Yochai Benkler: The End of Universal Rationality | Edge
The big question I ask myself is how we start to think much more methodically about human sharing, about the relationship between human interest and human morality and human society. The main moment at which I think you could see the end of an era was when Alan Greenspan testified before the House committee and said, "My predictions about self-interest were wrong. I relied for 40 years on self-interest to work its way up, and it was wrong." ...
There are lots of different disciplines where people have been doing work for a long time. In many cases, doing work that was peripheral during the period of the rise of selfish rationality. ...
[S]omewhere around the 80s in some places, like organizational sociology, somewhere closer to the 90s, if you talk for example about evolutionary biology, [with] the resurgence of the possibility of multi-level selection and group selection where it's not all reduced to the individual, there are also components that happen at the group level. Certainly in the context of political science and the emergence of some studies of commons and common property regimes and collective actions — successful collective action models. ...
[P]eople systematically and predictably behave in ways that are much more cooperative than would be predicted by the game theoretical impact.
