Jeune Street

Right now, I’m browsing through The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, by Paul Seabright. He basically tries to explain, from the perspective of evolutionary biology, why humans have developed complex economies that are based upon trust and recriprocity with strangers:

Human social organization has been able, as we have seen, to exploit the advantages of large groups because of exchange between unrelated individuals. But we still need to understand how this widespread reliance on exchange has been possible. It is virtually unknown in the rest of the animal kingdom, and it involves important risks. Only rarely do two individuals make simultaneous exchange of goods or favours of a known value. Much more commonly there is a favour extended by one in return for compensating favour at a later date…[But] how can you be sure that I will keep my promise?…

In short, and whatever the precise evolutionary origins of such behaviour, the potential costs of being cheated have become dangerously high for human beings dealing with nonrelatives. Not only may you never be repaid for the mammoth meat you gave me, but you may be murdered in return.

So far, I’m reading the book with one skeptical eyebrow raised. Seabright’s argument about reciprocity is that the genes for intelligence and murderousness develop together and thus incline us to engage in reciprocity out of enlightened self-interest.

While I admire his willingness to make the familiar (trust and reciprocity) strange and thus help us to step back in wonder at the grand experiment of economic globalization, his perspective is rather limited by the natural selection lens. Human history is full of us not trusting strangers because they are different to us. The story of the advancement of civilization, in some respects, is that of cross-cultural contact and a widening sphere of trust and exchange across social boundaries.

The genetic origins of reciprocity may be rooted in sustaining family relationships, but the abstract social trust that undergirds the modern economy has developed over the long sweep of history through the expansion of knowledge, understanding and tolerance. Although the capacity to reciprocate is part of what makes us biologically human, the rest is developed through socialization and individual capacities for trustworthiness and justice.