person, the
brain's reward system is activated. Similarly, the same reward system
responds negatively in the case where a subject cooperates but the other
player defects[xxv]. Further, there is ample evidence showing that there is
a specific region of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is used when
making moral judgments. When this part of the brain is damaged, subjects
exhibit normal patterns of judgment for issues that are non-moral in nature
and for many moral issues as well, but they are unable to deal with moral
issues in which one single disagreeable act will yield benefits greater to
the cost of that act. An example is with a person who is confronted with a
situation where they must kill one healthy person in order to save five
people that have been critically injured[xxvi]. Overwhelmingly, people
without brain damage would choose not to perform the act. The person with
the damaged part of their brain, however, automatically chooses to kill the
healthy person, which is the same choice that would most likely be urged
upon by a strict utilitarian as well. The injured subject lacks the innate
emotive moral objection to the killing that is inherent in most people and
which may be part of the moral organ (Interestingly, strict utilitarianism
makes many of the same assumptions about human behavior as neoclassical
economics).


The Perils of Market-Based Societal Organization
In the organization of historical social institutions (though they
exist today in some remote places, I refer to them as historical, for these
other modes of behavior are fast disappearing), production and distribution
was ensured through the behavioral principles of reciprocity and
redistribution. These principles were ingrained into the behavior of human
populations precisely because societies had been organized around them. Two
main social patterns were followed; symmetry to foster reciprocity, which
takes the form of a give and take exchange, and centricity in the form of a
leader to facilitate the aggregation and redistribution of goods. Under
both of these social frameworks, the economy was embedded into the social
fabric. In contrast, under the design of a self-regulating market, the
social fabric is embedded into the market economy, which always takes
precedence over social concerns. A market economy can be defined as being
an economic system controlled, regulated, and directed by markets alone. It
rests on the assumption that the primary motives for human activity are
those of self-interest and specifically the desire to amass as much wealth
as possible, and organizes interactions in such a way so as to encourage an
agent's use of self-interest at the expense of their altruistic tendencies.

However, as the recent discoveries of evolutionary psychology
discussed above have proved, the self-regulating market mechanism is not
the natural outcome of man's propensity to barter. The tendency to barter
and exchange has been inherent to all communities, without necessarily
having to turn into a market economy predicated on self interested
behavior. A close examination of the historical events surrounding the
transition to a market economy will reveal that the market economy was not
a natural outcome at all. In fact, it was roughly and almost violently
forced into British society by the government. The only "natural" events
that were occurring at that time were the united civil reaction against
this institutional intrusion, for want of protection from the evils that it
wrought.
"traditionally, land and labour are not separated; labour forms part of
life, land remains part of nature, life and nature form an articulate
whole. Land is thus tied up with the organizations of kinship,
neighborhood, craft and creed- with tribe and temple, village, gild, and
church. One Big Market, on the other hand, is an arrangement of economic
life which includes markets for the factors of production. Since these
factors happen to be indistinguishable from the elements of human
institutions, man and nature, it can be readily seen that market economy
involves a society the institutions of which are subordinated to the
requirements of the market mechanism."[xxvii]
There are several perils inherent in the structure of a market
economy, not the least of which is the fact that it rests upon what Karl
Polanyi refers to as the three fictions; labour, land, and money. The
commodification of the fictions is both an outcome of and a prerequisite
for the self-regulating economy because it has to "regulate" the entire
domain of human production. The following is an excerpt that emphatically
discusses the nature of these fictions and the dangers they present.

Despite having been written more than seventy years ago, the social
dislocation and environmental destruction predicted by Polanyi has
absolutely borne true. Further, the commodification of man's activities has
also had the debilitating moral and psychological effects he predicted.
Mental health status indicators show increasing rates of depression and
other psychological disorders, and the most prevailing moral principle
uniting our society (religion notwithstanding) is that of nihilism.
But how can society re-subordinate the market mechanism to its own
needs? The alternative solutions available resemble something as they were
in the past. The previous modes of human exchange and production-
reciprocity, redistribution, and householding, would once again rise to the
fore. In sum,
Our collective market ethic of accumulation and conquest of the
natural world has resulted in an appropriation of 40% of the world primary
productivity. Our current economic system, founded on neoclassical economic
principles, is based on the premise of unlimited growth.
Marshall Sahlins, in his book The Original Affluent Society, used the
results of anthropological research to demonstrate that many of the
indigenous peoples around the globe did not leave lives that were brutish
and nasty, as is traditionally conceived in Western society, but rather
they lead lives that are more affluent than those living in the modern
market society. He describes the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as "affluent",
based upon a worldview where individuals have few wants and plentiful
resources. This is in marked contrast to the market-driven, consumption
obsessed, globalizing society we live in today.
According to Sahlins, there are two roads to affluence. There is the
Zen road to affluence, which is the one taken by hunter-gatherer societies,
and is composed of limited material wants, abundant resources, and
relatively unchanging but sufficient technical means. That these societies
are so looked down upon is an example of ethnocentrism and prejudice.
Sahlins takes issue with the common anthropological belief that that the
Neolithic peoples were more advanced than the Paleolithic in their ability
to harness energy through their use of domesticated flora and fauna as
opposed to human effort. He shows that in fact, the amount of energy per
capita gathered each year was equal in Neolithic and Paleolithic economies,
and remained constant up until the industrial revolution.
The hunter-gatherer societies subsist on diets that are rich and
varied, and their material goods are few. They do not hoard or accumulate
and they build their possessions with those materials they find in their
environment. To these people, more goods are an encumbrance because they
limit mobility. And, contrary to popular belief, hunter-gatherers are not
suffering from hunger and spending their days searching for food. In fact,
they are often so successful at finding food, that "half the time the
people seem not to know what to do with themselves."[xxviii] The average
length of time spent on procuring and preparing food per person per day was
four to five hours. For some indigenous groups, resources were so plentiful
that each adult worker only had to work 15 hours per week.
The other road to affluence, the one that describes our current
society, is characterized by a market system. This market system, which
posits individuals as having unlimited wants in world where there are scare
resources, actually institutes scarcity. It becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy.

Conclusion:
Human behavior is far more complex than previous models have allowed.
It is the result of millions of years of evolution, during which humans
needed to adapt to their changing environment so they could survive and
reproduce. This was best accomplished in large groups where people divided
up labor. However, in order to be successful, such group dynamics required
specific behavior traits that are not merely selfish in nature, but such
that they lead to greater group cooperation.
Altruism, and specifically strong reciprocity where the agent does
not stand to benefit from the cost he is incurring, is clearly a common
trait in humans. Such a characteristic would benefit group selection by
strengthening the level of cooperation in a group. Altruistic
characteristics, and the methods for evaluating the different situations in
which they are used, have both biological and cultural origins. The toolkit
for dealing with moral decisions are innate features of the mind. The
science of economics has thus far relied on rational choice theory, the
idea that self interested, fully informed agents are constantly seeking to
satisfy their preferences, to explain behavior. However, in light of the
plethora of evidence indicating that human behavior does not follow this
model, the theory of human behavior should be more adapted to the
mechanisms of the mind and include the altruistic motivations behind
people's behavior as well.
The current market system is highly destructive, and unsustainable.
However, as we have seen, this is not the only way that humans have
structured their economies and relationships to the environment.
Alternative economies have a lot to teach us about living in accordance
with the environment. As Sahlins elegantly demonstrated, traditional
indigenous cultures around the globe lived sustainably and comfortably for
thousands of years. While it may not be feasible for our current
civilization with its population of over 6 billion people to return to a
totally traditional way of living, it is certainly possible to glean
certain lessons regarding successful attitudes and ways of living. If
altruistic tendencies are just as natural a human behavior as self
interested ones, if not more, then structuring interpersonal exchanges to
allow for the expression of such traits would be better for people and
better for society. The current framework allows for expression mainly of
self-interest, at the expense of altruism, and with severe social and
environmental consequences. Simply by allowing for the existence and
expression of such motives would likely be a large step in the right
direction and improve many social ills.

-----------------------
[i] Frank, Robert H, and Parker, Ian C., Microeconomics and Behaviour,
Second Canadian Edition. Toronto: McGraw Hill Ryerson, 2004. Chapter 1.
[ii] Frank, Robert H, and Parker, Ian C., Microeconomics and Behaviour,
Second Canadian Edition. Toronto: McGraw Hill Ryerson, 2004. p. 14
[iii] Frank, Robert H, and Parker, Ian C., Microeconomics and Behaviour,
Second Canadian Edition. Toronto: McGraw Hill Ryerson, 2004. p. ?
[iv] Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher. "The Nature of Human Altruism,"
Nature, Volume 425, October 2003.
[v] Christopher Uhlhaas, "Is Greed Good?" Scientific American Mind, July
2007.
[vi] Christopher Uhlhaas, "Is Greed Good?" Scientific American Mind, July
2007.
[vii] Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher. "The Nature of Human Altruism,"
Nature, Volume 425, October 2003, and Christopher Uhlhaas, "Is Greed Good?"
Scientific American Mind, July 2007.
[viii] Christopher Uhlhaas, "Is Greed Good?" Scientific American Mind, July
2007.
[ix] Christopher Uhlhaas, "Is Greed Good?" Scientific American Mind, July
2007.
[x] Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher. "The Nature of Human Altruism," Nature,
Volume 425, October 2003.
[xi] Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher. "The Nature of Human Altruism,"
Nature, Volume 425, October 2003.
[xii] Gary E. Bolton, Elena Katok, Axel Ockenfels. "Cooperation among
strangers with limited information about reputation." Journal of Public
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