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Pastimes : 5spl -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (6)	5/17/2002 10:44:43 PM
From: LPS5	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2534

Greed, Capitalism, and Anthropology I was just digging through some junk on my desk when I came across an article I'd cut out a few weeks back in the Wall Street Journal, written by David Wessel. Essentially, the argument reacts - potently, I believe - to the wide condemnation of capitalism ("American capitalism," some will qualify) in the wake of some of the recent "scandals" that have found their way to the eager desks of politically-motivated (or dangerously well-meaning) regulators. First, though: I personally believe that attempting to "justify" capitalism...or apologizing for outsized success among a small percentage of its' subjects...is tantamount to condemning it in the first instance. Nonetheless, the article proceeds as follows, describing an old economics experiment: Person One is offered $100, with the stipulation that he has to share it with Person Two - who'll know what the total stakes are. And, if Person Two rejects Person One's split, neither get anything. If both parties were rational in a way that exists only in textbooks and computer models, Person One would offer $5 or $10, and Person Two would accept it: One, to keep as much as he could, and Two, because he knows that something, however small, is better than nothing. Well, this experiment was conducted by anthropologists around the world, with the consistent result that individuals in less developed societies are far less generous than in developed countries. Seems the comfortable old adage about agricultural, less developed societies having more communal orientation is not the case inasmuch as this experiment demonstrates. When done with farmers in Hamilton, Missouri, the average split offered Person Two $48; among Nomadic Hamza tribesmen in Tanzania, the equivalent average amount offered to Person Two was $33. (Of course, the actual stake amounts were not dollars, but one day's wages.) "The most altruistic and trusting societies are those that are the most market-oriented...[m]any people thought markets would make people selfish and amoral. That view is at least too simple, if not just plain wrong[.]" Indeed, Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute muses that contrary to popular belief - and as I see it, counterinitutively from the homey, feel-good notion that agrarian, less developed societies are somehow tighter than their more advanced counterparts - "altruism [may be] a luxury that only developed societies can afford. Or maybe market societies grow accustomed to conventions, like splitting windfalls 50-50[.]" Not that, to be sure, I think that the less generous, more primitive societies are representative of anything bad (certainly not "greed") or doing anything wrong by offering as little of the money as possible to Player Two. But I find the comparatively pronounced generosity of game participants from the US and other capitalist countries reinforcing of the virtues of capitalism and a hint of the rewards that truly free markets would offer. If, that is, the insidious gradualism of regulatory encroachment on American lives and businesses were to be stopped in its tracks. LP.