Yochai Benkler: After Selfishness
From a talk, "After Selfishness - Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0 at Half Time" (video), by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks and professor at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society:
Now that we know that social production is here, how do we begin to harness it? How do we begin to think in a stable way about how to structure relations that integrate the social with the productive and that build a more realistic model of human motivation and human action, than those in the past have dominated our systems for organizing production? …
The need for faster learning and innovation, everywhere, all the time, is driving the idea of loosely coupled systems. If you know exactly what to expect, you can build a tightly bound system; you can constrain people’s freedom to act only as expected; and you can deal with known conditions. As conditions change very rapidly, you need people to be able to experiment; you need people to be able to make assessments; you need people to be able to learn – to teach each other, experiment, adopt, adapt, experiment, adopt, adapt. To do this, you need to put them in systems that are much more free, and less tightly coupled. … This is the shift that we’re seeing. …
The background to this work occurs on an intellectual arc that has been happening in several disciplines. In evolutionary biology, in the 50s there was a very strong group selection theory; in the 60s, 70s, and 80s we see the rise of very individualist conceptions of cooperation, with the idea of the selfish gene being the icon of these ideas. And what we’re seeing in the last 15 years is a return of multi-level selection, which is a modern version of group selection, of gene-culture co-evolution, of cooperation as a distinct driving force in evolution, as opposed to the other way around.
In economics, of course, we see the rise of selfish rationality as the basic operating assumption, but again over the last 15 years a lot of work on experimental economics – not only what we all know in law about deviations from rationality, the Kahneman and Tversky line of work, but also deviations from selfishness, where you can be completely rational, but your behavior will be inconsistent with a selfish model.
We see it in political theory, again from the late 50s and 60s, the rise of self interest as the model that explains politics, to - much more tentatively now - work on sustainable commons, the role of human rights, and moral economy.
