The Triumph of Selflessness
IN 1980, RICHARD STALLMAN ASKED A CO-WORKER for the program code for his printer. He was twenty-seven years old and in love with computers, and he’d broken off his study of physics to work as a humble programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was annoyed that his printer didn’t let him know when it had run out of paper or alert him to a paper jam. He wanted to improve the program. But the program’s author refused his request: His boss had made him promise not to release the code.
This refusal was the beginning of a story that would prove how much the balance of power between egocentrics and altruists has shifted in recent decades. His co-worker’s secrecy made Stallman furious, he recalls; that wasn’t how hackers were supposed to treat each other. At the time, the word “hacker” did not yet smack of computer crime but instead was what young—mostly male—computer enthusiasts called each other. A hacker was someone who really understood how computers worked, spent the night in front of his screen out of the pure pleasure of writing elegant programs, and shared the fun with others.
But lately, more and more hackers had been breaking the unwritten rules. Firms like the one still spelling its name “Micro-Soft” took possession of what had belonged to everyone and kept its program codes under lock and key. A stir was caused by an open letter to the hacker community declaring that software was property and using it without paying for it was theft. The letter was signed “Bill Gates.”
Stallman was not willing to accept the new convention. He believed that technology should serve humankind and be as good as it was possible to make it. To declare a program private property was in his eyes an enormous waste of human effort. It rankled him deeply that he was unable to improve the software for his printer because he was denied access to the code. On September 27, 1983, Richard Stallman threw down the gauntlet via the computer network net.unix-wizards: “Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.”1
At the beginning of 1984, Stallman quit his job and from then on earned his money as a freelance software consultant. Later he was paid by a foundation. First, he programmed an editor that, similar to Word, serves to enter text into the computer. Then he authored a compiler that translated the language of the machine, consisting of ones and zeros, into program instructions legible to humans.
The lone wolf from Boston quickly gained enormous respect in computer circles. What Stallman gave away for free was as good as the expensive commercial programs, and in some cases far better. (The GNU editor and the compiler are still being used today. In the computer world of short-lived programs, hardly anyone even remembers most programs from the 1980s, but Stallman’s creations and their ongoing elaborations continue to be standards.) Anyone who wanted the code for the software could have it. To prevent profiteers from taking over his work, Stallman had one condition which in retrospect he calls his best hack ever: Anyone may use, change, or expand the GNU code as they wish—but they must make all the programs they develop freely available in their turn.
By the end of the 1980s, however, Stallman had begun to reach the limits of what he could do alone. But then he got unexpected help from far-off Helsinki. Linus Torvalds, a twenty-one-year-old computer science student, was working on the central program that Stallman lacked, one that could oversee all processes on the computer. But whereas Stallman relied on his own capabilities, Torvalds made use of a new method to bring other developers into the process: the Internet. By 1993, more than 100 developers all over the world were working for free on the operating system now known as Linux.
That number has grown to tens of thousands today. It is common knowledge that Linux has been an unprecedented triumph. By now, not only do millions of desktop computers run on the system: It is also employed by the nerve centers of the information society—more than half of all the servers that feed data into the Internet. Anyone who has done a search on Google has been connected to a Linux computer.
Other software developers were also inspired by Stallman and began to make their work available to everyone for free. “Without free software, the Internet in its present form would be unthinkable,” says the technology writer Christian Imhorst.2 The principle is so far superior to the tradition of programming behind closed doors that for the time being, even for-profit companies publish their in-house applications for free. IBM, for example, supports the continued development of Linux with 100 million dollars annually in order not to be dependent on Bill Gates’ Windows. Most of that contribution is made by developing, at its own expense, components for Linux and then making them available free of charge.3 And Google has put into circulation a complete software system for cell phones under the GNU constraints. The Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer angrily compared the programs licensed by Stallman to a cancer; the freedoms that the annoying Boston hacker had built into his programs would infect everything that came into contact with the descendants of his software.
In the end, Stallman’s habit of giving away his knowledge began to prevail outside the world of computer science as well. Many more than one hundred thousand volunteers on all continents write for the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, which aspires to collect the knowledge of all humankind. A good 15 million articles in more than 200 languages have already been written for it. So that everyone who writes or edits an article can be sure that their contribution will always be available free of charge to everyone, the entire project adheres to the principles of GNU.
But even the mighty Wikipedia is only a tiny part of the selflessness on the Internet. Who among us hasn’t given advice to some stranger seeking help from an online forum? By now, so many people regularly share information on the Internet that no one tries to keep count of them anymore. The last estimate from 2008 counted 133 million blogs on which people share their ideas and knowledge. Very few of them earn money with ads on their websites. Direct benefits to the authors in general are very limited—they write, take pictures, film, and publish their works for the joy of sharing.4
The Global Tire
When the indomitable Stallman began developing his free software on his own in Boston, no one could have imagined that only two decades later, hundreds of thousands of people around the world would work together without pay to create communal products like Wikipedia and Linux. In the meantime, such forms of cooperation are spreading so quickly that we can hardly foresee where this development will lead. Perhaps future historians will someday compare it to the transition to communal hunting in the early Stone Age, when our forebears realized how much more reliably they could feed themselves if each family no longer had to fight for survival on its own. Thus arose tribal groups and norms, and the willingness to share became established.
In an analogous way today, we need paths by which we can shape communal life on a global scale. The problems of the earth obviously can no longer be solved by using the rules and institutions that were more or less effective on the smaller scale of families, settlements, regions, and countries.
Within a very brief period, people on all continents have become dependent on one another. Today, hundreds of thousands of men and women of the most varied backgrounds work together not just on collective enterprises on the Internet, but also in transnational corporations. One can see the extent of the change clearly by comparing the means of transportation used by our great-grandparents with our own. A hundred and fifty years ago, the breeder from the next village provided horses; you either built your own wagon or asked your neighbor the carpenter to help, and you fetched the wood you needed from the forest. On the other hand, modern cars, trains, and airplanes consist of thousands of parts brought together from all corners of the globe. Even the materials for an ordinary automobile tire come from a dozen different countries: the rubber from Vietnam and Malaysia, the polyamide fiber weave from China, and the steel belt from Sweden.
How dramatically the interrelation of the continents is accelerating can be measured by the so-called trade ratio. It indicates what percentage of a country’s total economic output is made up of imports, exports, and services. In Germany today, it is more than 70 percent. Worldwide, the percentage of goods that cross national borders has almost doubled since 1990 and more than tripled since 1950. The rate of increase is even greater when one includes services performed for foreign countries.5
While more and more people work with—and have constant contact with—geographically distant colleagues, traditional ties are loosening. In the postwar generation, it was still typical to feel closely tied to just a few groups. One’s identity was encompassed by being the citizen of a particular place, being a Catholic or a Democrat. For employees who proudly identified themselves as “Ford workers” or “US Steel workers,” it was a matter of course to stick with their factory through good times and bad. People knew what they could expect from their communities and were ready to give something in return. But in an era of sharper global competition, companies seldom promise secure, lasting jobs—and the price, of course, is that they can have less confidence in the productive engagement of their workers. Many highly qualified workers prefer to gain experience in New York today and in Hong Kong tomorrow. However, where people must seize opportunities where they can, they are all fighting for themselves alone.
One of the greatest illusions of the last few decades was that an economy founded on the pure self-interest of its participants would reliably provide for the needs of humankind and achieve optimal results. That illusion reaches back more than 200 years to the astute but often misunderstood analysis of Adam Smith. At the time when the first factories were being built, the question was how the new opportunities opened up by industrialization should best be exploited, and how to get hundreds—and later, thousands—of people to create something together.
With his answer to that question, Adam Smith, a professor at Glasgow University and later an independent scholar, became the father of modern economics. With the production of pins as his model, he explained how the increasing division of labor was leading to an enormous increase in production. A single craftsman without machinery could “scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty.”6 Ten workers in a specialized factory, on the other hand, could turn out 48,000 pins a day. But for the division of labor to work, people had to exchange things. And in this exchange, everyone was looking for their own profit: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
Nevertheless, the egocentric efforts of all citizens were supposed to lead in the aggregate to general welfare. Even if every individual “intends only his own gain,” the market would regulate itself. Every merchant would be “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.”7 The laws of supply and demand would ensure the optimal distribution of goods. Where the need was greatest, the highest profits were to be expected, and since any smart merchant would invest his money there, he would meet people’s needs in the best possible way. This was the position Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776. Its principles are still invoked today by economists and politicians.
The theory that Smith propounded and that his numerous followers continue to defend is well founded. An economy driven by pure egocentrics would indeed function—but only as long as all human interaction were amenable to regulation by the market. Thus except for their transaction, a seller and a buyer would have nothing to do with each other. One of them gets the merchandise; the other gets the money (or other merchandise in exchange). And third parties who are not participants in the business would not be affected by it.
One can argue about whether this conception was unrealistic even in the eighteenth century. In the view of the economic historian Joel Mokyr, the Industrial Revolution originated in Great Britain because English businessmen followed a strict moral code and trusted one another.8 But that also means that business deals have a decisive influence on uninvolved third parties, an influence hardly expressible in terms of money: Whenever two partners treat each other fairly, they strengthen the trust others place in the norms—and thereby also others’ willingness to risk entering into deals themselves.
Today, at any rate, such effects are omnipresent, for in a highly networked world, every action casts unimaginably wide ripples. The financial crisis of 2008 offers a perfect example. When the New York bank Lehman Brothers became insolvent in September, only its immediate creditors should have been affected, according to classic economic theory. But in fact, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers became known, the entire system of monetary transactions between banks all over the world broke down completely. Everyone feared a chain reaction. Even if a borrower had never done business with Lehman Brothers, he had reason to fear becoming insolvent, especially if a third bank owed money to him and had also lent money to Lehman Brothers or to one of their business partners. Moreover, it turned out that the once highly regarded Lehman Brothers had concealed its risky investments before it went bankrupt. So how could anyone be sure that other banks weren’t also playing with marked cards?
No one trusted anyone anymore, with the well-known result that the banks stopped renewing the credit that industry needs in order to survive. And soon thereafter, people in America and then in other places began to keep their wallets in their pockets.
During the entire crisis, all participants acted completely rationally from their own points of view, just as Adam Smith once described and recommended. However, far from increasing the wealth of nations, according to estimates of the International Monetary Fund, the financial crisis decreased it by an incredible 12 trillion dollars ($12,000,000,000,000).
In order to function, markets need a basis, and although they cannot produce it by themselves, they can certainly destroy it. Trust is such a basis.
Capital and Cod
An economy that intends to promote the general welfare simply by channeling egocentrism is an open invitation to freeloaders. Indeed, parasitism was the deeper cause of the 2008 financial crisis. In the preceding years, private investors, banks, and even entire states had all tacitly abandoned the norm that one should not live above one’s means. Those who spent more than they earned were no longer punished, but encouraged. And everyone profited from this shift of values: Citizens lived in houses they actually couldn’t afford. Banks did a land-office business in sub-prime mortgages whose risks they passed along to other investors. Politicians made voters happy with generous benefits willingly financed by creditors in other countries. This system could continue to function only as long as all of the players trusted one another. Everyone was juggling in their own ways with risky credit in the hope that they could pull out of the game at the right time—and thus leeching mutual trust out of the economy.
It’s not just the financial crisis that shows what enormous harm can be done to our highly networked world by freeloaders. When a fishing fleet left Glasgow harbor in Adam Smith’s time, there was no reason to fear that it would perceptibly decimate cod stocks in the North Sea. The ocean provided more than enough replacements. Today, thanks to more and more aggressive fishing techniques, so many animals have been turned into fish filets that cod stocks in many places have collapsed. The operators of the first steam-driven machines at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution didn’t have to worry about emitting coal smoke into the air. When an energy company does so today, it contributes to global warming and the threat that entire countries like Bangladesh will be inundated by rising sea levels.
Adam Smith was very well aware of the basic problem that the market cannot provide communal property because no one wants to pay for it. His view was that in such cases, government must intervene. The ruler of every land must ensure secure borders and provide reliable courts, roads, dikes, and education for his subjects.
But in a globalized world, governments increasingly fail to establish these basic necessities, for no one has hegemony over the air and the oceans. Worse still, when a country takes more than its share of these resources—for example, by emitting above-average amounts of greenhouse gases—everyone in the world suffers the consequences. Effective treaties to protect the atmosphere or the cod have failed because of this kind of freeloading.
And it seems no easier to tame the international financial markets. No one disputes that a set of strict regulations could prevent future crises. But capital is more mobile than ever before, and a country that insists on keeping its lax standards can hope to attract money from all over the world. Thus we are all stuck in the prisoner’s dilemma.
The Spoilers from Athens
Obviously, Adam Smith’s economic recipes are of only limited application in today’s world. On the other hand, societies leave a decisive resource untapped when they count on markets and the government alone to regulate citizens’ lives. After all, there have been large-scale communities for at least one hundred thousand years, but laws and markets of significant scope have existed for only a few thousand years. For most of human history, our forebears cooperated with one another because a certain amount of selfless inclination was innate, and also because they hewed to group norms. This is the foundation on which our life together as humans is based, not on egocentrism channeled in free markets.
Humans’ ability to be selfless developed in direct proportion to their increasing dependence on one another. From the communal concern for progeny and food in the early Stone Age to the admonition to love one’s fellow humans that emerged in the world religions about 500 BCE, the history of humankind has been a history of stronger and stronger altruistic norms.
And it is clear that this tendency continues. It is not only that, as described in the previous chapter, the larger the community, the more often its members are willing to pay more for fairness. A comparison of modern societies also shows that a complex economy encourages more and more civilized rules for living together. Three central factors encourage this progress: The societies become more diverse, they become networked, and knowledge plays a larger role in them.
The Nottingham economist Benedikt Herrmann and his colleagues investigated how people in various world metropolises behaved in the Free Rider Game. In cities in modern industrialized countries—Boston, Copenhagen, Bonn, Seoul, and even in Chengdu in China—participants paid relatively large amounts into the common pot.9 In cities in less developed countries, on the other hand—Istanbul, Riyadh, and also in Minsk—voluntary contributions were significantly lower. But it was the citizens of Athens who displayed the least communal spirit, although the experiments took place long before the Greek financial crisis.
Was the norm of cooperating with strangers weaker in the less-industrialized countries? When players in these countries are permitted to punish free riders, at any rate, they hesitated to make use of that opportunity. And when someone did decide to punish a free rider, strange things happened in big cities like Minsk, Istanbul, and especially in Athens: Dodgers who had to accept punishment did not think for a moment of changing their behavior and ponying up in the next round. Instead, they chose to invest in punishing some other player who hadn’t freeloaded. Possibly they suspected that particular fair player of giving them the punishment and were now taking revenge. Of course, they couldn’t be certain, because the punishers are always anonymous. At any rate, the free riders paid astonishing amounts to get satisfaction—and in so doing, completely destroyed cooperation in the group.
In cities like Boston and Copenhagen, by contrast, the parasites were quickly punished and accepted the penalty without complaint, as if understanding that they had deserved it. Surveys confirm these results. In the experiment, the more strongly citizens of their city believe in justice and the laws, the more reluctant the punished players were to take revenge. In these societies, people also find it less acceptable to cheat on taxes, keep a lost wallet, and disobey traffic laws—behaviors that people in Istanbul or Athens accept with a shrug.
Of course, inhabitants of these cities are not worse human beings, nor are they necessarily bigger egocentrics. And their behavior is understandable. It would be illogical to do much for strangers if they are likely to only be pursuing their own advantage. People in such societies feel more commitment to others within their immediate surroundings than to the general welfare. Paradoxically, wherever citizens display little communal spirit, their culture is strongly collectivist: The family is put first, the individual counts less—and of course, a more abstract entity like the state has an even smaller value.
Morality from Below
Conversely, it turns out that individualism does not promote parasitism. The experiments of Herrmann and his colleagues show exactly the opposite. Whether in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, or the United States—in all societies that value the free development of the personality, people made large contributions to the common pot.
What seems to be a paradox at first blush is easy to explain. In an individualistic society, people belong to many communities at the same time, and these circles are not concentric on the model of “family—clan—village.” Instead, they intersect. In the more traditional world of our grandparents, a village woman may have been a member of the church, belonged to the dairy cooperative, and been active in the sports club, but in reality she belonged to just one community, for the people she met in those various groups were essentially all the same people.
An urban woman of today, on the other hand, encounters a completely different group in her yoga class than in her church choir. Her strongest ally in the parent-teacher association may be a man who in his job is doing everything possible to weaken the company she works for. And many of her friends live in other towns—some even on different continents. Thus this woman comes to understand through experiences in extremely varied constellations that cooperation is worthwhile. Compared to her grandmother, she has a much larger choice of groups she can join. If she doesn’t like the people in her yoga class, she can look for another one or switch to tai chi. The various communities compete for members and, as we have seen in Chapters 7 and 8, that promotes altruistic norms.
A comparative study from Italy that has become a classic in the field shows how a rich web of overlapping social contacts strengthens moral behavior and mutual trust.10 In the late 1980s, the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam set out to discover why some regions in Italy were models of good government while others were rife with corruption and mismanagement. He was able to trace the differences back to people’s willingness to act toward the achievement of common goals. In areas like Emilia-Romagna in the north, for example, the social life of so-called civil society was flourishing. Although the neighborhood committees, athletic teams, and Rotary Clubs were for the most part apolitical, they strengthened the norms of the community. People were used to sticking to the rules and cooperating, and they made sure that others did, too. Thus politicians could not stay in power if they abused their position for personal advantage.11 In regions where civil society was less robust, on the other hand, such figures had an easier time of it, since the norms were more relaxed. Later studies comparing European countries and American states reached the same conclusion: Morality and trust permeate a society from below.12
If the willingness to act selflessly is increased by a multiplicity of group allegiances, then the networking of the world should have the effect that more and more people behave altruistically. There is much evidence to support that assumption.
The outpouring of global charity following the tsunami of 2005 and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 would have been hard to imagine two decades earlier. Americans donated 1.8 billion dollars for the victims of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean alone.13 And Germans gave almost nine hundred million dollars, a record donation for the country for disaster relief. This generosity could hardly be due to the television images alone, however heart-rending, for independent of current news reports, during the 1990s Germans donated increasing amounts for emergency and development aid.14 Obviously, we feel increasingly responsible for the fate of people in poorer countries.
Of course, modern communications technology makes it easier to help faraway strangers. If you want to donate, you can do it with no trouble via text message; social media seem made for organizing support for worthy causes. When the invitation to give comes from a friend, you probably feel some pressure to join in the campaign, and you can trust that the cause is not a scam. With just such a snowballing campaign in 2008 on Facebook, in just a few weeks the young Colombian Oscar Morales not only succeeded in getting more than four million of his own countrymen onto the streets to march in protest against the FARC guerrillas, but also in sparking demonstrations against the South American hostage-takers in dozens of cities around the world.15
Besides these practical advantages, global networking above all changes our perceptions. When we leave a comment on a California website, have a chat via Skype with old friends in Shanghai or Cape Town, and spend our vacation on a beach in Thailand, the difference between near and far soon starts to blur.
The feeling of having the whole world as a neighbor increases peoples’ willingness to work together. The American economist Nancy Buchan was able to show this effect in six cities on five different continents.16 She translated the metaphor of the global village into a game. Participants had the choice of paying money into a city pot (with four players in the group) or a world pot (with twelve players). The city pot took contributions from citizens of the players’ own town, the world pot from people on other continents. And then, as usual in the Free Rider Game, the total in the city pot was doubled, the total in the world pot was tripled, and the new amounts were distributed evenly among the players. To level the playing field for participants from poorer countries, Buchan began the game by giving each person ten coins of play money. After the game was over, players could exchange their chips for the currency of their own country.
Obviously, it was potentially more rewarding but also riskier to contribute to the world pot. If other players didn’t cooperate, there was a risk of loss. In both cases, however, paying in was a selfless act, for as we have seen in Chapter 7, the biggest winner is the parasite who pays in nothing but profits from the contributions of others.
The question was, would players be more generous with their compatriots or with the inhabitants of distant continents? Regardless of where they lived—in Milan, Tehran, Johannesburg, or Buenos Aires—participants paid an average of two of their ten coins into the city pot, but their contributions to the world pot varied widely. Citizens of Tehran invested two of their coins in the global as well as the city pot. But players from Columbus, Ohio, risked more than twice as much globally. They seemed to have more confidence in the fairness of people in other parts of the world. All the other cities lay between those two extremes: After Teheran came Johannesburg, then Buenos Aires, Kazan in Russia, Milan, and Columbus.
How can this sequence be explained? Buchan investigated how much the different countries had been affected by globalization. To measure its effects, economists have invented a “globalization index,” a number that increases the more a country trades with the outside world, is visited by foreign tourists, accepts immigrants, or watches foreign films. And the amount players were willing to pay into the world pot rose in parallel with this globalization index. Thus the more open a society is, the more comprehensive is its concept of fairness and solidarity.
Differences between players from the same city were also dependent on their intellectual and social horizons. Those who listened to music from other countries, made international calls, had access to the Internet, or could speak a foreign language almost always paid more into the world pot than their less cosmopolitan compatriots. Even regular visits to restaurants specializing in foreign cuisines or the purchase of international products like Coca-Cola and Levi’s jeans had positive effects. Obviously, consumers had internalized the fact that they were enjoying the benefits of cooperation across cultural barriers.
The way contributions were distributed between the city pot and the world pot is an optimistic sign: Participants who invested more in the global pot were not by any means more stingy toward inhabitants of their own town. Instead, the cross-border payments flowed in addition to the contributions to the local pot, which remained more or less the same. Thus globalization and worldwide networking do not merely cause a shift in our interest for other people. Instead, they release additional generosity. Seen in this light, altruism is not a finite commodity.
The Buffaloes of the Information Age
When early humans began to hunt together, they not only became more dependent on one another but also put their economy on a different footing. Here too, the analogy to our present situation is clear. We are in the midst of an economic revolution that is—in addition to social diversity and interconnectedness—the third factor motivating us to act altruistically.
Within just a few decades, the ways we earn our livings have radically changed. Fewer people work with their hands, more and more work with their heads. They invent, direct, and organize. Already today, German companies earn more than half their revenue with an insubstantial means of production: the knowledge stored in their employees’ brains.17 Even with a product as solid as a high-performance automobile, a third of its value resides in its electronic controls. And the programming of all the computers concealed in every car is increasingly important. Leading developers in the automobile industry expect that 90 percent of future progress will be in the area of electronics and software.18
The triumphant advance of the resource called information became undeniable in 2006, when Google became the most valuable brand in the world. The company has maintained that position every year since against firms from the traditional economy like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.19 Thus the number one company is one whose customers pay not one cent for its multiple services. People who google are trading information for information. They reveal their personal preferences and get almost everything the Internet has to offer in exchange.
Google based its business model on the fact that the trade in information is governed by different rules than those that apply to physical products and services. A car, a house, even an oil field can be owned and thus easily exchanged for money or other possessions. A barber naturally only plies his comb and scissors for a fee, because every haircut costs him more work. Under such circumstances, goods can be rationally distributed according to the laws that Adam Smith formulated.
But whoever has access to knowledge can give it away without losing it. There is good reason to call an economy whose most valuable commodities are not things, but information, a “weightless economy,” because knowledge is insubstantial. Since it’s so easy to pass on information, in the long run it’s almost impossible to maintain sole ownership of it. Restricting access to the fruits of your knowledge to paying customers requires a huge effort to catch and punish the ubiquitous pirates in the Internet. Knowledge producers face the same problem as a troupe of Stone Age hunters, according to the American anthropologist Samuel Bowles. They had to work together to bring down a buffalo, and we have to work together to program system software or unlock the human genome. Once the task has been accomplished, however, it does you no good to try to keep its fruits to yourself. A buffalo supplied more meat than the hunters could eat by themselves.
Thus the insubstantiality of knowledge encourages a culture of sharing. Science had transformed the world in the past 200 years. Its success has always rested on this principle: If individual scientists want their work to be recognized and acknowledged, they must publish their findings and allow them to be critically examined and also further elaborated. In almost every respect, a community whose members can feel free to help themselves to buffalo meat or research results will prosper more than one that sets up elaborate barriers. In the weightless economy of the future, it will be essential to share selflessly.
Humanity today stands before the enormous challenge of insuring cooperation on a global scale. Solutions that only apply to the interests of individual persons, companies, or countries will fail. We don’t have much time left. The price of failure would be catastrophic developments such as unchecked global warming, unmanageable streams of refugees, and endless wars over resources.
And yet, there is reason for cautious optimism. For the first time in history, people are beginning to share across borders, because cultures and continents are growing closer together, because physical distance hardly matters anymore, and because knowledge is becoming the most valuable means of production. To pursue only one’s own interest becomes more and more perilous and less and less profitable. For by risking their reputations, egocentrics also lessen their chance of success.
Altruists have always profited from being able to exchange information. The more people around the world know about and depend on one another, the higher the benefits and the lower the risks of selflessness.