Marking the start of the United Nations 'International Year of Co-operatives', ResPublica Fellow Ed Mayo considers a deeper approach to change
I do have to pinch myself that party leaders are now wanting to debate the future of capitalism. All power to ResPublica among others I guess for arguing that it is not just policy we need, but a deeper rethinking on policy and society.
If I were to point politicians to any one set of writers who could help to reconstruct our thinking about economic life, it would be Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. They operate out of the University of Siena, Italy and Sante Fe Institute, USA. For many years, they have been pioneers of a field sometimes called ‘experimental economics’, looking to model human behaviour as it is, rather than as the economics textbooks claim it should be.
In A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, Bowles and Gintis have recently drawn this together and blended it with work and thinking from across the academic spectrum, from ethnography to archaeology and biology, in order to compile an account of the centrality of human cooperation in the evolution of our species. It is a classic text. Our roots as a species are in cooperative action, and it is these pro-social strategies rather than models of pure competition that explain survival and success.
Bowles and Gintis are not the first to argue this – the idea of cooperating in order to compete has been developed over the last three decades in biology since Bob Trivers (‘inclusive fitness’), in game theory by Elinor Ostrom and others, and in political science by Robert Axelrod. In a neat about-turn from his phrase ‘the selfish gene’, Richard Dawkins now points to models where ‘nice guys finish first’. But what is stunning in A Cooperative Species is the construction of a plausible and comprehensive set of proof – including the breadth of evidence they bring to bear, from almost every discipline, and the power and reach of the core methodology they use of drawing on empirical evidence in order to model group behaviour in mathematical and systems terms.
I have just had an essay on "making life more meaningful" published in the new issue of Resurgence in which I conclude "we all need a story. It just turns out that the story we have been told for years – that people are naturally and primarily competitive and self-interested and that life is best shaped around that bleak fact – is bunkum."