Re: co-ops + human behavior

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:27 AM 12/6/00 -0500, you wrote:
> thanks for the reference.  i'll put the Encyclopedia of PE on my list that
> seems to grow faster than my purchases.  no wonder my psychiatrist daughter
> calls me a "bookaholic". (so how can i refute a Board-certified shrink?)
>
> interesting you mention the Mondragon market because Chomsky is always
> singing praises to it and Orwell's "Homage to ?" - about the workers' co-op...

it's "Homage to Catalonia." BTW, I wouldn't say that the Barcelonan co-ops
had stabilized to do regular production. Further, the book's more about
politics than about economics. It's a good book though.

Speaking of good books, the Encyclopedia of PE is excellent. Look for the
first article in volume I, along with two others that stand above the herd.

> with all these persuasive co-op comments from listers, though, i'm still
> missing an important ingredient on people's motivations for cooperative vs.
> competitive behavior that underlies all discussions of social institutions,
> including co-ops, i.e., the genetic ("nature") causes and environmental
> ("nurture") causes of cooperative and competitive behavior.
>
> co-ops may be limited by people's limited motivation for cooperation with
> each other.  e.g, if we are 25% genetically programmed to cooperate with
> people (for survival purposes) and 75%% genetically programmed to compete
> with people (again, for survival purposes), then cooperative ventures will
> always be subordinate to competitive ventures on the average.

As Stephen J. Gould points out, it's a mistake to quantify such things in
biology and I haven't the slightest idea of where you got these numbers
from. In any case, competition can take many forms. It doesn't have to be
the aggressive "take no prisoners" kind of competition encouraged by
capitalism.

> if this
> assumption is true, then no matter how much leftists try to change the
> environment ("culture") to promote more cooperation and less competition,
> their efforts will always be limited by "human nature" (genetic
> programming). ....

even capitalists cooperate a lot when they're not directly competing. As
I've noted before, there are a lot of industry self-regulation
organizations in the US economy (which are almost entirely ignored by the
economics textbooks -- I add the "almost" because I haven't read anything
close to all of them). There are all sorts of strategic alliances. There
are all sorts of political alliances.

It's impossible for a human being to make objective generalizations about
"human nature" because each of us is constrained and shaped by the societal
environment. People in different societies make different societies make
different generalizations. People living in an individualistic society such
as the US assume that people are more competitive than people in Japan do,
for example. Also these assertions about the nature of human nature seem to
vary in history.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine