11 The Selfishness Objection - Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests by Jason F. Brennan, Peter Jaworski - #paulzack #neipannialtrui #speculatoriprosocial #gintissullafiducia #cucciolimercificati #beckerdiscriminazione #goldinwagegap
The Selfishness Objection Markets rely upon self-interest. Therefore, markets cause people to be more selfish. Therefore, markets make us more corrupt.Read more at location 2278
conduct historical, sociological, and psychological research on what exposure to markets does to people,Read more at location 2282
Neuroeconomist Paul Zak says, … market exchange itself may lead to a society where individuals have stronger character values. The clearest evidence for this is the studies of fairness in small-scale societies conducted by Henrich and his colleagues. They showed that the likelihood of making fair offers to a stranger in one’s society is more strongly predicted by the extent of trade in markets than any other factor they have found.Read more at location 2285
Zak concludes that, as a matter of empirically verifiable fact, market societies induce people to play fair.Read more at location 2290
People from market societies characteristically know how to put themselves in their trading partner’s shoes.Read more at location 2291
Economists like to conduct experiments (using large amounts of real money) in which participants have the opportunity to cheat and swindle each other or to play fairly. Joseph Henrich, Herbert Gintis, and other moral psychologists and behavioral economists have tested a large number of variables to see which factors tend to make people play fair or cheat. These studies disconfirm rather than support the thesis that markets make people more selfish overall.Read more at location 2292
Movements for religious and lifestyle tolerance, gender equality, and democracy have flourished and triumphed in societies governed by market exchange, and nowhere else.Read more at location 2297
we measured the degree of market exposure and cooperation in production for each society, and we found that the ones that regularly engage in market exchange with larger surrounding groups have more pronounced fairness motivations.Read more at location 2303
Note that this is not just the result of one set of studies. Either studies produce similar results. Zak and Stephen Knack have shown that market societies also tend to be high-trust societies,Read more at location 2308
Omar Al-Ubayli, Daniel Houser, and colleagues have shown that “priming” people with words related to markets and trade makes them more (not less!) trusting,Read more at location 2310
Mitchell Hoffman and John Morgan found, contrary to everyone’s expectations, that “adult populations deliberately selected from two cutthroat internet industries—domain trading and adult entertainment (pornography)” are “more pro-social than [undergraduate] students: they are more altruistic, trusting, trustworthy, and lying averse.”Read more at location 2312
They found that introducing money into small groups made players more selfish and less cooperative, but that introducing money into large groups made them less selfish and more cooperative.Read more at location 2319
market exchange does not rely upon self-interest alone. It also relies upon—and at the same time tends to reinforce—mutual trust, reciprocity, and trustworthiness.Read more at location 2326
As an example, note that we could fly to Hong Kong, flash a credit card in front of strangers, and rent a luxury carRead more at location 2328
The Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation, in their Index of Economic Freedom, produce a similar ranking. Their top 10 are: Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, Mauritius, Denmark, and the United States.Read more at location 2333
Now, consider that, according to Transparency International, these are the top 10 least corrupt countries: Denmark, New Zealand, Singapore, Finland, Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland, and Norway. You may notice quite a bit of overlapRead more at location 2337
Benjamin Barber claims that markets corrupt politics, but in fact the most marketized societies are also the least corrupt.Read more at location 2347
On the contrary, one of the most consistent findings of public choice economics, the subfield of economics that studies government behavior, is that politics corrupts markets.Read more at location 2347
Corruption Objection should check to see whether otherwise identical pets belonging to demographically identical owners end up being treated worse if they were purchased rather than acquired through non-market means.Read more at location 2359
In particular, we ought to see not just that people treat purchased pets less well than they treat pets acquired outside the market, but also that purchased pets are treated as mere use objects,Read more at location 2363
We found one paper that found that people who consider themselves “guardians” rather than “owners” of their pets tend to treat their pets better.Read more at location 2372
Most of the self-described “guardians” purchased their pets, while many of the self-described “owners” did not.Read more at location 2376
purchased pets get better care than pets acquired from shelters, but, as far as we can tell from the paper, that is because people usually buy dogs but acquire cats for free, and dogs receive much more and better care than cats do. Not surprisingly, people with more money tend to give their pets better care—theyRead more at location 2381
Economist Gary Becker argued in a 1957 book that the market tends to eliminate unjust discrimination.Read more at location 2388
Or, take Jim Crow Laws. The economist Jennifer Roback says the economics of the streetcar business weighed heavily against providing separate compartments.Read more at location 2397
This explains Voltaire’s observation that at the London Stock Exchange, people of all races and creeds came together to do business.Read more at location 2411
“Women earn 77 cents to the dollar for what men earn.” This sounds like a clear counterexample to Becker’s thesis, but it’s not.Read more at location 2414
women tend to work fewer hours (outside the home) than men, even when working full-time. Women tend to take more sick leave and time off to care for children. Women also tend to choose jobs that pay less. Once just these factors are taken into account, the wage gap closes to 91 cents on the dollar. This doesn’t yet mean the other 9 cents is discrimination—there may be other factors at work, such as men being aggressive in negotiatingRead more at location 2417
A critic might respond that women tending to choose different jobs that tend to pay less, or tending to take care of children more and thus working fewer hours outside the home, reflects sexism.Read more at location 2422
Note: STEREOTIPI?
