Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations ... (ISBN 0262572370)

Fairness and Sociability:
For several years now, a group of social scientists has been studying the human tendency to be socially fair rather than narrowly selfish. The editors of this volume--Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr--are among the stalwarts; others are found among the authors of the book's chapters. The core of this long-running effort is Fehr's experiments with the ultimatum game, in which two people must share a sum of money (say, $10); Person A gets to propose a split, Person B can only accept or decline. Economists and politicians would expect every game to wind up with a $9.99/$0.01 split (or actually a 9-1 split, since bills are used), but in fact typical splits are more like 5-5 or 6-4, and in one place (Lamalera, Indonesia) people actually split something like 4-6, few A's ever claiming even half the money. This long-running set of experiments around the world adds to a vast, rapidly accumulating set of data showing that people are sociable, not "rational" in the folk-economic sense (i.e., dedicated solely to narrow material self-interest). The present book discusses the implications for economics and politics. If people are naturally concerned with fairness, narrowly economistic policies can be counterproductive; we all know cases of "crowding out," in which a material incentive actually makes people act worse, by crowding out moral incentives. If you reward people for being good, they will think it's all a cynical game, and will act worse. Punitive legislation to make people do what they do anyway (for moral reasons) is also counterproductive. Imagine what these realizations would do to American social policy. The problem with this book is that it is too optimistic and upbeat. The downside of human sociability is confined to one page, late in the book (p. 388), where racism, honor killing, and the like get a quick mention. Alas, the morning radio brings a stream of accounts not only of such things but also of religious butchery all over the world--Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and even Buddhists (theoretically prohibited from killing but busily genocidal). This brings us back to Adam Smith's suggestion that greed may not be lovable but may be better than the noble, virtuous alternatives. I hope Gintis et al work on how to decouple fairness and interpersonal concern from the desire to exterminate everybody who is not in one's immediate social set. Until this is done, the hope purveyed in this work will remain thin. The authors note that humans seem genetically programmed to have at least some sense of fairness and of self-sacrifice for the common good, but they wisely refrain from trying to unpack "hereditary" and "environmental" or "cultural" aspects. Heredity makes us do this, and learn it easily, and heredity gives us the ability to learn and develop cultures. No way to unpack. Still, more needs to be done on just how flexible these inborn moralities are. The range from Lamalera to certain parts of South America is pretty great. So is the range of murderousness in religious and ethnic settings. We need to know how to modify human behavior in these regards, and how much we can hope for. That being said, this book is the best yet in the long list of books that devastate the selfish-individualist model of human behavior. People desperately want to be sociable, and be good members of their society. This may lead them to fairness and generosity, or to body-piercing, or to suicide bombing. This book offers hope for building new societies through use of innate human decency. At this point in time, any book seriously offering such hope is desirable.

An eclectic collection of great essays:
This book is just really great. The literature on fairness and reciprocity in social science is growing fast, and this book is ideal to give you a flavour of why this is such a good thing. It is diverse, with entries ranging from biological models that attempt to explain the evolution of reciprocity, through the implications of reciprocity for the way legal sanctions work, to the political philosophy of the dark side of clan mentality. Most readers will probably not want to read everything, and even less people will agree with everything. One needs to remember that a lot of the stuff in this book is still controversial, including the existence of (strong) reciprocity, but this is what makes it so very interesting. And if only half of what's in this book is right, it is still revolutionary. In 10 years, this book will be terribly outdated. But for now, it is the best thing you can get if you are interested in the interplay between evolution, reciprocity and social order, and the fundamental questions of social science that it entails.

Well written, easy to read, informative:
Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Economic Learning and Social Evolution) combinds the theory of cultural evolution ala Boyd and Richerson (and Henrich et al) and the behavioral economy by people like Gintis, Bowles and Fehr. The book works further based on the theory - develops e.g. models for a better social policy etc. Book discusses an issue which is very central for "being a human being" - co-operation. Book is very informative, very well written even if there are many writers with heterogenous background. Also after the book you kind of get more optimistic about the prospects of humananity. I am without any formal education in antropology, biology and economics but have read "everything" by Boyd and Richerson - my understanding on economics is based on Microeconomics by Samuel Bowles. The book was to me a good further reading after the Bowles Microeconomics book. But the book can be read even by someone who does not know about economics even that much as me. The book is not too formal - easy to read actually.