If there’s one objection that proponents of the free market are familiar with, it’s that capitalism is anti-social. From Adam Smith to Gordon Gekko – so the objection goes – liberal and neo-liberal economists have been doing little else but reciting a mantra of ‘Greed is good.’
 
It was with this argument in mind that I found some recent research on markets and pro-sociality so intriguing. The research is reported in Joe Henrich’s excellent 2020 book The Weirdest People in the World. (The WEIRD people in the title are the inhabitants of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies, not free-market economists).
 
Henrich and his collaborators played a series of games with people from 27 different societies around the world, from modern Americans to hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. One of the games (called ‘the Ultimatum Game’) randomly pairs two strangers and gives one of them a sum of money – $100, say.
 
The person with the money is asked to offer some to the stranger he’s been paired with. If the stranger accepts his offer ($30, say), they both get to keep the money (with the offerer keeping $70). If the stranger refuses the offer, though, they both go away with nothing.
 
How much would you offer? WEIRD people offer an average of $48, apparently because they’ve internalized a norm of fairness and expect that lower offers will be rejected (which they often are). What about the other societies in Henrich’s survey?
 
What Henrich’s team found was that the less integrated people were into markets, the less they offered in games like the Ultimatum Game. In other words, markets seem to make people more generous, not less.
 
Why might this be? Henrich suggests that in market societies, an individual’s success will depend to a significant degree on a reputation for fair dealing, even with people they’ve never met before. Markets, for Henrich, thus encourage ‘impersonal pro-sociality.’
 
Impersonal pro-sociality, Henrich is quick to add, isn’t the only way humans can be generous. Hunter-gatherers, in fact, score much more highly on ‘inter-personal pro-sociality,’ in which individuals cooperate more readily with relatives and friends.
 
All the same, fairness to strangers is nothing to sniff at, and thanks to research by Henrich and many others its association with market societies seems increasingly secure. In 1792 Tom Paine declared that commerce was ‘a pacific system, operating to cordialize mankind.’ It now looks increasingly likely that he was right.