The Evolution of Social Cooperation: From Tradition to the Market System
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…Man is not an ant, conveniently equipped with an inborn pattern of social instincts. On the contrary, he seems to be strongly endowed with a self-centered nature. If his relatively weak physique forces him to seek cooperation, his inner drives constantly threaten to disrupt his social working partnerships. In primitive society, the struggle between self-centeredness and cooperation is taken care of by the environment; when the specter of starvation can look a community in the face—as with the Eskimos—the pure need to secure its own existence pushes society to the cooperative completion of its daily labors. Under less stringent conditions, anthropologists tell us, men and women perform their regular tasks under the powerful guidance of universally accepted norms of kinship and reciprocity… But in an advanced community […] when men and women no longer work shoulder to shoulder in tasks directly related to survival, the perpetuation of the human animal becomes a remarkable social feat.
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So remarkable, in fact, that society’s existence hangs by a hair. A modern community is at the mercy of a thousand dangers: if its farmers should fail to plant enough crops; if its railroad men should take it into their heads to become bookkeepers; if too few should offer their services as miners, puddlers of steel, and candidates for engineering degrees, industrial life would soon become hopelessly disorganized. Every day the community faces the possibility of breakdown from sheer human unpredictability. Over the centuries man has found only three ways of guarding against this calamity. He has ensured his continuity by organizing his society around tradition, by handing down the varied and necessary tasks from generation to generation according to custom and usage. Or society can solve the problem differently. It can use the whip of authoritarian rule to see that its tasks get done. The pyramids of ancient Egypt did not get built because some enterprising contractor took it into his head to build them, nor did the Five Year Plans of the Soviet Union get carried out because they happened to accord with hand-me-down custom or individual self-interest. Both Russia and Egypt were Command societies; they ensured their economic survival by the edicts of one authority…
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For countless centuries man dealt with the problem of survival according to one or the other of these solutions. It never gave rise to that special field of study called “economics.” For the economists waited upon the invention of a third solution to the problem of survival - the development of an astonishing arrangement in which society assured its own continuance by allowing each individual to do exactly as he saw fit, provided he followed a central guiding rule. The arrangement was called the “market system,” and the rule was deceptively simple: each should do what was to his best monetary advantage. In the market system the lure of gain steered the great majority to his (or her) task. And yet, although each was free to go wherever his acquisitive nose directed him, the interplay of one person against another resulted in the necessary tasks of society getting done. It was this paradoxical, subtle, and difficult solution to the problem of survival that called forth the economists.
