There are two posts over at Reason, about a study published in the journal Science. The study, entitled, “Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,” finds that ” market institutions cause people to treat each other, especially, strangers more fairly.” Reason has two posts about the study, one from last week, and another from this week.
I have not yet read the study, but I surely will. I find the reported results unsurprising, for three reasons. First, market principles ask people to treat each other objectively, based on cooperative, voluntary advantage, without prejudice or coercion. It makes sense that principles like these would encourage fair-dealing. Second, market principles of cooperative exchange reflect an underlying moral and religious conviction that, in fundamentals, are people are created equal (and so cooperation between people isn’t bound by location, race, or ethnicity.) Third, one can see historically that commercial societies where all adults may transact freely with each other are more fair and peaceful than coercive fascist or socialist alternatives.
Ron Bailey, writing in Reason, offers his remarks on the study’s findings.
Are people innately fair-minded or is it learned behavior? A fascinating new study, “Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,” that is a big step toward resolving this question is being published toward resolving this question is being published today in the journal Science [subscription required]. The researchers find strong evidence that market institutions cause people to treat each other, especially, strangers more fairly. The research is based on the results of behavioral experiments in 15 different societies which have varying amounts of integration into markets….
This is exactly the sort of argument that libertarian thinker and economics Nobelist Friedrich Hayek made, especially in his last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Successful societies are those that adopt market norms and they tend over time to outcompete societies organized in more primitive top-down ways. The upshot is that efforts to extract people from markets (e.g., communism, socialism, fascism) encourage them to revert to the innate savagery of dealing fairly only with kin and fellow tribespeople.
I’ll read and review the full study as soon as I can, considering both its underlying strength and how it has been reported.