I believe we are ready to break free of the selfishness mythand embrace human cooperation as the powerful and po-tentially positive force that it is. We as a society are in themidst of great disruptions in technology, business, ideology,and science. Ideas, trends, practices, and habits of mindtend to cohere over periods of time. When any relatively stable and coherent system—an economy, a country, or acommunity—suffers a shock, it leads to a new flexibility, anew openness to different ways of explaining our world andorganizing our lives. This is the way we come to reexam-ine old practices, try new ones, and adapt to the changeshappening around us. The economic collapse of 2008has forced all of us to come to terms with the fallibility of economic and financial systems built on self-interest. Thisdoesn’t mean we’re all about to become socialists (as someon the right might suggest). It simply means we shouldopen our minds to the possibility that the Invisible Handof the unregulated markets is a poor explanation of actualmarkets and actual human beings. It means that we shouldlook to ways we can harness cooperation and collaborationto improve the systems we inhabit, rather than stubbornly cling to impoverished descriptions of those systems.
The world is changing at lightning speed. We are nowat a period in our history when we need to learn how to rely on one another more than ever. But the seismic disruptions around us aren’t all unhappy stories. Take what is unques-tionably one of the greatest disruptions since the IndustrialRevolution—the Internet. A few years ago, when I wrote my previous book, The Wealth of Networks, I spent more than fivehundred pages trying to work out, in excruciating detail, whether and how the Internet is a fundamental, long-termchange or simply a newer, faster vehicle for accessing, shar-ing, and disseminating the information we already hadavailable. What I found was that the Internet has allowedsocial, nonmarket behavior to move from the periphery of the industrial economy to the very core of the global,networked information economy. Information and news,knowledge and culture, computer-mediated social and eco-nomic interactions form the foundation of everything inall aspects of our lives—from the pursuit of democracy andglobal justice, to the latest trends in business and media, tothe best innovations in the most advanced economies. TheInternet has revolutionized how we produce informationand the knowledge foundations of our society.
ReplyDeleteHow we see ourselves plays a significant role in what we end up becoming. The selfish view of the self is not only unflattering, it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. This book isat least partly about regaining a more balanced view of our-selves. I am not suggesting we are saints. Self-interest andcooperation aren’t mutually exclusive; quite the contrary. Valuing independence, autonomy, capitalism, and individ-ualism do not automatically make us egocentric, egotistic,heartless beings. Cooperation and profit can coexist. Em-bracing this duality, learning how to remake our society around it and harness it for individual, corporate, and soci-etal goals, is not only possible, it is imperative. And its timehas come.
ReplyDelete"The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest"
ReplyDeleteby Yochai Benkler
Modern European and North American history has cycledbetween social, political, and economic systems that tendedtoward the Leviathan, and those that were based on the In- visible Hand. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe’s absolute monarchies were more or lessinefficient versions of Leviathan (just substitute “monarchy”for “government”). The inefficiency in exercising controlprovided substantial breathing room for Invisible Handand the social action, the Penguin, to flourish underneaththe Leviathan, more or less informally. By the nineteenthcentury the decline of the monarchy, the Industrial Revolu-tion, and the subsequent rise of commerce swept the Invis-ible Hand into power (nowhere with more painful effectsthan in Britain, as Friedrich Engels and Charles Dickensportrayed with such excruciating detail). This long reign of the Invisible Hand in both Europe and America was punc-tuated by panics and crashes throughout the nineteenthcentury, then, in 1929, came to a swift and abrupt end as themarkets crashed, ushering in the Great Depression.
ReplyDeleteNow the pendulum swung violently in the other di-rection. In Germany, where industrialization had already suffered a major blow from World War I, and in Russia, where it had been passed over altogether, moving straight from the Czar’s lethargic rule to Stalin’s cruelly efficient model, Leviathan reared its ugly head with a viciousness un-matched before or since, in the form of fascism and Soviet communism. In the United States, Britain, and other lib-eral democracies, Leviathan took more benevolent forms:the burgeoning welfare state and the rise of government bureaucracies (ushered in by the New Deal in the UnitedStates, and by similar movements in Western Europe). By the late 1950s and early 1960s the pendulum began to swing back as concerns mounted over petty bureaucrats, un-checked discretion, and inefficiency. By the 1980s we wereback in full swing toward laissez-faire capitalism; the Rea-gan and Thatcher governments in the United States andBritain, the rise of the efficiency- and free-trade-focusedEuropean Commission in Europe, and the emergence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund asbearers of what came to be known as “the Washington Con-sensus.” The Invisible Hand seemed to have completely won when even the center-left governments of the UnitedStates and the United Kingdom, under Bill Clinton andTony Blair, busied themselves with dismantling welfare as weknow it—replacing government bureaucracies with priva-tized, market-based alternatives—and deregulating the fi-nancial markets that flourished in New York and London.The drive to weaken the state and make way for self-interest in the market reached new peaks under George W. Bush.Predictably, today we find ourselves facing a new crisis, oureconomic systems toppled by our blind faith in the powerof self-interest and in our ability to harness it effectively through incentives and payoffs.
Where does this leave us? If neither the command-control systems dictated by the Leviathan nor the Invis-ible Hand of the free market can effectively govern society, where shall we turn? What, if anything, do systems basedon cooperation have to offer besides the pleasant diversionor utopic ideal of a free operating system or a global on-line encyclopedia? Can the Penguin deliver us more robust, working social and economic systems that break us out of this vicious cycle?
ReplyDeleteI believe that he can.
Over the course of the twentieth century, intellectualtrends in such diverse fields as business, anthropology, psy-chology, human evolution, economics, political science, andlaw have pondered the question, How shall we construct thesystems we inhabit? We live our lives, after all, within theconfines of systems: business systems, like workplaces andshopping malls; legal systems, like intellectual property lawsor environmental regulations; technical systems, like the In-ternet, or the highways and bridges; administrative systems (some, like Medicare, run by the state; others, like arts andcultural foundations, by nonstate bodies); educational sys-tems, like preschools and university research labs; and so-cial systems, like our networks of friends.
Whether their goals were to increase profits, improvelaw and governance, advance the sciences, or simply help usto lead better, happier lives, leading researchers and think-ers have long sought to improve the way these systems aredesigned. In the twentieth century’s first six decades, thefavored approaches reflected the Leviathan; most systems were large, hierarchical, and controlled. Within the UnitedStates, this trend began in companies, when, early in thecentury, Frederick Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management, which concerns a management processby which every action, by every employee, was described,timed, measured, and monitored to assure the most efficient operation, reducing the employee to a very well-regulatedcomponent in a perfectly designed system—one that wascontrolled by the powers above.
ReplyDelete